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 Bee-friendly gardens Wind-friendly art Issue 82
2

THE EVIDENCE ASSESSED

LIFE ON
MARS

COLUMNS CHARGE! IS SCIENCE IN ROADBLOCKS

KATIE MACK THE FUTURE THE AGE OF MAR THE
PAUL DAVIES BATTERY ALTERNATIVE ADVANCE OF
& ALAN FINKEL POWERED? FACTS ELECTRIC CARS

82

9 771832 522008
AU $15.00 inc GST NZ $16.00 inc GST
COSMOS CONTENTS — 3

CONTENTS COSMOS 82 | SCIENCE FEATURES

PAGE 52

Can batteries
save the day?
Efficient energy storage is
imperative if renewable energy
is to go fully mainstream. It’s
also where the smart money and
smart research is to be found.
WILSON DA SILVA investigates.

22 33 36 76

LIFE ON MARS POPULATED COUNTRY SCIENCE VS FAKE NEWS GOING WITH THE GRAIN

RICHARD A LOVETT tries
to separate fact from fiction.
Indigenous occupation is
essential for the health of
Australian wilderness,
writes TANYA LOOS.
How can we deal in facts
when everyone has an opinion?
STEPHEN FLEISCHFRESSER
ponders that and other
questions.
A food revolution is
building in West Africa.
NATALIE PARLETTA reports.
4 — CONTENTS Issue 82

COSMOS 82
FEATURES, DISPATCHES, ESSAYS, REVIEWS

UPFRONT 44

FROM THE PUBLISHER 6

FROM THE EDITOR AND LEAD SCIENTIST 7

DIGEST

NEWS — Science stories you may have missed 9

CLIMATE WATCH — Helen Berry studies climate-related mental health 16

THE MAJESTY OF BATS
TECHNOPHILE — Meet the James Webb Telescope 18
The beauty of flying mammals.
VIEWPOINT

ASTRO KATIE — Katie Mack on the mysteries of the universe 20

64
INCURABLE ENGINEER — Alan Finkel on the perils of perfection 21

SPECTRUM

CREATIVE CHAOS AND WIND — The art of Cameron Robbins 79

OUT THERE — Paul Davies on astrobiology 84

BOOKS — The Chronicles of Evolution and other fascinating new writing 87

DESTINATION — The retired space shuttle 92 VIRUSES HAVE BELLYBUTTONS

The imperfections of nucleic acid molecules in

ARTEFACT — Fulsome prism blues 93
protein coats.
SCIENCE CLUB

BEES — How to attract native bees to your garden 94 66

TOP 6 — Not all science is serious 98

DID YOU KNOW — Werner Heisenberg 102

DEBUNKED — Can prayer really heal the sick? 104

THE BREAKTHROUGH — Charles Graeber's new book 108

END POINT
THE EPIDEMIOLOGY OF STUNTING
MIND GAMES — Fiendishly fun puzzles 112
The quest to find out what’s happening to Papua
PORTRAIT — Charlie Huveneers 114 New Guinea’s children.
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6 — UPFRONT
A LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR
WELCOME to the second edition of
Cosmos magazine published by The Royal
Institution of Australia.
As the Chief Executive and Director,
I thought it important that I take the time
to write to all our readers and explain
what The Royal Institution of Australia
is – and what our role is in the Australian
community.
The Royal Institution of Australia
was established in 2009 as the only sister
organisation of The Royal Institution
of Great Britain, which has a long and
prestigious history dating back to 1799.
Our mission is to promote public
awareness and understanding of all
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productions, and through working with
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to science. We have quickly become
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In conjunction with this, we also think
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CONTRIBUTORS
PAUL DAVIES
Physicist, writer and broadcaster Paul
Davies is a professor at Arizona State
University in the US as well as the director
of BEYOND: Centre for Fundamental
Concepts in Science. His books include
The Fifth Miracle and The Mind of God.
NATALIE PARLETTA
With a PhD, Bachelor of Psychology, and
Master of Dietetics, Natalie Parletta is a
researcher and freelance writer based in
Adelaide, South Australia. Her research
centres on links between nutrition and
mental health.
young Australians. We do this through
our Ultimate Careers offerings, and
through working with educators around
the nation.
Why do we do this? Our vision is that
science should be woven into the fabric
of society, in much the same way that
sport is. We aim for people to understand
science and its relevance in day-to-day
decision making. We need to empower
people to understand the world’s many
challenges.
A tall order? Maybe – but we are
working hard, engaging the public,
educators, families, institutions,
mainstream media and decision makers.
We will continue to do so.
We are Australia’s only charity solely
dedicated to this cause. We are young
and we are growing our audience every
day. We rely on individual donations and
corporate support to achieve this. Our
delivery of Cosmos will assist us further in
this quest, and I welcome your support in
making this possible.
BRADLEY ABRAHAM
Chief Executive Officer and Director,
The Royal Institution of Australia
KATIE MACK
Katie Mack is a theoretical astrophysicist
who studies a range of questions in
cosmology. She is an assistant professor
of Physics at North Carolina State
University, where she is also a member of
the Leadership in Public Science Cluster.
KIT PRENDERGAST
A noted expert in Australian native bee
species, Kit Prendergast is a science
educator and PhD candidate at Curtin
University in Perth, Western Australia.
Issue 82
EDITORIAL
Editor ANDREW MASTERSON
Publisher CHUCK SMEETON
Lead Scientist ASSOC PROF ALAN DUFFY
Sub-editor NICK CARNE
Art director CAROL PERKINS
Graphic designer SHAWNEE WILLIS
Social editor KELLY WONG
Contributors WILSON DA SILVA, PAUL DAVIES, NEIL
DOWLING, ALAN FINKEL, ELIZABETH FINKEL, STEPHEN
FLEISCHFRESSER, LAUREN FUGE, CHARLES GRAEBER,
JEFF GLORFELD, ROBERT LAWRENCE, DYANI LEWIS,
TANYA LOOS, RICK LOVETT, KATIE MACK, SAMANTHA
PAGE, NATALIE PARLETTA, KIT PRENDERGAST, DREW
TURNEY, RICHARD WATTS.
Mind Games TESS BRADY / SNODGER PUZZLES
Editor-at-large ELIZABETH FINKEL
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COSMOS UPFRONT— 7

