New Scientist - 11 30 2019

SUPER MAGNETS The new materials that will

transform technology

END GAME Grand unified theory of

two-player games revealed

YOUR DOG’S TRUE AGE ...and how to calculate it

PLUS THE MASS OF A NEUTRINO / WHY 70 IS THE NEW 65 / SUSPENDED ANIMATION / CLIMATE TIPPING POINTS

Why the medicine you take

could actually be bad for your health

Fast-tracked approval, efficacy

unproven

Potentially deadly side

effects

No better than placebo

Tested on 20 people

Not approved for your condition

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Congratulations Dr FehlingsDr Michael Fehlings, a neurosurgeon from Toronto, has spent his career researching and developing better treatment methods for degenerative cervical myelopathy, a spinal condition which causes pain and disability in older people.

Michael is the winner of the 2019 Ryman Prize, presented by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, for his fantastic work.

The Ryman Prize is a $250,000 annual award for the best work anywhere in the world to enhance quality of life for older people.

2019 Ryman Prize winnerDr Michael Fehlings with New Zealand

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Go to www.rymanprize.com for more information

30 November 2019 | New Scientist | 3

On the cover

42 Super magnets The new material that will transform technology

12 End game Grand unified theory of two-player games revealed

14 Your dog’s true age …and how to calculate it

News

Views

Features

8 Suspended animation Our exclusive special report on a groundbreaking medical first

17 Climate tipping points Mathematical analysis suggests we may be closer to disaster than we thought

20 The truth about vapingDoes a spate of lung injuries mean e-cigarattes aren’t safe?

23 Comment Vote with climate in mind, says Jacob Aron

24 The columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on the universe’s origin

26 Letters Neglected concerns about the nutrient choline

28 Aperture See the exquisite insides of a glorious gem

30 Culture Two books describe when innovations can kill

51 Stargazing at home See Mercury rising in the east

52 Puzzles Quick crossword, a book puzzle and a quiz

53 Feedback Paper phones and drug-raiding boar: the week in weird

54 Almost the last word Can screens make spectacles redundant? Readers respond

56 The Q&A Jeffrey Hangst on how to make antimatter

34 Why the medicine you take could actually be bad for you Rushing drugs to market may be doing more harm than good

40 Rational outrage Naomi Oreskes on the best ways to combat science denial

42 Super magnets Exotic new materials are poised to transform computing, cosmology and medicine

The back pages

31 Videotopian dreaming Nam June Paik is at London’s Tate Modern

Vol 244 No 3258

Cover image: Getty Images

34 Why the medicine you take could actually be

bad for your health

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10 The mass of a neutrino 16 Why 70 is the new 65 8 Suspended animation 17 Climate tipping points

This week’s issue

40 Features

“ Climate change is scary. And when people are frightened, they lash out in all sorts of directions”

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

BEING HUMAN

SECOND EDITION OF BEING HUMAN

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HIGH ideals have a way of seeming like high hurdles when time is running out. If someone you love has been told they have just months to live, and there is a drug that might offer them even a few months more, it suddenly matters less that the drug isn’t cost-effective, or that it was approved on the basis of a small trial and its risks and benefits remain unclear. What matters is that it might buy precious time right now.

Such dilemmas are why the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and similar agencies around the world aim to strike a balance between efficacy and expediency, speed and safety when it comes to approving new medications. In the 1970s, it took the FDA nearly three years to usher a new drug through its evaluation process. But in response to public demand after the AIDS crisis of

the 1980s, the agency began to introduce expedited approval processes to get new medicines to market much faster.

Today, there are several methods used to speed things up, and more than half of medicines are now evaluated through some kind of expedited pathway. To pay

for the staff to keep up the pace of approvals, however, the FDA has come to rely more heavily on pharmaceutical industry fees – and accepts those funds in exchange for keeping to set timelines.

The trouble is, the kind of research needed to ensure that drugs are safe and effective takes time. Faster approvals

may be based on smaller studies or measure things that are proxies for the desired effect. Medication that is rushed to market in this way is more likely to be withdrawn later over safety concerns or to turn out not to work as intended (see page 34).

There is a growing group of researchers raising the alarm over this trend. They don’t dispute the need for quicker access to new treatments or pretend that it is a straightforward problem to solve. And they don’t expect regulatory agencies to do it without help from companies. Fortunately, there is no shortage of ideas about how to strike a better balance.

That balance is critical, because if the drugs you take to get better could actually cause you harm, then he system meant to protect you just isn’t working. ❚

A critical balanceFast access to new medicines shouldn’t mean endangering health

The leader

“ When your time is running out, it suddenly matters less that a drug was approved on the basis of a small trial”

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THE huge challenge of meeting the world’s climate change targets has been starkly spelled out in a new report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

In 2018, annual global emissions of greenhouse gases reached 55.3 gigatonnes – a new high. This must fall by 32 gigatonnes by 2030 to avoid warming of more than 1.5°C by the end of the century. That is a 7.6 per cent emissions cut every year, says UNEP.

Climate scientists last year outlined the stark impact of overshooting 1.5°C and hitting 2°C, including wiping out the planet’s coral reefs, more droughts and extreme heat days and exposing hundreds of millions of people to climate-related risks. Globally,

annual emissions have never fallen, though they plateaued during 2014 and 2016, and have previously plunged dramatically at a country level, such as in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Despite the impossible-seeming cuts required, UNEP maintains it is still feasible to stay under 1.5°C. “How long can we keep 1.5°C alive? We haven’t killed it yet. Even if we don’t get to 1.5°C, 1.7°C is a hell of a lot better than 2.5°C, or the 3.2°C we’re looking at now. Every 0.1°C counts,” says Anne Olhoff at the Technical University of Denmark, one of the report’s lead authors.

The report comes less than a week before international climate talks resume at a summit in Spain, when countries are due to lay the groundwork for bolder carbon-cutting plans next year.

One source of hope is the decline of coal use in power plants, set for a 3 per cent fall in 2019 – the biggest drop on record – according to analyst Carbon Brief. UNEP cites protests by schoolchildren and the falling costs of green technologies as other reasons for optimism, but it also concedes there is “no sign of greenhouse gas emissions peaking in the next few years”. ❚

To minimise risks, the world must cut emissions by a staggering 7.6 per cent a year for the next decade, reports Adam Vaughan

Marine biology

Blue whale’s ultra-low heart rate WHEN blue whales dive for food they can reduce their heart rate to just 2 beats per minute – well below the resting rate of 15 beats researchers predicted the animals would have.

The finding is remarkable given the whales use lunge feeding, an energetic method in which they engulf vast volumes of prey-filled water, says Jeremy Goldbogen at Stanford University, California.

From a boat in Monterey Bay, California, Goldbogen and his team used a 6-metre pole to attach a heart rate monitor to a single blue whale. The monitor was held in place with a suction cup. The researchers were then able to monitor the whale’s heart rate for almost 9 hours. They detected heart rates of just 2 to 8 beats per minute hundreds of times.

The whale’s heart rate was at its lowest when the animal was diving for food and shot up after it resurfaced, reaching a peak of 37 beats per minute (PNAS, doi.org/dfwb).

The reduction in heart rate during dives enables whales to temporarily redistribute oxygenated blood from the heart to other muscles needed for lunging, says Goldbogen. Whales then recover upon resurfacing by increasing their breathing and heart rate, he says.

The whales have a “quite extraordinary level of control” of heart rate, says Sascha Hooker at the University of St Andrews, UK. ❚ Layal Liverpool

UN climate warning

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Spouse income

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than their wives feel

unhappier p14

Sharing fake news

How to nudge people

into thinking before

they click p16

More climate change coverage onlineFor the latest on our changing planet visit

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8 | New Scientist | 30 November 2019

AT LEAST one patient has been treated using an experimental technique called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), which cools down the body and gives doctors longer to operate, New Scientist exclusively revealed on 20 November. The technique is being trialled for people whose traumatic injuries are so severe that they would otherwise die.

It was “a little surreal” when the technique was first used, says Samuel Tisherman at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He told New Scientist that his team of medics had placed at least one patient in suspended animation so far, but wouldn’t reveal how many people had survived as a result.

EPR is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma – such as a gunshot or stab wound – and have had a cardiac arrest. Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. In cases like these, there are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5 per cent chance that the patient would normally survive.

EPR involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15°C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline. The patient’s brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body – which would otherwise be classified as dead – is moved to the operating theatre. A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person’s injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted.

At normal body temperature, about 37°C, our cells need a constant supply of oxygen to produce energy. When our heart stops beating, blood no longer

carries oxygen to cells. Without oxygen, our brain can only survive for about 5 minutes before irreversible damage occurs.

However, lowering the temperature of the body and brain can slow or stop all the chemical reactions in our cells, which need less oxygen as a consequence.

Tisherman’s plan for the trial was that 10 people who receive

EPR will be compared with 10 people who would have been eligible for the treatment but for the fact that the correct team wasn’t in the hospital at the time of admittance.

The trial was given the go-ahead by the US Food and Drug Administration. The FDA made it exempt from needing patient consent as the participants’ injuries are likely to be fatal and there is no alternative treatment. The team had discussions with the local community and placed ads in newspapers describing the trial, pointing people to a website where they can opt out.

Tisherman’s interest in trauma research was ignited by an early incident in his career in which a young man was stabbed in the heart after an altercation over bowling shoes. “He was a healthy young man just minutes before, then suddenly he was dead. We

could have saved him if we’d had enough time,” he says. This led him to start investigating ways in which cooling might allow surgeons more time to do their job.

Animal studies showed that pigs with acute trauma could be cooled for 3 hours, stitched up and resuscitated. “We felt it was time to take it to our patients,” says Tisherman. “Now we are doing it and we are learning a lot as we move forward with the trial. Once we can prove it works here, we can expand the utility of this technique to help patients survive that otherwise would not.”

The experimental technique is only intended for use in emergency medicine. “I want to make clear that we’re not trying to send people off to Saturn,” says

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Cooling the body to slow metabolism could give extra hours to operate

10 peoplewill be put into suspended animation as part of a trial

10°CThe minimum temperature to which their body will be lowered

2 hoursThe amount of time patients will be cooled to slow their metabolism

Emergency medicine

Suspended animationHumans have been put into suspended animation for the first time to give doctors more time to treat severe injuries, reports Helen Thomson


Tisherman. “We’re trying to buy ourselves more time to save lives.”

How much longer someone can be in suspended animation isn’t clear. When a person’s cells are warmed up, they can experience reperfusion injuries, in which a series of chemical reactions damage the cell – and the longer cells are without oxygen, the more damage occurs.

First stepsIt may be possible to give people a cocktail of drugs to help minimise these injuries and extend the time for which they are suspended, says Tisherman, “but we haven’t identified all the causes of reperfusion injuries yet”.

Tisherman described the team’s progress last week at a symposium at the New York Academy of Sciences. Ariane Lewis, director of the division of neuro-critical care at NYU Langone Health, said she thought it was important work, but that it was just first steps. “We have to see whether it works and then we can start to think about how and where we can use it.”

Although Tisherman’s team has been working on the trial since 2014, it may take a while to complete. In order for a patient to be enrolled, they must be present in the hospital at the same time as the large team trained in the technique. “The team’s probably a little too big,” says Tisherman. “But when you’re doing something like this, everyone wants to be a part of it.”

Tisherman says he hopes to be able to announce the full results of the trial by the end of 2020. ❚

Isn’t suspended animation a bit like an induced coma?Yes, there are similarities between the two. A medically induced coma uses drugs to slow the metabolism of the brain (so it needs less oxygen) to help reduce swelling and aid its recovery.

However, suspended animation goes a lot further by lowering people’s body temperature to almost completely stop metabolism in the body and brain.

Haven’t we been cooling the body to lower metabolism for years?Yes, we have. Cardiac surgeons will often lower a patient’s body temperature slightly while performing operations on the heart. But suspended animation lowers body temperature much further – to around 10 to 15°C – at which point most metabolic reactions slow or stop completely.

Do people get to choose whether they are put into suspended animation?The technique is only used as a last resort, meaning the team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, led by

Samuel Tisherman, will have done everything they can to save the person’s life the regular way first. People who experience a cardiac arrest from traumatic haemorrhage are unlikely to survive with current treatments.

In order to get approval for the trial, the researchers had to have several consultations

with the public. They also put details of the trial in the local newspapers, and made a website where people can opt out.

Is a patient’s future health considered before this procedure? The researchers can’t give an accurate prognosis until this trial has been completed. If it shows promise, they are likely to extend the trial to include more people.

What they do know is that people who experience a cardiac arrest in these circumstances are unlikely to survive with available treatments. This is essentially

a last ditch attempt at saving their life.

Tisherman said last week that if the researchers absolutely knew they couldn’t fix the patient’s injuries, they wouldn’t be considered. The patient’s quality of life, among other ethical aspects, was considered before the trial was approved.

Would this procedure only be available to the rich or famous?No, it doesn’t distinguish between rich and poor. There are several conditions for being a participant, not least that you need to have had a cardiac arrest due to trauma and have been brought to the correct hospital. The technique involves a lot of doctors who all have to be present at the right time.

What’s the real potential of the technique?The dream scenario is that you would be able to keep people in this state for months or years while they await a cure for their condition. But this is a distant dream – this trial is the first step and we don’t know yet whether the technique is effective.

So is immortality the endgame of all this?The endgame is about saving the life of someone who would almost certainly have died. You might liken it to the invention of the defibrillator – before that, many people who had a cardiac arrest would have died. Now some of them live as a result of that technology. ❚

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It only takes 5 minutes without oxygen before brain damage occurs

“ The dream scenario is that people spend years in this state while they wait for a cure”

Helen Thomson is a consultant for New Scientist and tweets as @hvthomson

Your questions answered New Scientist readers put their questions about the emergency resuscitation and preservation procedure to Helen Thomson


A COMPANY called Genomic Prediction has confirmed that at least one woman is pregnant with embryos selected after analysing hundreds of thousands of DNA variants to assess their risk of causing disease. It is the first time this approach has been used to screen IVF embryos, but some people think its use is unjustified.

“Embryos have been chosen to reduce disease risk using pre-implantation genetic testing for polygenic traits, and this has resulted in pregnancy,” Laurent Tellier, CEO of Genomic Prediction, told New Scientist. He didn’t say how many pregnancies there were, or what traits or conditions were screened for.

A few genetic mutations lead to serious disorders, such as cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs disease. It is already possible to screen IVF embryos to identify those that won’t develop these conditions.

But many disorders are polygenic – that is, caused by variations in many different genes that each have a small and less clear-cut effect. Geneticists attempt to work out the overall impact of thousands of gene variants by sequencing people’s DNA and calculating so-called polygenic risk scores, but there are big questions about how accurate or useful these are.

Genomic Prediction, which is based in New Jersey, is the first company to offer polygenic risk scores for embryos rather than adults, including an option to screen out embryos deemed likely to have a very low IQ.

Using these scores to screen embryos is controversial. “It is inappropriate to use pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to screen out polygenic risk factors for things like cardiovascular disease,” says Frances Flinter at Guy’s and St

Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in the UK. “I think it’s a misuse of the technology.”

Such screening places undue emphasis on genetics when it isn’t the biggest factor, she says. For instance, our risk of heart disease is typically determined by our diet, whether we smoke, how much exercise we take and so on.

“It’s completely different from using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to select out embryos at high risk of a very serious disorder, when we can predict with complete accuracy whether or not those embryos will be affected,” she says.

But Stephen Hsu, one of the founders of Genomic Prediction, says polygenic scores reveal that a few people – those who score among the top 3 per cent – have a much higher risk of, say, breast cancer or heart disease. The firm’s tests aim to identify such genomes.

“These results are very new,” says Hsu. “A typical pre-implantation genetic diagnosis expert who focuses on single-gene conditions might

not be aware of how strong the polygenic predictions can be.”

Genomic Prediction is offering polygenic screening to assess the risk of diseases and abnormally low IQ. A separate study has looked at whether polygenic screening could be used to select for desirable traits. Shai Carmi at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues fed genetic data into a computer model to estimate the maximum potential effect of selecting IVF embryos on the basis of polygenic scores for high IQ or height.

They found that the approach could only increase height by 3 centimetres at most, and IQ by an average of only 3 points (Cell, doi.org/dfvf). Carmi says it may be possible to achieve bigger gains when we know more about genetic variants.

He says his results don’t apply to Genomic Prediction’s polygenic risk screening because selection for quantitative traits such as height is different from screening out embryos at high risk of disease. ❚

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“It is the first time this kind of genetic diagnosis has been used for embryos rather than adults”

Physics

Mystery of the mass of the neutrino could soon be solved

WE HAVE made headway in our efforts to learn the mass of the neutrino. The particle, which was once thought to weigh nothing, probably has a mass 500,000 times less than that of an electron or lower.

The new upper limit of the neutrino’s mass, 1.1 electronvolts, is almost half the previous known upper limit of 2 electronvolts and brings us closer to pinning down the exact mass of this elusive particle.

