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OVER THE EVENT HORIZON
Telescope as big as Earth

prepares to image black hole
FINAL MELTDOWN
It’s the end of the
Arctic as we know it

DROP YOUR WEAPONS
Beating bacteria by

learning to live with them

WEEKLY April 8-14, 2017

CARBON WARS The surprising upside to the US climate reversal

REALITY IS REAL
...we’ve just been looking for it
in the wrong place

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CONTENTS Volume 234 No 3120

News This issue online
newscientist.com/issue/3120
8
Leader
Over the event
horizon 5 Climate fatigue plays into the hands of
the deniers
First snap of the black
hole at our galaxy’s News
centre coming soon
6 UPFRONT
ESO/B. TAFRESHI SpaceX relaunches orbital rocket. Copyright
quarrel. Killer landslide in Colombia
On the cover 8 Over the event horizon
Telescope as big as Earth 8 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
28 to image black hole Translating without transcribing. CO2 spike
warning. Apes understand false beliefs.
Reality is real 33 Final meltdown Fake humans teach AI to understand us.
The new Arctic Why female fertility falls with age. Dust
...we’ve just been from the cosmic dawn of the universe.
looking for it in the 38 Drop your weapons Ancient people made exotic jewellery.
wrong place Make peace with bacteria Projection mapping augments reality.
Tropical fish drug predators into releasing
Cover image 22 Carbon wars them. Tadpoles see through implanted eyes.
Francesco Bongiorni Climate reversal benefits Brain cells that link breathing and stress

People 42 The blot thickens 18 IN BRIEF
Secret history of the Octopuses grow giant on jellyfish. Europe’s
42 Rorschach test first cavefish discovered. ALS linked to
electromagnetic field exposure
The blot SCIENCE MUSEUM/SCIENCE & SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY
thickens Analysis

The rise and fall of 22 Carbon victory from defeat US climate
Hermann Rorschach U-turn is an opportunity we shouldn’t miss

Coming next week… 24 COMMENT
Geoengineering is scary, but we must start.
Make like a leaf Is cancer more chance or lifestyle?

Mimicking plants could transform future energy 25 INSIGHT
US citizens’ data is for sale to the high bidder
Flash of inspiration
Aperture
Mysteries of lightning laid bare
26 Claws-up view of marine life

Features

28 Reality is real (see above left)
33 Final meltdown It’s the end of the Arctic as

we know it
38 Drop your weapons Beat bacteria by

learning to live with them
42 PEOPLE (see left)

Culture

44 Talking with hands Did our free-roaming
minds help turn gesture into language?

45 High price How new work made China sick
46 Who we are Art highlights an identity crisis

Regulars

52 LETTERS Flies’ eyes explain zebra stripes
55 CROSSWORD
56 FEEDBACK Dispose of your round pounds
57 THE LAST WORD Whither wasps?

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 3

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LEADER

GETTY

LOCATIONS Same old story?
USA
50 Hampshire St, Floor 5, Fatigue is the friend of those who oppose action on climate
Cambridge, MA 02139
Please direct telephone enquiries to THE annual melt of Arctic ice is Again, you have probably heard future. Both are a tragedy of the
our UK office +44 (0) 20 7611 1200 commons that requires collective
under way, and this year’s may be it all before. But the alternative is sacrifice and both are open to
UK freeloading. And both are
110 High Holborn, the biggest ever. Its starting point to stop talking about it, which unchanging, remorselessly
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Tel +44 (0) 20 7611 1200 is the most shrunken ice cap since plays directly into the hands of cause people to glaze over.
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satellite records began. By the those who oppose action. Little But on antibiotic resistance,
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Tower 2, 475 Victoria Avenue, middle of September the ice will suits them better than a bored dropping. Great strides have been
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Tel +61 2 9422 8559 have retreated to the shorelines and disengaged public. number of resistant infections,
Fax +61 2 9422 8552 thanks largely to changing
of Greenland and Canada, leaving While we are on the topic of prescribing habits. Meanwhile,
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For our latest subscription offers, visit vast expanses of open water in the not-news, have you heard the antibiotics appear to be paying
newscientist.com/subscribe off, driven by a realisation that
Customer and subscription services are Arctic Ocean. It will not be many one about the antibiotic crisis? killing good bacteria as well as
also available by: bad ones is not wise (see page 38).
Telephone 1-888-822-3242 more years until the Arctic is ice- For years, if not decades, medics
Email [email protected] But the parallels only go so
Web newscientist.com/subscribe free in summer (see page 33). have been warning that overuse is far. The antibiotic problem has
Mail New Scientist, PO Box 3806, not been exacerbated by huge
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newscientist.com/people than a bored and there is still a positive conclusion
reporting climate science and disengaged public” to be drawn. The goal of denial
General & media enquiries politics is fatigue. Everybody is not just to cast doubt on the
[email protected] already knows the broad scientific consensus, but also to
bore the public. Fatigue is the
Editorial brushstrokes of the story and friend of inaction. The antibiotic
Tel 781 734 8770 story shows that it can be
[email protected] the news – if there is any – is bacterial infections could be fatal. overcome, as long as some people
[email protected] refuse to shut up about it. ■
[email protected] rarely good. Prospects for change Like alarms over climate change,

Picture desk appear minimal. those warnings often fell on deaf
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8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 5

UPFRONT

Coca’s role in killer slide LUIS ROBAYO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

NEARLY 300 people are thought to the soil, making it susceptible to
have died when part of Mocoa, a flooding,” Richani says.
town in Colombia, was swept away by
a torrent of water, mud and debris on The town’s position in a steep-
1 April. The trigger for the landslide sided valley also made it vulnerable.
was a night of extreme rainfall,
leading the president, Juan Manuel What’s more, the town ignored
Santos, to blame climate change. specific warnings as far back as 2012
about the risk of a major landslide.
But while global warming may “This vulnerability was known for
have intensified the rain, this seems at least a few years,” says ecologist
to have been a disaster waiting to Liliana Dávalos of Stony Brook
happen. Deforestation in the University, New York, whose work
surrounding mountains, driven by first revealed how the drug trade
cattle ranchers and by farmers drives deforestation in Colombia.
growing coca, the source of cocaine,
degraded the environment and A 2014 article on a local news
helped create the conditions that led website, for example, described
to the disaster, says Nazih Richani of how small landslips in the mountains
Kean University, New Jersey. around Mocoa had blocked river
channels, leading to a build-up
“The interplay of those factors of water in nearby soil and fallen
over the last three decades damaged debris. It warned of “a tragedy of
unimaginable proportions”.

–The landslide killed hundreds–

900-year ice low low was 900 years ago (Geology, EPA science attack requires EPA to base new
doi.org/b46k). regulations on sound science
A MAJOR glacier in Alaska has THE US Environmental Protection that is publicly available, and
retreated to its lowest point in They then ran climate Agency is facing a future in which not hidden from the American
900 years. simulations to find out what it will struggle to make effective people,” said the chair of the
triggered the rapid retreat of the policies based on science. House science committee, Lamar
Glaciers around the world are in glacier over the past 30 years. Smith, a Texas Republican who
retreat. But the Columbia glacier This revealed that summer air Last week, the US House of sponsored the bill.
is one of the most dramatic and temperatures about 1°C higher Representatives passed the
well-documented cases, as well as than normal between 1910 and HONEST Act, which, if approved While this may sound like a
the largest contributor to sea level 1980 led to the glacier thinning by the Senate, will prevent the EPA laudable move towards increased
rise out of the 50 or so glaciers until it became unstable in the from basing any of its regulations transparency, it would actually
that descend to the sea in Alaska. 1980s. The team attributes this to on science that is not publicly hobble the agency’s ability to
human-caused climate change. accessible – not just journal develop good, science-based
To put the current ebb in the “What was surprising was the articles themselves, but all the public health regulations, says
context of the past millennium, tight coupling between surface underlying data, models and Andrew Rosenberg at the Union
Anders Carlson at Oregon State temperature of the glacier and computer code. “The HONEST Act of Concerned Scientists.
University and his colleagues its response,” says Carlson.
bored down into the mud at the Launching again and again
“It shows that a small
“A small temperature temperature increase of less than EVEN Elon Musk was speechless – making the first successful landing
increase of less than 2°C is sufficient to destabilise a well, for a moment. On 30 March, on a drone ship. It then went through
2°C is sufficient to glacier,” says Chris Rapley at in a first for space flight, SpaceX rigorous testing before getting its
destabilise a glacier” University College London. launched and successfully landed an certification to fly again. A year later,
International efforts to fight orbital rocket that had already flown the booster landed right in the centre
bottom of the bay that the glacier climate change are focused on once before. of the same drone ship.
flows into, Prince William Sound, limiting warming to 2°C.
on the southern coast of Alaska. The Falcon 9 was carrying a Musk said he was at a loss for
They then examined the layers of It’s unlikely that this is an communications satellite for firm words after the booster landed.
sediment deposited over the past isolated case. The authors say that SES, which got a discount for He called it an “incredible milestone
1600 years or so, and also looked at some sites around the world, allowing its cargo to be transported in the history of space”, adding: “
at the age of tree trunks left on the retreating glaciers are exposing on a used rocket. The booster for this This is going to be a huge revolution
surface by the retreating glacier. trees that are some 7000 years mission first ferried a Dragon cargo in space flight.” He wants to have a
From this, they worked out that old, indicating that those glaciers capsule to orbit last April before rocket relaunch within 24 hours.
the last time the glacier was this are now smaller than they have
been in many thousands of years.

6 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

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

Copyright quarrel GLENN LOCKITCH / SEA SHEPHERD GLOBAL Sea to rise by 3 metres

IT’S a fight for the future of the The worst-case scenario for sea-
web. The World Wide Web level rise just got even worse. If the
Consortium (W3C), which sets latest numbers are correct, oceans
standards for how the web works, could rise almost 3 metres by 2100.
has formally proposed adopting The new figure includes rapid loss of
a controversial anti-piracy tool. mass from the Antarctic ice sheet,
and tops the 2013 IPCC estimate by
“Critics say that adopting 2 metres (Environmental Research
the anti-piracy tool will Letters, doi.org/b46w)
stymie innovation and
create security risks” The dope on sport

The Encrypted Media There were more than 1900
violations of anti-doping rules across
Extensions (EME) mechanism 85 different sports in 2015, says the
World Anti-Doping Agency. That’s
allows web browsers to deal with –Hundreds of whales will be killed– 14 per cent up on 2014. Of these,
280 infringements came to light
digital rights management (DRM) evidence that Japan’s “scientific via “evidence-based intelligence”,
whaling” programme has no rather than lab tests, reflecting the
software. This means people can scientific justification. agency’s push to expand its methods
for discovering dopers.
easily view copyrighted videos Open whale season “It’s yet another example that
without installing separate when an independent panel looks Blink and it’s gone
at the science, they can’t see any
plug-ins like Adobe Flash or THE harpoons are out. Norway’s value in it,” says Matt Collis, from Around 90 per cent of the Red
the International Fund for Animal Planet’s atmosphere was lost to
encountering compatibility whaling fleet is setting sail this Welfare. “It’s so utterly pointless.” space in just a few hundred million
years. NASA’s MAVEN orbiter
issues across browsers or devices. week, with a kill quota of 999 Norway, meanwhile, continues measured the ratio of two argon
whaling for commercial purposes. isotopes to work out how much had
But critics argue that minke whales. The mammals will disappeared (Science, doi.org/b46r).
Sexual health delay
standardising EME will stymie be caught for meat, and 90 per

innovation and create security cent are likely to be pregnant

risks for users. As it is illegal to females. And Japan’s fleet has

tamper with DRM systems in just returned to port with its

the US and European Union, cargo of 333 minkes, but will be

security researchers also fear heading out again soon to catch

they will be unable to properly endangered sei whales in the

inspect browsers with EME for north Pacific Ocean, claiming it Cancer progress

bugs. “This is really bad security,” is for scientific research. IT HAS become harder to access Death rates for most cancers are
sexual health services in the declining in the US, according to the
says Harry Halpin of the Inria “An expert report doesn’t UK, finds a study of 220 of the Annual Report to the Nation on the
research centre in Paris. see any value in Japan’s country’s 248 genitourinary Status of Cancer. Between 1999 and
scientific whale hunting. medicine (GUM) clinics. 2013, cancer incidence fell in men,
It’s not unprecedented for a It’s utterly pointless” but stabilised in women. Compared
proposal to be so controversial, UK standards advise that 98 per with the mid-1970s, five-year
says Philippe Le Hégaret at W3C, cent of people should get seen survival rates had increased
within 48 hours of contacting a significantly by 2012 for all types
but such divisions are rare. “It clinic. But in 2015, researchers of cancer, except those of the cervix
pretending they had symptoms and uterus.
happens only once every 10 years This comes as yet another were able to get appointments
within two days less than 91 per Turing Award
or so,” he says. report condemns as unnecessary cent of the time. In 2014 it was
possible 95 per cent of the time. World Wide Web creator Tim
SPACE X the killing of whales for scientific Berners-Lee has been awarded the
Researchers saying they had 2016 Turing Award, often described
research. Issued by a panel of concerns but no symptoms got as a Nobel prize for computing.
slots within 48 hours in less than The Association for Computing
the International Whaling 75 per cent of cases (Sexually Machinery credits Berners-Lee with
Transmitted Infections, DOI: inventing the web, the first web
Commission – the body that 10.1136/sextrans-2016-052882). browser and “the fundamental
protocols and algorithms allowing
introduced a moratorium on “The biggest worry is that the web to scale”.
patients will go undiagnosed and
commercial whaling in 1996 – the pass their infection on to other
people,” says Elizabeth Foley at
report rejects the rationale behind the Royal South Hants Hospital in
Southampton, UK.
Japan’s proposal for killing whales

in the north Pacific for scientific

research. “The proposal does not

adequately justify the need for

lethal sampling,” the report says.

The panel recommends no whales

should be killed until additional

work is undertaken and reviewed.