FROM THE EDITOR AND LEAD SCIENTIST

Reality, however you define it

WHAT IS REAL? It is the fundamental question that evidence carries the same communicative
drives many in philosophy, science and religion. influence as whole-cloth invention, how can the
In this issue of Cosmos, however, it drives two public distinguish the real from the rest?
very different stories – and requires two very These and our other stories, we hope, will
different approaches. serve to keep you fascinated and informed, as our
In our cover story, Life on Mars – the evidence talented contributors offer up articles on a wide
ANDREW MASTERSON
assessed, Richard A Lovett looks at the findings range of science topics, from batteries to electric
Editor
that have been offered – as early as 1877 in some cars and from native bees to why viruses have
cases – to support the contention that life does, bellybuttons.
or did, exist on the Red Planet. Extensive and We hope you enjoy this issue of Cosmos,
detailed, the result serves to remind us that courtesy of The Royal Institution of Australia,
however possible, or probable, the prospect of where our mission is, as always, keeping things
Martian biology might be – and however much we real.
might want it to be real – there is as yet no
evidence of it.
In the second story, Science in the world of fake ANDREW MASTERSON
news, Stephen Fleischfresser examines the fate of Editor
science news in a modern media landscape where
ALAN DUFFY
Trumpian “alternative facts” and conspiracy ALAN DUFFY
Lead Scientist
theories flourish inside the unmediated world Lead Scientist ,
of social media. At a time where peer-reviewed The Royal Institution of Australia

ISSUE 82

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COSMOS DIGEST — 9

DIGEST SCIENCE YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

SPACE
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS

Curiosity says hi from Mars

When you’re on a big trip, you gotta let friends know.

NASA’s Opportunity rover may be “Rock Hall” drill site, located on Mars’s Imager (MAHLI) – then stitched
dead, but its sibling Curiosity is still Vera Rubin Ridge. together into a panorama.
keen on a quick selfie. It took this In fact, there are 57 individual images The scene is dustier than usual,
happy snap in late January at the here – all taken by the Mars Hand Lens NASA says, due to a dust storm.

Contributors to Digest: NICK CARNE, SAMANTHA PAGE, ANDREW MASTERSON, TANYA LOOS, DYANI LEWIS, COSMOS EDITORS
10 — DIGEST Issue 82

SPACE

Is it Planet Nine or a
massive disc?
There’s another suggestion for what’s
causing some unusual orbital architecture.
So, are those mystery orbits in outermost
reaches of solar system caused by an
unknown ninth planet? There’s another
group of astronomers suggesting the
answer is “no”.
They believe it can all be explained by
the combined gravitational force of small
objects orbiting the sun beyond Neptune.
“The Planet Nine hypothesis is a
fascinating one, but if the hypothesised
ninth planet exists, it has so far avoided
detection,” says Antranik Sefilian, from
the University of Cambridge in the UK.
In a paper published in The
Astronomical Journal, Sefilian and
colleagues suggest there’s a disc made up
of small icy bodies with a combined mass
as much as 10 times that of Earth. When
combined with a simplified model of the
solar system, the gravitational forces of
the disc can account for the unusual orbital
architecture exhibited by some objects at
the outer reaches of the solar system.
Theirs is not, they concede, the first
theory involving such a disc, but it is
the first, they say, which explains the
significant features of the observed orbits
while accounting for the mass and gravity
of the other eight planets in our solar
system. CREDIT: ISTOCK/SUMAN BHAUMIK

BIOLOGY

Ancient giant burrowing

bat found in NZ
It’s not big, but it’s the biggest yet
described.