“Neutrinos are a billion times more abundant in the universe than atoms, so even tiny neutrino masses would make a big contribution to the mass in the universe,” says Christian Weinheimer at the University of Münster, Germany.

Identifying this facet of the neutrino will not only help us discern the structure of the early universe, it may also help scientists better understand the physics of the smallest things, he says.

Weinheimer and his colleagues on the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment made their measurements using an electron spectrometer some 24 metres tall and 10 metres across.

They analysed the decay of a radioactive form of hydrogen called tritium – a process that emits an electron and a neutrino simultaneously. By measuring the energy of the released electrons, they were able to estimate the mass of the neutrino with greater precision than was previously possible (arxiv . org/abs/1909.06048). “We are extremely happy and proud,” says Weinheimer.

“It’s very, very exciting,” says Melissa Uchida at the University of Cambridge. “This is just the most precise measurement we’ve ever had.”

“We may finally be able to put together the puzzle of how the formation of the universe happened,” says Uchida. ❚

Layal Liverpool

Analysing hundreds of thousands of DNA variants in embryos may give clues to future health

Human genetics

Michael Le Page

Genomic selection beginsNew method of analysing IVF embryos’ genes used for first time


IN A dimly lit room filled with computers at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, doctors pore over scans of people’s hearts. Until recently, medical staff here had to interpret the blotchy on-screen images purely by sight. Now artificial intelligence is helping to explain what they are looking at.

Charlotte Manisty, a consultant cardiologist at St Bartholomew’s, analyses an MRI scan of a struggling heart and points to blue smudges over one area of muscle. The image on her screen has been coloured in by AI. A swathe of blue around the left ventricle, the heart’s main pumping chamber, means that not enough blood is getting to that part of the muscle. The volume of blood reaching each bit of the heart is a good indicator of how well it is functioning.

The AI provides a numerical estimate of blood flow for each

region too. Previously, doctors had to eyeball black and grey scans to make a judgement about how much blood was present. Getting an actual number needed specialists and took several hours or days.

“All of the things that we’re working on here are to try to reduce the training required,” says Manisty. The AI works completely automatically and delivers its analysis in around 2 minutes, she says.

The same system is now used at more than 30 hospitals worldwide and has analysed more than 20,000 MRI scans to date. It was developed by Peter Kellman and Hui Xue at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland and their colleagues.

To get the algorithm to correctly identify each bit of the heart in MRI scans, the team trained it on more than 1900 scans of around

1000 patients. The system was then tested against 200 scans from 105 patients to show that it could reliably select each area of heart muscle. It proved to be at least 90 per cent accurate in each case.

The system was also previously trained to quantify blood flow and compared against cardiac positron

emission tomography, where it was found to be 92 per cent in agreement with that method.

Kellman and Xue’s team plans to upgrade the AI soon so that it can determine a patient’s condition, for instance by stating whether it thinks it has spotted a blocked artery, diseased tissue or a healthy heart. Along with other algorithms that Kellman and Xue

have developed, such as one that allows scans to continue even when patients accidentally move, AI has improved efficiency at St Bartholomew’s, says Manisty. Previously, the department scanned around 25 people a day – now that number is well into the 30s.

Shehab Anwer at University Heart Center Zurich in Switzerland questions whether the colour coding could obfuscate certain features of a heart scan, perhaps meaning that doctors miss other signs of disease. Manisty says that the original, grey scans are all still accessible in the system.

William Bradlow at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham in the UK says that there is little risk of distorting the scans. Interpreting MRI images of hearts is tricky, but with help from AI, more doctors could be doing it on a regular basis, he says. ❚

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Gege Li

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is healthier than it looks

Solar system

JUPITER’S giant storm, the Great Red Spot, may not be dying any time soon. It seems to have been unravelling for decades, but this is probably down to the movement and shredding of clouds rather than a sign that the storm is abating.

Concerns have been mounting that the Great Red Spot might disappear. Once it was big enough for almost three Earth-sized planets to fit inside it – now it can hold little more than one.

Although we know that the storm has been shrinking since 1878, the pace of this seems to have picked up since 2012.

What’s more, photos of Jupiter

taken earlier this year by the spacecraft Juno showed red “flakes” measuring 100,000 kilometres across apparently breaking off from the Great Red Spot.

But this flaking isn’t actually a sign that the storm is fragmenting and dying, says Philip Marcus at the University of California, Berkeley.

Using computer models, he and his colleagues found that the flaking captured by Juno was in fact the result of rare events: cyclones that are common in Jupiter’s atmosphere colliding with lumps of cloud that hadn’t yet been pulled into the storm as they passed by.

The impacts broke apart the

clouds, which appear red because they sit above the Great Red Spot and are therefore exposed to more of the sun’s UV radiation. This gives the impression that parts of the storm are disintegrating.

Marcus presented these findings at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Seattle this week. He says he was surprised by how straightforward it was to simulate the flaking, which “cried out for explanation”.

“It’s wonderful to see serious attempts at numerical simulations being brought to bear on this complex topic,” says Leigh Fletcher at the University of Leicester, UK. ❚

The giant storm on Jupiter may not be abating after all

Machine learning

Chris Baraniuk

Artificial intelligence is analysing heart scans in dozens of hospitals


WE ARE a step closer to having wearable artificial kidneys, after a prototype device that is worn like a small handbag was used successfully in people for the first time.

While the technology still needs refining, it could eventually free people from being tied to large dialysis machines or hooked up to bags of fluid and tubing, says its developer Marjorie Foo at Singapore General Hospital. “For some patients, dialysis is controlling their life – this gives a bit more freedom.”

People whose kidneys are failing usually need a transplant, but they may spend years on a waiting list. In the meantime, they have to undergo dialysis to remove toxins from their blood.

The most common form is haemodialysis, which takes about 4 hours at hospital, three days a week. This can interfere with people’s daily lives.

The alternative, peritoneal dialysis, involves putting fluid into part of the abdomen, which allows toxins to pass from the blood into the fluid. The fluid is then drained away. This can be done at home daily so toxins don’t build up, but it can be time-consuming to exchange the large volumes of liquid.

The new wearable kidney is a more portable form of peritoneal dialysis. The system recycles the waste liquid by passing it through a cleaning device kept in the bag then returning it to the abdomen. This avoids the user having to deal with large volumes of fluid.

The device is about the size of a small handbag and is joined with a tube to a port in

the abdomen. Users must change a cartridge in the device every 7 hours to replace the chemicals.

In a trial last year, the device was used successfully for three days by 15 people. Blood tests suggested it worked as well as both conventional forms of dialysis and would only need to be used for two 7-hour sessions a day, says Foo, who presented the work at the American Society of Nephrology Kidney Week conference in Washington DC earlier this month.

Some users complained it made them feel bloated, but this can also happen with conventional peritoneal dialysis. Foo says the device wouldn’t suit everyone as some prefer to have their dialysis done in hospital rather than managing it themselves.

It would give people whose kidneys are failing more independence, says Susie Lew at George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences, who co-chaired

the conference session. “They would not need to store boxes of dialysis fluid,” she says.

Most other groups trying to develop wearable artificial kidneys have attempted to create a portable version of haemodialysis.

Meanwhile, a team at the University of California, San Francisco, is developing an implantable artificial kidney that uses human kidney cells kept separate from the patient’s blood supply, so immune-suppressing drugs won’t be needed. ❚

THERE is now one game to rule them all. Whenever two parties face off, the possible outcomes can be analysed with a unified theory, rather than the various methods used in the past.

Game theory uses maths to analyse strategic scenarios. It can help work out what will happen between two “players”, such as kids fighting at school, nations locked in a trade war or animals vying for food. It can also assess the best strategy for winning.

Jin Yoshimura at Shizuoka University in Japan and his colleagues have created a single game that can account for all the variables in two-player encounters where each person has the option to choose between cooperation and betrayal or disengagement.

The most famous of these is the prisoner’s dilemma, in which each of two inmates are told they can either cooperate with the other inmate and stay silent or betray them by testifying against the other person. There is also the hawk-dove game, a bit like a game of chicken to avoid a collision,

A unified theory for two-player games

Mathematics Medical technology

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and the stag hunt, which requires cooperation to get better prey.

To study all of these possible games as one, the research team imagines two players who must lift a heavy bag. There is an energy cost associated with lifting the bag. Each player gets a reward or is fined depending on whether the bag is lifted (Royal Society

Open Science, doi.org/dftw).The bag can be carried by one

or two people, and by varying the number of players choosing to cooperate and the rewards or costs in the scenario, Yoshimura says their game can encompass all other two-player games.

This approach may make it clearer how to move from a scenario in which cooperation is hard to one where it is easier, and that could help us devise social interventions that encourage cooperation, says Kevin Zollman at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. ❚

The classic prisoner’s dilemma weighs the costs of betrayal or cooperation

Wearable artificial kidney trialled in people

“ For some patients, dialysis is controlling their life. This device gives more freedom”

Congratulations Dr FehlingsDr Michael Fehlings, a neurosurgeon from Toronto, has spent his career researching and developing better treatment methods for degenerative cervical myelopathy, a spinal condition which causes pain and disability in older people.

Michael is the winner of the 2019 Ryman Prize, presented by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, for his fantastic work.

The Ryman Prize is a $250,000 annual award for the best work anywhere in the world to enhance quality of life for older people.

2019 Ryman Prize winnerDr Michael Fehlings with New Zealand

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Go to www.rymanprize.com for more information


MARRIED heterosexual men feel most comfortable when they earn 50 per cent more than their wives, according to a study of data from the US.

Over the past few decades, more and more women have started to out-earn men. Joanna Syrda at the University of Bath in the UK wanted to investigate the psychological effects of this change. She analysed data from a US survey of more than 6000 married heterosexual couples that included questions about income and emotional well-being.

So far she has focused on the effects in men. She found they tended to be unhappier when their wives earned more than them, becoming gradually more so as their wives’ earnings grew relative to their own. This was unrelated to total household

income, the amount of housework the men did, or the hours their wives worked.

Men who were the sole breadwinners were also relatively unhappy, perhaps due to the stress of being the family’s only financial source. But they weren’t as unhappy as men who earned less than their wives.

The men who were happiest were those who earned 60 per cent of their households’ total income and whose wives earned 40 per cent. This is probably the point at which wives earn enough money to minimise financial strain on their families without challenging the traditional stereotype of the male breadwinner, says Syrda (Personality and Social Psychology

Bulletin, doi.org/ggb5mk).“The male breadwinner

identity – the idea that a man

must take care of his family – has been incredibly durable despite many other changes to gender norms,” says Syrda. “These findings show that it can actually be harmful to men’s mental health because they feel emasculated if their wives earn more than them.”

Nicholas Haslam at the University of Melbourne in Australia agrees. “Even if men think they’re beyond all of this sexist stuff, very often they’re not,” he says. “The fact that men are happiest when women earn two-thirds what they do shows we have a long way to go to reach equality.”

However, not all men feel the same way, says Syrda. Her analysis found that men whose wives earned more than them when they got married didn’t experience the same discomfort. This is probably because men who choose to pair up with high-earning women feel less threatened by female success to begin with, she says.

The way happiness was measured in the study – by asking respondents how often they had negative thoughts in the past 30 days – was fairly crude, says Haslam. However, it still provided a useful snapshot of general well-being, he says.

Syrda now wants to compare how women are affected by male partners’ earnings. She also plans to see how income differences affect same-sex couples. ❚

Psychology

Alice Klein

News Canine calculatorWork out your dog’s age in human years

newscientist.com/dog-age

Dogs hit the equivalent of human middle age after only a few years

Animals

Formula for calculating your dog’s real age

YOU may need to rethink your dog’s age. Conventional wisdom says that one human year is the equivalent of seven dog years, but a new analysis suggests we have been getting this all wrong.

The seven dog years to every human year rule comes simply from crudely dividing human lifespan, around 80 years, by dog lifespan, typically 12 years. Trey Ideker at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues found that the rule is a little off.

The team performed a genetic analysis of dogs and humans to identify how they age over time. The researchers discovered that, compared with us, dogs age faster at first, blazing into the

equivalent of human middle age after only a few years.

But this ageing quickly tapers off, with the next 10 years only accruing two human decades’ worth of changes. The team put this together into a single formula: human age = 16 ln(dog age) + 31 (see the top of the page for a link

to our online dog age calculator). It is a significant revision to

our understanding of how to map dogs against their human owners in terms of age, says Ideker.

The team studied 104 Labradors, ranging from very young puppies to 16-year-old dogs. The researchers then compared the

dogs’ methylomes – a set of chemical changes to genes that fluctuates throughout life – to those of humans over a lifetime. By matching these methylomes, the researchers could convert between the physiological age of dogs and humans (bioRxiv, doi.org/dftv).

In both, these age-related changes largely involved developmental genes found in all vertebrates that are important from their time in the uterus through their childhood.

Matt Kaeberlein at the University of Washington in Seattle says it would be interesting to find out what happens to the age clock in dog breeds with very different lifespans, such as Great Danes and chihuahuas. ❚Jake Buehler

Heterosexual husbands happiest when they out-earn their wives

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Science of pro cycling: Mont Ventoux

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A highly immersive expert-led training camp with sports scientists from Sheffield

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achieved a Grand Tour stage win in his own right at the Vuelta a España.

A unique ride experience, in the company of experts giving stimulating seminars and

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5 days for £2,199 (approximately $2,859)21 May 2020


THERE may be a simple solution to stop people sharing incorrect information online: just ask them to think about accuracy.

Gordon Pennycook at the University of Regina in Canada and his colleagues presented more than 2500 people from the US with real headlines and images taken either from mainstream news stories or from a cache of stories that had been debunked by independent fact-checkers.

Some participants were asked to indicate if they would consider sharing the headlines on social

media. Many said they would, and this wasn’t influenced by whether the headlines were true or not.

In a follow-up study, the team asked another group of people to judge the accuracy of headlines before asking them whether they would consider sharing them on social media. People who were given this accuracy prompt were significantly less likely to say they would share false headlines.

Building on this second finding, the researchers explored whether Twitter users could be encouraged not to share stories

that they suspect to be fake. The researchers used Twitter

bots to message 5500 users who had shared news from potentially misleading websites. They asked these people to rate the accuracy of a non-political headline.

Afterwards, the team measured the trustworthiness of the news shared by these users, with a trustworthiness scale developed

by independent fact-checkers.The team found that the news

the Twitter users shared in the 24 hours after they received the message was 3.5 per cent more trustworthy than the news shared before they had been contacted (psyarxiv.com/3n9u8).

This suggests people are more likely to spread misinformation because they aren’t thinking about accuracy, says Pennycook.

He would like to partner with social media platforms to scale up the experiment. ❚

Social media

How to fight the spread of fake news

News

3.5%Rise in trustworthiness of shared news when we consider accuracy Donna Lu

OUR health outcomes at older ages may be changing: people who are 70 today feel as healthy as 65-year-olds did a few decades ago, according to the UK’s official statistics authority.

The idea that turning 65 marks the beginning of old age is already seen as outdated in the world of work, with the UK’s state pension age looking set to rise to 68 by the end of the 2030s. But the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) says it now appears that the notion is outmoded for health and longevity too.

The ONS found that levels of poor health for men aged 70 today were about the same as those for a 65-year-old man in 1997. A 70-year-old woman today is on a par with a woman aged 65 in 1981.

Today’s 70-year-olds also have a remaining life expectancy similar to that of a 65-year-old several decades ago. A 70-year-old man in 2017 is considered to have 15 years left to live on average, the same as a 65-year-old man had in 1997. For women aged 70, remaining life

expectancy is 17 years, equivalent to a 65-year-old woman in 1981.

The ONS says these findings imply that 70 really can be thought of as the new 65 when it comes to life expectancy and health.

“The data is believable, it reflects what we see in the clinic,” says Janet Lord at the University of Birmingham, UK. She says there are three possible reasons why large health improvements have been seen, particularly for

men, in recent decades: the introduction of new drugs to treat hypertension, reduced levels of smoking and the introduction of lipid-lowering statins.

The ONS used two long-running surveys to measure health. One asked people to rate their general health, while the other asked whether they had a long-term illness and, if so, whether it reduced their ability to do daily activities. On average, 45 per cent

of people aged 65 to 85 reported poor general health in 1981, which fell to 39 per cent by 2017.

“It’s not surprising that there have been increases in life expectancy, but I was pleasantly surprised about the improvements in terms of health,” says João Pedro de Magalhães at the University of Liverpool, UK. “This means that people are not only living longer but they are living longer healthier, which is what we all want.”

One caveat is that the measure of health was self-reported by people rather than being assessed by a doctor, says Lorna Harries at the University of Exeter, UK. “People’s perception of how healthy they are can differ quite a lot from person to person. Something relatively minor for one person may be perceived to have a big impact by someone else.” ❚

Ageing

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Older people in the UK seem to be staying healthier for longer


Geology Climate change

Leah Crane Michael Marshall

THERE could be oceans’ worth of water hiding deep within giant planets. Minerals with water bound up in their molecular structure can remain stable at extremely high pressures, a new study suggests. This means they could act as reservoirs for water even inside planets much larger than our own.