Conservation groups say the
–Used rocket, one careful owner– panel’s report adds to mounting

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 7

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Piercing the ESO/B. TAFRESHI
galaxy’s heart

We’re about to take the first images of our
galaxy’s central black hole, says Leah Crane

GET ready to peer into the genomes of some 2 billion Once they can study that –One of many eyes on the sky–
unknown. This week, we will have people – astronomers hope to take “banana” of light for the first
our first chance to take a picture the first image of the event horizon time, researchers hope they will As other telescopes are
of the supermassive black hole at around a black hole, and the be able to clear up some of the added to the network in coming
the centre of our galaxy. The image bright matter hurtling around it. long-standing enigmas of black decades, observations of the black
could teach us how black holes holes. One such puzzle is how holes will become even more
work and even how the largest “Event horizons have been part some supermassive black holes, precise, and should provide
and smallest forces governing the of the mythology of science, but like the one in M87, generate the fundamental insights into the
universe fit together. they will become real, in a way,” enormous jets of particles that workings of our universe.
says Heino Falcke at Radboud shoot from their centres at near
The Event Horizon Telescope is University in the Netherlands, the speed of light and where all One of the greatest mysteries in
switching on. It consists of eight who is part of the international that energy comes from. modern physics is how Einstein’s
radio observatories around collaboration.“Seeing is believing.” theory of general relativity, which
the world, including telescopes covers gravity and the behaviour
The actual images may not be of very large objects, meshes
“Event horizons have been processed and ready for publishing with quantum mechanics,
part of the mythology until next year, but simulations whose realm is the very small.
of science, but they will mean that the team has a decent
become real” idea of what they should see. Falcke hopes that observing
the intense gravity at the edge
in Spain, the US and Antarctica Even light is bent in the intense of a black hole will help us figure
(see map). And for just four or gravity around a black hole. The out how the two main theories
five nights between 5 and 14 April, side of the black hole rotating describing our universe fit
if the weather is clear at all of towards Earth should feature a together. “Something new will
the observatories, they will all bright crescent of light warped happen, and I think that new
turn on at once. around its edge, while the side thing will happen at the event
rotating away will be dimmer. horizon.”
Each telescope will point at
Sagittarius A*, the supermassive All together now “If you create an image at
black hole at the centre of the a resolution you’ve never had
Milky Way, and measure every The Event Horizon Telescope needs eight radio observatories in six different before, you might see things that
radio wave coming from its locations around the world to work in sync you’ve never even thought of,”
direction. Linking together says Stefan Gillessen at the Max
observatories spread across such IRAM radio telescope (Spain) Planck Institute for Physics in
a huge area and combining their Munich, Germany. The Event
observations to filter out extra Submillimeter Telescope (Arizona,US) Horizon Telescope’s first run
light will effectively create a should prove that event horizons
powerful “virtual telescope” James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and really exist. Future runs could
almost the size of Earth. Submillimeter Array (Hawaii, US) help us understand the basics of
our universe. ■
These telescopes will together Large Millimetre
capture sharper and more Telescope (Mexico)
detailed data than we’ve ever had
from Sagittarius A*, which we still Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array
know very little about, as well as and Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (Chile)
the larger black hole at the centre
of nearby galaxy M87. South Pole Telescope (Antarctica) SOURCE: NATURE

With the telescopes generating
a total of 2 petabytes of data per
night – enough to store the full

8 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

In this section
■ Dust from the cosmic dawn of the universe, page 11
■ Tadpoles see through implanted eyes, page 16
■ Carbon victory from defeat, page 22

Neural nets translate The system could be useful for in the Native American tribe
speech straight to text
translating speech in languages of the same name, and Ainu,

that are spoken by very few a language spoken by a handful

people, says Sharon Goldwater at of people in Japan.

the University of Edinburgh, UK. The system could also be used

GOOGLE’s latest take on machine translate, each neural layer used International disaster relief to translate languages that are
translation could make it easier this knowledge to manipulate the
for people to converse in different audio waveform until it was teams, for instance, could use it to rarely written down, since it
languages, by translating speech turned into the corresponding
in one language directly into text section of written English (arxiv. quickly put together a translation doesn’t require a written version
in another. org/abs/1703.08581).
system to communicate with of the source language – unlike
Machine translation of “It learns to find patterns of
speech normally works by first correspondence between the people they are trying to assist. conventional systems.
converting it into text, then waveforms in the source language
translating that into text in and the written text,” says When an earthquake hit Haiti in Until it is tested on a much
another language. But any error Dzmitry Bahdanau at the
in speech recognition will lead University of Montreal in Canada, 2010, says Goldwater, there was larger data set, it’s hard to tell how
to an error in transcription and who wasn’t involved with the work.
a mistake in the translation. no translation software available the new approach really compares

To cut out the middle step, for Haitian Creole. with existing translation systems,
researchers at Google Brain,
the tech giant’s deep learning Goldwater’s team is using a says Goldwater. But she thinks it
research arm, have turned to
neural networks. By skipping similar method to translate could set the standard for future
transcription, the approach
could potentially allow for more speech from Arapaho, a language machine translation.
accurate and quicker translations.
spoken by only 1000 or so people Text translation service Google
The team trained its system on
hundreds of hours of Spanish Translate already uses neural
audio with corresponding English
text. It used several layers of FLORESCO IMAGES/GETTY networks on its most popular
neural networks – computer
systems loosely modelled on the language pairs to translate whole
human brain – to match sections
of the spoken Spanish with the sentences at once. Intriguingly,
written translation. To do this,
it analysed the waveform of the this system appears to use an
Spanish audio to learn which
parts seemed to correspond with “interlingua” – a common
which chunks of written English.
When it was then asked to representation of sentences

that have the same meaning in

different languages – to translate

from one language to another.

This means it could translate

between a language pair it hasn’t

explicitly been trained on.

The Google Brain researchers

suggest the new speech-to-text

approach may also be able to

produce a system that can

translate multiple languages.

But while machine translation

keeps improving, it’s difficult to

tell how neural networks are

coming to their solutions, says
–I hear you– Bahdanau. Matt Reynolds ■

C5O02-mleivlleiolsnt-yoehaitr hotter now than it was at the time. Human emissions are now remove it from the atmosphere.
high by 2050 But CO2 is now rising too fast for
These conclusions come from the reversing the long-term decline in CO2
WE ARE pumping carbon dioxide into levels revealed by Foster’s estimates its warming effect to be counteracted
the atmosphere so fast that it could best estimate yet of how CO2 levels by this natural weathering. This has
soar to its highest level for 50 million changed over the past 420 million for the past half a billion years. This led some groups to investigate
years by the middle of this century. whether it is possible to speed up the
years. To produce it, Gavin Foster at decline has balanced out a gradual process, to geoengineer our way out
And if we carry on burning fossil of global warming.
fuels, by the 23rd century CO2 levels the University of Southampton, UK, rise in the sun’s warmth over the same
will be as high as they were 400 “Plant-driven weathering processes
million years ago. But this time the and his colleagues compiled data from period, says Foster, keeping our are too slow to save us from global
planet will be much warmer than it warming, but they can be accelerated
was back then, because the sun is more than 100 different studies. planet’s temperature in the habitable by applying crushed silicates to
croplands to capture CO2,” says David
Comparing their estimates of past zone – with a little help from plants. Beerling at the University of Sheffield,
who is leading a project to explore this
CO2 levels with standard scenarios for Land plants help break down volcanic idea. Michael Le Page ■

future emissions, they say the level rocks that then react with CO2 and

will soon be as high as the average

around 50 million years ago, at around “By the 23rd century,
carbon dioxide levels will
600 parts per million (Nature

Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ be as high as they were

ncomms14845). 400 million years ago”

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 9

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Great apes can boxes and can decide to open having a false belief, A doesn’t
read your mind
either one. actually know where the object is.

When A remained in the room, The apes chose to unlock each

the apes were equally likely to box equally often, perhaps, the

unlock either box. But when researchers say, because it was less

A wasn’t there for the switch, the clear what the person’s intention

apes unlocked the box containing was (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/

Sam Wong Planck Institute for Evolutionary the object in 77 per cent of trials. journal.pone.0173793)
Anthropology in Leipzig,
OUR closest evolutionary relatives Germany, and colleagues tested This shows apes can recognise Because the apes behave
are quite the mind readers. And 34 zoo chimpanzees, bonobos and
they can use that knowledge to orangutans, in search of more when A is acting under a false differently in each of the two
help people figure things out conclusive evidence.
when they are labouring under a belief, the researchers argue. scenarios, it shows they have
misapprehension, according to In their test, person A places
the latest research. an object into one of two boxes, The apes guess that the person is some mental representation of
then either remains in the room
The ability to attribute mental or leaves. Person B removes it, trying to find the object, and help what the other person believes,
states to others, aka theory of places it in the other box and locks
mind, is sometimes considered both boxes. Then A tries to open them by opening the right box. says Buttelmann, rather than
unique to humans, but evidence the box where they left the object.
is mounting that other animals The apes know how to unlock the Their performance in this test just thinking that person doesn’t
have some capacity for it.
closely matches the behaviour know where the object is.
In a study last year, chimps,
bonobos and orangutans watched of a 16-month-old baby. The results show apes apply
videos of people behaving in
different scenarios as cameras In a second test, A gives the their understanding of others’
tracked their eye movements.
The experiment found that the object to B, then leaves the room beliefs when deciding how to
apes looked where an actor in the
video would expect to see an while B puts the object in one of behave in social interactions,
object, rather than towards its
true location, suggesting the the boxes. In this case, rather than he says. Many other studies
animals were aware others could
hold false beliefs. have found that great apes

But that experiment left open understand other mental states
the possibility apes were simply
predicting that the actor would such as goals, intentions and
go to the last place he’d seen the
object, without understanding desires. “The fact that we now
that he held a false belief. Now,
David Buttelmann at the Max have two studies that show

evidence of belief understanding

in great apes, shows that we

are not that different,” says

Buttelmann. “Whether this

belief understanding is as fully

JOEL SARTORE/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE fledged as it is in humans is a

different question.”

Alia Martin from Victoria

University of Wellington, New

Zealand, isn’t convinced by the

conclusions. “I’m excited to see

researchers look for this amazing

ability in apes, but we’re going to

need more research to settle the
–I know what you’re thinking– ape theory of mind debate.” ■

CGI humans images is natural for humans. Getting and that’s just not possible,” says Gül than 65,000 clips and 6.5 million
help computers frames. Randomly selected body
understand us computers to do the same requires a Varol at the École Normale Supérieure shapes and clothing were used for
the figures, each one set in different
WE ARE hard for computers to figure lot more effort,” says Javier Romero at in Paris. poses (arxiv.org/abs/1701.01370).
out. Our actions are unpredictable
enough that machine vision systems, the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent So Varol, Romero and their “With synthetic images, you can
such as those used in driverless cars, create more unusual body shapes
can’t readily make sense of them. Systems in Tübingen, Germany. colleagues have made thousands of and actions,” says Mykhaylo Andriluka
at the Max Planck Institute for
Fake people – videos and images of At the moment, the best computer videos of “synthetic humans”. They Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany.
computer-generated bodies walking,
dancing and doing cartwheels – could vision algorithms are trained using walk, they run, they crouch – and since Computers with an enhanced grasp
help them learn what to look for. of our movements could also better
thousands of images that have been the clips are computer-generated, predict them. A driverless car, for
“Recognising what’s going on in example, might be able to tell whether
painstakingly labelled to highlight key every frame is automatically labelled a person is walking close by or about
to step into the road. Timothy Revell ■
features. This is how they learn to with all the important information.

distinguish an eye from an arm, say. In total, the team generated more

Ideally, every pixel in every frame “With synthetic images, you
of a video would be labelled. “But this can create more unusual
would mean instead of creating body shapes and actions
thousands of annotations, people to train vision algorithms”
would have to label millions of things,

10 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

Chaotic egg
division causes
fall in fertility

WOMEN are reminded only too NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UCLA –A window on cosmic history–
frequently about biological clocks.
Now we actually have a clearer idea Oldest-ever dust shines the universe at all,” says Watson.
of what makes fertility fall – chaotic a light on early universe The findings also suggest that
mix-ups when egg cells divide.
THE early universe was filthy. gravitational lens and thus tracing cosmic dust could be a
One reason egg quality declines useful probe for studying these
is a loss of cohesion between That much can be gleaned from magnified the distant galaxy by early galaxies.
chromosomes during the final
divisions of eggs as they mature. newly detected cosmic dust in a a factor of two, Laporte’s team Astronomers usually study
Because the chromosomes in the universe’s first galaxies
older eggs stick together less well, galaxy whose light reaches us discovered the distant dust. To by counting their numbers,
eggs can end up with too many or measuring their luminosities and
too few chromosomes, usually from when the universe was boot, there’s enough of it that it observing their colours, says co-
making them infertile. author Richard Ellis at University
only 600 million years old. could fill the sun 6 million times College London. That’s much less
But Greg Fitzharris at the University information than we can get from
of Montreal in Canada and his team The finding is a game changer over (arxiv.org/abs/1703.02039). observations of nearby galaxies,
have now identified another way in of which we can take crystal-clear
which cells can be left with the wrong that might ultimately show how So much dust so early on pictures and detect spectral lines –
number of chromosomes. They have spikes or drops in light at specific
found that eggs from older mice are quickly the early galaxies evolved. provides a strict limit on the time wavelengths based on the chemical
more likely to behave chaotically elements they contain.
during the first phase of dividing In the past 10 years, astronomers it takes to form, which should help
than those from young mice. But the detection of early dust is
have learned that dust is forged astronomers better understand a big step forward in investigating
This is caused by microtubules, the first galaxies – standing as a
structures that normally corral during the aftermath of the some of the mysteries about the proxy for the presence of heavier
chromosomes to opposite ends of elements, which also form from
a cell before it divides. But in half supernova deaths of massive, “Examining dust may supernova explosions.
the cells taken from old mice, short-lived stars. But many ultimately show
microtubules sent chromosomes in mysteries surround dust’s origin. how quickly the first Next, astronomers want to
different directions, causing clumps Astronomers, for example, don’t galaxies evolved” peer back to a time in cosmic
in three or four spots. This made the know how dust can withstand history when the emission
resulting egg cells more likely to have from dust disappears. These
the wrong number of chromosomes the violent shock waves from first galaxies were so pristine
(Current Biology, doi.org/b46s). that they contained only the
supernovae and precisely how origins of dust. It also hints that the hydrogen and helium left over
Swapping the nuclei of young eggs from the big bang.
with those from old eggs showed that long it takes to form. early universe might have looked
it is the age of the egg cell, and not the “That’s what we’re looking for,”
chromosomes inside the nucleus, that In light of that, Nicolas Laporte familiar, with protoplanetary says Watson. “We’re trying to
seems to cause this problem. When push back far enough where we
given a young nucleus, older cells still at University College London discs or even Earth-like planets see the formation of the first
had dysfunctional microtubules. But galaxies.” Shannon Hall ■
younger eggs hosting older nuclei and his colleagues turned ALMA, circling those early stars, says
didn’t show chaotic division.
the Atacama Large Millimeter/ Darach Watson at the University
“It implies that there’s something
about that aged cytoplasm, the big submillimeter Array, to peer out of Copenhagen in Denmark.
volume of that cell, that’s not able to
direct the chromosome segregation at the early universe. They studied That’s because dust is a
machinery,” says Francesca Duncan,
at Northwestern University, Illinois. a star-forming galaxy called crucial building block; it gives

Fitzharris says that understanding A2744_YD4, whose light dates all molecules something to bind
what’s going on might one day equip
us to make older eggs behave like back to just 200 million years to, from molecular hydrogen
younger ones. Chelsea Whyte ■
after the birth of the earliest stars. within stars to the complex

With a little help from a molecules inside planets and

foreground galaxy cluster called even you. “You need dust to do

Abell 2744, which acted as a anything actually interesting in

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 11

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Prehistoric artists
used exotic beasts

Alice Klein quickly integrated these species JUSTIN MOTT/MOTT VISUALS –Surprising finds on Sulawesi–
into their symbolic lives. Last year,
STONE Age style was all about for example, archaeologists Brumm believes future work out the route humans took
the latest animal necklaces reported on 42,000-year-old excavations on Sulawesi and from Asia to Australia and how
and bracelets. Some of the first jewellery beads made from the other islands between Asia and they altered their symbolic
humans to cross the ocean from shells of Nautilus pompilius – Australia – known as the Wallacea practices in each new habitat.
Asia to Australia fashioned a South Pacific mollusc – found region – are likely to yield further A 46,000-year-old kangaroo bone
jewellery from the bones, teeth in a cave on the island of Timor. examples of prehistoric art and nose ornament recently found in
and shells of the unfamiliar jewellery. “The area is woefully Australia has already confirmed
creatures they found on islands Now, a team led by Adam underexplored,” he says. that humans continued to adapt
along the way. Brumm and Michelle Langley at Although there are 2000 islands their jewellery-making skills to
Griffith University in Queensland, in Wallacea, only seven are being new fauna when they arrived
The finding adds to evidence Australia, has dug up three investigated for early human from the islands.
that early inhabitants of ancient ornaments created from occupation, he says.
Australasia had symbolic the bones and a tooth of native “For a long time, people
practices that were just as rich animals on the island of Sulawesi, More research is needed to thought that the spark of
as those of their European north-west of Timor. human brilliance and artistic
counterparts. genius came out of prehistoric
One is a pendant made from Europe,” says Brumm. “But
“We used to think that the the finger bone of a bear cuscus all these emerging findings
spark of human brilliance (Ailurops ursinus), a tree-dwelling show that there were complex,
and artistic genius came marsupial. A hole drilled in the sophisticated, symbolic cultures
out of prehistoric Europe” top suggests it was strung from flourishing on the other side of
a necklace or bracelet. The other the world at the same time.”
Modern humans first left Africa two are beads made from the
at least 60,000 years ago, with tooth of an odd-looking pig Peter Veth at the University
some travelling west towards known as a babirusa or pig deer of Western Australia agrees.
Europe. Others spilled east, (of the genus Babyrousa). The “The idea that complex,
spreading to the southern edge ornaments – between 22,000 figurative behaviours did not
of mainland Asia, before building and 30,000 years old – were exist in Wallacea and Australia at
boats and island-hopping to found in an inland cave (PNAS, this time is just not true,” he says.
Australia about 50,000 years ago. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1619013114) “It’s exciting that we’re now filling
in the gaps.” ■
Along the way, they stumbled The cave was excavated because
across a dizzying array of new and it is near some of the world’s
exotic plants and animals that oldest rock art: a 35,000-year-old
differed from island to island. painting of a babirusa and a
Growing evidence suggests they 40,000-year-old hand stencil
reported in 2014.