Scientists have discovered an ancient

giant burrowing bat that is related to NZ’s
endemic burrowing bats – and the first new
bat genus added to the country’s fauna in
150 years.
The bat’s teeth and bones were
discovered in 16-19-million-year-old
sediments near the town of St Bathans by an
international team led by researchers from
the University of NSW.
It was named Vulcanops jennyworthyae
after team member Jenny Worth, who
discovered the fossils, and Vulcan, the
mythological Roman god of fire and
volcanoes.
With an estimated weight of just 40
grams Vulcanops is hardly a “giant”, but it is
three times the size of living burrowing bats
in NZ today, and the largest burrowing bat
yet described.
NZ’s burrowing bats are so called
because of their distinctly terrestrial
lifestyle; they forage for insects, fruits and
flowers while running about on all fours,
and roosting in small burrows created in
leaf litter or logs, or seabird nests.
“Burrowing bats are more closely
related to bats living in South America than
CREDIT: GAVIN MOULDEY
to others in the southwest Pacific,” says
UNSW’s Suzanne Hand.
“They are related to vampire bats,
ghost-faced bats, fishing and frog-eating
bats, and nectar-feeding bats, and belong
to a bat superfamily that once spanned
the southern landmasses of Australia, NZ,
South America and possibly Antarctica.”
The findings are published in a paper in
the journal Scientific Reports.
COSMOS
PALAEONTOLOGY
The oldest jewellery in Europe
Excavations in Russia add details to the
lives of mysterious Denisovans.
This is a collection of bone points and
pierced teeth found in the Denisova Cave
in the Bashelaksky Range of the Altai
mountains in Siberia, Russia.
It was retrieved by researchers led by
Katerina Douka of the UK’s University of
Oxford.
The cave is highly significant because
evidence shows it was inhabited – at
times, perhaps, simultaneously – by
both Neanderthals and the little-known
hominins known as Denisovans.
In papers published in the journal
Nature, scientists report that Denisovans
occupied the cave approximately 287,000
to 55,000 years ago, while Neanderthals
lived there between 193,000 and 97,000
years ago.
DIGEST — 11
Dates calculated by the two groups of
researchers don’t completely agree,
although are not wildly divergent. Douka’s
team calculated the bone and tooth
artefacts date from between 49,000 and
43,000 years ago.
This makes them the oldest such
artefacts so far found anywhere in northern
Eurasia, and possibly of Denisovan origin.
CREDIT: KATERINA DOUKA
12 — DIGEST
BIOLOGY
Is the chicken the most
potent symbol of our
time?
Modern broilers are a wholly technology-
dependent species.
The humble chicken (Gallus gallus
domesticus) is the actual and symbolic
product of humanity’s influence on the
planet, researchers claim.
The sheer numbers of the bird and the
changes to its height and mass brought
on by specialised breeding programs
initiated in the 1950s “vividly symbolise
the transformation of the biosphere to fit
evolving human consumption patterns”,
according to a team led by Carys Bennett
from the UK’s University of Leicester.
Writing in the journal Royal Society
Open Science, they suggest the modern
domesticated chicken serves as solid
SPACE
DNA sugar can form
in space, experiments
show
Lab work adds to evidence that
extraterrestrial organic compounds may
have seeded life on Earth.
Laboratory experiments have shown
that a sugar critical to the structure of
DNA arises when ice formed on planets,
asteroids and meteorites is subjected to
ultraviolet radiation.
The result adds to evidence that
organic molecules can form under non-
biological conditions, and extends the
argument that the substances needed for
life to emerge on Earth may have originally
CREDIT: PHOTOALTO/MILENA BONIEK/GETTY IMAGES
evidence for the classification of the
current period in world history as the
“Anthropocene”.
The term denotes a time in which
the Earth is totally dominated and
largely reconfigured by humans. It is
controversial, however, with some
scientists feeling it has more to do with
come from outer space.
In a paper published in the journal
Nature Communications, researchers
from NASA’s Ames Research Centre in
the US report detecting 2-deoxyribose
– the sugar component of DNA – and
several deoxysugar derivatives in residues
produced from the ultraviolet irradiation
Issue 82
pop-culture than empirical evidence.
Even among those who feel it has
merit, debate rages over when the
Anthropocene began. Estimates range
from 900CE to 1950.
Bennett and her colleagues favour
the more recent end of the spectrum, and
cite as a key marker the post-war advent
of the Chicken of Tomorrow competition
launched by the US Atlantic and Pacific
supermarket chain to encourage farmers
to breed a fatter bird.
Since then, the researchers write,
“chickens have undergone extraordinary
changes. From the mid-twentieth century
to the present, broiler growth rates have
soared, with up to a fivefold increase in
individual biomass.”
The modern chicken is, in fact, a wholly
anthropogenic species, with its survival
utterly dependent on the technology of
intensive meat production. In the US, 97%
of broiler hens are reared in factory farms,
and worldwide the figure drops only to
72%.
CREDIT: DOTTEDHIPPO/GETTY IMAGES
of ice mixtures under standard astrophysical
conditions in the laboratory.
They also tested samples from selected
meteorites and detected the presence of
deoxysugars. The quantities were too small
to permit the unambiguous identification
of the DNA sugar, but the results are highly
significant nevertheless.
COSMOS DIGEST — 13

SPACE

The shape of our

galaxy revealed
Ingenious research finally reveals the true
shape of the Milky Way.

The Milky Way is warped and twisted,

a collaboration between Australian and
Chinese astronomers has established.
The three-dimensional shape of the
galaxy in which Earth resides has been a
mystery due to the inherent difficulties
in trying to ascertain what any object
looks like when restricted to making only
internal measurements.
Most assumptions have proceeded by
means of analogy. The galaxy is spiral so,
the logic runs, it’s probably the same shape
as other spiral galaxies. The closest of
these is Andromeda, which is pretty much
a pancake.
However, we now know it isn’t spiral
at all, thanks to research led by Richard
de Grijs from Macquarie University and
Xiaodian Chen from Chinese Academy of
Sciences in Beijing.
CREDIT: CHAO LIU / NATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATORIES, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
To accurately measure the shape of the
galaxy the researchers plotted the position
of 1339 Cepheids – large pulsating stars
each about 100,000 times brighter than
the sun. Because their brightness varies
only very little, the stars functioned as
reference points for the gigantic mapping
exercise.
By comparing the distances between
the Milky Way Cepheids and those
found in other galaxies – the shapes of
which can be easily confirmed through
direct observation – Chen, de Grijs and
colleagues discovered that our home
system becomes increasingly warped
and twisted as distance increases from
its centre.
The researchers say their evidence
“suggests that the origin of the warp is
associated with torques forced by the
massive inner disk”.
The research behind this finding was
originally published in the journal Nature
Astronomy.