Earth has a reservoir of water like this. It is bound up in a mineral called ringwoodite, deep underground in our planet’s mantle. But at higher pressures than those in the mantle, we are unsure how these sorts of water-bearing, or hydrous, minerals behave.

Masayuki Nishi at Ehime University in Japan and his colleagues investigated using a mineral made of aluminium, oxygen and hydrogen. “We succeeded in observing the hydrous mineral under pressures far higher than those in previous studies,” says Nishi.

To mimic the heat and pressure at the centre of large planets, the researchers squeezed samples of the mineral between two small diamonds and heated them with laser beams. They then used X-rays to examine the crystal structure.

At high pressures, they found, the aluminium hydroxide shifted to a new phase with a sturdier structure. The water bound up in the mineral remained there even under incredibly high pressures and at temperatures well over 2000°C (Icarus, doi.org/dfmh).

Nishi suspects that many hydrous minerals can be stabilised under much higher pressures than we had thought possible, although it is difficult to be sure because testing how each mineral behaves at high pressure is challenging.

Hydrous minerals might act as an underground reservoir for surface water on large terrestrial exoplanets called super-Earths and help them to maintain liquid oceans. ❚

Huge exoplanets could host water deep underground

EARTH’S climate may change far more abruptly and dramatically than we predicted. Regions of the planet that are thousands of kilometres apart may influence each other, causing the global climate to lurch into a new state.

Climatologists have long suspected that parts of the planet will change dramatically and irreversibly if they are warmed past a certain tipping point.

One such place is the Greenland ice sheet. Warmer temperatures are melting the ice, so its upper surface is now at a lower altitude – where the air is warmer and more melting will occur.

It isn’t clear how much the climate needs to warm relative to pre-industrial levels to trigger irreversible melting of this ice sheet, but one study suggested 1.6°C would be enough.

That is alarming, but in recent

years scientists have realised that the various tipping elements can interact: one tipping point could trigger another, like dominoes.

For example, if the Greenland ice sheet passes its tipping point and starts melting irretrievably, it will dump cold water into the north Atlantic Ocean. This could collapse a vast ocean current called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation

(AMOC), causing rapid sea level rise along the US eastern seaboard and playing havoc with the West African monsoon.

Now a mathematical analysis of tipping points suggests that in some cases it could be even worse than that.

The new study looked at what can happen if two elements influence each other.

It turns out there is a nasty surprise: the two elements can start changing irreversibly at a lower temperature, so tipping points may arrive sooner (arxiv.org/abs/1910.12042).

“There might be a possibility that certain feedbacks between tipping elements lead to earlier than expected tipping of the connected system,” says study co-author Jonathan Donges of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

The study is an abstract simulation rather than an attempt to model real-world tipping points like those that could impact the Greenland ice sheet or the AMOC. Even so, the researchers think it could be applicable to the real world. In theory, that could mean the Greenland ice sheet will pass its tipping point and start melting unstoppably before the global climate has warmed by 1.6°C.

However, Donges cautions that the model the team used is “very stylised”.

Nevertheless, the analysis is “very convincing”, says Anna von der Heydt of Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She says such premature tipping could well turn out to be real, and it is important to find out.

A link between Greenland and the AMOC is plausible, says Juan Rocha at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden. “They are large, [geographically] close, and their consequences are strong enough as to affect each other.” ❚

Earth’s tipping points may be closer than we thought

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“Regions of the planet that are thousands of kilometres apart may influence each other”


Psychology

Bots can check pipes while water still runsSWARMS of floating robots could help map underground pipe networks and detect leaks and blockages in plumbing.

Peter Baltus at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and his team have developed golf ball-sized sensors that can gather information as they float through pipes.

Each robot has a microprocessor, a sensor, memory boards and a

Why sex is especially memorable for fliesFEMALE fruit flies get a boost in their long-term memory after mating thanks to a molecule found in male fly semen.

The substance involved, called the sex peptide, binds to the sperm of male flies and is passed on to females, where it travels from the reproductive tract to the brain.

It was already known that this molecule, which is unique to fruit flies, alters behaviour. After mating, it changes what females prefer to eat and makes them reject future mating partners, for example. It normally does this by acting on nerve cells that are connected to the uterus.

Now Thomas Préat and his colleagues at PSL University, France, have found that this molecule also enhances long-term memory by targeting cells in the brain responsible for it.

To test fruit fly memory, the

RoboticsAnimal behaviour

IF YOU were watching a basketball game and a person in a gorilla suit walked across the court, you would notice, right? Earlier experiments showed that only about half of us would, and now it turns out that if you don’t notice within 1.5 seconds, you are unlikely to catch it at all.

The effect is called inattentional blindness. But Katherine Wood and Daniel Simons at the University of Illinois wondered if lengthening the time a new visual cue is in our field of view helps. To test this, they asked people to watch black and white shapes moving in straight lines across a computer screen and bouncing off the screen edges.

The people were told to count how many times objects of one colour bounced. While doing this, a new, cross-shaped object passed over the screen for either 2.67 or 5

seconds. People failed to spot it at around the same rate in both cases.

Next, the cross appeared for either 1.5 seconds or 5 seconds. Slightly more than half noticed it if it was displayed for 5 seconds, and slightly less than half when it was shown for 1.5 seconds. There was just a 13 per cent greater chance of noticing it if it was displayed for 5 seconds rather than 1.5 seconds.

“The most natural thing to assume is that the longer it’s there, the more opportunity you have to notice it, so we were quite surprised when it turned out that it seems not to help you very much,” says Wood. The team found that 1.5 seconds is the time beyond which most people will have noticed something like this if they are going to spot it (Royal Society Open Science, doi.org/dfk4). Chelsea Whyte

Look sharp or you’ll miss the gorilla on the court

battery. They can be programmed to detect sound, temperature, pressure, acceleration, rotation and magnetic fields.

To save power, a sensor can be activated by a sudden change in conditions, such as hissing sounds associated with water escaping, or increased rotation, which could be a sign of turbulent water flow. The robot would then increase the rate at which it takes measurements.

One use the team has in mind is to improve sketchy maps of ageing water distribution networks below cities. “The documentation is spotty and incorrect, or at least very approximate,” says Baltus.

The advantage of these robots is that they can work without having to shut down the networks they travel through. “It makes many people unhappy if you have to switch off drinking water to inspect pipelines,” says Baltus.

Similarly, the robots could inspect piping in a chemical plant without the need to shut the plant down entirely. Donna Lu

team conditioned females to pair certain smells with electric shocks. Flies that had mated could remember to avoid smells associated with shocks, but flies that hadn’t mated forgot after four days, showing they couldn’t retain this training in the long term.

The researchers found that females who mated with males modified to lack the sex peptide didn’t have better long-term memories, but flies that hadn’t mated but were injected with the peptide saw a memory boost (Science Advances, doi.org/dfk5).

In nature, flies that are yet to mate might lack such a memory in order to make them braver and more likely to search out mates. In contrast, long-term memory may mean flies that have mated can remember safe spots to lay eggs.

Stuart Wigby at the University of Oxford says he is surprised that the sex peptide can migrate all the way to the brain and affect learning. “It’s kind of amazing,” he says. Gege Li

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Music

Environment Bionics

Bitcoin’s impact may not be so bad

Mining the cryptocurrency bitcoin may be less polluting than we thought. A study found powering the computers it uses led to the release of 17 megatonnes of carbon dioxide in 2018, one-third that of an earlier estimate (Environmental Science and Technology, doi.org/dfkx). The new figure took into account the various ways energy is produced across the world.

Humans are putting plant species at risk

A third of plants in the tropical region of Africa may be at risk of extinction, according to an analysis of 22,000 species (Science Advances, doi.org/dfkw). Human impacts, including increasing deforestation and climate change, are thought to be responsible.

Trash-talking robot curbs performance

People who played a video game against a robot opponent made worse decisions when the bot trolled them, a study has found (arxiv.org/abs/1910.11459). The research discovered that negative comments, for example, made people make less rational decisions in the game.

The world may sing in harmony after allALL music seems to have similar structural elements. In fact, we even use the same simple building blocks to make melodies, which means humans might have an innate “grammar” for music.

While music seems to be in all cultures, the prevailing view is that it has few, if any, universal elements. Settling the matter empirically has been difficult because research often focuses on individual cultures and

PALM oil has become a villain in environmental terms, as people realise that producing it often involves clearing rainforests. But it turns out this happens less often in Colombia than in other countries that are major producers.

If you buy products containing palm oil from plants grown in Colombia, there is a 60 to 70 per cent chance that it comes from trees on old cattle pasture, rather than on former rainforest, says Juan Carlos Quezada at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne’s Ecological Systems Laboratory.

Planting oil palms on pasture in the South American country doesn’t

increase carbon emissions, according to a study by Quezada and his team (Science Advances, doi.org/dfk6). He says it also has much less impact on wildlife.

Globally, growing demand for palm oil is leading to a rapid expansion of oil palm plantations. In Malaysia and Indonesia, rainforests are being cut down to make way for the crop. This is not only devastating for wildlife such as orangutans, it also releases a lot of carbon dioxide.

The main reason why palm oil demand is increasing is that huge quantities are now being turned into subsidised biofuels, including in Europe. Michael Le Page

musical contexts, says Samuel Mehr of Harvard University.

To seek universal features, Mehr and his team turned to data science. They collated about 5000 descriptions of songs – the voice being an instrument used in all cultures – and their performances in 60 societies.

Not only was music present in all societies, but when they analysed the data, clear patterns emerged. For example, songs used in similar contexts shared similar features. Ritual healing songs were more repetitive than dance songs, and dance songs were quicker and

Wearable patch gives sense of touchA SYNTHETIC skin could help add a sense of touch to prosthetic hands or give video games a more realistic feel. The skin comes as a battery-free patch that can be stuck onto any part of the body.

Created by John Rogers at Northwestern University in Illinois and his team, it works by vibrating and pushing the skin. It is powered wirelessly and can be matched to the user’s skin colour.

In a demonstration, a man with a prosthetic hand wore the skin on the upper part of this arm. When he grasped a cup with the artificial hand, sensors transmitted the touch sensations to his upper arm (Nature, doi.org/dfk3).

“Touch is important for being able to use a limb,” says Christof Lutteroth at the University of Bath, UK. Anyone who has tried opening a door with cold, numb hands knows how vital it is for grasping and manipulating objects, he says.

The patch could also be used in video gaming. In another demonstration, it vibrated to convert strikes in a combat game into sensations felt on the body.

Rogers now wants to refine the touch sensations transmitted by the patch, for example by adding the ability to gently heat and cool the skin. Layal Liverpool

more rhythmic than lullabies.But the most striking discovery

was that all cultures had melodies centred around a “basis tone”. A good example is Twinkle, Twinkle,

Little Star, which starts on the note C and uses notes from the C major scale. This means that the C note gives the song a sense of stability and feels like “home”.

The authors suggest that this might be a sign of a universal “musical grammar”, much like the idea we have a universal linguistic grammar of speech sounds (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aax0868). Ruby Prosser Scully

Turn pasture into plantations if you want greener palm oil

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SINCE e-cigarettes were launched just over a decade ago, their popularity has soared. Some 3.6 million people in the UK and more than 10 million in the US are vapers. But then came the horror stories. In the past few months, 47 deaths and over 2200 cases of lung injury have been linked to e-cigarette use in the US, where health officials are now warning against vaping.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says the only way to ensure you aren’t at risk while the problem is being investigated is by “refraining from use of all e-cigarette, or vaping, products”. But UK health bodies seem to disagree, with the statement that vaping is “95 per cent safer than smoking” – taken from a report by Public Health England – widely repeated. So how safe are e-cigarettes? Why has the UK not seen the same health problems as the US? And are we unnecessarily exposing another generation to nicotine addiction?

“It’s such a complex, rapidly moving landscape that it’s difficult for people to keep track,” says Linda Bauld at the University of Edinburgh, who has advised the UK government on tobacco control.

E-cigarettes are handheld, battery-run devices that vaporise “e-liquids”. These typically contain nicotine, along with other chemicals and sometimes flavourings, but they are free from the tar found in tobacco cigarettes.

Bauld highlights two key issues with e-cigarettes: the current rash of health problems and users’ age.

So far, every US state apart from Alaska has reported cases of lung injury linked to vaping. There is no specific test for such injuries, but symptoms include coughs, nausea, diarrhoea, shortness of breath and pains in the chest or abdomen. Some people have

developed a form of pneumonia caused by substances from e-liquids getting into their lungs.

E-cigarettes have been available for about 10 years, so why are we only seeing these health problems now? The cases may all be linked to a chemical typically found in illicit products, according to a

study by the CDC and other health bodies. Among a sample of 867 people diagnosed with vaping-related lung injury, 86 per cent reported having vaped tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – the chemical that gives cannabis users

Under EU law, many e-cigarette ingredients – including vitamins – are banned as a precaution.

That isn’t to say that no problems have been reported in the UK. Any suspected health effects must be passed on to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. As of 15 November, the agency has received 74 notifications describing 216 health effects that may be linked to e-cigarettes, although these have yet to be confirmed. Most of them relate to breathing and lung disorders.

Regarding the age of users, in the US, most lung injuries have been in people under the age of 24. A recent survey estimates that 28 per cent of high school students use e-cigarettes. Manufacturer Juul Labs has come under scrutiny for developing flavours that might appeal to young people and marketing its products as being fashionable.

School advertisingIn September, the US Food and Drug Administration sent the firm a warning letter, raising concerns about it having marketed its e-cigarettes in a school using terms like “totally safe” and “99 per cent safer than cigarettes” without authorisation from the agency. Within a few weeks, the company’s CEO had stepped down, and the firm promised to restrict advertising.

All of the researchers contacted by New Scientist agreed that e-cigarettes shouldn’t be used by young people or people who have never smoked. Researchers in the UK said that because e-cigarettes lack the tar found in tobacco

The truth about vapingA sudden outbreak of health problems linked to e-cigarettes has raised concerns about their safety. Jessica Hamzelou investigates

Vaping liquids typically contain nicotine, but lack the tar found in cigarettes

a high. These THC-containing e-liquids were probably obtained from the black market, says Bauld.

It is unlikely that THC itself is to blame for lung injury – we haven’t seen the same symptoms in cannabis smokers, for instance. But other chemicals are often used with THC in e-cigarette liquids. The CDC has flagged vitamin E acetate, a synthetic form of the vitamin, as the most likely culprit. In a recent investigation, it was found in all the lung samples taken from 29 people with vaping-related lung injury.

The eight cases of confirmed or probable lung injury related to vaping in Canada are likely to be connected to vitamin E acetate-containing products from the US, says Bauld. That might also explain why there hasn’t been the same spike in cases in the UK.

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2200The number of recent lung injury cases linked to vaping in the US


Numerous deaths and thousands of cases of lung injury have been linked to vaping. Reclassifying vaping products as medical devices might limit their appeal as lifestyle products and put them under greater regulatory control. They could then also be better targeted towards people who already smoke.

So far, only two products in the UK have got this approval. Both were authorised as nicotine replacement therapies and could have been made available on prescription in the UK, but their owner, British American Tobacco, eventually changed tack, deciding to focus on consumer products rather than medical ones.

There were moral and ethical concerns that the UK National Health Service would be subsidising products developed by the tobacco industry, says Ben Hawkins at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He worries that tobacco companies may rebrand as nicotine technology firms, which might enable them to get around an international treaty that limits industry representatives from lobbying governments.

Sarah Jackson at University College London has another concern. Were e-cigarettes to be classified as medical devices, tobacco firms may be the only ones able to afford to put them through the expensive licensing process. “If the only provider of e-cigarettes was the tobacco industry, that would be a precarious position to be in,” she says.

Medical e-cigs

▲ CybertruckElon Musk unveiled Tesla’s electric pickup truck last week. The stainless steel Cybertruck already has over 200,000 orders.

▲ ColdplayColdplay plans to curb its carbon footprint by not going on tour. The move should also significantly reduce noise pollution (only joking!).

▲ QuackingVive la France! Ducks on a small farm can carry on quacking, after a French court rejected a noise complaint by a neighbour.

▼ Word(s)A few weeks ago Collins Dictionary chose “climate strike” as its word of the year, even though it is two. Now, Oxford Dictionaries has made its choice: “climate emergency”. Can nobody count to 1 any more?

▼ Sumatran rhinoMalaysia’s last known Sumatran rhino has died. There are now fewer than 100 left in the wild.

to the image of e-cigarettes. In the US, Juul Labs has marketed them as a trendy lifestyle product.

But in the UK, young people are more likely to consider e-cigarettes as an aid to quitting smoking, says Bauld. That might have something to do with the EU imposing much stricter rules on their advertising. Television, radio and magazine ads are banned, for instance.

There is an argument that classifying vaping products as medical devices could shift their image in the US, too – although this may bring other problems (see “Medical e-cigs”, left).

In the meantime, e-cigarettes may be a useful tool for people who are trying to stop smoking. An influential study published earlier this year concluded that the use of e-cigarettes seems to work better than other forms of nicotine replacement therapy when it comes to quitting. And, in the UK at least, it appears to be cheaper than these other techniques, too, says Sarah Jackson at University College London, who conducted a cost-comparison survey.