LATEST LINE IN NEANDERTHAL DECORATION

A BONE from a raven’s wing carved notches 2 and 6 are shallower and notches, created similar patterns to
with regularly spaced notches is the angled slightly obliquely. D’Errico those on the raven bone (PLoS One,
best evidence yet that Neanderthals, thinks these two were most likely doi.org/b45g). “When you compare it
too, had an eye for aesthetics. added later to fill in gaps in the with modern human variability in
original sequence and create a more producing the same type of notch on
Francesco d’Errico at the University regular pattern for aesthetic reasons. a bird bone, you see that there was a
of Bordeaux, France, and colleagues will by the Neanderthal to make them
examined a 38,000 to 43,000-year- His team found that notches 2 and equidistant,” D’Errico says.
old raven bone from a Neanderthal 6 are needed for the sequence to be
site in Crimea. Five of its seven carved perceived as being evenly spaced. In He thinks the pattern may have
notches are parallel, with a similar addition, volunteers given stone tools been symbolic, perhaps as a mark of
depth and shape, suggesting they like those the Neanderthals had and ownership, but such explanations
were cut with the same tool. But then asked to carve evenly spaced remain speculative. Sam Wong

12 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

EINSTEIN’S
UNIVERSE

Get to grips with space-time, the Big Bang,
black holes, gravitational waves, time travel
and the search for a theory of everything.

Buy your copy from all good magazine retailers or digitally.
Find out more at newscientist.com/thecollection

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Augmented reality Lightform, based in San The whole package will cost
minus the headset
Francisco, has designed its system more than a depth sensor like

to work with existing projectors, Microsoft’s Kinect but less than a

the choice of which determines mid-range laptop when it goes on

the scale of the experience. sale later this year, says Jones.

“You could do your coffee mug The mapping is not quite real-

using a tiny pico projector or you time – it takes about a minute to

Victoria Turk much-hyped Florida-based could do the side of a building do a scan – and you can’t interact
start-up Magic Leap is expected
YOU don’t need special glasses to to follow suit later this year. using a really big projector,” with the projected images, unlike
enjoy an augmented view of the
world. A new device superimposes Eliminating headsets would says Lightform’s design director with some systems that use haptic
images over real-world objects mean many people can share in
without the need for a bulky head- an AR experience at once, without Phil Reyneri. feedback or motion tracking to
mounted display. special preparation. It also
sidesteps problems involving the The device’s camera give users the illusion of touching
Combining camera and comfort, weight and power cables
computer, Lightform connects of wearable displays. periodically rescans the scene and what they see.
to a video projector to beam
images and animations on to recalibrates if things have moved, Using light to augment reality
surrounding objects – a technique
called projection mapping. It making the system suitable for is exciting, says Natan Linder at
essentially turns any surface into
a screen by using depth sensors long-term installations. An app the Massachusetts Institute of
to map the shape of objects, then
tailoring its lighting effects to fit. gives control over the graphics. Technology. Adding projection

“The idea is to seamlessly mapping means you can “paint
merge the virtual world with
the physical world, and to do it with light” and give objects virtual
without wearing anything on
your face,” says Lightform CEO textures that fool the eyes.
Brett Jones. Initial demos show
a coffee shop’s price list Jared Ficklin, chief technologist
materialising on a blank slate,
squiggly lines dancing across at design firm Argo Design,
a store window display, and a
cactus undulating with decorative imagines projected interfaces for
pulses of light.
controlling smart home devices
Until now, augmented reality
(AR) has often been delivered via alongside voice-recognition
a wearable device: Microsoft’s
HoloLens uses a headset, and the technology like Amazon’s Alexa.

They could beam a recipe on to

a kitchen surface, for example.

But projected AR has its own

drawbacks, Linder points out.

Shadows can be a problem if

anything gets between the

projector and surface, and it does

not work well in bright spaces.

If projected interfaces become

integrated into the spaces we

VCG/GETTY IMAGES live and work in, they could

usher in a new kind of ubiquitous

computing, Linder says. But first

they need to find really useful
–Immersed in a projection– applications. ■

Tiny fish drugs swim out unscathed. “The predators effect. “What’s really unusual are neuropeptide Y act together to cause
predators with a drop in blood pressure of as much
unique venom shake and quiver, and open their jaws these opioid-like neuropeptides as 37 per cent in 4 minutes. “If this
happened in a human, you would
SOME little fish bite back. A tropical and gills really wide,” says Nick called enkephalins, which don’t feel faint, dizzy and quite sick,”
blenny uses prominent fangs on its says Casewell. “We don’t really know
lower jaws to inject venom that sends Casewell of the Liverpool School of induce pain,” Casewell says. “Most what sensations fish experience, but
larger fish into a limp mess. they clearly suffer such an adverse
Tropical Medicine, UK. “They never eat animals that produce venom use it to sensation that they avoid ever eating
When a predator engulfs a blenny, blennies again.”
the tiny fish bites the predator’s blennies again, so whatever the effect inflict pain, yet we found no evidence
mouth. The bigger fish’s blood The third main ingredient is PLA2,
pressure plummets, its coordination is, it seems to be very unpleasant.” of that with the blenny.” a phospholipase – commonly made by
goes awry and its mouth gapes snakes, lizards, bees and scorpions –
involuntarily, allowing the blenny to Casewell and his colleagues have The second, neuropeptide Y, that probably causes inflammation
(Current Biology, doi.org/b447).
tested the venom of 11 species from has been found in cone snails and Andy Coghlan ■

reefs in the western Pacific, including causes blood pressure to drop.

the striped poison-fang blenny Casewell thinks the enkephalins and

(Meiacanthus grammistes). The venom

has three main components. One is “When bitten, the predator’s
enkephalins – seen in some scorpions blood pressure plummets,
its mouth gapes open
– which act on opioid receptors,

suggesting they have a pain-relieving the blenny swims out”

14 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Neurons linking
breathing and
stress found

A TYPE of brain cell that connects

breathing rate to alertness has been

ALLEN DISCOVERY CENTER AT TUFTS UNIVERSITY found in mice. Killing these neurons

made mice unusually calm, and these

cells may explain why deep breathing

makes us feel relaxed.

Kevin Yackle at the University of

California, San Francisco, and his

team have dubbed these brain cells

“pranayama neurons” in reference

to a yoga breathing exercise. They

–New eye in a new place– identified them using a database of

Tadpoles see with gene activity in mouse brain cells,
transplanted eyes
nervous systems – an essential which showed that the pranayama
Jessica Hamzelou system, which controls the body step for being able to send visual neurons are a distinct type of neuron
information to the brain for in the hindbrain.
and feeds information back to processing. But this rose to
40 per cent in those given the There are only 350 of these cells
BLIND tadpoles have learned to the brain. To see if the body might drug (npj Regenerative Medicine, in a mouse’s brain, located in a region
doi.org/b448). responsible for controlling breathing,
see again – using eyes implanted be able to adapt to a new eye, for and they are connected to a nearby
What’s more, the tadpoles area known to control alertness.
in their tails. instance, Levin’s team turned to could see with the eyes, despite When the team used genetic
them being connected to the engineering and a special drug to
With help from a drug usually frogs. Although they are very spinal cord, not the brain. The kill the pranayama neurons in three
team found the tadpoles could mice, the animals took a greater
used to treat migraines, the eyes different to people, frogs share learn the difference between red number of slow breaths and spent less
and blue areas, for instance, and time exploring and sniffing (Science,
grew new connections to the similarities with us at the avoid coloured triangles as they doi.org/b449). They also did more
moved on a screen beneath them. grooming, becoming “super-chilled
tadpoles’ nervous systems. molecular level, says Levin. out”, says Yackle.
That the tadpoles could see
The same approach may work The team removed eyes from using eyes connected to their The usual role of these neurons
spinal cords is surprising, says might be to ensure that when mice are
in people, allowing the body to three-day-old tadpoles, and Bernd Fritzsch at the University more physically active – such as when
of Iowa, and good news for teams they are exploring a new place – their
integrate organs grown in the lab. attached one eye into each of developing engineered organs sniffing and fast breathing trigger
like eyes and ears. greater alertness, says Yackle. If the
“If a human had an eye “This work suggests you same mechanism is at work in people,
implanted in their back, could put an ear on the “We have no idea how we would slower breathing might make these
connected to their spinal cord, neck. It might look funny, connect a retina to the brain, and neurons less active and so lower
would the human be able to see but it could still work” if you wanted to replace an ear, stress levels.
out of that eye? My guess is you would have to cut out a big
piece of the skull,” Fritzsch says. Many kinds of relaxation therapies,
probably yes,” says Michael Levin “This work suggests that this such as yoga and meditation, involve
might not be necessary – that you deliberately slowing our breathing.
at Tufts University in Medford, the tails of other tadpoles of the could put the organ on the neck, Doctors also recommend deep
for example, and connect it to the breathing to help combat anxiety
Massachusetts. same age that were also blind. spinal cord. It might look funny, or panic attacks. Miguel Farias of
but it could still work.” Coventry University, UK, hopes
Many people in need of new Some of these were then given a the findings will encourage more
But Fritzsch says the team research into relaxation techniques.
organs spend years on transplant drug on the site of their new eye needs to find out whether the “Deep breathing is a very effective
drug works the same way in way of calming you down,” he says.
lists. Synthetic organs might solve straight after the surgery. Called people, and whether its effects “It’s a very strong and quick effect.”
extend beyond young animals Clare Wilson ■
this, and teams around the world zolmitriptan, the drug activates to adults. ■

have created replacement a class of serotonin receptors

organs – bladders, for example – that seem to trigger electrical

in the lab and tried implanting activity in cells – something

them in people. Groups are now that Levin’s team had previously

working on more complex organs, discovered encourages the growth

such as eyes and hearts. of neurons.

But to work, these particular Of those that didn’t receive the

organs would need to be drug, only 5 per cent grew new

connected to the central nervous neurons that reached their central

16 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017



IN BRIEF

AUGUSTSNOW / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO Space-time ripples
slow down star spin

Stealthy sawfish is more movement to ensure the program mimicked it accurately. THE rapid spin of a neutron star is
inconspicuous than it looks “These are tools we use every day for engineering slowing in bursts – and it may be
problems, but now the technology is able to cross because of gravitational waves.
YOU would think it would be hard to miss, but the boundaries into biology,” says team member Phil Clausen.
formidable snout of the sawfish has evolved to be Neutron star J1023+0038 flits
undetectable to prey as it swishes through water. We knew that sawfish use rostrums as weapons between a state in which it emits
to bludgeon prey, sometimes impaling fish on the mostly radio waves and one where
So says Sam Evans, an engineer at the University of razor-sharp teeth. But Evans and his team found that it mainly gives off X-rays, when its
Newcastle, Australia, and colleagues. Evans was inspired the snouts also cut through water without creating spin slows more quickly.
when he watched a TV programme about the sawfish vibrations – just like wind turbine blades through air
and realised its snout – called a rostrum – looked similar (Journal of Fish Biology, doi.org/b43g). Brynmor Haskell at the Polish
to the wind turbine blades he usually studies. To find out Academy of Sciences and his
whether the rostrum had similar properties, his team This is crucial to hunting because prey fish rely on colleague now suggest that
CT-scanned three sawfish species and made 3D computer vibrations in the water to determine whether potential gravitational waves could be
models. They used videos of the rostrum’s natural predators are swimming nearby. It is especially true in behind the unusual slowing. In
areas with low visibility like the muddy coastal waters the X-ray phase, they say, the star
and estuaries of Western Australia, where sawfish thrive. steals material from a smaller
companion star that orbits it. The
Dark web not all that dark, it turns out Sanchez-Rola at the University of material sticks to J1023’s surface to
Deusto, Spain: anyone using the build up a bump. This pushes the
IF YOU thought your anonymity websites such as Google. Owners same script as a dark web service atoms beneath deeper into the
was assured on the dark web, of these resources can track when could track a user’s activity and star, where higher pressure fuses
think again. they are loaded, potentially potentially identify them when them into heavier elements.
letting them monitor traffic to they visit less private sites. The
Close links between the dark dark web services. team presented their work at the This could make the star’s
web and the regular “surface” World Wide Web Conference in gravitational field asymmetrical,
web could pose privacy issues Privacy researchers also found Perth, Australia, this week. and cause it to radiate
for users. An investigation of tracking scripts, designed to gravitational waves that carry
1.5 million pages on the dark web analyse users’ browsing Those using Tor proxies – away energy, slowing its spin
network Tor found that more than behaviour, on 27 per cent of the services on the surface web that more (arxiv.org/abs/1703.08374).
20 per cent imported resources hidden pages. Nearly a third act as gateways to the dark web,
like pictures, documents and originated in the surface web. like the popular Tor2Web – are Apps conspire to
Javascript files from surface most at risk, says Sanchez-Rola. steal your data
That’s a problem, says Iskander
THOUSANDS of Android apps are
colluding to obtain information
such as your contact list or
location data, without permission.

Once Android apps are
downloaded, they can function by
talking with each other without
notifying you. But some exploit
this to gain access to data they
shouldn’t be able to touch.

Among the 100,206 most
popular apps in the Google Play
store, Gang Wang of Virginia Tech
and colleagues found 23,495 pairs
in cahoots. But each pair
contained one of just 54 apps that
instigated the collusion. Those
most likely to be up to mischief
included emoji and ringtone apps.

The researchers presented their
work at a security conference in
Abu Dhabi this week.

18 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

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

Giant octopuses Europe’s first ever cavefish discovered in south Germany
live on… jellyfish
A CAVE diver in Germany has Germany, who led the team that and just a few thousand years
AN ELUSIVE deep-sea giant has discovered Europe’s first cavefish. analysed the fish. might be enough, says Behrmann-
been filmed with its prey for the The pale-coloured loach is Godel. “Cavefish could exist
first time – and it’s surprisingly thought to have begun to diverge “Despite this short time virtually everywhere in principle,
low-calorie for a giant. The octopus, from surface fish as glaciers from span, the fish show trademark and there’s no good reason to
Haliphron atlanticus, was filmed on the last ice age receded some adaptations to cave life compared expect long evolution times for
top of a medusa jellyfish, devouring 16,000 to 20,000 years ago, with loaches from surface them to adapt to caves,” she says.
its innards with its beak, with the linking surface and cave waters. locations nearby, including a
medusa’s sticky tentacles still pale body colouration, much Simply dubbed “cave loach” or
hanging out of its mouth. The “Our first genetic studies, plus smaller eyes, plus larger nostrils “barbatula” for now, the fish was
researchers think the octopus might knowledge of the geological and barbels,” she says. Larger discovered in 2015 by Joachim
even be using the jellyfish tentacles history of the region, suggest the barbels, whisker-like feelers, may Kreiselmaier, an amateur cave
to ensnare more prey. cave loach population is improve tactile sensing in the diver, in a water-filled cave
amazingly young, certainly not dark (Current Biology, DOI: labyrinth called the Danube-Aach
Little is known about this octopus, older than 20,000 years,” says 10.1016/j.cub.2017.02.048). System in southern Germany.
which can grow to be 4 metres long Jasminca Behrmann-Godel at the “To reach the area with the fish
and weigh 75 kilograms. Steven University of Konstanz in It shows fish can adapt quickly takes an hour [of diving],” he says.
Haddock from the Monterey Bay to these subterranean habitats,
Aquarium Research Institute in
California and his colleagues have© 2017 MBARIPlanet and asteroid
only seen it in the wild three times JAMES DAVIES / ALAMY STOCK PHOTOplay chicken
in as many decades before filming
three of them using remotely THERE’S an asteroid in Jupiter’s ALS linked to occupational exposures
operated vehicles. orbit around the sun that’s going
in the opposite direction – and it
The team also analysed the may have been doing so for more
stomachs of five museum than a million years.
specimens, mainly finding the
remains of gelatinous zooplankton Object 2015 BZ509 was
and jellyfish. The open ocean is discovered in 2015 and is the only
teeming with such creatures, asteroid we know of that shares
so the octopuses make use of a planet’s orbital space while
what’s available. But most other moving in the opposite direction.
octopuses eat more substantial Paul Wiegert at the University of
prey such as fish and crustaceans, Western Ontario in Canada and
so it is a surprise to see this species his colleagues have now
grow so large on jellyfish (Scientific examined it to see why it doesn’t
Reports, doi.org/b43h). Haddock crash head-on into Jupiter.
says this illustrates the complexity
of the ocean food web and the The asteroid passes the planet
overlooked role of gelatinous food. twice per orbit: once when it
slips between Jupiter and the sun,
and once on the planet’s far side. WORKPLACE exposure to frequency magnetic fields were
Each pass provides a small electromagnetic fields is associated twice as likely to develop ALS as
gravitational tug, which keeps with a higher risk of developing people who have never had this kind
BZ509’s path just to one side of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). of occupational exposure
Jupiter’s so they don’t collide. (Occupational & Environmental
Several studies have found a Medicine, doi.org/b43j). Jobs with
The team has calculated that higher risk of ALS in electrical relatively high exposures include
this precarious-sounding orbit is workers. One theory is that electrical welders, sewing-machine operators
actually fairly stable and safe for shocks are to blame, or extremely and aircraft pilots, says Vermeulen.
the asteroid. It has been following low frequency magnetic fields.
this retrograde path for at least “The effect of extremely low
1 million years and ought to Now a study of more than 58,000 frequency magnetic fields on ALS
remain on it for a million more. men and 6500 women suggests the development is not clear,” says
second idea may be correct. Roel Christian Holscher at Lancaster
We still don’t know what put Vermeulen at Utrecht University in University, UK. He says the finding
it on its backwards path in the the Netherlands and his team found should be interpreted with caution
first place, however. “It’s very that people whose jobs exposed as it may be a false positive.
peculiar,” says Mattia Galiazzo at them to high levels of very low
the University of Vienna, Austria.