BIOLOGY

giants, scientists, immortals and talking

Call to correct horses.

It’s a great piece of writing, but Toshio
Gulliver’s Travels food Kurkori identifies some problems with the

estimates mathematics – in particular Swift’s precise

Researcher finds famous satirist made
mistakes on Lilliputian physiology.
Calculations in Gulliver’s Travels, the
satiric masterpiece written by Jonathan
Swift in the early 18th century, are
incorrect, according to a researcher from
calculation that Gulliver needed the food
of 1724 little Lilliputians to satisfy his
hunger.
Kurkori compiled a multi-factorial
analysis based on the heart and respiration
rates, life spans and blood pressure of
the people of Lilliput and found the real
number was a much more conservative 42.
At the other end of the scale, he found
that Swift’s hero would need just one- CREDIT: ZU_09/GETT IMAGES

Japan’s University of Tokyo. forty-second of a typical Brobdinagian text should be corrected after almost three
The novel, as most people know, details meal to fill his belly. centuries,” Kurkori concludes in a paper
the travels of Lemuel Gulliver through a “Based on the above findings, the food published in The Journal of Physiological
number of lands populated by tiny people, requirement of Gulliver in the original Science.
14 — DIGEST Issue 82

BIOLOGY

A recent study of Australian inferred a preference for mates with

For boy budgies, budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulates) by

a Chinese and Dutch team suggests that
greater cognitive abilities based on
secondary behaviours correlated with
brains beat brawn males who reveal their smarts become intelligence, such as song. However,

in the mating game more attractive in the eyes of female

Research finds female birds prefer suitors
that demonstrate clever behaviour.
There’s interesting dating news from
China. Brains beat looks in attracting
birds. If you’re also a bird.
counterparts.
That’s significant, the researchers say,
because it could underlie the evolution of
cognitive performance in animals.
Perhaps surprisingly, the fitness
benefits of cognition, as well as the
underlying selective mechanics, have been
little studied outside humans.
Previous studies with birds have
this does not directly address the role of
cognitive ability on mate choice.
In the new study, the researchers
examined whether female budgerigars
altered their preference for males after
observing a potential suitor’s ability to do
something clever that its rival couldn’t.
And they did.
The study was reported in a paper
published in the journal Science.