Epidemiologists think that smoking rates are falling faster in the UK than in Australia at least in part thanks to the popularity of e-cigarettes in the UK. They are banned from being made or sold in Australia.

So, for smokers, switching to e-cigarettes as a way to give up smoking seems like a sensible choice. But anyone else might want to consider the unknown health risks of vaping. “There’s a lot we don’t know,” says Tarran. ❚

cigarettes, they truly are 95 per cent safer, with the remaining 5 per cent of risk down to low levels of toxic substances in e-cigarette vapour, which may have long-term effects for health.

In the US, however, the CDC is warning that nicotine can harm the developing adolescent brain. And a US survey published last year found that young people who vape are twice as likely to become smokers. This trend hasn’t been found in the UK, however.

At the same time, there is evidence that e-cigarette vapour may be more harmful than it appears – for adults as well as young people. Robert Tarran at the University of North Carolina criticises the “95 per cent safer” figure because it was based on a comparison of the number of chemicals in e-cigarette vapour and tobacco smoke. “The number of chemicals is irrelevant,” he says. “No one knows what concentration these chemicals are reaching in the lungs.”

Tarran’s team has found markers of lung disease in samples taken from people who vape. He says these markers are the same as those found in the lungs of people with emphysema, a condition that causes shortness of breath and shortens life expectancy. “If you vape over a lifetime, you probably have a high chance of getting it,” says Tarran. “From everything I’ve seen in the lung, it doesn’t seem to be safer than smoking.”

E-cigarettes haven’t taken off among young people in the UK as they have in the US. A survey published in June suggests that 84 per cent of young people in the UK have never tried e-cigarettes. Over half who have used them have done so just to “give it a try” – only 1 per cent said they did so because it “looks cool”.

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“ Every US state apart from Alaska has reported cases of lung injury linked to vaping”

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BREXIT, Brexit, Brexit. UK politics has been dominated by little else

since the country’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union. The upcoming general election on 12 December may finally break the impasse, but a far bigger issue overshadows this vote: climate change.

Environmental issues have risen up the UK’s political agenda recently, buoyed by concern about plastics in the ocean and publicity surrounding climate protests by Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg’s school strikes. A continuing spate of extreme weather events, most recently record-breaking rainfall and flooding in parts of central and northern England, has brought the practical implications of a changing climate to the fore of many people’s minds.

In a recent Ipsos Mori poll, more than 20 per cent of respondents named the environment and pollution as a concern unprompted. That is up from just 2 per cent in 2012, and is beaten only by Brexit, crime and the National Health Service.

The next UK government will have a huge opportunity to display international leadership on the climate, as the COP26 UN climate summit is due to be held in Glasgow in November 2020. There, nations will take stock of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and commit to ratcheting up efforts to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.JO

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Jacob Aron is New Scientist’s deputy news editor @jjaron

Views

The columnist

Chanda Prescod-

Weinstein on the

universe’s origin p24

Letters

Neglected concerns

about the nutrient

choline p26

Aperture

See the exquisite

insides of a

glorious gem p28

Culture

Two books describe

when innovations

can kill p30

Culture columnist

Simon Ings on a

gripping film about

CRISPR p32

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that emissions will need to fall 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero in 2050, to limit global warming to a “safe” level of 1.5°C. Inaccurately reported as “we only have 12 years to save the planet”, the 2030 goal is still vitally important. The 2050 target

is a legal requirement in the UK.Assuming no more early

elections – a slightly risky assumption, perhaps, given the febrile state of UK politics at the minute – the politicians taking office in a few weeks’ time will still be in charge in 2024. That is a crucial time frame if the UK is to meet the IPCC’s 2030 goal.

That we should aim to hit that goal is a matter of global duty and naked self-interest, as it is for all developed economies. The UK was one of the first nations to industrialise and is responsible for a disproportionate amount of the emissions that have got us into this mess. Rich nations like the UK can provoke a trickle-down effect by lowering the cost of green tech, making it accessible to the rest of the world. We have already seen this with solar and wind farms.

This isn’t about telling anybody who to vote for: the complex, multi-party nature of this election and the perverse effects of the voting system makes any general advice pointless. But it is worth taking the time to inform ourselves what each of the parties says about climate change before putting a cross on the ballot paper. New Scientist aims to play its part: with my colleagues in our news department, I am currently working on a detailed analysis of the various UK political parties’ climate policies, to appear in the next issue.

As the world warms and sea levels rise, who do you want to be in charge? Who is going to tackle the biggest problem of our age, and who is going to set us on the right path to 2030? Brexit may seem important now, but looking to the future there are no bigger questions to answer than these. ❚

Vote with climate in mindOne issue is dominating the UK general election – but for those who care about the future, it’s not the right one, says Jacob Aron


THERE may not have been a beginning to the thing we understand as

“the universe”. Before I explain what I mean, I should say: of course, this isn’t the story I expected to tell audiences when I was a child who wanted to be just like Stephen Hawking.

I was certain, in fact, that the job I was signing up for was the one where we figured out exactly what happened in the very beginning, to a level of detail that humanity has never before known. As a grown-up scientist, I have had the wonderful opportunity to investigate that era and to discover again and again that the universe is more bizarre than we previously imagined.

The old story from 1980 or so goes that in the beginning of space and time, space-time exploded out of nothing and then rapidly expanded. The expansion was so fast that it grew faster than the speed of light, because it turns out that the only thing that can violate the universal speed limit is space-time itself. This era, known as inflation, was first simultaneously hypothesised by Alan Guth, Alexei Starobinsky, Andrei Linde and a team comprised of Martin Einhorn and Katsuhiko Sato. They were all motivated by a desire to try to explain phenomena that astronomers had observed.

Before we even try to imagine what inflation means, we have to grapple with the expansion of space-time and what space-time even is.

The idea that space and time aren’t completely separate entities is a relatively new one. Their merger is a theoretical necessity induced by Albert Einstein’s relativity, which tells us that when two of us are moving with respect to each other, your space and my

time can mix: time and space aren’t as independent as they feel on everyday, human scales.

The expansion of space-time itself can also be hard to fully grasp because it is so different from everyday life. Readers may have previously heard an analogy that space-time expansion is akin to galaxies racing away from each other like fast cars driving in opposite directions. The reality is more fantastical than that.

Imagine a not-yet inflated balloon covered in little dots. As you blow up the balloon (hopefully not with precious helium), the distance between

the dots grows. This is what the expansion of space-time is like. Galaxies aren’t racing apart but rather space-time is growing between them.

This expansion isn’t anything to worry about, because it is only happening on very large scales, not on the scale of our solar system, where gravity is playing its part to keep things together.

When our space-time was less than a second old, this expansion accelerated faster than the speed of light for a very brief moment. Imagine a percentage of a second with 40 zeros after the decimal. That is how long cosmic inflation occurred for. This expansion was exponential.

To get a sense of what this means, buy a loaf of bread and wait until it shows signs of mould. Once there is a little, it will become a lot very quickly. This is because the microorganisms ruining

your bread are reproducing at an exponential rate.

One of the challenges that inflation theory faces is that while it fits all of our cosmological data almost perfectly, we haven’t been able to work out the details. We still don’t have an exact equation to describe the energy that governs inflation.

What we have learned, however, is that many reasonable candidates for this energy equation implicate space-time in a fantastic trick: it may be eternal. New bubbles of space-time may pop up and grow continuously, with no beginning and no end.

Not everyone loves this idea. In fact, one of the early architects of inflation, Paul Steinhardt, has since become one of the fiercest critics of inflation – and especially eternal inflation – and a source of many editorials challenging its status in mainstream cosmology. But so far, no one has offered an alternative idea for why the contents of space-time look the way they do that matches the data as gracefully as inflation does.

In the meantime, the search for the right energy equation continues and there are those of us who are thinking beyond inflation to the energy that is left over after the process is done.

In a series of papers, I and my colleagues have begun to unravel how the energy from inflation can plant the seeds of all the matter we see in space-time: galaxies, planets and us. I struggle with the idea that inflation could be eternal and the whole of space-time may not have had a beginning.

That aspect of inflation theory may not be testable, which makes many people ask whether it is still science. I think it is, and I try to remember that the universe wasn’t designed to be easy for me to understand. ❚

This column appears monthly. Up next week: Graham Lawton

“ To understand cosmic inflation’s exponential expansion, watch how mould spreads on a loaf of bread”

The beginning that has no end Investigations of the universe’s

origins make us repeatedly rediscover that the cosmos is stranger

than we ever imagined, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Field notes from space-time

What I’m readingI am really enjoying

Hazel Carby’s

Imperial Intimacies: A tale of two islands.

What I’m watchingI’ve been marathon

watching the reboot of

Charmed, and it is great!

What I’m working onWhat if dark matter

and dark energy were

connected?

Chanda’s week

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and a core faculty member in women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars and particles beyond the standard model

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Editor’s pick

We can take lessons from these rodent drivers2 November, p 12

From Roger Morgan, Presteigne, Powys, UKRats have been taught the complex skill of driving a tiny car to collect a food reward at their destination, Alice Klein tells us. Monitoring the rats’ levels of hormones associated with stress showed that they were relaxed: online you report that they were less stressed than rats that were driven around in remote-controlled cars. It seems to me that the rats may enjoy learning and mastering new skills such as driving – just as humans do.

This work was done to enable research on how brain conditions can affect cognitive function, for extrapolation to humans. But this brilliant piece of research may be as important in giving us pause for thought over autonomous vehicles. Will human drivers become stressed by going driverless?

The aether was a very productive idea on light2 November, p 32

From Dave Tarpley,

Concord, California, US

Brendan Foster describes renewed interest in the luminiferous aether. For all its shortcomings, the aether was one of the most productive scientific ideas of all time. Many conceived of it as being electromagnetic as well: it allowed James Clerk Maxwell to deduce that light was an electromagnetic phenomenon.

The hope that the forces of nature could be understood in strictly mechanical terms died before the aether did. Although the electron was seen as a knot or whirl in the aether, it was recognised as having fundamental electrodynamic properties. One of the discoverers of the electron, J. J. Thomson, made great use of the idea of an aether.

In the information age, many physicists treat the universe as a

computer or a hologram. Those models will almost certainly lead to insights and even breakthroughs. But they will be no more literally true than the idea of the aether as a fundamental fluid filling space.

Hypnosis may be suffering from mentalist reputation9 November, p 34

From Stefan Badham,

Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK

Reading Helen Thomson’s interesting and amusing article on hypnosis, I wondered if hypnotists aren’t taken seriously because, historically, they claimed to be using only their minds to do it. As Thomson reports, anaesthetist Aurore Marcou uses local anaesthetics and mild sedation in modern, medical-based hypnosis, making the hypnotist one part of the process rather than the whole process itself.

Thanks for bolstering my suspicion about measles9 November, p 15

From David Muir, Edinburgh, UK

Debora MacKenzie reports that measles massively damages the

immune system. In 1960, before vaccination was available, I had two weeks off school with measles. On the first day back, I came home covered in chickenpox. For decades I have suspected that there was some relationship.

Thanks to New Scientist, I now know that this was probably the case. Given the information in the article, I count myself lucky to have got off so lightly.

Neglected concerns about the nutrient choline26 October, p 20

From Marloes Schaap,

Utrecht, The Netherlands

With Clare Wilson’s article on the neglected nutrient choline, you present a diagram showing beef liver as an important source of it. As Wilson reports, some research suggests that women should have more choline when they are pregnant.

But pregnant women are advised to avoid liver of any kind, since too much vitamin A from animal sources poses a serious risk for their unborn child.

The second-best source of choline that you show, hard-boiled

eggs, is easily matched by soy and wheat germ flour, which you don’t show.

There is also a possibility that the relationship between the intake of meat, milk and eggs and advanced prostate cancer may be partly attributable to the choline levels of these foods. In the public interest, it is worth mentioning that health concerns about dietary choline are being investigated.

Will nobody think of the poor Martian children?26 October, p 30

From Anthony Richardson,

Ironbridge, Shropshire, UK

Reviewing the Moving to Mars exhibition, Simon Ings offers some welcome balance to dreams of long-term space exploration. I would add some ethical issues.

Adventurous adults may make informed, rational decisions about leaving Earth permanently. But if this isn’t to be temporary, there must be plans for them to have descendants, who will have made no such decision.

We have no long-term idea of how deeply the characteristics of Earth’s environment may be

Views Your letters


hardwired into us as necessary for our well-being. Earth-scented gloves and green wallpaper may be insufficient for their welfare.

Little figures on the ceiling explained by science9 November, p 42

From Hillary Shaw,

Newport, Shropshire, UK

You mention the camera obscura as an example of unconventional imaging. I saw a camera obscura after moving into a house with high ceilings, tall windows and a short front garden. On a bright first morning, I saw tiny figures moving on the ceiling. The folds at the top of the curtains were acting as pinholes, projecting pedestrians on the street onto the ceiling.

Tackling the puzzle of low-carbon domestic energy9 November, p 18

From Jeremy Hawkes, Liverpool, UK

As Adam Vaughan says, gas boilers are a UK election battleground, with three of the main parties wanting to phase them out, each at a different rate. But methane is a great biofuel that is relatively easy to make, store and transport. Sensibly, three times more UK domestic energy is supplied by gas than by electricity. So if we remove gas, we will need four times the electricity generation capacity. This is a large price to pay for a possible 12 per cent carbon saving. The next government should look at the low-carbon possibilities for domestic heating.

We need investment in insulation and heat recycling to avoid heat going down the drain, and into making gas from waste.

From Karen Hinchley, Newark-on-

Trent, Nottinghamshire, UK

I am pleased by the progress in planning new homes that

Vaughan outlines. But the suggestion that a space can be “airtight, but still well-ventilated” is confusing.

Should air trapped in an airtight home be recirculated? How would moisture escape? Dehumidifiers need electricity and moisture-absorptive materials have to be recharged (more electricity consumption) or replaced (recycled or landfilled).

The editor writes:

We mean only that houses should be built in a way that avoids unintentional draughts, not that no air can get in and out.

Recycling heat to save energy in our homeLetters, 26 October

From Patrick Davey,

Dublin, Ireland

Matthew Allan proposes that we retrofit homes with integrated heat-handling equipment. This is a great idea.

We already have a sealed house. Its controlled ventilation incorporates a heat exchanger working at 92 per cent efficiency. The only heat we waste is water from washing machines and showers. These use only 30 per cent of the normal water flow. Very few visitors notice the difference, and, of course, you don’t heat the 70 per cent you don’t use.

One spoonful of tea avoids plenty of plastic problems5 October, p 16

From Paul Whiteley,

Bittaford, Devon, UK

You report the pollution and possible health risks of plastic particles from teabags. There is a simple way to avoid these: stop using teabags. For the price of a box of teabags that makes 25 cups, I buy loose tea to make 250 cups. ❚

To find more from the archives, visit

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To find more from the archives, visit

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35 years ago, New Scientistwas covering the aftermath of the world’s worst industrial disaster

IT WAS a brutal statement of a brutal tragedy. “Poison gas leaking from a pesticide plant killed more than 1000 people in central India this week, and injured more than 20 000,” our correspondent Debora MacKenzie wrote in our issue of 6 December 1984. “It was the sort of mass disaster which

may become increasingly frequent as cities in the Third World grow and surround factories.”

Thankfully, that hasn’t come to pass, at least not on the scale of the leak from the plant run by a local subsidiary of the US-based chemical corporation Union Carbide in Bhopal, capital city of Madhya Pradesh. “Many of the town’s 700 000 inhabitants fled to a hill to escape the gas,” MacKenzie reported, “which eventually covered an area of 40 square kilometres.” The final death toll is unclear. In a deposition to India’s supreme court in 2010, the Indian government quoted a figure of 5295, with more than 500,000 non-fatal injuries. Bhopal remains the worst industrial disaster the world has ever seen.

The culprit was methyl isocyanate gas, an intermediate in the production of pesticides. At Bhopal, it was stored as a liquid under pressure in tanks fitted with pressure valves, spill tanks and air scrubbers. On the night of 2 December, nearly a tonne of water being used to clean pipes poured into a tank holding 40 tonnes of the chemical, resulting in a runaway reaction.

Evidence emerged within weeks that Union Carbide had known that safety systems were inadequate at the plant, incapable of preventing a leak resulting from a chemical reaction of this magnitude.

The company still maintains that sabotage was the proximate cause for the leak, however. Although court cases related to the disaster proliferated in both India and the US, the only people convicted to date have been a few Indian managers. “The case,” our correspondent Fred Pearce wrote in 2013, reflecting on the legal fallout, “remains a textbook example of the persistent failure of legal systems to hold multinational corporations to account for their failures.” Simon Ings


Views Aperture


Glorious gem

Photographer Chris Perani

THIS exquisite image captures the astonishing internal structure of crazy lace agate, also known as Mexican agate. This section of the mineral is some 65 million years old. Agate is related to quartz and infused with aluminium and iron, which help create the chaotic explosion of colours and patterns.