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 19

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ANALYSIS CLIMATE POLICY

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–Plenty more where that came from-

The price of emission

Donald Trump’s rollback of climate legislation is a chance for the world
to unite against the US with carbon tariffs, says Michael Le Page

LAST week, US president Donald of greenhouse gases has given up Such a global carbon price has Although some countries
Trump signed an executive order have unilaterally introduced
that aims to reverse the climate on even trying to meet its target historically been dismissed as carbon pricing, they have done
regulations introduced by the so only in a very limited way or
Obama administration. It could under the agreement. politically infeasible. But that was with a very low price, or both –
effectively cancel plans to restrict greatly reducing the effectiveness
carbon dioxide emissions, such Now what matters is how the before Trump’s flagrant climate of the policy. Why so toothless?
as those from coal-fired power Countries fear that if companies
plants. Years of legal battles lie world responds. If other countries rollback. Suddenly, an intriguing have to pay high penalties for
ahead, but the message could their carbon emissions, their
not be clearer: the US is turning stand by and let the US brazenly possibility has arisen: could the industries will go bust or move
its back on efforts to curtail production elsewhere to avoid
global warming. flout its commitments, the entire outrageous behaviour of the US the higher costs.

The nightmare scenario that agreement could slowly unravel unite nations to take action on Take the European Union.
Trump’s inauguration posed for In theory, it has carbon pricing
the nearly 200 countries signed as its credibility evaporates. climate that will be effective? in the form of its carbon trading
up to the Paris climate agreement system. Companies in carbon-
has now become reality. The But what can the other nations An ever-rising price on carbon intensive industries – for
world’s second-biggest emitter example, electricity, steel and
do when the agreement includes has long been the most agreed-on

no enforcement measures? way to speed the transition to

There is an alternative zero-carbon economies.

approach, and many think it But it is easier said than done.

could lead to faster emissions “Trump might just outrage
cuts. It is introducing a global the world so much that
price on carbon, and slapping he makes the politically
carbon tariffs on goods from any infeasible feasible”
country that refuses to join in.

22 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

cement – must buy permits that it would create so much bad Getting away with it Germany has been analysing
to emit CO2 (see chart, right). will, when Paris created good will.” using an economic model.
However, to keep these companies Just under a quarter of the world’s CO2 His as-yet-unpublished work
competitive with their non-EU Now the situation has changed. emissions from fossil fuels and cement suggests more countries would
counterparts, the EU dishes out Trump has just demonstrated production should soon have a price on need to join in to force the US to
free permits, for instance, to the how ineffectual the Paris them, but it is too low to lead to cuts
cement industry. Even when not
given freely, the EU permits are so approach is. The key problem, EU ~4.5 change course.
cheap they have failed to drive as his executive order reveals, ~8.5 If tariffs are imposed only by
emissions reductions. is that the Paris agreement does 39 other
not deter selfish behaviour: initiatives ~9.5 the EU and China, the short-term
How to break the stalemate? nations leaving it to others to costs to the US will be relatively
Carbon tariffs, also known as tackle climate change while China small, Böhringer concludes.
border adjustment taxes, are one (predicted) China, by contrast, would lose
answer. The idea is that countries
that impose carbon pricing on benefiting from their efforts. Global ~77.5 SOURCE: WORLD BANK much if the US claimed carbon
their own industries would also tariffs violate trade rules and
impose border taxes on goods “The Trump case confirms that emissions
imported from countries that do not covered
not. This would allow countries to
raise carbon prices to a meaningful climate change is a problem of retaliated by slapping punitive
level without putting their own
industries at a disadvantage. international free-riding,” says tariffs on goods from China –

Better still, if enough powerful Ockenfels. “And carbon pricing in other words, if there was a
countries banded together to
institute carbon tariffs, it would could be an effective way of situation, says Oldag Caspar of trade war.
create a compelling incentive
for other countries to join in too. preventing free-riding.” trade and environment group In principle, there shouldn’t
That’s because if your exporters
are forced to pay a carbon tax, So carbon tariffs are now back Germanwatch, based in Bonn. be. If carbon tariffs are designed
better to collect that money
yourself rather than see it go to on the agenda. After Trump’s “EU-China talks are already to be fair, they should be allowed
another country (see “How to put
a price on carbon”, below). election, former French president starting on this.” under World Trade Organization

A global carbon price is the Nicolas Sarkozy openly called This could lead to new rules, says Sam Lowe of
approach that many prominent
researchers and economists, for the imposition of carbon agreements between China and environmental organisation
including Axel Ockenfels at the
University of Cologne in tariffs on US goods. Mexico, the EU, Caspar says – possibly Friends of the Earth. But no one
Germany, have been calling for.
They argue that it will produce whose relations with the US including one on carbon tariffs. can say for sure. “So much has
much faster falls in emissions
than simply setting targets, have been strained by the new China’s stance could be crucial. “Climate change is a
which is the current approach. administration, has also said it
For example, under the Paris is considering it. In the past, it has been the problem of international
agreement, each country comes
up with its own target for cutting And in February, Europe’s proposed target of the tariffs, free-riding – one that
emissions – and there are no steel-makers joined the calls for
penalties for failing to meet them. and has fiercely opposed them.
But now its situation has changed. carbon pricing could solve”
Last year, the prospect of using
carbon tariffs to force countries to a tariff, claiming that they are China has been making huge
adopt carbon pricing faded after
the apparent success of Paris. losing out to competitors in other efforts to cut pollution, and it also been written on this question,”
After signing the agreement,
countries could not then turn countries because of the EU has plans to introduce a carbon Lowe says. “We will only find out
around and threaten to impose
carbon tariffs on others, says carbon trading system. trading system similar to that of if it gets challenged.”
Glen Peters at the Center for
International Climate Research in EU leaders have been more the EU. For the first time, China For many economists, the risk
Norway. “The general feeling is
circumspect. In public, they may be starting to see some of trade wars is the strongest

have said they have no plans for upsides to tariffs as well as argument against carbon tariffs.

tariffs – but conspicuously have downsides. However, world leaders will need

not ruled anything out. So could the EU and China join to weigh this risk against the

Even before last week’s climate together to impose them on the immense and growing costs of

U-turn in the US, there was much US? This is the surprising scenario climate change. There is an

discussion behind the scenes that Christoph Böhringer at the opportunity here for countries

about how to deal with the US University of Oldenburg in that are serious about tackling

climate change to bypass the

HOW TO PUT A PRICE ON CARBON ineffectual Paris agreement
and club together to impose a
If someone vandalised your house, production – a carbon tax. The other
global carbon price.
you’d be outraged if they got away is to impose a limit on how much CO2
scot-free. The idea of a carbon price can be emitted by large industries, Here again, Trump might
make the decision easier.
is to make polluters pay for the and then sell permits to pollute – cap He has been threatening to slap

damage their emissions will do and trade, or carbon trading. big tariffs on goods from China

to people’s homes and livelihoods, We already know that a to boost US industries, an action

as a result of climate-change related high-enough carbon price that could spark a trade war. If it

floods, storms and sea level rise discourages fossil fuel use, happens, imposing carbon tariffs

(see page 33). encourages energy efficiency and on US goods would be one of the

One approach is to tax goods and makes renewables more competitive. ways China and others could
services on the basis of how much To be really effective, the carbon
respond while maintaining the
carbon dioxide is emitted during their price just needs to rise rapidly.
moral high ground. We live in

interesting times. ■

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 23

COMMENT

The heat is on

Pumping chemicals into the stratosphere to cool Earth is a scary
idea, but we may have to do it anyway, says Jamais Cascio

FEW people working on ways to halt the rise in atmospheric
geoengineer the atmosphere to carbon dioxide and acidification
cool Earth think it’s anything but a of the oceans. It also risks
scary idea. Unfortunately, it’s one droughts and political conflicts
we may soon have to embrace. over control and liability.

Solar radiation management But we may eventually have to
(SRM) adds particles to the upper use it. Why? Because planetwide
atmosphere to reflect a small efforts to reduce greenhouse gas
fraction of incoming sunlight, emissions have been sluggish, all
potentially slowing, halting or but wiping out hope of avoiding a
reversing global warming. 1.5°C rise. Averting a 2°C rise also
looks doubtful. And there is broad
Researchers at Harvard agreement that warming above
University are about to launch a 3°C risks “apocalyptic” impacts.
project in the sky above Arizona
to see if it works for real. The test This brings a key complication
will be too small to alter global to the fore: the lag between action
temperatures, but it still amounts and effect. Due to geophysical
to the biggest trial of the method. factors, such as CO2 persisting in
the atmosphere for decades, even
Those studying geoengineering a rapid reduction in carbon
emphasise that this technique, emissions won’t immediately end
although potentially quick and temperature rises. The longer we
relatively cheap, would not offer a wait to really get going, the greater
permanent fix. It would be a the chance we will see more than
climate tourniquet to temporarily 3°C of warming, even after major
stem rising temperatures. action across the globe.

SRM alone would do nothing to

Avoidable illness? from 69 countries. Hence the follow-up, showing
It is a follow-up to their 2015 that the link between stem cell
divisions and cancer holds across
study, which suggested that nations with very different
environmental conditions.
Is most cancer just bad luck or does lifestyle variations in cancer incidence in
This time, the authors used
different tissues were linked most a model that could distinguish
between internal and external
still matter, asks Darren Saunders closely to the number of stem cell drivers of mutation in a more
divisions, and hence random DNA complete way. This goes some
way to resolving apparent conflict
replication errors, in those tissues. between biological mechanisms
and population-level estimates of
Unfortunately it was ripe for the role of environmental factors.
For example, the authors cite the
COMPETING narratives of chance changes that characterise cancer: misinterpretation, usually that fact that nearly 90 per cent of the
most common form of lung
and lifestyle often frame debate inheritance, random errors when “most cancer is just bad luck”. cancer is preventable, even if they
find random stem cell copying
about cancer’s causes. Studies are cells replicate, and environmental Some researchers questioned

frequently misinterpreted as exposures such as smoking. the study and insisted external

showing that cancer is either The latest attempt to do this factors still dominate.

largely bad luck or almost entirely comes from US researchers
preventable. Who’s right? (doi.org/ 10/b43q), who aimed to “So which of the competing
narratives about cancer’s
To answer that, we need to resolve conflicting evidence by
gauge the relative contributions using genome-wide sequencing cause – chance or lifestyle –
of three routes to the DNA and population-wide disease data is right?”

24 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

At the planetary level, this INSIGHT Privacy
would mean that our best efforts
may not be enough to keep ASTRAKAN/PLAINPICTURE –Generating valuable data–
temperatures at a liveable level.
So drastic changes to billions of Your entire internet Foundation, a digital rights campaign
people’s lifestyles and dozens of history is now for sale group. “It’s a lot more than advertising.”
countries’ economies will have
delivered little apparent benefit. Sally Adee giving up your privacy,” says Jeanette It might also become more likely
Imagine the fallout when we Hofmann, director of the Alexander that ISPs analyse your email account
eliminate carbon emissions, in detail to look for useful information
but temperatures keep rising ONLINE in the US? Everything you do von Humboldt Institute for Internet to sell.
and climate disruption worsens.
is for sale. On 28 March, US Congress and Society, Berlin. For now, not much will change after
Thus the importance of the the repeal, since the scrapped law
Harvard test. Simulations indicate finalised the process of scrapping laws And as ISPs aren’t required to say wasn’t due to go into force until the
that SRM could hold down end of 2017.
temperatures, while studies of passed in the late days of the Obama what data they share about you, you
events such as volcanic eruptions But what worries many is the
also support the idea, but there is administration, which would have will never know exactly what they are precedent it sets. In comparison with
no hands-on experience with the European Union directives like the
technique outside labs. required internet service providers gathering or where that data goes. right to explanation and the right to
be forgotten, it’s hard not to see this
We need to know how it could (ISPs) from the end of 2017 to ask So who can they sell it to? The as relegation of Americans to digital
work and, more importantly, how second-class citizenship, says John
it could fail before we face the permission before selling the data Obama ruling explicitly mentioned Havens, who runs the IEEE Ethics
possibility of having to use it. Initiative in New York City.
Field trials may well prove critical they collect about their customers to advertisers, but not because ISPs are
to our civilisation’s ability to deal The new ruling also bars the FCC
with global climate disruption. third parties. This isn’t just another restricted to selling your data to them. from adopting any similar rules to
govern ISP collection and behaviour
Even the co-lead of the Harvard small erosion of our dwindling privacy It’s just that advertisers are currently in the future.
experiment, atmospheric
scientist Frank Keutsch, calls the on the internet: it’s more fundamental, the highest bidders, and it might be There are some small measures you
prospect of full-scale deployment can take to protect your data. Different
“terrifying”. He’s right, but it and worrying, than that. damaging to an ISP’s reputation if it ISPs let you opt out of different data
might be the only way to avoid an collection: you can call each ISP and
even worse outcome. ■ The repeal eliminates any got out that they were selling ask them what the opt in and opt out
policy is, and to whom they sell data.
Jamais Cascio is a distinguished fellow requirement by the Federal One way to minimise what they see
at the Institute for the Future in is to visit sites which use https.
California Communications Commission (FCC) – “If all ISPs collect and sell
which oversees internet regulations in your data, it is impossible Another possibility may arise. In
errors account for 35 per cent of to use the internet without 2013, AT&T began to charge about
DNA changes in this tissue. the US – that ISPs get consent from $29 extra per month to customers
who didn’t want their traffic analysed
So which of the competing their customers before collecting and giving up your privacy” using deep packet inspection. So take
narratives about cancer’s cause is heart, Americans. You don’t have to be
right? Unsurprisingly, the answer selling sensitive data: not just your web second-class citizens – if you’ve got
lies somewhere in the middle. the cash. ■
browsing history, but also geolocation individual customers’ data to, say,
Two key messages emerge.
First, it is impossible to say with data, financial information – such as a pharmaceutical company.
certainty what caused a particular
tumour, so trying to translate who you bank with – and metadata. But the absence of a rule means
population-wide data to
individual cases is not wise. It may sound like ISPs are just that if an ISP puts something into their
Second, we can reduce cancer risk
by modifying lifestyle, but chance getting the same deal as tech firms like privacy policy, they can sell the data to
does play a significant role. ■
Facebook and Google. But Facebook whoever they wish. “We’ve seen data
Darren Saunders is a cancer biologist
at the University of New South Wales, and Google are optional, ISPs are not. brokers sell lists of ‘gullible seniors’, or
Australia
“If all ISPs collect and sell your data, it is rape victims or AIDS patients,” says

impossible to use the internet without Jeremy Gillula at the Electronic Frontier

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 25

APERTURE

26 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

Scarily good in claws-up

THESE fearsome pincers are no B-movie prop.
Long before David Attenborough brought the
natural world to UK television screens, Jean
Painlevé was sharing his own passion for marine
life with French audiences through films and
photographs.