CREDIT: FLORIDAPFE FROM S.KOREA KIM IN CHERL/GETTY IMAGES

COSMOS
TECHNOLOGY
Changing the way
to design sensors
US engineers have 3D-printed piezoelectric
materials.
If you use voice-activated software – like
iPhone’s Siri or voice-to-text – tiny, brittle
pieces of crystal or ceramic are converting
the vibrations of your voice to electric
impulses.
Now, researchers at Virginia Tech
University in the US have developed
a method to custom-design materials
that could replace the delicate crystal
and ceramic that were previously the
only materials able to convert pressure
to electricity in what is known as the
piezoelectric effect.
These materials are smart, and they
can sense stress and monitor impact in
any direction, says research leader Xiaoyu
Zheng. “We can tailor the architecture
to make them more flexible and use them,
PALAEONTOLOGY
Australia’s fearsome
marsupial lion
Thylacoleo carnifex had a huge jaw, sharp
teeth, retractable claws – and feet like a
possum.
New fossil finds have enabled the first
reconstruction of a complete skeleton of
the extinct “marsupial lion”, Thylacoleo
carnifex.
The bones – which include the first
full-length tail and collar-bones not
previously known to exist – have opened
a window into how the prehistoric beast’s
bizarre features made it a deadly predator,
according to a report published in the
journal PLOS One.
DIGEST — 15
for instance, as energy harvesting devices,
wrapping them around any arbitrary
curvature. We can make them thick, and
light, stiff or energy-absorbing.”
The previously available crystal and
ceramic piezoelectric materials can only
work in certain orientations, because of
the atomic structure.
The 3D ink designed by Zheng’s team
copies the natural “lattice” of the crystal
but allows for the orientation to
be changed around. The materials can
be printed using UV light in thicknesses
only a fraction of the diameter of a human
hair.
The possibilities for use go well
beyond voice activation. While previous
piezoelectric materials were limited by
their stiffness and delicacy – needing
a clean room for manufacturing – the
robustness and flexibility of the new
process means Zheng and his team
envisage using the materials as sensors
for nearly anything.
A paper detailing the team’s work
was published in the journal Nature
Materials. CREDIT: H CUI, ZHENG LAB
Much like the platypus
(Ornithorhynchus anatinus), the marsupial
lion had a weird mash-up of features.
Weighing more than 100 kilograms,
it was roughly the size of a modern-day
jaguar, but unlike the jaguar, or its African
lion namesake, Thylacoleo was a pouched
marsupial, related to other antipodean
icons such as the kangaroo, the koala and
the extinct thylacine.
Its jaw – estimated to be the most
powerful of any mammal – bore chisel-
like front teeth and fused cheek teeth,
reminiscent of a pair of gardening
secateurs, the likes of which aren’t seen in
any other mammal.
Its muscular forearms were topped off
with fearsome hooked first claws. These
were retractable – another unique feature
not seen in any other marsupial. CREDIT: CLAY BRYCE
16 — DIGEST
COUNTING THE
PSYCHOLOGICAL COST
OF CLIMATE CHANGE
WHEN HELEN BERRY learns that I’m
the same age as one of her children, she
apologises for the situation her generation
has created.
“I didn’t do it, but I’ve been implicit in
it,” she tells me. “I feel terrible about it, I
really do. It’s no world to leave you.”
Berry is the inaugural Professor of
Climate Change and Mental Health at the
University of Sydney, where she explores
the complex ways in which climate change,
disasters and place influence mental health
and wellbeing – and what we can do to
adapt and protect ourselves.
Her career started in a very different
place. Born in north London, she first
went to university in Scotland to study
languages. An Australian boyfriend
brought her to Canberra at the age of 24,
and she’s been here ever since.
A graduate program led her to work
in the public service for a decade, where
she became fascinated by leadership
and management. She enrolled in a few
psychology subjects at ANU, ended up
completing a second undergraduate
degree with honours, then, as large
groups began to interest her more
than individuals, started a PhD in
epidemiology.
Her research began to intersect with
climate change during a postdoc at ANU’s
National Centre for Epidemiology and
Population Health, where she met Tony
Planning fire control strategies in Miena, Tasmania,
in January 2019.
CREDIT: HEATH HOLDEN / GETTY IMAGES
McMichael — the late epidemiologist who
alerted the world to the health effects of
climate-induced crises.
“Climate change is not just about
disruptions to the local economy or loss
of jobs or loss of iconic species,” he once
said. “It’s actually about weakening the
foundations of the life support systems
that we depend on as a human species.”
Berry took this idea and extended it to
mental health. She’s one of few pioneers
in a field she says is “still very stigmatised”
and hugely underfunded.
Research into the effects of climate
change on human health has steadily
climbed over the past decade, while
equivalent research into mental health has
plateaued, even though climate-induced
disasters are already wreaking havoc on
the mental health of many.
Climate change doesn’t cause mental
health problems or create new categories
of mental disorders, she says, but it is
“exacerbating existing problems and
creating risk”.
It is increasing the frequency and
intensity of weather-related disasters and
exposing more people to extreme events
and ramifications such as food shortages,
power cuts, and damage to public
infrastructure, transport, agricultural
lands and sacred places.
Those with underlying risks – such as
existing health or mental health issues,
Issue 82
or those living in poverty – are put
under greater strain, leading to a greater
prevalence of psychological problems
such as anxiety, depression, grief, distress,
trauma and even suicide.
This means, of course, that certain
groups are disproportionately affected,
depending on where they live, their social
and political resources, and their wealth.
“We did a study with Queensland
Health following the 2010-11 Queensland
floods,” Berry says. “What we found was if
you lived in a poorer area you were two or
three times more likely than people living
in wealthy areas to get flooded in the first
place, and if you were flooded you were
twice as likely to be traumatised as a result
of being flooded – so you have a double
risk factor.”
The tricky thing is that we need good
mental health to effectively deal with and
respond to our changing world, yet the
effects of climate change may take these
mental tools away from us.
So, can we prevent or minimise the
psychological impacts of climate change?
There are many potential answers,
including giving affected communities
adequate warning before a disastrous
weather event; providing high-quality
training and support to first responders
and equipping emergency services to deal
with increased capacity; and managing
natural disasters as a cycle rather than
COSMOS
Helen Berry works at the
intersection of global
warming and mental health.
She discusses her work
with LAUREN FUGE.
isolated events, with communities
recognising that there will be more to come
and preparing services and using past
experience to better plan for the future.
But there is one thing that may help
people more than any logistical solutions.
“One of the best things that you can do for
your mental health – other than try not to
be born poor or in the wrong country or
anything like that – is to be well socially
connected,” Berry says.
She hopes her own work will help in
implementing not just solutions but also
preventative measures.
As the science is now good enough
to make fine-grain predictions about
how different regions will be affected by
climate change, she envisages a program
where communities are armed with the
knowledge of their localised risks and
given the support and resources to prevent
disasters from becoming catastrophic
to their environments and their mental
health.
She’s applied for funding many times
to kickstart such a project, but has so
far not been successful, likely due to the
combined power of the reluctance to act on
climate change and the underfunding and
stigmatisation of mental health.
For now, she is instead focused on
international collaborations such as
working with the Lancet Countdown,
which tracks progress on health and
A flooded road in Townsville, Queensland,
in February 2019.
CREDIT: IAN HITCHCOCK / GETTY IMAGES
“I BELIEVE THAT THE WORLD AND
HUMANITY AND HUMAN HEALTH IN
PARTICULAR ARE IN GREAT DANGER
AND WE HAVE A MORAL OBLIGATION
TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT.”