Visualising the complexity of agate requires special techniques. Photographer Chris Perani uses a 200-millimetre camera lens, to which he attaches a microscope objective lens in order to achieve the necessary magnification.

Each final image is made up of around 25,000 photos merged together. To do this, Perani first takes 350 photos of a section using a focus rail that moves the lens no more than 10 microns per shot (the average width of a human hair is around 75 microns). He uses software to merge them, repeating this process 70 times.

Perani finds the crazy lace agate at specialist fairs and inspects each specimen for scratches, which he says would make the photo look terrible. This kind of photography captures the intricacies of minerals like never before, he says. ❚

Gege Li


Books

Ingenious: The unintended consequences of human innovationPeter Gluckman and Mark Hanson

Harvard University Press

Power to the People: How open technological innovation is arming tomorrow’s terroristsAudrey Kurth Cronin

Oxford University Press

THE termite mounds of Australia’s Northern Territory are marvels. Often 3 metres tall, they are flat on two sides like tombstones, and oriented in the same direction. But unlike grave markers, they sustain life, moderating the harsh climate by absorbing sunlight on chilly mornings and evenings, while minimising solar exposure at midday.

These mounds are a classic example of something common to many species: niche construction, or optimising living conditions by altering the environment. Yet humans stand apart at this. Through our unique capacity to persistently transform our environment, we have extended our niche globally.

In Ingenious, Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson attribute this to cultural evolution, the process by which shared ideas advance over time. For them: “Our ability to develop technologies, learn and communicate about them, and then redevelop them… is, effectively, human nature.”

The book explores human ingenuity, and while the authors sometimes labour the obvious (yes, we know we are a technological species), they make a strong case for cultural evolution. More interestingly,

When innovation can killCultural evolution may define humans, but its products include climate change and inventions that have been weaponised, says Jonathon Keats

they consider what happens when the change it produces accelerates beyond our ability to assimilate it, and when beneficial technologies are used for negative ends.

Runaway cultural evolution may even pose serious or

existential threats. Gluckman and Hanson’s most obvious example is obesity, caused by a ruinous mismatch between biology and the niche we have created. We are genetically predisposed to store calories and use them efficiently because food was scarce and hard to gather during our evolutionary history. Yet pre-packaged, high-energy foods are now

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industrial growth, but, as Audrey Kurth Cronin documents in Power

to the People, the invention also powered modern terrorism.

Dynamite was the perfect weapon: it was easy to conceal and detonate, and demand from industry ensured it was readily available. In 1881, a small group of anti-monarchists assassinated Alexander II of Russia using dynamite, turning it into a global symbol of violent uprising.

Superbly researched and richly detailed, Power to the People is a fascinating history of the technology appropriated for violence. Cronin describes how AK-47 rifles became all-purpose weapons after the second world war, and why aeroplane hijackings became so popular from the 1970s.

For Cronin, future attacks will be fuelled by accelerating cultural evolution relating to such things as AI. Dynamite, she says, offers clues to the kinds of innovations that will be adopted. It was invented in an era of open innovation, when amateurs were encouraged to experiment. Some used it to fish; others added clocks to make primitive time bombs. Its accessibility and ease of use tell Cronin that attackers may target the likes of consumer-grade drones or infrastructural changes such as the internet of things.

So can humans learn to predict the mortal dangers posed by cultural evolution, and avert catastrophic mismatches between biology and society? Clearly to avoid extinction, our next evolutionary move must be to become wiser about ingenuity. ❚

Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist and experimental philosopher

widespread just as we have become increasingly sedentary.

Other evolutionary mismatches include the impact of social media on our political structures, which are undermined by surveillance and hacking. Even more profound is the mismatch climate change brings, as fossil fuel-powered vehicles and cities wreck Earth. “Technology seduces us,” write Gluckman and Hanson. Unlike animals, we innovate way past survival needs – on a whim, for convenience or pleasure. And while cultural evolution helps us achieve almost anything, it is blind to consequences.

This problem is urgent, but not new. Consider Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite back in the 1860s. He created it as a safer, more reliable alternative to the standard nitroglycerine used in mining and heavy construction. He laid the groundwork for epic

Drones can be used to carry out attacks

“ The evolutionary mismatch of climate change means fossil fuel-powered vehicles are wrecking Earth”


Exhibition

Nam June PaikTate Modern, London

Until 9 February 2020

THE legacy of Nam June Paik is impressive. He is the man who predicted the internet, YouTube, remote education courses and many other icons of our information age. He died in 2006, living long enough to see some of his ideas start to become the drivers of today.

He was an artist who spent much time engineering, dismantling, reusing and swapping out components. He often replaced old tech with better tech, delivering what he could of his vision with the components available: cathode ray tube TVs, neon, copper, FORTRAN punch cards. A video synthesiser he designed with Tokyo artist-engineer Shuya Abe in 1969 created the psychedelic video effects to music programme Top of the Pops in the UK and the MTV channel.

A fascinating retrospective at London’s Tate Modern celebrates all this – and his involvement with that loose confederacy of artist-anarchists known as Fluxus. Paik, born in what is now Seoul in 1932 during the Japanese occupation of Korea, was educated in Germany, where he met Fluxus composer John Cage and also the legendary Karl-Heinz Stockhausen. (Yoko Ono was a patron of Fluxus; David Bowie and Laurie Anderson were hangers-on.)

Beneath Paik’s celebrated, and celebrity-stuffed, concerts, openings and “happenings”, there is what amounts, in the absence of Paik’s controlling intelligence, to a pile of junk. More than 660 televisions, some broken. A black box the size

of a double refrigerator, containing the hardware to drive one of Paik’s massive “matrices”, Megatron/Matrix, an eight-channel, 215-screen video wall. It is in pieces now, a nightmare to catalogue, never mind reconstruct, stored in innumerable tea chests at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The trick for Saisha Grayson and Lynn Putney at the Smithsonian was to distinguish the raw material of Paik’s work from the work itself. Then curators like Sook-Kyung Lee

at Tate Modern had to interpret it for a new generation, using new tech. This is because what Paik used to make his art is likely to end up in the bin. Consumer electronics aren’t like painters’ pigments, which can be analysed and copied, or sculptors’ marble, which may be repairable.

“Through Paik’s estate, we are getting advice and guidance about what the artist really intended,” says Lee, “then we are simulating

those things with new technology.” Paik’s video walls (the works for

which he is best remembered) are monstrously heavy and absurdly delicate. But the Tate has managed to recreate his Sistine Chapel for this show. Video projectors fill a room with a blizzard of cultural and pop-cultural imagery, a visual melting pot reflective of Paik’s vision of a tech utopia, in which “telecommunication will become our springboard for new and surprising human endeavors”. The projectors are new, but the feel of this recreated piece isn’t so very different to that of the original.

To stand here, bombarded by images of Bowie, President Nixon, Mongolian throat singers and other flitting, flickering icons of Paik’s madcap vision, is to recall our (mostly broken) dreams for the information age: “Video-telephones, fax machines, interactive two-way television… and many other variations of this kind of technology are going to turn the television set into an ‘expanded-media’ phone system with thousands of novel uses,” Paik enthused in 1974, “not only to serve our daily needs, but to enrich the quality of life itself.” ❚

Internet Dream, one of Paik’s signature video walls ©

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Videotopian dreamingRecreating the visionary video installations of Nam June Paik reveals our hopes for the information age, says Simon Ings

“ Paik’s utopia saw telecommunications become a springboard for new and surprising human endeavours”

Don’t miss

Visit

Parasites: Battle for survival at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh explores the country’s role in the fight to eliminate five deadly diseases that together affect 1 in 18 people. From 6 December.

Read

Nano Comes to Life (Princeton) draws on author Sonia Contera’s adventures in molecular-scale engineering to herald the coming of age of nanotechnology, and its promise to re-engineer tissue and transform lives.

Last chance

Antony Gormley has been twisting our perceptions of space and the body for half a century. A major show of his art has been running at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. Catch it before it ends on 3 December.

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Views Culture

MATURE and intelligent, Human

Nature shows us how gene editing works, explores its implications and – in a field awash with alarmist rhetoric and cheap dystopianism – explains which concerns are worth losing sleep over.

This gripping documentary covers a lot of ground, but also works as a primer on CRISPR, the spectacular technology that enables us to cut and paste genetic information with something like the ease with which we manipulate text on a computer. Human

Nature introduces us to key start-ups and projects that promise to predict, correct and maybe enhance the genetic destinies of individuals. It explores the fears this inspires, and asks whether they are reasonable. Its conclusions are cautious, well-argued and largely optimistic.

Writers Regina Sobel and Adam Bolt (who also directs) manage to tell this story through interviews. Key players in the field, put at their ease during hours of film-making, speak cogently to camera. There is no narration.

Ned Piyadarakorn’s graphics are

ravishing and yet absurdly simple to grasp. They need to be, because this is an account hardly less complex than those in the best popular science books. As the film progressed, I began to suspect that the film-makers assume we aren’t idiots. This is so rare an experience that it took a while to sink in.

There are certain problems the film can’t get round, though. There are too many people in white coats

moving specks from one Petri dish to another. It couldn’t be otherwise, given the technology involves coats, specks, Petri dishes and little else by way of props the general viewer can understand. That this is a source of cool amusement rather than irritation is largely due to the charisma of the film’s cast of researchers, ethicists, entrepreneurs, diagnosticians, their clients

The other cutting room How much do you really know about the revolutionary gene-editing technology called CRISPR? A sharp independent film will have you up to speed in no time at all, says Simon Ings

“ A mutation in a gene called ADRB1 allows us to get by on 4 hours’ sleep. I would leap at such a therapy”

Film

Human NatureDirected by Adam Bolt

UK cinemas, 6 December

Simon also recommends...

Films

Gattaca Directed by Andrew Niccol

The most intelligent sci-fi

movie ever made about

genetic engineering – and a

cracking whodunnit to boot.

The FlyDirected by

David Cronenberg

A daft tale of scientific

hubris or one of the most

heart-rending love stories

ever committed to celluloid?

You decide.

and people with conditions that could be helped by the technique, such as schoolboy David Sanchez, who has sickle-cell anaemia. We learn that researchers are running clinical trials using CRISPR to test a therapy for his condition.

Foundational researchers like Jennifer Doudna and Jill Banfield, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Fyodor Urnov provide star quality. Provocateurs like Stephen Hsu, a cheerful promoter of designer babies, and the longevity guru George Church are given room to explain why they aren’t nearly as wrong as some people assume.

Then the bioethicist Alta Charo makes the obvious but frequently ignored point that the Brave New

World nightmare CRISPR is said to usher in is a very old and well-worn future indeed. Sterilisations, genocide and mass enslavement have been around a lot longer than CRISPR, she says, and if the new tech is politically abused, we will only have our ourselves to blame.

There is, of course, the possibility that CRISPR will let loose some irresistibly bad ideas. Consider the mutation in a gene called ADRB1, which allows us to get by on just 4 hours’ sleep a night. I would leap at the chance of a therapy that freed up my nights – but I wonder what would happen if everyone else followed suit. Would we all live richer, more fulfilled lives? Or would I need a letter from my doctor when I applied for a 16-hour factory shift?

The point, as Human Nature makes all too clear, is that the questions we should be asking about gene editing are only superficially about the technology. At heart, they are questions about ourselves and our values. ❚

David Sanchez eyes a CRISPR future for his sickle-cell anaemia

The film column

Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer and a culture editor at New Scientist. Follow him on Instagram @simon_ings

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instance. Even when collaboration isn’t direct, FDA decisions have ripple effects: the US process is viewed as the “gold standard” worldwide and drugs granted accelerated approval by the FDA or EMA can then be fast-tracked by authorities elsewhere.

Speed wasn’t always a priority. In the late 1970s, the FDA was downright sluggish: it took an average of 35 months for a drug to get through the review process. Today, it takes less than a year. Starting in the early 1990s, several measures were introduced to speed up approval, largely in response to public demand from people who faced life-threatening or life-limiting conditions. New pathways were established to give quicker access to medicines that addressed a serious unmet medical need or represented “breakthroughs” in our understanding of how to treat a disease.

Yet despite those virtuous initial goals, these days, many drugs being hurried through are neither of those things. In 2008, the FDA granted accelerated approval for bimatoprost,

Bad medicine?Rushing drugs to market was supposed to help people in need, but it may be doing more harm

than good. Jessica Hamzelou investigates

WEEKS before their due date, some women find themselves stunned, peering through glass at their baby,

a tiny body covered in sensors and tubes, striving to stay in the world.

Premature birth can be terrifying. Although survival rates for babies born before 37 weeks of pregnancy have steadily improved, they are still significantly worse than those of babies born later, and the likelihood of longer-term health complications is higher.

So any medication that could reduce that risk would be gratefully received – and has been. In 2011, a drug called Makena was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the basis of a small trial showing that it helped prevent preterm birth. Later, larger studies found that it didn’t. One hospital even reported higher rates of gestational diabetes among women given the drug. Then last month, a large trial found that Makena was no better than placebo; an FDA committee recommended withdrawing it

from the market. The FDA has yet to decide.It isn’t just Makena. At drug approvals

agencies around the world, more and more medications are being rushed to market after limited testing. Drugs are approved based on preliminary findings, or authorised for a particular use, then widely prescribed for something else. And hanging over the process is a worrying question: are these agencies working to protect the public or to further the interests of drug companies?

We would all like to think that any treatment our doctors offer is the best option available for us, based on credible evidence. But not only do some approved drugs turn out not to work, they may be worse for us than doing nothing.

Decisions made by the FDA or European Medicines Agency (EMA), which agree on approvals more than 91 per cent of the time, have international ramifications. The FDA recently announced an initiative with Canada and Australia for faster, simultaneous approvals of certain cancer medications, for

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a treatment that encourages eyelash growth.“Increasingly, these pathways have become

the norm rather than the exception,” says Caleb Alexander at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Today, more than half of all the drugs that the FDA authorises are granted an expedited approval of some kind.

The FDA told New Scientist that drugs authorised in this way “are held to the same approval standards as other FDA drug approvals”, but some researchers dispute this. “Fewer trials are being relied upon to approve a drug,” says Jonathan Darrow at Harvard Medical School. “Those trials are less likely to be randomised than they were 20 years ago, less likely to be blinded, less likely to be [placebo] controlled and likely to be smaller.” Barbara Mintzes at the University of Sydney, agrees. “With the expedited approvals, there is a trend toward a lower bar of evidence.”

Faster drug approval has become more common in Europe, too. Since 2006, the EMA has been able to grant a “conditional

marketing authorisation” to new drugs that treat serious or rare disorders or respond to a public health emergency, but may not meet the standard level of evidence that they work.

Those lower standards of evidence include settling for “surrogate markers”. Instead of finding out if a drug can prevent heart attacks, for example, a pharmaceutical company may only need to show that it lowers blood pressure. “These are things that are not necessarily going to tell us that people are going to live longer or have a better quality of life,” says Joel Lexchin at the University of Toronto in Canada.

No survival boostNew drugs that are similar to existing ones and treat the same conditions are often approved based on surrogate markers, says Adam Cifu at the University of Chicago Medicine. That includes some of our most widely used drugs, statins, which are taken to lower cholesterol. “If you compare atorvastatin, pravastatin,

simvastatin – those drugs are all different,” says Cifu. “Because we don’t have comparative trials of them, or even individual placebo-controlled trials which we can compare, often it’s not entirely clear which is the best of the drugs.”

This is also the case with many new cancer drugs, which make up the majority of medicines approved through an expedited pathway. Cancer therapies often have debilitating side effects, so knowing whether they will extend your life or not could be critical in deciding whether to take them at all.

Between 2009 and 2013, via both expedited and routine pathways, the EMA approved 48 cancer drugs for 68 different uses. At the time of approval, the drugs had been shown to improve survival for only a third of those uses; in just 10 per cent they seemed to benefit quality of life. Even after these drugs had been on the market for between three and eight years, they still hadn’t been shown to improve survival or quality of life for half of the approved uses.

Many cancer drugs authorised by the FDA


SOURCE: GAO, FDA

The drug is tested for efficacy in a few dozen to a few hundred people who have the condition it is designed to treat. Sometimes these trials are placebo controlled or compare the new drug against existing treatments

Drugs are tested for efficacy and safety on hundreds to thousands of people. For some drugs sent to market after phase 2, these larger trials may be completed after approval

Many drugs that follow expedited pathways can go to market at this point, before large-scale trials have been carried out. Such drugs are more likely to be found to cause harmful side effects or be withdrawn from the market later

The drug is initially tested in 20 to 80 healthy volunteers for safety and to identify common side effects

= 10 peoplePhase 1

Phase 2

Expedited approval

Approval

Phase 3

Lowering the barGetting drugs to market faster often means relying on lower standards of evidence

have similarly unclear benefits. Between 1992 and 2017, says Mintzes, “only 19 of 93 new cancer drugs showed a survival advantage”.