After studying biology at the Sorbonne,
Painlevé set up a studio on the coast of Brittany
in 1925, where he used microscopes to capture
close-ups of crabs, octopuses and sea urchins that
belie their true size. Admired by many on the Paris
avant-garde art scene, Painlevé showed that the
natural world was a source of images and tales
just as bizarre and shocking as anything Dada and
surrealism could offer.

Painlevé was also a pioneer of underwater
photography, encasing his camera in a
rudimentary waterproof box (pictured below) to
make films such as L’Hippocampe (The Seahorse).
He didn’t shy away from using anthropomorphism
and humour to help his audience relate to the lives
of animals, describing, for example, the labour
pains of the male seahorse, the courtship rituals
of the octopus and the vanity of a crab. He also
championed the use of film in scientific research.

By the time he died in 1989, Painlevé had made
more than 200 films in a career spanning half a
century. His work is the subject of an exhibition at
the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK, until 4 June.
Sam Wong

Images

Crab Claw (1928) and Painlevé with camera
(1935) © Archives Jean Painlevé, Paris
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, ikon-gallery.org

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 27

Speaking

Unseen influences may explain
the mysteries of quantum reality,
says Anil Ananthaswamy

IN OCTOBER 1951, physicist David Bohm regardless of observers. Newton’s laws
left the US for Brazil. Branded a communist of motion, for example, say we live in a
sympathiser, he had been arrested for clockwork, deterministic world that
refusing to testify to the US Congress. behaves in well-defined, predictable ways
Acquitted, he was still stripped of his Princeton independently from what we are doing.
professorship. His departure began an exile
that would last until his death, as a naturalised The thin end of the wedge came in
British citizen, four decades later. 1905, when Albert Einstein said that the
photoelectric effect, in which certain metals
The theory Bohm was nurturing as he left give out electrons when illuminated, can only
his native shores has spent even longer in the be explained if light is made up of quantum
cold. In part, that’s down to politics. But his particles – photons, as they came to be called.
ideas also seemed scientifically beyond the
pale. Bohm proposed there was a hidden The thing was, light was known to be a
reality to quantum theory, meaning its crazy wave. In the early 1800s, Thomas Young had
predictions of a world that doesn’t exist until done a version of the now classic double-slit
you choose to look at it are just that: crazy. experiment, in which light is shone at two
parallel slits. The interference pattern formed
That went against the established grain, and on a screen beyond is what we would expect
still does. But more than six decades on, Bohm if waves of light were spreading outwards
is getting a fresh hearing, as new experiments from both slits – behaviour that seems
are hinting that he might have been on to impossible if it is made of single particles.
something. If so, some aspects of reality
would become easier to fathom, while others So which is it then – particle or wave?
would be harder to stomach. Forget standard Both, as versions of Young’s experiment
quantum weirdness – the world Bohm revealed have since confirmed. These involve light
is a more profoundly and mysteriously so dim that only one photon at a time passes
interconnected place than we ever imagined. through the double slit. Each photon lands
on the screen at some seemingly random
It wasn’t always distasteful to suggest spot. Over time, however, these positions
that reality is, well, real. Before quantum turn out not to be random; rather, the
physics, our understanding was governed accumulated spots form an interference
by classical theories in which reality exists pattern, as if each photon were going

28 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

COVER STORY

through both slits and interfering with itself.
Try to detect the photons’ path through one

or the other slit, however, and the interference
pattern disappears. Not only is light’s nature
fundamentally ambiguous, but its guise
seems determined by what we choose to
measure. And as a young French physicist
named Louis de Broglie proposed in 1924, it’s
not just light. Experiments soon confirmed all
the quantum particles that make up material
reality have this dual nature, too.

Finding that reality’s true character is
slippery is still a big step away from saying
it doesn’t exist when we aren’t looking.
Yet this is exactly what orthodox quantum
mechanics says. In this picture, often called
the Copenhagen interpretation after the
Danish city where it took shape, a quantum
object is represented by a mathematical wave
function that allows us to make probabilistic
predictions of what we will find when we
measure things. Only on measurement
does this wave function “collapse” to reveal

“Reality’s nature is slippery,
but that’s a big step from
saying it doesn’t exist”

something localised in space and time. In the

words of Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer of the

Copenhagen interpretation, “the idea of an

objective real world whose smallest parts exist

objectively in the same sense as stones or trees

exist, independently of whether or not we

observe them… is impossible”. That remains

the dominant view to this day.

Yet it’s not the only possible interpretation

(see “The many guises of quantum theory”,

page 31). De Broglie suggested another: that

particles are real and have equally real waves

associated with them. In this picture, when a

particle goes through one of the double slits,

its “pilot” wave goes through both, interferes

with itself, and then guides the particle to a

location on the screen.

De Broglie presented his ideas at the 1927

Solvay Conference in Brussels, a legendary

gathering of the early quantum greats. But he

had not developed the theory mathematically,

and it received a lukewarm reception. He

quietly dropped the idea, becoming an

adherent of the Copenhagen interpretation.

David Bohm was unaware of de Broglie’s

work when, in the early 1950s, he developed a

SAM CHIVERS mathematically solid theory in which a wave

with properties identical to that of the wave

function guides particles around. “This >

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 29

wave is a pilot wave,” says physicist Sheldon IMAGES COURTESY OF DANIEL HARRIS AND JOHN BUSH, MIT
Goldstein of Rutgers University in New Jersey,
“It choreographs the motion of the particles.”

Bohm’s theory made exactly the same
predictions as standard quantum theory. But
the fact that you could only predict outcomes
of experiments probabilistically was because
you lacked knowledge about the particles’
initial state, not because nature doesn’t exist
when you’re not looking. Bohm’s ideas made
de Broglie revisit and revise his own pilot-
wave theory. He developed a two-wave theory
in which every particle rides a pilot wave,
which in turn interacts with another wave
that behaves like a wave function.

Spooky influences

Both of these pictures also explained another a philosopher of physics at Columbia And there it has largely stayed, bar the odd
central feature of the quantum world – the University in New York City. It didn’t help that finding that, if anything, hindered its revival.
way “entangled” quantum objects seem to Einstein, then in his twilight years and a vocal In 1992, for example, a thought experiment
influence each other’s states instantaneously critic of quantum theory, dismissed it too. In a by physicist Marlan Scully of Texas A&M
at a distance. Standard Copenhagen quantum letter to Max Born, another quantum pioneer, University and his colleagues showed that
mechanics provides no explanation for this he wrote: “Bohm believes (as de Broglie did, the theory made it possible for a particle to
non-locality, or “spooky action”, as Einstein by the way, 25 years ago) that he is able to be measured passing through one slit in a
dismissively referred to it. In the alternative interpret the quantum theory in deterministic double-slit experiment, but then land on
picture, though, if particles are entangled, terms… That seems too cheap to me.” the screen at a position that implied it had
a common pilot wave guides them, and any Bohmian mechanics entered the twilight passed through the other. “Tersely: Bohm
change in the position or momentum of one zone of scientific theories – not quite dead, trajectories are not realistic, they are
particle instantly changes the pilot wave, thus but not really a live concern either. surrealistic,” they wrote.
influencing all the other particles. “The fact
that Bohmian mechanics is non-local is not
a defect of the theory,” says Roderich Tumulka,
Goldstein’s colleague at Rutgers. “It is a feature
that a true theory has to have.”

In another world, Bohm’s work might have
been seen as a breakthrough. But by the time
the idea was published in 1952, he was already
in exile. “A lot of the reception of Bohm’s
theory is tied up with that,” says David Albert,

Really surreal

Quantum double-slit experiments tell us that nothing is quite as it seems

Measurements at the slits detect single photons Allow the photons to reach the screen and an Now introduce an entangled "probe" photon that
passing through one slit or the other: light is made interference pattern develops over time: light tells us which slit its partner photon passed through.
of particles is a wave, and it passes through both slits Measure at the slits again, and the states of the two
photons must agree

LASER INTERFERENCE PATTERN PROBE
30 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017 PHOTON
SCREEN

The many guises of more rigorous version of the experiment,
quantum theory with proper shielding from air currents. They
found, once again, that the bouncing droplet
Why does reality only seem to coalesce into a definite creates a pilot wave that guides it on – and
state when you make a measurement? The answer they discovered a second wave pattern.
depends on your preferred view of the quantum world Created by the interaction of the droplet with
the edge of the circular bath, this pattern in
Copenhagen interpretation Quantum Bayesianism the droplet’s position emerges over time and
The “shut up and calculate” view: Quantum uncertainty is not intrinsic has properties that mimic the wave function.
the quantum world does not exist to reality – it has to do with your own This is just as in de Broglie’s more complex
in any meaningful sense without lack of knowledge about whatever you version of pilot-wave theory (Journal of Fluid
measurements. are attempting to measure. Mechanics, DOI: 10.1017/jfm.2016.537).

Many worlds interpretation Information The bouncing droplet experiments have
Make a measurement and the When you measure something, allowed Couder’s and Bush’s teams to observe
universe splits, taking you into the you extract some physical form of behaviour usually seen only in quantum
parallel world where you got the information from it, forcing it into a systems. For example, the statistics of the
result you did. high-definition state. droplet’s seemingly chaotic movements
bear an uncanny resemblance to those of
Objective collapse Bohmian mechanics an electron moving inside a corral of atoms.
Spread-out quantum states are Reality is guided by pilot waves; “Now we have a macroscopic realisation of
collapsing into definite states all the measurement just discovers what the physical picture suggested by de Broglie,
time. Your clodhopping measurement reality is up to, in the same way as and it exhibits many of the allegedly
just helps things on their way. classical physics (see main story). inscrutable features of quantum mechanics,”
says Bush. “That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
It was a series of unlikely experiments which gave the droplet a horizontal as well as
involving oil droplets that started to change a vertical kick. The bouncing droplet started Maybe – but there was still the problem of
some minds. In 2005, Yves Couder and wandering across the oil bath, guided by the those contradictory, surrealist particle paths
Emmanuel Fort at Denis Diderot University very wave that it had created and helped the alternative theory seems to allow. Last
in Paris stumbled upon a physical analogue sustain with each bounce. year, a refined version of the double-slit
of pilot waves. They discovered that if they experiment conducted by Aephraim Steinberg
let a millimetre-sized droplet of silicone oil fall The interesting thing was what happened of the University of Toronto, Canada, and his
on to a bath of the same oil that was vibrating when this wave-particle system encountered colleagues suggested that might not be quite
up and down, the droplet would bounce a barrier, a fraction of a millimetre below the such a problem after all. Brace yourself,
indefinitely on the surface. And not just that: surface, with two gaps in it: a double slit. The because this is where things get really weird.
when it bounced the first time, it created a walking droplet went over one or the other slit,
wave that it encountered on the next bounce, while its pilot wave went over both, and the First, the researchers created pairs of
wave pattern that emerged on the other side photons with entangled polarisations. One
Take measurements at the screen, however, and guided the droplet on. The researchers photon of each pair was sent through the
half the time they disagree: the state of the probe collected 75 such trajectories, and their double slit, which was designed so that if the
suggests the travelling photon went through one analysis suggested the formation of an photon was vertically polarised it would go
slit, but its position on the screen implies it passed interference pattern on the far side of the through slit A, and if horizontally polarised
through the other – a seemingly surreal trajectory slits. Despite there only ever being one through slit B. The second photon served
particle-like droplet in the apparatus at as a probe: thanks to the entanglement,
PROBE PHOTON any time, its pilot wave was causing it to measuring its polarisation was akin to
acquire seemingly wave-like behaviour. knowing the polarisation of the photon
If you couldn’t see the wave, the pattern passing through the slits, and thus which
built up over time would make you think slit it must have gone through (see “Really
the droplets had gone through both slits surreal”, below left).
(Physical Review Letters, vol 97, p 154101).
This set-up gave the team two bites at the
It was clearly only an analogy, and attempts same cherry: they were able to determine the
by other teams to repeat the work suggest travelling photon’s position as it went through
that the supposed interference pattern might the apparatus, and could also measure the
have been the product of air currents, as well polarisation state of the associated probe
as inadequate statistics. More recently, John photon. They did this with tens of thousands
Bush and his colleagues at the Massachusetts of photon pairs, and found that, on average,
Institute of Technology have performed a at the moment a photon passed through
slit A, the probe photon would be vertically
polarised, as expected. But at the screen,
things were a lot more ambiguous. When
a travelling photon was measured at a
position on the screen corresponding to >

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 31

having passed through slit A, half the time
the polarisation of the probe photon was
horizontal – suggesting that the travelling
photon had passed through slit B. These were
seemingly surreal trajectories, unmasked
(Science Advances, vol 2, p e1501466).

Reality regained

What’s happening? In a word, non-locality. The IMAGES COURTESY OF DANIEL HARRIS AND JOHN BUSH, MIT
experiment shows that the moving photon is
constantly changing the polarisation of the BRAIN DEATH showing that a Bohmian wave function can
probe photon. Look at the probe photon at the create structures or “foliations” in space-time,
moment the moving photon goes through a Quantum mechanics gives a bizarre and that events on any one foliation are
slit, and there is no contradiction. But look at twist to that old trope about a monkey simultaneous, leading to non-locality. It’s
it the moment the moving photon hits the at a typewriter with infinite time. the most sophisticated approach yet – but
screen and, half of the time, its polarisation Ditch the monkey, and consider also very much still a work in progress.
state has changed. This sort of non-locality is quantum fluctuations in an everlasting
admissible in standard quantum theory, but it universe. They could at some point When Goldstein started learning standard
is baked into Bohm’s version. The experiment spontaneously form anything, even a quantum mechanics in the 1960s, he was
is by no means a proof of Bohm’s theory, but it brain. If one such “Boltzmann brain” seduced by its mystery and spookiness, he
shows that its prediction of surreal trajectories exists, it’s likely that many others do. says – only to realise gradually that Bohm’s
cannot be used to debunk it. In fact, if we live in such a universe, ideas made more sense. Besides, he says,
it’s likely that our brains are this kind. Bohm’s ideas have their own sense of mystery:
So Bohmian mechanics can and should the way in which every entangled particle
remain a contender, says Albert. “Any realist That sounds nonsensical. “If a influences every other particle in the universe,
picture is preferable to any anti-realist theory predicts that the majority of and the fact that the wave function is a new
picture,” he says. observers are Boltzmann brains, that’s kind of entity. “You have still got romance,”
bad for the theory,” says Roderich he says. “It’s in the right place now.
But winning hearts and minds will Tumulka at Rutgers University. Not misplaced.”
still be a struggle. For a start, Bohmian
mechanics is formulated to replicate the Standard quantum mechanics says In the end, though, it’s not about winning
predictions of standard quantum mechanics: that an infinitely enduring universe over minds, but being open to the Bohmian
experimentally, it’s almost impossible to tell exists in a “superposition” of all picture, says Steinberg. “The best thing
them apart. Also, the theory is mathematically possible states, including those with experiments like ours can do is to remind
fleshed out only for particles travelling far Boltzmann brains. But in Bohmian people that the interpretation exists,” he
slower than the speed of light. Quantum mechanics (see main story) such a says. “People aren’t aware of it, and we
mechanics, in contrast, has been extended to universe evolves towards a static want to bring more attention to it.” Bush
embrace relativistic particles travelling close state. The probability of that state feels similarly about his walking-droplet
to the speed of light, and so forms the basis being one with Boltzmann brains is experiments. “That’s why I’m a believer in
of quantum field theory and the standard minuscule, and even if it is, nothing this venture, even if its sole result is to get
model of particle physics. “Clean, worked-out is changing so the brain can’t be young people to question their views on
Bohmian versions of those things do not functional. “It’s much more likely that quantum mechanics,” he says. ■
exist,” says Goldstein. there are no Boltzmann brains, and
then it stays that way,” says Tumulka. Anil Ananthaswamy is a consultant for New Scientist
For David Kaiser, a physicist and
historian of science at MIT, that may be
the theory’s Achilles heel. “My aesthetic
concern is that it feels, in the original
description at least, horribly non-relativistic,
anti-relativistic,” he says.