climate change, to include indicators of
mental health.
“Australia is actually the centre of
climate change and mental health work; it’s
just that Australia itself is not interested in
it,” she says with a somewhat sad laugh.
Though climate change has not affected
her own mental health, Berry says is does
worry her. “People have absolutely no idea
how bad it’s going to be and how serious
this threat is.”
But her research, she tells me, is
actually a cause for optimism. “If we
do grasp the nettle and start looking at
adaptation and mitigation seriously, we
could end up with … a much more difficult
world from the perspective of weather and
climate, but a much better world in the
social and political sense, one in which we
are happier and healthier.”
Australia has a long way to go before
achieving these pipe dreams, but Berry
tries to live her own life in a sustainable
way.
She walks and cycles where possible,
and eats a “climate-friendly” diet: not
DIGEST — 17
CLIMATE WATCH
just because a plant-based diet reduces
emissions from industrial agriculture,
but also because a healthy body will be an
important asset to adapt going into the
future.
She adds that she’s very aware that
an “individual’s capacity to choose is
enormously constrained by who and where
they are”.
While individual choices do matter,
they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
The choices made at higher levels of
organisation are far more important,
Berry says, “partly because those levers
are bigger – if you pull those levers you get
much more change much faster and much
more effectively”.
She gives examples such as the
government’s ability to implement an
improved public transport system where
everyone lives within five minutes of
efficient transport, or to install solar panels
on social housing.
Though conducting balanced research
is her main priority, she says she also sees
herself as an activist.
“I definitely see my role in climate
change and health research as a political
role as well as a scientific role. I’m
absolutely partisan ... I believe that the
world and humanity and human health in
particular are in great danger and we have
a moral obligation to do something about
that.”
18 — DIGEST
TECHNOPHILE
The Time
Machine
A new space-borne telescope will see farther
than any man-made instrument before it, and
reveal more secrets about our origins and our
destiny, as DREW TURNEY reports.
AS ANYONE WITH even a passing knowledge of astronomical
hardware knows, space-borne telescopes unaffected by
the light pollution and light-refracting soup of Earth’s
atmosphere are our most useful tools for figuring our what’s
going on in the universe.
For the last few decades, one name – Hubble – has been
synonymous with the field, but that is set to change.
When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is finally
launched, it will feature different instruments set to different
parameters, allowing scientists to see farther than ever
before: even back to the epoch of the first few galaxies that
formed a mere couple of hundred million years after the Big
Bang.
Webb, who died in 1992, was NASA’s administrator
during the Apollo 11 moon landing era.
As long ago as 1965 he wrote that a large telescope
orbiting in space should be a priority for the US space
agency. If all goes to plan, his vision will become reality
during 2021 when the JWST rises from a launch pad in
French Guiana aboard an Ariane 5 rocket.
It has taken a while to get to this stage. The planned
launch has been moved almost every year since 1997 and the
cost has risen from US$500 million to almost $10 billion.
But the wait – and the cost – will be worth it.
Why? We’ve probably all seen those jaw-dropping
images from Hubble, of galaxies just like ours that might
contain trillions of advanced civilisations, scattered like so
many forgotten seashells across the void. The JWST will
make those look like the first prototypes from Galileo’s
workshop by comparison.
Instead of Hubble’s near ultraviolet, visible and near
infrared spectra, the JWST will scan lower frequencies, from
long-wavelength visible light to mid-infrared, letting it see
high redshift objects that are too old and far for any existing
technology – never mind that we can’t even service Hubble
now that the US space shuttle fleet has been mothballed.
The project is a collaboration between NASA, the
European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space
Agency (CSA), with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Centre developing the hardware and Northrup Grumman
manufacturing it.
Issue 82
THE VEHICLE
Looking like an attack ship from a very friendly galactic
invasion force, the JWST will be the size of a tennis court,
the five-layered sunshield covered in Kapton, a proprietary
polyimide film that will keep infrared light and heat from the
sun, the Moon, the Earth and the vehicle’s own electronics
from affecting the mirrors.
The main 6.5-metre wide mirror comprises 18
hexagonal panels made of lightweight beryllium and
covered with gold. Drive systems and actuators control each
panel individually through up to six degrees of movement,
position and curvature, which will let mission controllers
make incredibly fine adjustments to set the directional
focus.
Four main instruments are packed into the box at the
back of the primary mirror. The spectrometer is the tool that
lets us repurpose visible light into a spectrum that reveals
properties about the chemical composition of the object.
The near infrared camera is the primary visible light imager.
The Fine Guidance Sensor/Near Infrared Imager and
Slitless Spectrograph or FGS/NIRISS (as always, NASA
could take a leaf out of Apple’s book when it comes to
naming its stuff ) lets the platform target an object with high
precision so the instruments can stay focused on it long
enough to gather as much data as possible.
The Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) is the time
machine that will reveal the redshifted light of distant
galaxies.
FLIGHT AND CONTROLS
The JWST will technically orbit the sun rather than the
Earth. Fourteen days after launch, the secondary mirror will
deploy and the whole thing will be ready for action, but it
won’t reach its destination – the second Lagrangian point –
until after a month of flight.
One-and-a-half million kilometres out from us, in the
opposite direction of the sun, the combined gravitational
pull of the Earth and sun will keep the JWST in its orbit,
moving slightly faster than us so as to stay in line as it peers
outward into deep space.
The underside of the sunshield facing Earth contains
the solar panels, the enclosure that will hold the rolled up
sunshield during launch, the spacecraft bus containing the
electrical and drive systems, the antenna to communicate
with us back home and more.
COSMOS
WHAT WE’LL SEE
More sensitive by a factor of 100 than anything that’s come
before – including Hubble –the JWST will end what’s been
called the Dark Ages. We’ll be able to see artefacts from the
reionisation period, an epoch between 500 million and a
billion years after the Big Bang, when galaxies and quasars
began to coalesce and form out of the chemical soup.
Giving us a clearer view of those objects will let us
compare them with more recent examples, such as the
giant spirals and ellipses of our own home, giving us a
DIGEST — 19
better idea of how galaxies are born and evolve.
It will also be able to see through the giant clouds of gas
and dust that normally obscure stars and planets as they
form, giving us more clues about their make-up and chemical
conditions like atmospheres. From there it might be a hop,
step and jump to seeing the building blocks of amino acids
and proteins (or whatever their local equivalents are) in
action elsewhere in the universe, maybe peeling the lid off
the formation of life itself.
ILLUSTRATION: ANTHONY CALVERT
20 — VIEWPOINT
KATIE MACK is a theoretical astrophysicist who focuses on finding
ASTRO KATIE
new ways to learn about the early universe and fundamental physiccs.
A DARK AND
MYSTERIOUS INFLUENCE
DARK ENERGY IS WITHOUT a doubt the
weirdest thing in the universe. Despite
being present in every corner of the cosmos
and dominating its evolution, dark energy
is so far outside our best existing theories of
physics that we’re still trying to figure out if
it’s something in the universe or just a basic
property of space itself.
And it would be nice to know a bit more
about it, because if you look ahead on a
long enough timescale, dark energy will
almost certainly destroy the universe and
everything in it.
Here’s an analogy for how dark energy
works. Imagine you throw a baseball up in
the air. The baseball and the Earth here are