Consider Afinitor, a drug used in the treatment of metastatic breast cancer. It was approved by the FDA in 2012 based on a surrogate marker – that it limited tumour growth – but has since been shown not to extend survival. “It’s very costly, it has real side effects and it doesn’t let you live longer,” says Vinay Prasad, an oncologist at Oregon Health and Science University. “And yet it remains on the market in both the US and European Union.”

When drugs are approved on the basis of slim evidence, it is sometimes on the understanding that testing will be carried out after they get the green light – as was the case with Makena. Yet these trials can take years to complete and are often poor quality. In some cases, they just don’t happen. Nearly half of post-marketing studies requested by the FDA haven’t been completed five years later.

It is also more likely that drugs approved this way will later be found to have serious side effects, says Mary Olson at Tulane University in

New Orleans. “The drugs that receive the fastest reviews are also the ones that tend to have the most serious risks, and even serious risk resulting in death,” she says. “There is a trade-off between speed and safety, and the FDA has been struggling to find the right balance.”

Having to attach serious warnings and even ultimately withdraw certain medicines are clear indications that some of these drugs “should not have been approved in the first place”, says Christopher Robertson at the University of Arizona.

Dangerous alternatives?Once medicines make their way to market, it can be hard to wrest them back. When the latest data on Makena was released, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which has more than 58,000 members, said it would still recommend prescribing the drug.

In part, the rationale may be that having something to offer is better than nothing. On the 16-person FDA advisory committee that recommended withdrawing Makena, seven members voted against this move. Jonathan Davis, a paediatrician at Tufts Medical Center in Massachusetts, was among them. He wants Makena to stay on the market while more trials are conducted because he worries that doctors will seek out potentially dangerous alternatives if it is no longer available.

The reality is that sometimes the drugs that doctors prescribe may simply be best guesses. Once approved for one purpose, drugs can be prescribed “off label” for other uses. Officially, Makena is intended for pregnant women who have already experienced a spontaneous premature birth. “But doctors prescribe it for all sorts of other risk factors,” says Amy Romano, a midwife and maternity care researcher based in Milford, Connecticut. “Even if the trials haven’t been done to show it does anything, they’ll still prescribe it because they want to do something rather than nothing.”

Sometimes off-label prescribing can be useful, says Cifu, as in the case where only one birth control pill has specifically been approved to treat adolescent acne, but there are several with similar chemical structures and doctors know from clinical use that they have similar effects. “To prescribe one of those for acne makes perfect sense,” he says.

But 80 per cent of off-label uses for drugs aren’t supported by evidence because companies aren’t required to run clinical trials for such unofficial uses. “We can proceed for

“ The drugs that receive the fastest reviews are the ones that tend to have the most serious risks”


letters sent by the FDA to pharmaceutical companies appears to have dropped. Yet it remains the case that off-label prescriptions can be dangerous. They are more likely to cause adverse or allergic reactions, for instance.

For many, when these issues are taken together they become a major source of worry: is the FDA prioritising the interests of drug companies over those of the public?

It is certainly the case that an increasing amount of the agency’s funding comes from industry. Under the Prescription Drug User Fee Act introduced in 1992, pharmaceutical companies agreed to pay fees to help fund additional FDA salaries and, in return, the agency agreed to speed up approval times. Back then, the FDA received around $36 million a year from drug companies, says Darrow.

The fees have been repeatedly renewed and expanded since. “Now it’s around $1.5 billion per year coming from user fees,” he says. At the EMA, 89 per cent of the €330 million annual budget comes from similar fees. For the FDA, it’s 45 per cent. “There is some concern about the quality of evidence and the willingness of the FDA to consider the industry as its primary client, rather than the public,” says Darrow.

New Scientist contacted both agencies to ask whether that financial dependency conflicts with their missions to serve the public. The EMA didn’t respond by the time this went to press. An FDA representative replied in a

guilty of misbranding and sentenced to a year of probation and 100 hours of community service. But Caronia appealed on the grounds that he was merely exercising his right to free speech. In 2012, a court of appeals overturned his conviction, deciding that, “as long as everything he was saying was true, he had a constitutional right to say it”, says Robertson. To the court, it didn’t matter that there wasn’t robust evidence to support his claims.

Robertson thinks the FDA may now be unwilling to pursue similar cases because, if one made it to the US Supreme Court and the agency lost, it would lose the ability to effectively regulate drugs and medical devices. Since the Caronia case, the number of warning

years and years using a drug off-label without ever really knowing if it’s safe and effective for those uses,” says Robertson.

Off-label prescribing can also benefit pharmaceutical firms that develop what are known as “orphan drugs”. These are medications intended to treat rare diseases, defined in the US as those that affect fewer than 200,000 people. There and in places such as Europe and Australia, orphan drugs are granted fast-tracked approval and either reduced fees or tax breaks. In 2018, 34 of the 59 new drugs authorised by the FDA were orphans. After approval, drug developers are usually granted exclusive rights to market new medicines for several years. With orphan drugs, this period may be extended, allowing firms to set higher prices for longer. Makena was granted orphan drug status. It was first marketed at $1500 per shot, or $30,000 over an entire pregnancy.

Once these drugs are on the market, they can be prescribed for much more common disorders. “There are products that have made tens of billions of dollars that are anything but orphans,” says Alexander.

A lidocaine patch marketed as Lidoderm, for example, was approved as an orphan drug by the FDA in 1999 to treat nerve pain caused by shingles – which affected about 191,000 Americans at the time. Since then, it has become widely prescribed for other types of pain. By 2005, 82 per cent of Lidoderm prescriptions were for uses not approved by the FDA. “Once you let a product on the market, it’s very difficult to control how it’s going to be used,” says Lexchin. “The drugs get around – people use them for other conditions where they’re not found to be beneficial.”

“We’re in this odd situation where the off-label use is largely unregulated, but the reimbursements for it can be extremely profitable for the companies,” says Robertson.

It is illegal for drug companies to deliberately market drugs for disorders that they haven’t been officially approved for. But whether the FDA can intervene if salespeople do this is now “a little bit hazy” thanks to a 2012 court case, says Robertson.

The story starts with Alfred Caronia, a sales rep for the company that made Xyrem, a drug officially approved to treat narcolepsy. In 2005, Caronia was recorded telling a doctor that the drug could also benefit people with insomnia and fibromyalgia, that it was being investigated in Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis and that it was safe to use in children.

The US government argued that Caronia was “marketing a dangerous drug for use not approved by the FDA”. In 2009, he was found >

“ We can proceed for years using a drug off-label without ever knowing if it’s safe and effective”

Most drugs given fast-tracked approval are to treat cancer

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written statement that user fees are “to hire additional staff and upgrade its information technology systems”, and that the user fee act “committed the Agency to speed the application review process for new drugs without compromising its high standards for new drug safety, efficacy, and quality”.

Upfront payments aren’t the only way the industry can influence the FDA. Drug companies may offer payment for work on advisory boards or cover accommodation or travel expenses for members of an FDA panel after a drug has been approved, avoiding the need to report a conflict of interest beforehand.

Once approved, the way drugs are promoted or prescribed might also be influenced by drug company funds – even at a surprisingly small scale. A 2018 study found that physicians who receive financial benefits from companies that make opioid drugs are more likely to prescribe them, even when the compensation is as small as a $13 meal.

With the enactment of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act in 2010, it became a legal requirement in the US for drug and device manufacturers to report any financial ties with doctors greater than $10. According to publicly available data, two of the doctors who voted to keep Makena on the market received financial compensation from the manufacturer at some point. The amount one reportedly received was just $17. That may seem like peanuts, but that money represents an opportunity for the sales rep to give a pitch directly to the doctor –“an intimate education session” as Romano puts it. “They wouldn’t do them if they weren’t so effective,” she says.

As intended, these kinds of disclosures are

enabling the public to subject financial ties to much closer scrutiny. Last September, an investigation by The New York Times and ProPublica revealed that José Baselga, then chief medical officer at the highly regarded Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, “put a positive spin on the results of two Roche-sponsored clinical trials that many others considered disappointments”, without disclosing that he had received more than $3 million from Roche in the preceding three years. When the story broke, Baselga issued an apology and resigned, but within months was given a senior role at AstraZeneca. “It really isn’t much of a punishment when you get a very lucrative job,” says Prasad.

Getting betterThe first step towards addressing these issues is to shine a light on them, and an increasingly vocal group of physicians, researchers, lawyers and policy-makers are attempting to do just that. Prasad is writing a book exposing flaws in the way cancer drugs get approved and prescribed, for instance. Darrow has published paper after paper examining the nuances of how drugs make it to market in the US and abroad. Aaron Kesselheim of Harvard Medical School, a co-author with Darrow on several papers, has testified before the US Congress multiple times to draw attention to problems in drug development, approvals and pricing.

But change is slow in coming. What’s more, most doctors and scientists contacted by New

Scientist don’t necessarily blame regulatory bodies for the lack of evidence in support of many new drugs. They point out that organisations like the FDA are balancing the need for scientific evidence with pressure from doctors and patient groups – even if some of these groups are funded by drug companies.

Frustratingly, too, direct efforts to change things have fallen short. In 2005, a UK parliamentary select committee recommended that the government’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency work with industry to design trials that test whether each drug is likely to improve a person’s life. It also suggested a limit on how much promotional material doctors receive about new drugs. But the government decided to maintain the status quo, stating that “there is no indication that the measures currently in place are not effective”.

There is a lot at stake. “We’re losing out on our ability to treat patients because medications are not being properly evaluated and not being properly prescribed,” says

“ We’re losing out on our ability to treat patients because medicines aren’t being properly evaluated”

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withdrawn from the market if they aren’t shown to improve survival within a set number of years. Most of those contacted by New Scientist had heard this suggestion brought up at conferences, but it has yet to develop into a coherent campaign.

While advocates for reform carry on with the long slog towards meaningful change, there are things we can all do to ensure we get the best possible medicines (see “Taking your health into your hands”, left). That starts with taking an active role in our healthcare and weighing up the risks and benefits of any new treatment. If a doctor recommends a drug, ask questions about it, says Robertson. Ask if that drug is approved for your specific condition, and for the evidence supporting its use.

Your doctor should also be able to tell you how new the treatment is, how much is known about its safety and if a new treatment outperforms older ones. It may seem like a lot to ask of doctors who are pressed for time or who may struggle to keep up with the constantly evolving research. But when your health is on the line, this may be your best chance of getting the medicine that is genuinely best for you.

“Gone are the days when a doctor should tell you, ‘You need drug A’, ” says Prasad. “Here are the days when a doctor should tell you, ‘Let’s sit down, let’s talk about drug A, let’s talk about drug B, let’s talk about what if we do nothing.’ ” ❚

Lexchin. Robertson echoes the point. “If we end up in a situation where we know less and less about the chemicals that we are putting in our bodies in situations where we are the most vulnerable and the most desperate for health solutions, that’s really worrisome,” he says.

That is why they and other outspoken critics won’t stop trying to raise the alarm. Meanwhile, their wish list for how to do things better grows longer by the day. Lexchin thinks we need to make organisations like the FDA and EMA financially independent. “Regulation should be funded out of public money, not out of user fees that the industry pays,” he says.

Huseyin Naci at the London School of Economics says that “drugs should be evaluated on the basis of their overall survival benefit wherever possible”. Mintzes agrees. The use of expedited approval pathways shaves an average 11 months off the time it takes for a drug to get to market. “That’s not that long,” she says. If data collection ahead of approval were to take longer, people who wanted to try the drug in the meantime can be granted access by taking part in clinical trials or through compassionate access schemes, says Mintzes.

When drugs are approved without clear evidence that they work, this should be made apparent on their packaging, says Darrow. “Patients overestimate the value of new medications, in some cases by a factor of 10 or more,” he says. “What’s really needed is a drug fact box, just like we have nutrition fact boxes, where we use terms that patients can understand.”

One idea that is gaining some traction is for approved drugs to automatically be

Jessica Hamzelou is a reporter at New Scientist. She specialises in covering health and medicine. Follow her @JessHamzelou

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Taking your health into your hands

Ask your doctor how new the drug isNewer drugs may have less safety information. We don’t find out about the side effects of some drugs until they have been on the market for years, and given to hundreds of thousands of people.

Ask if the medicine was approved for your condition or symptomsDrugs are often prescribed “off label” for uses unapproved by regulatory bodies, and for which there is little or no evidence to support their use. “If it is, you’re covered, if not, it’s worth asking, ‘Why are we using it?’ ” says Adam Cifu at the University of Chicago Medicine.

Ask how likely the medicine is to workThe “number needed to treat” reveals how many people would have to try a drug before one person benefits. A high number suggests the drug is less likely to help you.

Ask how the drug compares with other drugsNewer drugs may not have been compared with existing drugs. Ask where the evidence lies.

Look for studies on the drugYou can find out how a drug was approved by searching the website of the regulatory body, such as the FDA or EMA. Cochrane reviews provide easy-to-understand summaries on how the drug has fared in clinical trials.

Fact boxes on packaging could be a way to inform the public about the evidence for new medications

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Links to relevant research papers

are included in the online version

of this article at newscientist.com


“ It’s rational to be outraged by things that are outrageous”Naomi Oreskes has long defended science against the forces of misinformation. But it’s time scientists stopped being so arrogant, she tells Graham Lawton

Features Interview

A HISTORIAN of science at Harvard University, Naomi Oreskes is best known for exposing the tactics of

science deniers. Her first book Merchants of

Doubt, co-authored with Erik Conway, chronicled how industry-funded scientists spread misinformation and doubt about tobacco smoke, climate change, acid rain and more. She has since exposed how the “tobacco playbook” has become the standard corporate strategy to delay regulatory action and protect bottom lines. In her new book Why Trust

Science?, she sets out what scientists must do to stem the tide of denialism.

Graham Lawton: We live in troubled times. Have you ever known science denial and misinformation to be so rampant and widespread?Naomi Oreskes: I don’t like to overstate the situation because we’ve had denial for a long time. However, two things have happened to make things worse. One is the blatant, overt, unapologetic and completely shameless rejection of science by the president of the United States.

The other is that people’s lives are really at stake. Climate change is here, it’s unequivocal. People are being killed by floods and

particular scientific conclusions that people think threaten or conflict with their self-interest: that could be economic self-interest, it could be religious beliefs or it could be some kind of political position like commitment to free-market capitalism. Denial is quite specific, not the broad-brush thing that people sometimes make it out to be. And I think that distinction is important, because the solution is different.

It seems that we have gone from science denial to denial of facts and evidence in general. Would you agree with that? Yes. What we’re seeing is the “manufactured doubt” strategy being universalised as a political tactic, because once you can undermine people’s beliefs in facts and credible authority, then you can say almost anything.

Normally in politics, one of the tools that we use to fight back against things we don’t agree with is to point out when they’re factually incorrect. Now, because there’s so much cynicism and distrust, that’s become extremely difficult.

Social media cops a lot of the blame. Is that fair? I think it’s an oversimplification. We know from history that you don’t need social media to spread disinformation, you can do it with old-fashioned media. However, I do think social media has made it worse because it’s now possible to get disinformation out to incredibly large audiences rapidly at very low cost. A bunch of guys in a basement can now do a lot of damage and do it pretty quickly.

When corporate interests spread misinformation, it is clear why they are doing it. What motivates the guys in the basement? People do things for all kinds of reasons. It isn’t just about money. They are often driven by free-market ideology, the idea that if the government intervenes into the marketplace, we’re on the road to socialism. Lots of people buy into this myth – and it is a myth – that government is bad, that any regulation, even to protect your health and safety, is bad. There’s a well-funded and very smart campaign to persuade ordinary people that their self-interest is the same as that of the captains of industry.

Is ideology the only motivation?Attention-seeking behaviour is part of it too. There are a lot of people who would not be

Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University

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hurricanes. To deny it in the face of human suffering – there’s a moral dimension to that. I can’t think of a word other than “shocking”.

Why do so many people reject and mistrust science?I would push back on “so many people”. When we look at opinion polls in the US, UK and around the world, the vast majority of people do accept science. But we see resistance to


ideologically motivated misinformation. What you have to do is to expose their motivation, and then you can say, “Look, I get it. I care about freedom too. So let’s talk about solutions to this problem that we could achieve without taking away your freedom.” Then you have shifted the terms of debate.

You and others have been banging this drum for years. Do you feel like you have failed? I don’t think so. We have made people aware that this is not simply a problem of scientific literacy. However, we’re up against really, really big forces.

There is an incredibly powerful and well-funded network, organised and financed by some of the most powerful corporations that have ever existed.

Denial makes me angry, but I don’t know if that is an appropriate response. Does it make you angry?Oh, absolutely. I think we need to be angry. We need to be outraged. I always say it’s rational to be outraged about things that are outrageous. But then we have to channel that anger and outrage into productive political action.

One of your previous books, The Collapse of Western Civilization, painted a deeply pessimistic picture of the future. Do you still feel that way?Every single day you can find grounds for optimism. Greta Thunberg is amazing, the Gandhi of climate change. She is clearly motivating lots of people. So is Extinction Rebellion. There is rising anger, people are saying, “This is ridiculous.” I think that’s all good.

But every day, you can also find grounds for pessimism. Are we going to figure out how to dislodge these incredibly powerful forces that we’re up against? I think the jury’s still out on that.