Goldstein and his colleagues have been
trying since the mid-1990s to marry Bohm’s
ideas with Einstein’s special relativity.
The hardest part is to accommodate the
instantaneous interactions of Bohmian
mechanics. That’s at odds with relativity’s
limit on how fast influences can spread –
namely, the speed of light. What’s more,
relativity does not distinguish points in space
as being in any one present. Goldstein and
his colleagues have tried to get around this,

32 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

“THAW #10 BY TIMO LIEBER”/WWW.TIMOLIEBER.COM

A year on thin ice

The Arctic’s four seasons have been radically transformed, finds Fred Pearce

CHANGE is afoot at the top of our world. following a winter of heatwaves. February
Spring has sprung, marking a crucial
moment in the Arctic’s annual cycle. temperatures were above freezing.
Each year, the ice sheet reaches its maximum
extent in March, then begins to shrink as These are the symptoms of a new Arctic that
temperature warm up.
is being created – perhaps the most profound
But this year, something is different.
The floating sea ice, which at its peak normally change to the look of our planet for millions of
extends as far as the eye can see and feels
as solid underfoot as a continental shelf, years, with consequences for the rest of the
is rotten. For the third year in a row, its
maximum March extent is at a record low, planet. In all likelihood the Arctic Ocean will

soon be ice-free in the summer, surrounded

by snow-free lands. “We are in a new Arctic

regime,” says marine biologist Antje Boetius.

Follow us as we take you through a year

on thin ice. >

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 33

Winter SEASONAL CYCLE

In the world’s most northern settlement, an Satellite data collected by the US National The Arctic sea ice grows and shrinks with
international research town in Svalbard Snow and Ice Data Center show that the the passage of the seasons. But the total area
called Ny-Ålesund, the sun sets in the last growth of sea ice slowed down to a crawl at covered by ice is getting smaller year after
week of October and doesn’t rise again until times. Twice – in late November and year, because of global warming
mid-February. The polar night ushers in December – the ice cap actually shrank.
freezing temperatures that are essential for 1980 1990 2000 2010 2012
the region’s annual cycle (see diagram, right). The consequences of the warm winter are 2016 2017
As the mercury plummets, ice starts to grow likely to be long-lasting. Thin, broken-up ice is
out over the ocean’s dark waters, covering it in far less likely to survive the summer melt and 18
a floating ice shelf. Winter has come. form sustainable multi-year ice. Three decades
ago, 45 per cent of ice during the winter 16
Historically, the ice could grow to be 5 metres maximum was multi-year ice. In March 2016 it
thick in places where it survived the summer was just 22 per cent and this winter is on track 14
and thickened with each passing winter. But to be equally extreme, although the numbers Sea ice extent (million km2)
that is changing. Antje Boetius, at the Max aren’t in yet. 12
Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in SOURCE: NATIONAL SNOW AND ICE DATA CENTER (PIOMAS)
Bremen, Germany, experienced the new Current climate models don’t come close to 10
conditions first-hand during an expedition predicting the scale of ice loss we’re seeing in
last October. “Areas that showed up on the region, says Julienne Stroeve at University 8
satellites with 100 per cent ice cover often had College London. “We’re basically about
at best very broken ice. Even when there was 30 years ahead of where the models say we 6
ice, it was so thin we could often see through it,” should be.” Why this is the case is a hot topic.
she says. “This rotten ice is causing misleading One possibility is that the loss of ice brought 4
measurements,” says David Barber at the about by global warming is being amplified by
University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. natural variabilities – decadal weather cycles 2
Satellites can’t picture the planet’s surface in that have nothing to do with climate change
high enough resolution to show the broken-up and fossil fuels. Another is that something 0
ice, which means that many of the usual isn’t quite right in the models. Boetius points Jan Mar May Jul Sep Nov
statistics about ice cover underestimate out that they don’t properly mimic things like
what’s going on. local weather changes due to global warming, The thickness of the ice is also shrinking.
and the physical effects of winds and waves Heatwaves late in 2016 mean the volume of
Conditions didn’t improve as the winter that break up ice. the Arctic ice sheet is now much lower than
settled in. A heatwave in November and any other winter on record
December brought temperatures that were as What is clear are the extreme conditions on
high as -7°C in some parts of the Arctic, 15°C the ground. The ice cap reached its maximum 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
warmer than the average over the past three extent on 7 March this year. At 14.42 million 2015 2016
decades. The repercussions were remarkable. square kilometres, it was the smallest it has
been in 38 years of satellite records. 30

FACT FILE: HIGHER SEAS Total sea ice volume (thousand km3)
Q Glaciers on land are flowing into the oceans faster because
SOURCE: PSC.APL.UW.EDU (PIOMAS)
of climate change, pushing sea levels up worldwide 20
2017
Q Annual ice loss from the islands of the Canadian
archipelago has increased 10-fold in 10 years 10

Q Greenland’s glaciers release 250 cubic kilometres of water a 0
year, contributing 40 per cent of annual sea level rise Jan Feb Mar

Q If all the ice on Greenland melted, global sea levels would
be 7 metres higher

34 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

Spring FRAGILE ICE

The annual return of sunlight to the For a sense of scale, the team compared The average thickness of the ice sheet has SOURCE: 10.5194/tc-9-269-2015
Arctic triggers a cascade of events. this with the warming effect of carbon dioxide dropped considerably. This a concern
The rays warm the air and start to melt over the same period. They found that the loss because thicker ice can survive the regular
the snow. Gaps between the sheets of floating of sea ice has delivered a warming boost to the summer melt, but thinner ice cannot
ice get wider and the surface of the ocean entire planet equivalent to 25 per cent of the
warms up. effect of rising CO2 levels. This is the main 3.59m
reason why the Arctic has on average been
Beneath the ice, a unique food chain is set warming more than twice as fast as the planet 1975
in motion: as light begins to filter through, as a whole over the past half-century.
photosynthetic algae start to grow in tiny 1.25m
crevices in the ice, feeding tiny crustaceans “You can’t ignore that,” says Eisenman.
that in turn feed small fish. At the surface, “The sea ice is an important player in the 2012
polar bears emerge from hibernation to seek global climate change that we have observed
out seals, while whales move about in the in the past 30-odd years.” Climate models do September 2016 was tied with 2007 for the
widening cracks between the ice. include the loss of Arctic reflectivity – also second-lowest summer ice extent on record.
known as albedo – in their calculations of The oldest, thickest ice, which used to stretch
The return of light also highlights an future warming but, he says, the change over much of the Arctic Ocean, is now mostly
important way in which the new Arctic is measured is twice as large as what packed up against Canada and Greenland
affecting regions further south: we are losing models predict.
a vital mirror that helped keep the planet cool. Historical sea ice extent for September
White snow and ice typically reflect 85 per cent It’s not just sea ice that is disappearing. (median for 1981-2010)
of solar radiation back out into space, whereas Snow and ice are vanishing on land, too, and
dark ocean only reflects 10 per cent. As the ice bare tundra reflects just 20 per cent of the
and snow disappear, the ocean’s reflectivity is sun’s rays. This is also having a large effect,
being almost entirely destroyed. warns Peter Wadhams, an ocean physicist at
the University of Cambridge. “The snowline
To calculate how much extra solar heat is retreat in midsummer is now 6 million square
being absorbed in the Arctic as the white kilometres, compared to the 4 million square
surfaces turn dark, Ian Eisenman and kilometres loss of sea ice,” he says, adding that
colleagues at the Scripps Institution of the warming effect of darker land masses
Oceanography in San Diego, California, turned could be as big as that from lost sea ice. The
to satellite radiation data. They found that an calculations are rough, but the message seems
extra 6.4 watts is being absorbed today for clear: the Arctic is amplifying global warming
every square metre of the Arctic, compared on a large scale.
with 1979.

FACT FILE: OCEAN GRAB SOURCE: NOAA / NSIDC
Q Russia planted its flag on the ocean floor at the North Pole
Sea ice concentration
in 2007, kick-starting a dispute over who owns the Arctic September 2016 (%)

Q The carve-up is likely to be done by the Arctic Council, an
intergovernmental club of all eight Arctic nations

Q The US Geological Survey estimates that 30 per cent of the
world’s undiscovered natural gas could be in the region

Q Ice-free Arctic waters could also halve the journey time for
cargo from China to Europe

0 15 60 100

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 35

Summer HOT POLE

Arctic summers are greener and more between huge globular sponges that are up Arctic temperatures have risen more and
lively these days. Average June snow to a metre across and hundreds of years old.” faster than anywhere else on Earth
cover has declined by 58 per cent since
1979, exposing more tundra for longer. Her fear is that all this may be lost before it +2ºC
Howard Epstein of the University of Virginia is even found – an ice-free Arctic will be a very
in Charlottesville has measured a 20 per cent different environment favouring a very AIR
increase in plants on the tundra since 1982. different style of life. Recent years have seen
Woody shrubs are spreading at the expense of mass congregations of walruses on the Air temperatures were 2°C warmer in 2016
more distinctive local species such as the lichen Alaskan and Siberian coasts of the Chukchi than the norm*
that are an important food source for reindeer. Sea, taking a breather on land because the sea
ice from which they normally hunt had +5ºC
Coastlines are also being transformed. disappeared. The new behaviour has resulted
Waves are pounding shorelines that ice once in overcrowding, stampedes that are deadly to OCEAN SURFACE
protected. According to Irina Overeem at the young calves, and food shortages.
University of Colorado, erosion rates along In August 2016, the surface waters were 5°C
the coast of the Beaufort Sea have more than It’s not just behaviours that have changed. warmer than the norm*
doubled in half a century to an average of Melt the snow, warm the water, remove the ice
14 metres a year. that once kept the waters dark, and we can +15ºC
expect a biological cornucopia. According to
In some ways, the greening of the tundra the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
is good news. It is extracting CO2 from the Administration, last year the Barents Sea north
atmosphere, which helps to counteract global of Scandinavia had 19 per cent more biomass
warming. But many predict this helpful than the average for 2003 to 2015. That could
feedback could soon be overwhelmed by the be the start of a predicted 70 per cent increase
release of CO2 and methane from melting in the Arctic Ocean’s biomass production.
permafrost on land and ocean sediments. The At the base of the ocean’s food chain,
frozen Arctic traps an estimated 1500 billion phytoplankton have increased by 20 per cent
tonnes of organic carbon, twice the amount of since 1998 thanks to more open water.
CO2 in the atmosphere. Under controversial
doomsday scenarios, large quantities could be On top of this, Atlantic species are moving
belched into the atmosphere, pushing global north, lured by more food and warmer waters.
temperatures up by a further 1°C or more. Some call this the “Atlantification” of the
Arctic. In her latest expedition, Boetius found
Meanwhile, we are only just discovering the haddock at 85° north, just 100 kilometres from
richness of life in the Arctic. Last year, Boetius the North Pole. The fish are primarily a North
led an expedition to Karasik Seamount, a Atlantic species and don’t normally stray
submerged summit in a mid-ocean ridge just further north than Svalbard. Others have
400 kilometres from the North Pole, to shown that both Atlantic and Pacific cod have
document the world’s northernmost known also moved in. The concern is that an influx of
coral. The Arctic Ocean is a vast and largely newcomers could crowd out and even kill off
unexplored space, and Boetius was stunned the natives. Arriviste orcas, for instance, are
by the diversity she saw: “Huge white starfish, hunting native narwhals in the archipelagos
blue snails, red crabs and brown clams, of northern Canada.

FACT FILE: RUBBISH 2016 HEATWAVE
Q Arctic Ocean litter has increased 20-fold in 10 years
Q A 2014 survey recorded 6333 pieces of litter per square In November, air temperatures were 15°C
above the norm*
kilometre off the Fram Strait east of Greenland
*compared with the average for 1981-2010
36 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017
SOURCE: NSIDC/NOAA

Autumn SEA ICE & YOU

September marks a second turning point between 15 and 36 years away if greenhouse 3m2
in the Arctic’s annual cycle – known as the gas emissions remain high, estimate
ice minimum – and one day soon it will Alexandra Jahn at the University of Colorado of sea ice disappear for every...
be monumental. This is the point in the year and colleagues. This could be delayed by a
when the shrinking stalls for a few days before decade or so if we were to reduce emissions. 1 tonne
winter starts up again and the cycle repeats.
With 4.14 million square kilometres of ice, last Can anything be done to save the Arctic’s of CO2 emitted
September’s minimum was tied with 2007’s ice? Stroeve reckons only the 2015 Paris
as the second smallest on record. Agreement’s aspirational target of halting A typical US car emits
global warming at 1.5°C would deliver a
The downward trend is reliable, and realistic chance of this. Some fear the region 1 tonne
according to the most pessimistic climate may soon pass a threshold beyond which
researchers, an ice-free September is just years the warming effect caused by the loss of of CO2 per 4000 km
away. Wadhams is in this camp, having said reflective ice is sufficient on its own to melt
last year that he expects the first ice-free most of what’s left. That would be irreversible, 1 tonne
summer to be in 2017 or 2018. It’s worth noting and could unleash runaway global warming
that what scientists have agreed to call “ice- that would continue whatever we did to of CO2 is emitted for each seat on a
free” in fact makes allowances for 1 million emissions. Eisenman calculates that this is return flight from London to San Francisco
square kilometres of ice, most of which will unlikely before all the summer ice is gone,
be packed up against the region’s convoluted but perfectly possible thereafter. The average American emits
coastlines and inside the Canadian
archipelago, where the ice is thickest. We always knew a warmer world would be 16 tonnes
different, with deserts spreading north, super
Wadhams is definitely at the extreme end El Niños, conflagrations in the rainforests and of CO2 each year
of predictions. In practice, several factors – more intense hurricanes bubbling up above
including natural variations in the weather the hot oceans. Many saw the melting Arctic as
from year to year – make it difficult to a largely passive victim of that climate change.
pinpoint the first ice-free summer with that No longer. Feedbacks from an ice sheet that
degree of precision. A study published last has vanished faster than anticipated mean a
year estimated that any forecasts must have new Arctic is alive and kicking. ■
an error bar of roughly 25 years. With that in
mind, the first ice-free summer could be Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist

ARCTIC ICE, YOUR WEATHER The average European emits

What happens in the Arctic changes in the Arctic may Russia in 2010, the drought in 7 tonnes SOURCES: DOI: 10.1126/SCIENCE.AAG2345, WORLD BANK, ICAO, EPA
doesn’t stay in the Arctic. Studies explain a 10 per cent decline in North America in 2012 and
show that the shrinking ice cap is its speed since 1980, she says. Europe’s killer heatwave in 2003. of CO2 each year
effectively helping to warm the Francis suggests it could also
rest of the planet (see Spring, The slower jet stream has explain persistent cold spells in Globally, we emit
page 34). It may also be changing begun to meander more. Instead east Asia.
your local weather. Jennifer of pushing weather systems 35 billion tonnes
Francis at Rutgers University in along, it traps them in one Some researchers say weird
New Jersey has pointed out that place, creating longer summer weather can never be attributed of CO2 each year
rapid warming in the north is droughts and winter cold spells. to a single cause in this way.
reducing the difference between The frequency of such stalled Francis agrees it may be a long At these rates, the Arctic summer
Arctic and mid-latitude air weather systems in summer has time before we can be sure she ice sheet will be gone by
temperatures. That difference doubled since 2000, says Dim is right. But if the new Arctic
drives the northern jet stream, Coumou of the Potsdam Institute causes the jet stream to slow 2046
which moves weather systems for Climate Impact Research in permanently, Europeans and
around the hemisphere. So Germany. He blames this for the North Americans could be in for a 8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 37
heatwave and forest fires in bumpy ride of climate extremes.