standing in for galaxies moving apart from
each other in our expanding universe, and
your throw is the expansion set off by the
Big Bang.
Now, because both the baseball and
the Earth have mass, gravity wants to pull
them back together, no matter how hard
your throw. Even if you have an inhumanly
good arm and throw the ball fast enough to
escape the Earth entirely, gravity will still
slow the ball down at some level. Maybe
the ball will fall back down; maybe it’ll coast
through space forever. But what it won’t do
is suddenly speed up and shoot off into the
sky, defying gravity in the truest sense of
the term.
But that’s what the universe is doing.
After a nice long period of reasonable
post-Big-Bang slowing, about five billion
years ago, the expansion of the universe
began inexplicably speeding up. Whatever
is causing that to happen, we call “dark
energy”.
The “dark” in dark energy just refers
to the fact that we can’t see dark energy
and have no idea what it actually is. But it
might as well be a reference to what it does
to our cosmos. A universe whose expansion
is accelerating is one in which galaxies are
relentlessly driven apart from each other.
Space on the whole gets darker, emptier,
and colder, and the lack of interactions
ASTROPHYSICS
starves galaxies of their supply of fuel
for new stars. Stars die, matter decays,
and eventually the cosmos is devoid of
all structure, with only trace amounts of
radiation wandering aimlessly through the
void.
This rather bleak, lonely denouement
is known as the Heat Death. But it could be
worse. Much worse.
The standard explanation of dark
energy is a cosmological constant – an idea
Einstein first proposed in 1917 as an added
term in his equations of gravity to explain
why the universe appeared to be static
instead of collapsing upon itself. When
If you look ahead on a
long enough timescale,
dark energy will almost
certainly destroy the
universe.
expansion was discovered soon after, the
cosmological constant term was thrown
out, only to be dragged out again decades
later as a possible culprit for accelerated
expansion.
A cosmological constant fits the data at
least as well as any other explanation, but
from a theoretical viewpoint it’s a mess.
It represents vacuum energy – a kind of
minimum energy inherent to empty space,
one whose density stays constant no matter
how much the universe expands – but its
magnitude is all wrong.
The best theoretical calculations we
can do from particle physics theories
suggest vacuum energy should be at least
120 orders of magnitude stronger. And
we know that this quantum mechanical
version of vacuum energy has to be there,
because it’s been detected experimentally,
causing tiny metal plates to move very,
very slightly via a phenomenon called
the Casimir Effect. But if cosmological
Issue 82
constant were strong enough to make
the whole theoretical story fit together, it
would do more than slowly isolate galaxies
over time. It would violently rip apart all
structure in the universe.
So we’re left with a conundrum. It
would, in some ways, be easier to explain
a universe with no cosmological constant
than with a bizarrely small one. And there
have been explanations of dark energy that
don’t involve Einstein’s term at all. Some
of these allow for dark energy’s density
to be changing over time. In fact, some
recent observations of the expansion of
the universe as deduced from very distant
exploding stars and supermassive black
holes have lent support for just that idea.
Unfortunately, “dynamical” dark
energy comes with its own issues. If dark
energy gets more powerful over time, as
some of these observations have suggested,
it, too, can tear the universe apart.
So perhaps we should hold out hope for
a heat death, that we might go gentle into
that good night. At least it might remind
us to take a moment to appreciate the
beautiful cosmos all around us, while we
still can.
COSMOS
INCURABLE ENGINEER ALAN FINKEL is an electrical engineer, a neuroscientist and the chief scientist of Australia.
PURSUIT OF PERFECTION
WILL SLOW TRANSITION
THE CLIFFS OF CAPE GRIM tower over
the breaking waves at the north western
tip of Tasmania. Perched above is a
research station that collects samples of
the most pristine air in the world, carried
by the prevailing westerlies thousands of
kilometres across the Indian Ocean.
The message these samples carry is grim
indeed. Every year since recording began
in 1976, the carbon dioxide concentration
has risen. I’ve often looked eagerly at
the graph, hoping to see the downturn in
the slope resulting from the adoption of
national and international agreements to
reduce emissions. It’s not there. Instead,
the slope of the graph is now steeper than
ever.
Our planetwide efforts to reduce
carbon dioxide emissions are not working.
One reason is that the task is much bigger
than most people can fathom. The world
runs on energy and civilisation depends
on it. The existing energy supply system
is enormous and replacing it with low-
emissions alternatives is a journey that will
take decades rather than years.
But perhaps the biggest problem is
that we have no sound roadmap for how
to get there. Some would block the path
altogether, by denying the problem.
Others unintentionally slow the journey,
by seeking perfection.
As an engineer, I can tell you that
pursuing perfection is not the way to
achieve success. Design a perfect bridge
and the expense will mean that it never sees
the light of day. What bridge designers do
is optimise for the key parameters of safety
and cost over an expected lifetime.
A perfect world would indeed run on
solar and wind electricity, supplemented
by batteries, pumped hydroelectricity,
compressed air and stored hydrogen as
energy reservoirs for the dark and windless
intervals. But the reality is that right now
solar and wind provide only 6% of our
worldwide electricity needs and storage
systems are collectively a drop in the ocean.
ENGINEERING
If we were to close down all the coal
fired electricity generators in the next ten
or twenty years, we could try to replace
them through a massive commitment to
building solar and wind, but it is difficult
to conceive that we could build enough
storage in that timeframe. Without this
storage there would be electricity shortages
and the political backlash that slows the
path to the perfect world.
So wherein lies the possible but
imperfect solution?
To support the adoption of larger
quantities of emissions-free solar and
wind generation it will be necessary to
Pursuing perfection is
not the way to achieve
success.
supplement them with conventional
electricity sources such as natural gas fired
electricity or catchment hydroelectricity
(in which rainwater falling in large
catchment areas fills massive dams fitted
with generators).
However, in Australia we haven’t built
a large-scale catchment hydroelectricity
system for more than 50 years and the
likelihood of building more in the future
is slim. Geothermal, wave and tidal
generation, and coal fired electricity with
carbon capture and sequestration are not
ready to operate at the scale we need.
Although nuclear, electricity can
operate at scale, it is politically fraught and
too slow to construct in many countries.
Biofuels can also operate at scale but they
are controversial because it is not clear
to what extent they lower emissions and
scaling up takes away land and water
needed for food production and forests.
That leaves natural gas. Not perfect
– but very good. The carbon dioxide
VIEWPOINT — 21
emissions from modern natural gas
generators are only 40% of the emissions
from the very best modern coal generators.
They have another advantage over coal
in that their output can be ramped up and
ramped down very quickly. This means
that they only have to operate when solar
and wind generation cannot meet demand,
making their overall contribution to
emissions even lower.
In the US, driven by low domestic
prices, the use of natural gas has grown
dramatically, in many cases displacing
coal, with the result that energy-related
emissions there have fallen 15% since the
increase in natural gas production began in
the mid 2000s.
Natural gas generators are compact,
high capacity and in a mature stage of their
design cycle. We can build them as quickly
as needed to support increased variable
solar and wind electricity generation.
If we could agree to utilise our abundant
natural gas to support the roll out of more
wind and solar electricity, while managing
local environmental concerns about natural
gas production and accepting that it is very
good rather than perfect, we would be able
to lower emissions more quickly.
And at Cape Grim, the news would start
getting cheerier.
22 — COVER STORY ISSUE 82