You have yourself been targeted by denialists and misinformation campaigns.Of course, but I try not to dwell on it. I know it’s toxic. I get much more support than I get pushback. Most people are with us. Most people understand the threat. They know it is real and want to do something about it. I try to stay focused on that. ❚

“ Once you undermine beliefs in facts then you can say almost anything”

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Protests against tighter rules on vaccination exemptions in Sacramento in August

well known who are actually quite famous now because of their climate denialism.

I also think some of them are lonely. Once, this guy gave me a really hard time at a book reading. Then afterwards, he asked me out. And I think they’re scared. Climate change is scary. And when people are frightened, they lash out in all sorts of directions and they often shoot the messenger. When someone comes along and says, “Don’t listen to those geeks, they’re just a bunch of elite, arrogant eggheads” – which, honestly, some of them are – some people find that an attractive message.

You think scientists are partly to blame? I don’t want to use the word blame. But some way in which we’ve structured science and our understanding of what it is to be a scientist has contributed.

A lot of scientists are really full of themselves, right? There is a certain way in which scientists – not all, but some – can be dismissive of ordinary folks. Scientists have to stop being so arrogant.

The problem is in the way we’re trained and what we’re taught to value. There’s a cultural obsession with the idea that to be a great scientist, you have to be absolutely single-minded. You get no training whatsoever in communication. But there’s plenty of evidence

that to communicate is to connect with a fellow human being, and you cannot do that without some degree of emotional investment. So when scientists expunge their emotions, it doesn’t work.

What can scientists do to counter public doubt?When the doubt thing first happened, most scientists misdiagnosed it. They saw it as a problem of scientific literacy and thought that the response was to explain it more clearly. More facts, more evidence.

That doesn’t work because these people are not lacking information. This is not a knowledge deficit problem, it is a problem of

Graham Lawton is a staff writer at New Scientist. Follow him on Twitter @GrahamLawton


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Exotic new materials with remarkable properties are poised to transform computing, cosmology and medicine. Stephen Ornes reports

RISE of the SUPER MAGNETS


ONE April night in 1820, the Danish experimentalist Hans Christian Øersted made a remarkable

discovery. By bringing an electrical wire near a compass lying on his workbench, he found its needle could be made to shiver and dance. Whether a lucky accident or an inspired bit of experimentation, that moment cemented Øersted’s reputation. What he had discovered was that electricity and magnetism, long thought to be entirely distinct phenomena, were in fact inextricably linked.

Two hundred years later, this connection powers our world. Moving magnets give rise to electric fields, driving the motors in electric cars and generators in hydroelectric dams. Flowing electric currents in turn give rise to magnetic fields, such as those used in MRI scanners and particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. But this symbiosis has its limits. Until recently, it was thought to be impossible to produce a single material that could possess a permanent magnetic field and electric field at the same time.

Then, one day in 1998, a researcher at Yale University named Nicola Spaldin asked a deceptively simple question. Why?

“It was a question that really no one was asking, or had thought to ask before,” says Spaldin. That moment marked a turning point in her career and launched a revolution in materials science, a decades-long pursuit of elusive wonder stuff with both properties. Today, the first examples of these so-called multiferroics could change technology for good. There might be no end to their power: from making better solar cells and boosting

computational power to helping search for the universe’s missing matter (see “Heroic multiferroics”, right and following pages).

Spaldin, now at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, was ideally suited to hunt such substances. “My passion is really electrons,” she says. “I love thinking about them.” That boded well because understanding electrons is key to understanding why multiferroics are so valuable.

Virtually all the matter that we can see is made up of atoms. These, in turn, consist of electrons spinning around a nucleus formed of protons and neutrons. Despite their tiny size, electrons play a vital role in determining a material’s electric and magnetic properties.

Let’s take magnetism first. All electrons have a quantum property called spin that can be thought of as an arrow that points in one of two directions. Most of the time, these arrows are oriented randomly, with no one direction dominating. In some materials, however, the arrows get in formation when they are exposed to an external magnetic field. If all the arrows are aligned the same way, the material starts generating a magnetic field of its own.

“ It was a question that really no one was asking, or had thought to ask before”

>

CANCER DETECTION AND BRAIN MAPPING

From the signal-sending of neurons to the ion channels of cells, your body is positively tingling with electrical activity. “If you have access to electricity at the molecular level, then you can actually control cells, treat diseases and even control biological processes,” says Sakhrat Khizroev, a physicist and inventor at the University of Miami in Florida looking for medical applications for a new class of wonder materials called multiferroics (see main story).

The potential is vast. Multiferroics might reduce the need for invasive techniques by being made into nanobots designed to swim through blood vessels and deliver life-saving drugs. They would be guided by magnetic fields outside the body and able to interact with tissues through their electric properties.

For his part, Khizroev has developed multiferroic nanoparticles to spot signs of cancer. The idea is that once inside the body, the multiferroics flag cancerous cells in a way that can be detected through nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. Studies suggest they can outperform traditional, cobalt-based nanoparticles.

Ultimately, he has other targets in mind, including the brain. “The brain is more energy-efficient than any computer working today,” he says. His vision is to use multiferroic particles to map the organ’s network of neurons, and then develop a computer based on that map.

Heroic multiferroics

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Materials like iron, which are capable of becoming magnetised and retaining their magnetism even when the external field is removed, are said to be ferromagnetic.

Ferromagnets are everywhere in our daily lives. A compass needle is one example, and your fridge is probably covered with dozens more, holding up your holiday snaps and reminders. Less well known to most of us, but also well-established, are ferroelectrics – materials that can produce electric fields, used today to power some types of computer chip.

Their superpower, just like ferromagnetism, starts with electrons. Briefly put, some materials have a mix of charged atoms built into their structure. If an electric field is applied to the material, these charges can permanently shift, and the separation of negative and positive charges generates a tiny electric field, called a dipole. When these dipoles line up in the same direction, they form what is called an electric polarisation. This means the material produces an electric field. Materials that can do this are said to be ferroelectric (see “Fields of dreams”, right).

The first observation of ferroelectric behaviour came in an unlikely substance: a laxative called Rochelle salt, developed by a French pharmacist in the 17th century.

Its creator wouldn’t reveal his recipe, but its ingredients weren’t its only secret. In 1824, Scottish physicist David Brewster observed that Rochelle salt is pyroelectric, which means it produces a small voltage when heated or cooled. And in 1880, the Curie brothers – Jacques and Pierre – showed that it was also piezoelectric, generating voltage when it was squeezed, stretched or otherwise physically deformed. In 1899, Thomas Edison took advantage of Rochelle salt’s piezoelectricity to build a commercial version of his phonograph to play back sound recordings.

Those early findings suggested something strange was happening in the salt’s atoms. The situation became even more interesting in 1921, when a physicist at the University of Minnesota found that if Rochelle salt was immersed in an electric field, its electric

“ Ferroelectric behaviour was first seen in a laxative called Rochelle salt”

UNPICKING STRING THEORY

String theory is one of the most popular (and controversial) candidates for a theory of everything, a unified mathematical framework capable of describing the entirety of physics. Among its predictions is that everything in the universe is made of unbelievably tiny strings, whose vibrations correspond to the subatomic particles we see in our daily lives.

In the 1970s, physicist Tom Kibble described how such strings might arise in the early universe, in the moments shortly after the big bang. Gaining insight into those conditions appears impossibly difficult, but Kibble identified a number of mathematical symmetries that the early universe should obey. If someone could only find something with those symmetries, they might be able to model those primordial conditions.

Forty years later, Nicola Spaldin, while at the University of California, Santa Barbara, proposed a multiferroic called yttrium manganite as the answer. The equations that describe the material as it changes polarisation, wrote Spaldin, match the conditions Kibble laid out to such an extent that it is the “crystallographic equivalent of cosmic strings”. She suggests that the material may enable physicists to simulate the conditions that prevailed billions of years in the past.

charges line up. Even if the electric field is taken away, the charges stay put, and the salt produces its own electric field. By analogy with ferromagnetism, which had been known about for millennia, this property was called ferroelectricity.

Coming just a century after Øersted’s demonstration, this Rochelle salt experiment deepened the known connections between electricity and magnetism. Given this relationship, you might think that getting ferroelectricity and ferromagnetism into the same material would be easy. But no such luck. “When you have magnetic materials, they’re almost by definition not ferroelectric,” says materials scientist Manfred Fiebig at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Mutually exclusiveThe logic is fairly simple: magnetism only occurs because electrons, in order to align their spins, must be free to move between atoms. For a ferroelectric material to create an electric field, charges must be free to move when an external field is applied – but then stay in place. “It is not a trivial thing. You want to relate two different kinds of physical phenomenon. One with currents, one with stationary charges. How do you create materials that have both of these properties?” asks Ramamoorthy Ramesh at the University of California, Berkeley. “These two things are in some sense pointing in opposite directions.”

But that didn’t stop scientists from looking for examples. In the 1950s, Soviet physicists developed a synthetic material that had flickers of promising properties when cooled to below 0°C, but these vanished at room temperature, limiting their usefulness. In 1965, Swiss physicists overcame some of these difficulties, but the fragility of their material meant that industry wouldn’t bite.

The next three decades brought a steady trickle of experimental attempts to mix magnetic and ferroelectric ingredients, but multiferroics remained mostly out of reach, difficult to make and harder to use.

This is where Spaldin comes in. When she left Yale for a new position at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she took a bold tack. She abandoned her original research plans and instead dedicated herself to hunting multiferroics full-time. Then, in 2000, she published an electrifying paper that changed everything. It was titled, simply: “Why Are There So Few Magnetic Ferroelectrics?”

Her short, sharp analysis of the necessary properties of such materials was inspirational.

2


One researcher she inspired was Ramesh, then working on the other side of the country. He had been conducting experiments on a synthetic compound called bismuth ferrite, and the weird results he was seeing seemed to match the signature of Spaldin’s multiferroics. So he picked up the phone.

“I remember it very clearly,” says Spaldin. “He was very Californian. He didn’t know me very well, but he just asked, ‘What do you think is the electric polarisation of bismuth ferrite?’ ”

That unconventional opening line launched a collaboration: Spaldin with the theory and big vision, Ramesh with the materials-making background. As it turned out, bismuth ferrite was the perfect candidate. On a microscopic level, it consists of a lattice of bismuth atoms interspersed with charged ions of iron and oxygen. The structure of the bismuth atoms provides the ferroelectricity, and the

Fields of dreamsA material’s electric and magnetic properties depend on the behaviour of its electrons. Individual electrons can generate electric or magnetic fields that cluster together in small regions called domains. In ferroelectric and ferromagnetic materials, these domains line up in the presence of external fields. In multiferroic materials, both sets of domains line up at the same time

FERROMAGNETIC MATERIAL

FERROELECTRIC MATERIAL

MULTIFERROIC MATERIAL

Apply a magnetic field

Apply an electric field

“ Spaldin changed her plans and started to hunt multiferroics full-time”

FINDING DARK MATTER

Around 85 per cent of the matter in the universe is invisible. We know this so-called dark matter is out there because of its gravitational effects, but nobody has yet spotted it directly. Sinéad Griffin at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California is one of the many physicists looking to change that.

Her idea is simple. As the Earth whooshes through a big cloud of dark matter, that directional motion might give rise to a kind of invisible wind. Such a wind would impart energy that ordinary matter could pick up, providing evidence of dark matter’s existence and possibly its composition.

“A smoking gun for a dark matter experiment would be getting this directionality,” says Griffin. “If you have a target that can pick this up, it’s enough.”

Conveniently, the energy range that multiferroics are sensitive to is exactly right for picking up the likely constituents of dark matter. Most dark matter detectors are huge vats of inert liquids, tucked away deep underground, that are looking for high-energy particles. But they have largely seen a lot of nothing. The detectors that Griffin envisions would pick up even fainter signals, making them an exciting option.

>

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In some ways, though, computer memory turned out to be the low-hanging fruit. In the past few years, researchers have realised that these materials have so much more to offer, including in endeavours as diverse as medicine and cosmology (see “Heroic multiferroics”, page 43). “The applications have exploded beyond what we ever imagined,” says Spaldin. In fact, she notes that perhaps the biggest surprise to emerge from the past two decades is how many uses have been found for multiferroic materials that have nothing to do with the coupling of magnetic and electric behaviours. “In many applications, we’re finding that the multiferroicity itself isn’t as interesting as something else that came along with it,” says Fiebig. For example, many multiferroics have a structure that makes them exceptional harvesters of solar energy. In principle at least, that means they should have conversion rates far greater than today’s silicon-based top performers.

Better and more efficient multiferroics are surely still out there. And, no doubt, somewhere beyond them are entirely new classes of material with as-yet-undreamed-of combinations of natural properties. Perhaps all it will take for us to root them out is for someone like Spaldin to start asking the right questions. ❚

wiggling electrons in the iron ions supply the magnetic boost. But it isn’t enough to simply have these two on their own, says Ramesh. The oxygen atoms play a crucial role too, creating the stable geometry that allows both properties to emerge. “You have to have all of them together in a certain way,” he says.

When a plan comes togetherIn 2003, Spaldin and Ramesh reported on their first observation of multiferroicity in this substance. For the first time in history they had an example of this material that lent itself to applications. It had the necessary superpowers and it maintained its properties at room temperature. The group also showed that it was ideally suited to uses in computing, especially memory (see “Boosting memory”, left).

The revelation that practical multiferroics existed sparked a revolution. Before 2003, the related terms “multiferroic” or “electro-ferromagnetic” were mentioned in a few hundred papers. Since 2003, they have shown up more than 32,000 times. The field exploded beyond the reach of Spaldin, as labs around the world took up the challenge to make and explore their own multiferroics.

“It was exactly like a Bollywood movie, with a lot of fight scenes, and people crying, and dance sequences, things like that, but translated into physics,” jokes Ramesh. Since then, he and Spaldin and other physicists have been locked in an ongoing race to extract the next surprising, serendipitous revelation from a class of materials that just keeps on giving.

Stephen Ornes is a journalist based in Tennessee. He tweets @stephenornes

Going beyond the ferromagnetism of ordinary bar magnets was seen as impossible

BOOSTING MEMORY

Computer hard drives are essentially made of tiny magnets whose polarity can be used to store binary information. Magnets point one way for a “1” or flipped over for a “0”. Right now, computers use an electric current, applied directly through a wire, to flip the magnets when necessary.

Multiferroics suggest another way. Earlier this year, Ramamoorthy Ramesh’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, unveiled a multiferroic electrical component that also stores information as 0s and 1s. But unlike ordinary hardware, it doesn’t need current from a wire. Instead, these switches can be flipped by applying an external electric field. That may not seem like a big deal, until you consider it would take 10 to 30 times less energy per bit of information stored to do it this way.

Given the explosive growth of power-hungry technologies like the internet of things, self-driving cars and artificial intelligence, it is small wonder that companies like Intel are actively pursuing such devices.

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The back pages

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Stargazing at home onlineProjects will be posted online each week at

newscientist.com/maker Email: [email protected]

Abigail Beall is a science writer in Leeds, UK. This series is based on her book The Art of Urban Astronomy @abbybeall

What you needBinocularsA good view of the eastern horizon

For next weekA dark night at high latitude

Next in the series:1 Mercury transits the sun2 How to watch the Leonid

meteor shower3 Venus and Jupiter

in conjunction4 Mercury at its greatest

elongation5 How to see the

Northern Lights Where to go and what to look for

6 Find the Andromeda galaxy

7 How to see Santa (the ISS) on Christmas Eve

MERCURY passed in front of the sun two weeks ago in a rare transit event. This week, we get a chance to see the planet at night. But you will have to set your alarm.

Mercury and Venus are known as inferior planets, because they orbit closer to the sun than Earth does. On 28 November, Mercury reached its greatest western elongation. This is the point in its 88-day orbit of the sun when the distance between the sun and Mercury as seen from Earth is the biggest it gets. This apparent distance is also known as the angular separation. In the following days, the planet dips a little lower in the sky, but you should still get a good view.

Seeing the planets depends on them being as far from the sun as possible, because when they are right next to it, the light they reflect is outshone by the sun itself. This matters even more for Mercury than it does for Venus, because it is much smaller and fainter than its neighbour, and so close to the sun. The rocky planet, with a cratered surface rather like our moon’s, is less than 5000 kilometres in diameter. That makes it smaller than Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, and Titan, which orbits Saturn.

Mercury’s maximum angular separation varies between 18 and 28 degrees according to how close it is to the sun in its highly elliptical orbit (the absolute maximum separation is shown in the illustration). For Venus, it is between 45 and 47 degrees. Mercury’s angular separation is

If you are up before sunrise, look out for the smallest planet as it reaches the spot where it is most easily seen, says Abigail Beall

Stargazing at home 2 Week 4

Mercury rising in the east

Almost the last word

Can screens make

spectacles redundant?

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Puzzles

Quick crossword,

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a quiz p52

The Q&A

Jeffrey Hangst

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antimatter p56

smaller because its average orbit is about 58 million km from the sun, while Venus’s is 110 million km and Earth’s is about 150 million km.