38 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

Living with
the enemy

There’s another big problem with antibiotics: indiscriminately killing bugs
is making us sick. It may be time to call a truce, says Drew Smith

YOU are home to 10,000 species of infectious diseases fell by more than 90 per So how can we do it? The idea is to stop
bacteria. The vast majority, more than cent, contributing to a broader transformation
99 per cent, cause you no harm. Indeed, of society. We take for granted our long lives bacteria behaving badly. Before they can cause
many actually help by providing you with and freedom from plague and infection, but
nutrients, tuning your immune system, this is unprecedented in human history. an infection, bad bugs first need to stick in
balancing your metabolism and warding off
mood disorders. You depend on these bugs. This freedom comes with a cost. Ridding places where they aren’t wanted. If they can’t
ourselves of all of these bugs has contributed
Yet as anyone who’s had an upset stomach to a rise in disorders of the immune system, grab hold, they can’t invade.
after taking antibiotics can attest, when we metabolism and even the mind (See “Are
target the dangerous minority of disease- antibiotics making us sick?”, page 40). Taking This strategy has already shown promise
causing species, we often wind up killing off a dose of antibiotics is like throwing a stink
the good ones too. Now, after generations bomb into a subway. The criminals clear out, for treating urinary tract infections, which are
of doctors prescribing antibiotics for every but so do the citizens. The rats and
sniffle, we know that the collateral damage cockroaches remain, unfazed by the stench. particularly common in women. Most UTIs
goes well beyond the occasional tummy ache.
The survivors can become resistant to our are caused by Escherichia coli, which use their
Indiscriminately wiping out bacteria may weapons. Every year, 23,000 people in the US
be contributing to rising levels of asthma, alone die from antibiotic-resistant infections. hair-like pili to bind to carbohydrates on cell
allergies, obesity and many more conditions. Proclamations of an impending superbug
These effects, together with the growing threat apocalypse are overblown – these bugs surfaces. But now researchers have found that
from antibiotic resistance, have some primarily attack older people and those who
researchers advocating a sea change in the are already ill – but it is clear that overusing if you give people carbohydrates similar to
battle against the bugs: after 70 years of antibiotics drives up resistance, and we are
fighting to wipe them out, it may be time for running worryingly low on replacements. those naturally found on cells, they act as
a truce. If we can disarm harmful bacteria
without killing them, we may be able to reduce If we were to treat infections without killing decoys. E. coli bind to the decoys, and never
antibiotic resistance, take the strain off these bacteria, they wouldn’t need to evolve
overworked drugs and leave our helpful resistance to our antibiotics. Not only could get a grip on the cell surfaces. As a result, the
inhabitants be. Doing so may even mean this strategy, known as anti-virulence therapy,
resurrecting some forgotten strategies from provide alternative drugs to fight infection, it bacteria get flushed out when people urinate.
the past. If the 20th century was defined by could help to restore the potency of antibiotics
our ability to kill off deadly bugs, then the for when we do need them. “If we don’t always In a small trial of women with recurrent
21st will be known as the era in which we go to them for every infection, we can preserve
learned to get along. their use for much longer,” says Brad UTIs, just 15 per cent of those given the simple
Spellberg, an infectious disease specialist at
In the latter part of the 19th century, strong the University of Southern California. carbohydrate D-mannose got a UTI within
evidence that germs cause disease kicked off
more than a century of war against bacteria. 1 in 3 six months, compared to 20 per cent of those
We expunged them from our water, food and
homes with disinfectants; roused our Number of unnecessary treated with antibiotics and 61 per cent of
immune systems against them with vaccines
and wiped them out with penicillin and other prescriptions for antibiotics the women given a placebo. In another trial,
chemical weapons. Human deaths caused by
SOURCE: US Centers for Disease Control women who drank a solution of D-mannose

didn’t get another UTI for more than six

months, on average, compared with 52 days

for those given antibiotics.

Daniele Porru and colleagues at the San

Matteo Foundation in Pavia, Italy, who ran the

trial, also found that antibiotics became more

potent for the women treated with D-mannose

instead. Because antibiotic-resistant bacteria

are generally less fit than susceptible strains, in

the absence of antibiotics, regular bugs beat out

resistant ones for resources, and come to

outnumber them. That means when you do

need antibiotics, they are more likely to work

as most of the bacteria are the vulnerable kind.

RENAUD VIGOURT When the researchers tested samples of the

bacteria, that’s just what they found. “We noted

an increased sensitivity to antibiotics, and very

few side effects,” says Porru. >

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 39

25,000 More advanced blockers are in the works that bacteria produce to break open cells and
too. Scott Hultgren and Jim Janetka at gobble up nutrients. It is a strategy first used
People in the European Union Washington University in St Louis have in the 1880s by German bacteriologist Emil
who die from antibiotic resistant developed synthetic mannose derivatives von Behring (right) and his Japanese colleague
infections each year that may be more effective and linger longer Kitasato Shibasaburo. The pair injected
within the body, meaning you need less to sublethal doses of diphtheria and tetanus
Source: World Health Organization make a difference. Studies in mice show that toxins into animals, harvested the toxin-
a single dose can prevent E. coli infections for neutralising antibodies they produced, and
at least three days, and begin to clear existing then used these to treat patients. This strategy
infections within 6 hours. And by blocking eventually halved the death rate from
E. coli instead of blasting them with diphtheria and tetanus, and earned von
antibiotics, the bacteria didn’t need to evolve Behring the very first Nobel prize in medicine.
resistance to drugs, and beneficial bacteria But when antibiotics came along, anti-toxin
living in the urinary tract were left unharmed. therapy was largely abandoned.
The potential impact is big: in the US alone,
more than 25 million antibiotic prescriptions “A lot of treatments were forgotten because
are written for UTIs each year, and up to half antibiotics were so successful – and the loss of
of the people who take them will have a these is now reflected in the lack of treatment
recurrence. Hultgren thinks using blockers is choices,” says Laura Piddock, a microbiologist
just the kind of approach that will “launch an at the University of Birmingham, UK. With
antibiotic-sparing therapeutic revolution”. the rise of antibiotic resistance, anti-toxin
treatments are getting a fresh look.
If you can’t stop bacteria from sticking,
the next line of defence is a long-forgotten One area in which anti-toxins have huge
treatment. The idea is to neutralise the toxins potential is in treating diarrhoea. Each year
nearly 30,000 people in the US die from
ARE ANTIBIOTICS MAKING US SICK? diarrhoea caused by Clostridium difficile
(pictured, left) an infection often acquired after
DR KARI LOUNATMAA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Antibiotics are among the safest Antibiotic use, especially in antibiotic treatment during hospital stays. The
drugs. Indeed, doctors even childhood, has been found to be solution is usually even more antibiotics, but
prescribe them for viral infections, a risk factor for all of these. for a quarter of patients, the infection comes
knowing they are useless, on the back. In a recent trial, when people were also
grounds that “it can’t hurt”. In some sense, links to obesity given a drug that neutralises C. difficile toxins,
shouldn’t be news. Antibiotics have it nearly halved the recurrence rate.
Except that it can. And not just been used to fatten livestock since
because it leads bacteria to develop the 1940s. The first study showing The trouble is, this kind of therapy doesn’t
resistance to the drugs. Antibiotic- a similar effect in people dates to necessarily reduce risk of death from this
associated diarrhoea and allergic 1955. But the mechanism was a infection down the line. Richard Proctor, an
reactions commonly send people to mystery and there was little interest emeritus professor of microbiology at the
hospital. And antibiotic use is almost in follow-up. Germs were our enemy, University of Wisconsin in Madison, is
always the cause of diarrhoea antibiotics got rid of germs, so nevertheless confident that next generation
associated with Clostridium difficile, antibiotics were good, right? anti-toxin drugs will cover more strains of
which kills nearly 30,000 Americans bacteria and be more effective. “The concept
every year (see main feature). Until the last decade, few is correct,” Proctor says.
imagined that gut bacteria might be
But people who study the needed for the development of our There is reason to hope: a lab-grown
microbiome suggest the toll may be immune, metabolic and nervous antibody to toxins produced by the common
far higher. One study in Denmark, systems. But it’s becoming clearer as bacterium Staphylococcus aureus – known as
for example, revealed that people links between the use of antibiotics MRSA in its antibiotic-resistant forms – can
who redeemed five or more and an increased risk of diabetes, prevent death and disease in infected mice.
antibiotic prescriptions over the psychosis, anxiety, depression and It is now being tested to prevent pneumonia
course of a 15-year period were obesity steadily grow. caused by S. aureus in people on ventilators.
much more likely to develop type 2
diabetes compared with those who There is a lot that we still don’t Another approach is to play with the
took antibiotics once or less during know about the balance of bacteria relationship between dangerous bugs and our
this time. in our bodies, but we now know immune systems. This is tricky though. We
enough to understand that have evolved together with bacteria in a game
Beyond diabetes, changes in the constantly disrupting it is imprudent,
balance of bacteria in our guts are even dangerous. Even if the rise of 99 per cent
now associated with obesity, antibiotic resistance did not drive a
inflammatory and autoimmune need for alternative therapies, the The proportion of bacteria in or
disorders and even depression. need to preserve our health does.
on our bodies that do us no harm

Source: US National Institutes of Health

40 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

Nobel pursuit: Emil von could prevent many types of bacteria from
Behring’s (centre right) producing a whole menu of toxins. And
140-year-old approach studies in mice show that the strategy works.
to defeating bacteria is The trouble is, if the ploy were too effective, it
being revisited could backfire; bugs that are resistant to these
quorum-sensing scramblers could be more
GETTY IMAGES likely to survive and cause harm. Such drugs
“could inadvertently select new strains of
of cat and mouse that is millions of years old. one. The process is set in motion by so-called superbugs” that pump out high levels of
The bacteria hide; our immune cells evolve quorum sensing genes, which only kick into toxins continually, says Proctor.
to seek out and destroy them; bacteria evolve action when there are enough relatives
new ways of hiding. S. aureus, for instance, around. If the signals from these genes can It is still years away from human trials,
can cloak itself in human proteins, rendering be scrambled, the bacteria won’t attack. but there may be a less risky way to achieve
it invisible to an immune system trained to the same thing. It turns out that some of the
ignore the body’s own cells. This approach is appealing because it harmless bacteria that live on us also get a say
works on a more global scale, says Vanessa in whether bad bugs go on the attack. One
There is research into stripping away such Sperandio, a microbiologist at the University theory suggests that their presence deters
disguises, but the more promising strategy is of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. In harmful bacteria from invading because they
perhaps surprising: hide the bacteria on principle, a single quorum-sensing inhibitor don’t want to share their plunder with
purpose. The most devastating consequences strangers. Corynebacterium, a common skin
of infection – particularly septic shock, which EDIT BAD BUGS’ DNA? inhabitant, releases compounds that suppress
kills more people in US hospitals than cancer – S. aureus infections in mice. Not only do they
are not caused by the infection itself, but One strategy to disarm harmful bugs throttle production of S. aureus toxins, they
an overstimulated immune system on without wiping them out would be to turn up the expression of genes associated
a rampage. disable the genes that make them with a non-infectious lifestyle. They don’t just
attack. With the great strides taken disarm S. aureus, they convert it to a pacifist.
See no evil in gene editing recently, why aren’t
more people trying it? The golden age of antibiotics is over. We will
One component of the cell walls of many never again develop safe, cheap, effective new
harmful bacteria is a molecule called The trouble is, bacteria often carry ones as fast as bugs develop resistance to
endotoxin. Its presence sets off an alarm many such virulence genes, and in a them. But old habits will be hard to break.
triggering our immune systems to react. But variety of combinations. “Targeting a Antibiotics have saved millions of lives. Even
despite its menacing name, endotoxin itself single gene or factor can be a trap,” in our current age of resistance, most first-line
does no damage to our cells. Indeed, mice says Brad Spellberg, an infectious treatments work most of the time. That means
without the necessary gene to detect it are less disease specialist at the University of these new strategies have to clear a very high
likely to die from infection (though they are Southern California. Unless the gene bar before doctors take them seriously. “We
more likely to get infections in the first place). is a linchpin for all factors bacteria will almost have to get to the post-antibiotic
In studies, multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter can use to drive infection, “knocking era before that happens,” says Proctor.
kills all infected mice by driving them into it out is ineffective or even harmful”.
septic shock. But when infected mice are given None of these strategies is a silver bullet.
the experimental drug LpxC-1, which blocks The basic problem is the incredible But they may provide alternatives, help make
the production of endotoxin, the death rate diversity of the microbial world. Two existing antibiotics more effective, and
plummets. Because bacteria signal their strains of the common gut bacterium crucially, leave us less susceptible to disease.
presence in many other ways that prompt a E. coli may share only 40 per cent of That is where their real value lies. “We have to
less severe response than endotoxin, mouse their genes. In other words, these reconsider antibiotic use in a wider context,”
immune systems eventually fight off the bugs may be no more closely related says Piddock. “We don’t want to disrupt the
infections, but without setting off the alarms than a dog is to a dogwood tree. All microbiome and inflict collateral damage.”
that send the animals into shock. Human humans, by contrast, are more than
trials may begin in the next few years. 99.5 per cent genetically identical. If we don’t reassess our use of antibiotics,
Targeting a specific gene in bacteria we may have traded freedom from bacterial
Another strategy for thwarting harmful is unlikely to take out more than a plagues for death by a host of other ailments.
bacteria rather than wiping them out is to break subset of the offending bugs, and Obesity, fatty liver disease, diabetes, arthritis,
up their social networks. For many kinds of they will quickly be replaced by inflammatory bowel disease, multiple
bacteria the decision to switch from peaceful mutants and variants missed by sclerosis, asthma, anxiety and depression
grazers to aggressive predators is a communal precision gene editing technologies. have all been linked to use and overuse of
antibiotics. Without the ability to fight off
infections, modern life would be impossible,
but we also need to preserve the microbial
communities so crucial to our health and
well-being. It’s time we learned to get along. ■

Drew Smith is a molecular biologist and writer in

Boulder, Colorado

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 41

How you see it,
how you don’t

When psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach used inkblots to
open a window into his patients’ minds 100 years ago,
he also opened a can of worms, finds Damion Searls

NUREMBERG, 1945. Hitler, Himmler and to integrate into a whole, so that while some SCIENCE MUSEUM/SCIENCE & SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY:PORTRAIT WWW.BRIDGEMANIMAGES.COM
Goebbels were dead, but two dozen of us can pull together a big picture, others get
other leading Nazis were awaiting trial hung up on details. And do you see movement
for crimes against humanity. The prize catch and life, or only cold, inanimate forms?
was the creator of the Gestapo and the death There’s one blot that almost everyone says
camps, Hitler’s number two: Hermann Göring. looks like a bat or moth; do you say likewise?

While they waited, prison psychologist Rorschach gave scores based on the
Gustave Gilbert administered psychological frequency of what he termed “whole”, “detail”
tests, keen to solve the mystery of the “Nazi and “movement” responses, among others.
mind”. Most of the prisoners responded like You could calculate ratios with those scores,
show-off schoolboys, eager to beat their peers. and track patterns. The test results were
They did well on IQ tests, but to assess their derived from these measures. Rorschach
personality there was another technique to originally called his inkblots a perception
try, and the prison psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, experiment, not a test; it simply explored
had written a book on it. He and Gilbert gave how people process visual information.
19 Nuremberg prisoners the Rorschach test. Only later did he realise that different kinds
of people tend to see the blots differently.
Hermann Rorschach, a psychiatrist working
alone in a remote Swiss asylum, had invented Nazi personality
the inkblot method in 1917 and published it
in 1921. Rorschach was a follower of Freud, In the decades after his early death in 1922,
though never doctrinaire or dogmatic: he once
joked to a colleague, “In Vienna, they’re going aged 37, of appendicitis, Rorschach’s test
to be explaining the rotation of the Earth
psychoanalytically before long.” He had also languished in Switzerland and Germany.
studied with Carl Jung in Zurich, where Jung
had developed the first empirical test of the But practitioners in the US helped it surge to
unconscious mind: word association.
prominence. That’s why in 1945, Kelley and
Rorschach was a lifelong artist. In school
he was known for his drawing skill and, aptly, Gilbert, both Americans, saw a golden
his nickname was “Klex”, the German word for
inkblot. He was visual, whereas Freud was a opportunity to try it on prominent Nazis. became the leading“X-ray of the unconscious”.
word person. Psychoanalysis was built around
the talking cure, slips of the tongue, what we Ultimately, though, the Rorschach test It was used in the most ham-fisted ways
say and don’t say, but Rorschach thought how
we see was more revealing than what we see. wasn’t considered a success at Nuremberg imaginable, and was expected not just to reveal

After extensive revisions, Rorschach because it didn’t identify a “Nazi personality”. mental illness or personality, but to practically
decided on 10 inkblots to make up the test.
The same 10 are still used today, 100 years on. Although it found some common elements, read minds. Too many death-related responses
They are not random smears: they have
structure, visual qualities beyond mere such as a certain lack of introspection, the to an inkblot dubbed the suicide card and you
ambiguity. For instance, they are challenging
Nazis showed essentially the same range of became a candidate for electroshock therapy.

variation, from the psychotic to the very well Had he lived, Rorschach would have been

adjusted, as any other group. This result was appalled that an inkblot test could result in

unacceptable to both psychologists and the such drastic treatment. Shortly before his

general public – surely only monsters could “Used in the most ham-fisted
do what the Nazis had done – and so the

findings were disregarded for decades. ways, the test was expected
Meanwhile, in the mid-century heyday of to practically read minds”

Freudian psychoanalysis, the Rorschach test

42 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

PEOPLE

death, he wrote to a colleague eager to use the Hermann Rorschach objectively. Although he initially logged
test to evaluate academic potential: “When I (above) and card 2 responses as “+” or “-” for being good or poor
imagine some young person, who has maybe of his 10 inkblots. descriptions of the card, he collected a large
dreamed of going to university from an early What do you see? data set as quickly as he could and shifted to
age, being prevented from doing so as a result scoring answers as Popular or Uncommon,
of failing at the experiment, I naturally feel a is better than arbitrary interpretation.” independent of his own subjective judgement.
bit like I can’t breathe.” Yet many psychiatrists preferred their
The mountains of data collected and
Rorschach anticipated many objections to own interpretations, and so the Freudian analysed
his test, in particular the potential conflict incarnation of the Rorschach test captured the since the test was invented allowed statistical
between its numerical results and a doctor’s world’s imagination, spreading into film noir, norms
subjective insight into their patient. This advertising and popular culture. This version to be established. After psychologist John
“dilemma… comes up unfortunately quite eventually, justifiably, met with widespread Exner devised a “Comprehensive System” for
often in the test,” he noted. But Rorschach criticism. In the late 60s, it began to fall out scoring in 1974, the test gave a more complex
took the side of scientific objectivity: “All my of favour, along with Freud. In the UK and readout than ever before, with all sorts of
work has shown that crude systematisation elsewhere, it has never recovered. But in the measurable numerical thresholds.
US, the test was reinvented in the 1970s with These in turn could be mapped to diagnoses in
a renewed emphasis on numerical results. the US psychiatrist’s handbook, the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or
From the beginning, the test was meant other accepted assessments.
to be a science, not an art. A priority for
Rorschach was that it could be scored Whether such mapping is reliable has
been controversial for decades, and is the
subject of a great deal of research. Is the
Rorschach test, even in its modern
incarnation, just an excuse for a psychiatrist
to draw whatever conclusions they want?
According to a giant meta-analysis published
in 2013 in Psychological Bulletin, the answer
is no. In the light of that study, even some of
the test’s most vocal critics agreed that its
ability to detect and differentiate between
psychotic thought disorders now had
scientific support. And those of Exner’s
scores that were found not to meet scientific
standards of validity and reliability were
removed from the system, leaving the rest
on a firm footing.

The inkblots have been used in so many
ways in the 100 years since Rorschach sent
them out into the world that they can seem
as hard to pin down as human nature itself.
And, as with any tool, there is scope for misuse.
Gilbert failed to heed what the inkblots told
him in Nuremberg, and continued to believe
that there was a “Nazi personality”: in 1963,
he published an article with the lurid title
“The mentality of SS murderous robots”.
Yet Kelley, the more expert Rorschacher,
had found nothing particularly out of the
ordinary – simply the banality of evil.

No test can get around the complexity of
how different people see the world, and that
complexity will always generate controversies.
One can only wonder what Rorschach himself
would have made of it all. ■

Damion Searls is a writer and translator based in

New York City. His new book is The Inkblots: Hermann

Rorschach, his iconic test, and the power of seeing

(Simon and Schuster)

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 43

CULTURE

Talking with hands

Did our free-roaming minds help turn gesture into language? Alun Anderson explores

The Truth About Language: What it is
and where it came from by Michael
Corballis, University of Chicago Press

HUMAN language

has long appeared

miraculous.

It has enabled us

to accumulate

knowledge, build

cultures and

conquer the

planet, making us a creature

seemingly apart from the rest of

the animal world.

During the 19th century, Alfred

Russel Wallace doubted whether

natural selection could explain

such a unique power. In our

century, Noam Chomsky, the

Massachusetts Institute of ERICH LESSING/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Technology academic who has

dominated linguistics for 60

years, has supported a hypothesis

that language and thought

arose suddenly within the past

100,000 years.

In The Truth About Language, Tricky question: just how could

Michael Corballis rejects all such a computer science professor account unique in stressing mime morph into speech?
“mind wandering”, the subject
“miraculist” explanations. He lays at the University of Southern of one of his earlier books, and works backward.” We have the
storytelling as important parts good sort that allows us to travel
out a plausible route by which California in Los Angeles. of the long journey to language. forwards, too. Without that, we
would live in an “eternal now” and
spoken language might have They have a good reason to When we have nothing much language couldn’t have evolved.
to do, our minds travel through
evolved, not from the calls of our consider that human speech past experiences, future plans Where did mind wandering
and imaginary possibilities. The come from? Corballis explores the
primate ancestors, but through didn’t evolve directly from process of mind wandering, or evidence that other animals share
daydreaming, is more remarkable some of this power of thought.
stages in which a language of primate vocalisations. Ape calls than it seems. It shows our Birds that cache food may
capacity to recall particular remember where they hid it and
gesture and mime dominated. are spontaneous, involuntary episodes from the past and also its “use by” date so they won’t
project them freely into possible go to find it after it has gone off.
Corballis, now an emeritus expressions of emotion, made situations in the future, even Chimps and bonobos that have
though we are not using words, been shown King Kong-style
professor at the University of even when there is no one to hear. but thinking in images. movies demonstrate by where
they look on screen that they
Auckland, New Zealand, has spent Hand movements are different. Corballis quotes approvingly anticipate what will happen next
the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s when they watch the films again.
a lifetime studying language and They are voluntary and can be Through the Looking-Glass: “It’s a
poor sort of memory that only
his book is a delight; it is finely controlled. It’s easy to shape

confident, wise and witty. fingers to represent objects or

The idea of rooting language wiggle them to mimic movement.

in gesture is not new. Its key Each of the Michaels has their

exponents are two more own story, with Corballis’s new

Michaels: Michael Tomasello, “Our ‘mind wandering’ may
a co-director of the Max Planck be built on an ancient
Institute for Evolutionary ability to map movements
Anthropology in Leipzig, and plan journeys”
Germany, and Michael Arbib,

44 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culture

Crucially, recordings of the Calling for help
rat hippocampus – the part of
the brain that lays down A film telling the stories of desperately sick Chinese workers shows
memories – show how the brain the shocking price of modern electronics, finds Victoria Turk
constructs maps of movement
in space and time. Our mind
wandering may be built on an
ancient ability to map
movements and plan journeys.

Acting it out Complicit by Heather White and Lynn began to work on a smartphone paperwork: a document from the
health authorities that states she
Telling stories allows us to share Zhang, Human Rights Watch Film production line, spending has an occupational disease
those wanderings with others. caused by exposure to benzene.
Corballis quotes another Festival, London 15 hours a day in a poorly
researcher’s fictional account of Sickness and struggle take their
our early ancestors returning ventilated space polishing phone toll. For many young workers
from a hunt with a kill and acting seeking a better life in the city,
out the day’s events, then miming YI YETING’s bones hurt. It feels, screens. She was poisoned by leaving is not an option. Like Xiao
plans for tomorrow. It is easy to Ya, Shang Jiaojiao was poisoned by
picture and to see how the power he says, like ants are eating him n-hexane, a solvent used as a n-hexane. Even when she was in
of such stories could drive future hospital unable to walk, she
cooperative activity. from the inside out. Yi has cleaning agent that can cause wouldn’t tell her mother. She left
home, she sobs, to avoid being a
Corballis agrees with Aristotle leukaemia, caused by exposure nerve damage and paralysis. burden. Now she is one.
that fiction is more important
than history because it deals to the carcinogen benzene, while None of the workers knew about Those who fight back face
with possibility. If the gestures brutality. Protesters are arrested,
of mime become standardised working in a factory. He has the dangers until they got sick. activists’ offices raided, Yi’s group
and abstract – which happens has had to move several times.
naturally in modern sign already been to hospital 28 times The film-makers found sick “The most vulnerable are... targets
languages – communication of the crackdown the government
would grow ever more fluent. for chemotherapy when we see workers just by walking into is waging,” says White.
This is a move towards language.
him there, putting on a brave face “Shang Jiaojiao was There has been some positive
All this is just a part of the vista action. Samsung announced an
Corballis wants us to see. There is as his wife and son visit. poisoned by n-hexane. She $85 million fund for workers with
much more, including the ability occupational illnesses including
of languages to refer to things that Yi’s story is one of many in left home to avoid being a leukaemia and lymphoma. And in
are not present, theory of mind 2014 Apple banned benzene and
and the emergence of grammar to Complicit, a documentary by burden. Now she is one” n-hexane in final assembly
make language more efficient. manufacturing processes.
The trickiest section, however, is Heather White and Lynn Zhang
at the end when we reach the final But Complicit shows this is not
step, as sound goes from an that premiered recently at the enough. When you have global
accompaniment of mime to a subcontracting and outsourcing,
replacement, turning into speech. Human Rights Watch Film Festival hospitals near the factories. says White, it is easy for brands to
look the other way and they have
At this point, I have doubts and in London. The film gives a voice Others were directed to them by no legal liability for workforces.
must admit, as Corballis does on But Western consumers can use
his final page, that he too might to workers exposed to toxic Yi, who campaigns against the use their voice, she says, to bolster
be writing a just-so story, despite campaigners’ efforts and force
the breadth of his evidence. Still, I chemicals making smartphones of benzene and n-hexane and big brands to take responsibility.
much prefer a speculative account
of how language might have and other electronics in Shenzhen helps workers get compensation. At the end of the film, Xiao Ya
evolved to an invocation of is out of hospital and has gone
miracles. And, right or wrong, and Guangzhou. This is not easy since sick home. Yi has left his job for health
Corballis will make you see your reasons, after still more chemo.
own mind differently. ■ Xiao Ya is another victim. One workers must have an official His dedication acts as a call to
arms. The film-makers remind
Alun Anderson is a consultant for of hundreds of millions of China’s diagnosis of occupational disease. us of an Apple advertising slogan:
“The people who are crazy enough
New Scientist migrant workers, she left her rural One worker says when he sought to think... they can change the
world, are the ones who do.” ■
home as a teenager to seek a a diagnosis, company officials

better life in Guangzhou and accompanied him to the health

authorities, carrying a bag of
Poisoned lives: work in the big city money. One crucial scene shows a
turns sour for many migrants
woman revealing a rare piece of

FROM COMPLICITFILM

8 April 2017 | NewScientist | 45

CULTURE

Who is Dominique Lambert?

How official tools represent us can distort our very identity. A tantalising
exhibition dissects the troubling connections, finds Laura Spinney

Identité, FraenkelLAB, San Francisco, STÉPHANIE SOLINAS; DOMINIQUE LAMBERT (DETAIL), 2004-2010; ©STÉPHANIE SOLINAS, COURTESY FRAENKEL GALLERY of a receding hairline and a high
to 13 May forehead. He wears round glasses
high on the bridge of his nose,
WHAT is the essence of you? Identity crisis: 12 attempts to colour, I would be…”. Of the and a well-trimmed moustache.”
What is it about you that makes
you, well, you? These are no mere define Dominique Lambert 65 people who responded, Using these texts, graphic
academic questions for armchair artist Benoît Bonnemaison-Fitte
philosophers, but practical ones 20 complied with her other produced sketches, which police
with real consequences. investigator Dominique Ledée
images into near caricatures in request to send a passport photo. transformed using Electronic
Take a police artist sketching Facial Identification Technique
a suspect from an eyewitness the process. Both Sans Titre and This became her sample group. (E-FIT) software. Armed with the
description, or a profiler writing E-FITs, Solinas used a large-format
up the behavioural idiosyncrasies Traits show how we distort Solinas set up the Advisory camera to photograph Parisians
of a particular “perp”. These who closely resembled them.
representations become tools identity simply by trying to define Committee for the Description
in criminal investigations that The final step of the project
often lead to arrests. If they fail to it, but the project that does this to of Dominique Lambert, with a is a series of books, one for each
capture the essence of the person Dominique Lambert, that
being sought, the wrong person best effect is Dominique Lambert. “If representations of a document the process from start
may be arrested. In France, Dominique is the suspect fail to capture to finish. Each book is completed
their essence, the wrong by the original passport photo of
French artist Stéphanie Solinas most popular first name shared person may be arrested” one of the Dominique Lamberts,
is fascinated by the elusive nature by men and women, and the 27th hidden in a sealed envelope. You
of identity, and her exhibition at most popular first name overall, can’t see the photo at the show –
the FraenkelLAB in San Francisco you have to buy the books.
is called Identité, in a nod to her while Lambert is the 27th most
nationality. In one project, Sans Even then, Solinas doesn’t
Titre (M. Bertillon), for example, common surname. When Solinas psychologist, a statistician, reveal which face completes
she takes an 1893 mugshot of which series. She just says that
Alphonse Bertillon, the French launched the project, the French a police inspector, a lawyer and some of her portraits do not
police officer who, years before resemble the original person at
fingerprinting became popular, phone book contained 191 a corporate identity consultant. all, others come very close and
invented a way of identifying still others resemble a different
criminals based on photography Dominique Lamberts. She wrote The five had to collaborate on Dominique Lambert more than
and anatomical measurements. the one they should represent.
to all 191, inviting them to take a written physical description
Solinas ran the mugshot There is a serious point to this
through facial analysis software part in an artistic experiment that of each of the 20 Dominique tantalising effort. Each step is
to produce a 3D paper mask, cut it inevitably accompanied by both
into pieces and invited people to meant completing a personality Lamberts, based on their loss and gain of information,
assemble them to reconstruct making many interpretations
Bertillon’s face. test and a questionnaire. This questionnaire answers. possible. Solinas reminds us that
official bodies use these tools to
In another project, Traits, she involved completing a list of One reads, “He is a 45-year-old represent us. But rather than
photographed young men face-on criticise, she says that Dominique
and in profile, the way police statements such as, “If I were a man, stocky, with the beginnings Lambert questions “the power of
forces worldwide record suspects. the representation over identity
She drew on the resulting images itself”. The result is utterly
with a permanent marker, to captivating and very powerful. ■
highlight the facial characteristics
by which a person is commonly Laura Spinney is a writer based in
identified – transforming the
Paris, France

46 | NewScientist | 8 April 2017

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TOMORROW
For more details, and to book tickets, visit newscientist.com/thetomorrowclub

CLUB 15 June 2017 13 July 2017
In partnership with Into the Unknown:
A Journey through Science Fiction. THE EXPLORERS’ CLUB THE GAMERS’ CLUB
7KHJHQUHGHƌQLQJH[KLELWLRQRIDUW
GHVLJQƌOP OLWHUDWXUH Is the golden age of What happens when
exploration just beginning? virtual worlds become
better than reality?
Acclaimed authors
Adam Roberts and Stephen Playwright Lucy Prebble
BaxterƌQGRXW talks to futurist Pat Kane

29 June 2017 27 July 2017

THE DREAMERS’ CLUB THE TRANSHUMANISTS’ CLUB

Who decides what the Do new technologies enhance
future should look like? our humanity or endanger it?

Ask speculative architect Broadcaster Adam Rutherford
Liam Young, space writer talks to digital anthropologist
Piers Bizony and editor in Beth Singler and writer
chief of 2000 AD Matt Smith Joanna Kavenna