Mercury’s proximity to the sun makes it hard to see most of the time, with the best viewing opportunities being just before sunrise or just after sunset.

While the greatest elongation is on 28 November, Mercury will be visible for two weeks after this, rising 2 hours before sunrise and reaching 10 degrees above the horizon 45 minutes before sunrise. People in both hemispheres should get a look, but those in the north will have the best view. To spot Mercury, try to find the

constellation Libra and the planet should be there.

Binoculars will give you a better view, but you can see the planet with the naked eye. At the time it rises, Mercury will have a magnitude of −0.44, so should be visible to most people with clear skies regardless of light pollution. Because it is close to the horizon, it will shine with a pink hue, like the setting sun. That is because Earth’s atmosphere scatters light coming through it, reducing the amount of blue light reaching your eyes.

The nights are getting longer in the northern hemisphere, so next week is a guide to the best way to watch the aurorae there. ❚


The back pages Puzzles

Quick crossword #46 Set by Richard Smyth Quick quiz #30 Puzzle set by Zoe Mensch

#32 Rearranging books

Once a week, it is Jordie’s job at the library to put books back in order on the shelves.

This week, he finds that the 10-volume encyclopedia has been mixed up in the order shown above. He has to put them back in order, and since the books are heavy, he wants to move as few volumes as possible.

A move consists of taking a book off the shelf and sliding the other books to the side to make space, if necessary. What is the smallest number of moves he needs to make to rearrange the books in the order one to 10 from left to right?

Answer next week

#31 Three hats

Solution

Cassie can’t deduce the colour of her hat from looking at the two in front of her, so she says nothing. This silence tells Ariana and Beverley that their hats are different colours. Beverley can see a white hat in front of her, so she says “black”. Ariana then deduces that her hat is white.

Answers and the next cryptic crossword next week.

Get in touchEmail us at

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Quick quiz #30 Answers

1 Panthera pardus pardus, Loxodonta africana, Diceros bicornis, Syncerus caffer… what is missing from the list?2 When viewed from the northern hemisphere, does the moon appear to be the same way up as it looks from the southern hemisphere or is it upside down?3 Russia’s Lake Baikal is the world’s deepest lake and its largest freshwater lake by volume. Which lake is second on both of these lists? 4 What creature, when discovered swimming off the eastern coast of South Africa in 1938, had been missing for some 66 million years?5 The five telescopes of the High Energy Spectroscopic System in Namibia investigate which phenomenon?

Answers below

Cryptic Crossword #19 Answers

ACROSS 1 Rice (Trice), 3 Dominant, 9 Thyroid, 10 Crest (Rest), 11 Trust (Rust), 12 Mantle, 14 Rumble (Crumble), 16 Adhere, 19 Alight (Light), 21 Fling (Flint), 24 Turbo (Turbot), 25 Meatier (Metier), 26 Charming (Harming), 27 Smew DOWN 1 Rotatory, 2 Coypu, 4 Oedema, 5 Incan (Tin Can), 6 Areolae, 7 Tots (Cots), 8 Mortal (Moral), 13 Hedgerow, 15 Malaria, 17 Defeat (Defect), 18 Stamen, 20 Groom (Room), 22 Ilium, 23 Otic

1 Panthera leo, the lion. Together with the African leopard, the African bush elephant, the black rhinoceros and the Cape buffalo, it makes up the “Big Five” of African game2 Upside down3 Lake Tanganyika in East Africa’s Great Rift Valley4 The coelacanth. The fish, previously known only from fossils, was thought to have become extinct around the time the dinosaurs did5 Cosmic rays, specifically gamma rays

ACROSS1 Control ___ , reactor

core components (4)3 Cancer-causing

substance (10)10 Cryptid of North America (7)11 Charles ___ , US

seismologist (7)12 Animated sci-fi sitcom, first

broadcast in 1999 (8)13 See 21 Down16 Pewter or bronze, say (5)17 Compound containing

an oxyanion of W (9)18 Operation on the

small intestine (9)

21 Formulating Online Calculations in Algebraic Language (5)

23 Royal ___ , honeybee secretion (5)

24 Group of bonded atoms (8)27 Japanese tech company,

founded in 1910 (7)28 Human-like automaton (7)29 Point on Earth’s surface

closest to a detonation (6,4)30 US transport firm, founded

in 2009 (4)

DOWN1 Vitamin B₂ (10)2 Not analogue (7)4 The use of labour-saving

devices (10)5 European Organization

for Nuclear Research (4)6 Core of an atom (7)7 1997 biopunk sci-fi film (7)8 Standard; type (4)9 ___ Canyon, supertanker

that ran aground in 1967 (6)

14 Herbivorous dinosaur of the order Ornithischia (10)

15 Giant salamander (10)19 Type of synthesised

dance music (7)20 Si (7)21/13 Mathematics prize (6,5)22 C (7)25 Species of cormorant (4)26 Effervesce (4)

10 7 2 6 5 4 1 9 3 8

A B C


The back pages Feedback

Got a story for Feedback?Send it to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street,

London WC2E 9ES or you can email us at

[email protected]

Twisteddoodles for New ScientistBetter on paper

Our masters in Silicon Valley have our best interests at heart. For evidence, look no further than an innovation uploaded to Google’s Digital Wellbeing Experiments platform. “Paper Phone” is aimed at helping those driven to destruction by their smartphones and the Google products on them.

To take advantage, simply go to the Google Play store and download the Paper Phone app (bear with us here). The app allows you to choose the things on your phone that you can’t do without – your daily schedule, say, maps, notes, recipes or Sudoku puzzles, and then… print them. On paper.

For those who don’t remember paper, it is like a super-thin tablet with very limited memory, or a single page of a Kindle book in independent physical form. With essential data logged in this handy format, you can safely leave your phone at home. “A paper phone can do most of the things a smartphone can do,” the app’s designers explain in a helpful video, “but it doesn’t distract you as much.”

It all rather reminds Feedback of the Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge device, a paper-based technology first advertised on the pages of the magazine Punch many moons ago. Compact, portable and durable, the BOOK ordered essential information on sequential sheets of paper that were optically scanned directly to the brain. BOOKs even came with their own personalisation tool, the Portable Erasable Nib Cryptic Intercommunication Language Stylus, or PENCILS.

Feedback still owns a few BOOKs, and highly recommends them. Having just tried out Google’s latest digital detox device in the bath, we can report it worked swimmingly too. That’s more than can be said of our last smartphone.

I, spy

Emerging from beneath the suds, Feedback is reminded that the key

to being a good spy is the ability to stay undercover. Feedback isn’t a spy, we add perhaps too hastily. We are merely an anonymous magazine column prone to talking about itself in the third person.

Few spies have blown their cover quite so spectacularly as Hvaldimir the Russian spy whale. His is a story that tugs at the heartstrings. The beluga was first found in April near a Norwegian fishing village wearing a harness saying “Equipment St Petersburg”. He has since continually attempted to make contact with humans, receiving numerous injuries from ship propellers and the like.

A few weeks ago, a beluga looking strikingly like Hvaldimir was filmed playing fetch with the South African crew of a boat in the Arctic Ocean. “Catch this,” say the sailors, as they throw a rugby ball into the icy waters. “I know I shouldn’t,” you can imagine Hvaldimir thinking, “if I want to continue the charade that I am but an ordinary beluga whale, but go on.”

The suspicion is that Hvaldimir, whom Feedback is choosing to call The Spy Who Came in from the Cold But Then Went Back Because It Was His Natural Habitat, was so heavily socialised during his training that he has proved unable to kick the human habit. Meanwhile, we don’t wish to blow any more covers, but we would like to know what a crew of South Africans equipped with a rugby ball is doing in the Arctic Ocean.

High on the hog

Never work with children or animals, top wisecracker W. C. Fields once wisecracked. Friendly Arctic whales aside, that certainly seems to apply if your line of business is selling cocaine in central Italy. One gang of dealers, accustomed to keeping its powder dry in underground woodland caches, has had its entire stash discovered and destroyed by a gang of wild boar.

The elite tusk force is said to have

destroyed more than $20,000 worth of high-grade cocaine, grubbing up and ripping open several packages, and scattering their contents through woodland near Montepulciano.

Assuming altruistic motives, that makes them the do-gooding-est swine since sheepdog locum Babe won the county sheepherding competition in the eponymous 1995 film. If Feedback were an Italian hog, we might be considering a career change – the thought of being turned into an unusually intoxicating guaniciale doesn’t bear thinking about.

Hot water bottle

Good news on the climate change front: we could soon be tackling it in our sleep. “You may be interested in purchasing an advanced technology Ceramo

pillow from Blu Sleep,” writes regular correspondent Prashant Rao. The revolutionary technology in this bed cushion is “powered by our own metabolism”, in which “bio-ceramic [gel] recycles and converts radiant body heat into something that gives the body a boost – infrared energy”.

Ah yes, infrared energy – otherwise known as heat. Blu Sleep promises that the pillow will increase tissue oxygen levels, reduce inflammation and promote vitality, as well as lessen stress and fatigue – a crucial selling point for anything calling itself a pillow. Yet Feedback thinks the Ceramo is something far more precious. By heating us with our own expelled body heat, it must be the world’s comfiest perpetual-motion machine. Buy 10, and sleep like a baby knowing you’re doing your bit to save the planet. ❚


Needing focus

I wear spectacles to correct for

myopia and astigmatism. Is it

possible to create a program to

adjust the image of a TV, mobile

or PC monitor using my optical

prescription such that I could

view it without spectacles?

Dan O’Donovan

Solihull, West Midlands, UK

The eye uses a lens to focus light on the retina at its back. It needs to do this because the iris is a circle rather than a tiny hole, so a circle of light enters the eye.

All of the light from each point on, say, a computer screen reaches the lens and is then redirected to one point on the retina. This relies on the lens changing shape so that it can refract the light by the correct angle.

As no program can adjust the path of the light as lenses do, the screen can’t seem to be a different distance to the lens than it actually is, so the simple answer to this question is no. However, placing a magnifying lens, such as a fresnel lens, over the screen may help with myopia.

Graham Jones

Bridgham, Norfolk, UK

In 2014, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, developed a prototype display that can be viewed by people who are near or far-sighted without the need for glasses. It involves placing a second screen covered in pinholes in front of the image, as well as software to adjust the screen picture so that slightly different images reach each eye. This acts in a similar way to a lens, redirecting the path of the light such that each of a person’s lenses can focus it. However, the technology doesn’t seem to be available yet.

Eric Kvaalen

Les Essarts-le-Roi, France

Astigmatism results from irregularities in the shape of the cornea or lens. It might be possible

to adjust the image for the astigmatism of one eye, but then it wouldn’t be right for the other.

Dreamy looks

Strangers appear in my dreams.

Their features are clear, but none

are familiar, not even from an

earlier dream. What is going

on in my brain, and do others

experience the same?

Tony Holkham

Boncath, Pembrokeshire, UK

Considering that my dreams almost always involve going somewhere, either on foot or by car, I should expect to meet many strangers. Yet I hardly ever do. Most of the people I interact with in my dreams are either well known to me or curious hybrids of more than one friend or relation.

Many of the places I dream about, though, don’t exist. When I wake, I marvel at how these events could have been created in such minute detail by my brain – and, more to the point, why.

Christine Warman

Hinderwell, North Yorkshire, UK

Dream pundits, of which there are many, tend to go along with the idea that strangers in dreams are real people. They say our brains can’t fabricate faces, so these people are actually recollections of real people we have seen but don’t consciously remember.

Such accounts support the concept that everything we experience is accurately stored in our memory, if only we could access it. Yet it is more likely that memories are reworked and edited, and can be false. I think dream people are invented from a stock of general images.

In 1996, Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle conducted a survey of the content of dreams. They found that most involve the dreamer and two or three others.

Around 50 per cent of dream people are strangers. Male strangers were aggressive more often than female strangers, and female dreamers were more likely to encounter hostile characters. Dreams rarely involve aspects of everyday life, but seem to be a way of examining, in symbolic form, our own anxieties.

Elwyn Hegarty

Armidale, New South Wales,

Australia

I see a parade of clear but unfamiliar people’s faces in my mind’s eye just as I am about to fall asleep, rather than later. If I have been waiting a while for sleep, I find this reassuring, as it means that rest is just round the corner. I have heard of two others who have had the same experience.

Peter Gandolfi

London, UK

I get visual hallucinations sometimes when I am tired and I close my eyes. It is as if I have entered a world of people, none of whom I know, and always different. I quite enjoy the experience and marvel at the workings of my brain.

Some of my friends with severe visual impairments also have hallucinations, a phenomenon known as Charles Bonnet syndrome. It is quite common among those with sight loss, especially those who are newly blind, and tends to go away as the brain adapts to the loss of vision.

I hear that many people with the syndrome are wary of talking about their symptoms, thinking that they are experiencing a mental health problem. I believe that I am in good health, with good vision. ❚

This week’s new questions

Poetic prediction “Red sky at night, shepherds’ delight;

red sky in the morning, shepherds’ warning”. Putting aside

the occupation of the observer, is there any truth in this

adage? If so, why is it true? Richard Kubiak, Pen-y-cae-mawr,

Monmouthshire, UK

Come clean What is the difference between shampoo and

shower gel and, if so, what is it? Sam Wong, London, UK

Want to send us a question or answer?Email us at [email protected]

Questions should be about everyday science phenomena

Full terms and conditions at newscientist.com/lw-terms

The back pages Almost the last word

DAV

ID C

OLE

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MY

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PH

OTO

Does red sky at night really mean that the next day’s weather will be fine?

Don’t miss a special souvenir issue from New Scientist celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landings. Explore the past, present and future of space exploration with over 100 pages of in-depth articles on the wonders of the solar system, plus 20 pages of newly resurfaced historical content from New Scientist’s archive detailing the original space race as it happened

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The back pages Q&A

Jeffrey Hangst spends his days puzzling over antimatter at CERN, the world’s biggest particle physics lab. He wants to learn why there’s more matter than antimatter in the universe

As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?

I always wanted to be a scientist. I grew up during the space race, and I clearly remember thinking

that being an astronaut would be cool, but that being a scientist would be cooler.

Explain your work in one easy paragraph.

I work with antimatter, which is this weird, mirror opposite to “normal” matter. It is a huge puzzle,

because we think matter and antimatter existed in equal quantities just after the big bang, but

we can’t explain why only matter survived. My ALPHA experiment is looking at the properties

of the simplest anti-atom, antihydrogen, to see if there may be some small, overlooked difference between matter and antimatter.

Why did you choose this field?I have always worked with antimatter. I guess

I like a challenge. Where’s the fun in getting your atoms out of a gas bottle that anyone can buy?

Did you have to overcome any particular

challenges to get where you are today?Well, everything about antimatter is challenging. You have to produce antiprotons in high-energy

collisions and then slow them down and stop them to make antihydrogen. Even then, you only get a handful of atoms that you have to keep in an

ultra-high vacuum away from normal matter. I have been told by colleagues at every step of the

way that all this is impossible, but here we are.

What’s the most exciting thing you’ve worked on in your career?

Antimatter has been my entire career, and it has always been exciting, if a bit daunting. It is cool

to work on something that fascinates people and shows up regularly in science fiction. I like to be

the first to see something new, and that’s the case with everything we measure.

What achievement are you most proud of?There are two. In the ATHENA collaboration,

we succeeded in producing the first low-energy atoms of antihydrogen in 2002. The second was

the first confinement of antihydrogen by ALPHA in 2010. I started ALPHA in 2005 to get to this, and

everything we do today is based on that result.

Which discovery or achievement do you wish you’d made yourself?Paul Dirac’s insight, predicting the existence of antimatter, is right up there – one of the truly great intellectual leaps in the history of science. If you could have a conversation with any scientist, living or dead, who would it be?Could I exchange this to bring back John Bonham, so I could go to a Led Zeppelin concert?

If you could send a message back to yourself as a kid, what would you say?Get your atoms from a gas bottle.

Do you have an unexpected hobby, and if so, please will you tell us about it?I play guitar in a rock band. We are three CERN physicists and a singer from Transylvania. The name of the band is Diracula. I also build my own guitars. This is easier than making antihydrogen.

What’s the best thing you’ve read or seen in the past 12 months?I really enjoyed Roger Waters’s movie Us + Them, which was only shown for one day in Geneva. I am a huge Pink Floyd fan.

How useful will your skills be after the apocalypse?I am much more likely to be blamed for the apocalypse… Seriously, though, experimental physicists can build or repair pretty much anything, and we are great scavengers of equipment. And I was kidding, we could never make enough antimatter to be dangerous to anything other than our own sanity.

OK, one last thing: tell us something that will blow our minds…I’ll tell you four things. Roger Waters visited ALPHA this year. We had a beer. He autographed my guitar. If I send him an email, he answers. ❚

Jeffrey Hangst is spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment at CERN in Geneva and professor of physics at Aarhus University in Denmark

“ I like to be the first to see something new, and that’s the case with everything we measure”

SIDE: RICHARD ISAAC/SHUTTERSTOCK

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