ILLUSTRATION: MARK GARLICK / SCIENCE PHOTOLIBRARY

COSMOS COVER STORY — 23

LIFE ON
MARS – THE
EVIDENCE
ASSESSED
RICHARD A LOVETT sifts through the myths,
legends, clues, facts and red herrings.
24 — COVER STORY
Face on Mars: A 1976 photograph taken by NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft that generated public interest in the Red Planet.
CREDIT: CORBIS / GETTY IMAGES
IN 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli
turned his 21.8-centimetre telescope – one of the finest
of the time – on the enigmatic disk of Mars.
Scientists had long known that rather than simply
being a point of light in the sky Mars was an entire
world unto itself, but Schiaparelli was the first to
attempt to map it in detail.
He observed dark areas, which he presumed to
be seas, connected by linear features hundreds of
kilometres long. He dubbed the latter canali, a term
that technically means channels, but was translated
into English as “canals.”
In the 1870s and ’80s, Schiaparelli mapped Mars
again and again, convincing himself that the canal
system was rapidly expanding – much as if an advanced
civilisation were desperately trying to preserve its
water supply in the face of drought.
Even at the time, many of Schiaparelli’s colleagues
were dubious, wondering, in the words of US
astronomer David Weintraub in his 2018 book Life
on Mars (Princeton University Press), whether these
Issue 82
features were simply “the result either of bad optics in
Schiaparelli’s telescope or in his own head.”
But Schiaparelli’s vision captured the public
imagination. Others would even suggest that the Red
Planet’s colour was due to ruddy vegetation, much as
if it were covered in Japanese maples. In 1938, Orson
Welles’ radio adaptation of War of the Worlds panicked
hundreds of thousands of listeners, convincing them
that death-dealing Martian “tripods” were on the verge
of showing up at their doorsteps.
In 1976, when NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter provided
the first good images of Mars, one, dubbed the “Face on
Mars”, entered tabloid infamy as proof that humanoid
aliens once existed on our planetary neighbour, creating
giant structures that would put the ancient Egyptians to
shame.
We now know that the Face on Mars, like the
canals, was a trick of light and shadow. But the search
for life on the planet continues to tantalise. Orbiting
spacecraft and landers have proven that Mars was once
remarkably Earthlike, with oceans, lakes and rivers,
COSMOS
Martians attack Earth in this illustration from a 1906 edition of The War of the Worlds by English author H G Wells.
CREDIT: BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES
plus an atmosphere considerably denser than the thin
film it has today.
The Red Planet’s earliest epoch is now officially
dubbed the Noachian – a term designed to conjure
images of vast amounts of water.
Today, the burning question isn’t whether Mars
might once have been habitable – at various times in
its distant past, it most certainly was – but whether it
might have developed life before its climate became
too cold and dry. If so, that would be evidence of what
astrobiologists call a “second genesis” of life (the first
being our own).
Even if that second genesis never developed beyond
single-celled microorganisms, it would mean that life
arose at least twice in our own solar system. And if
that happened here, how often might it have occurred
on the thousands of planets astronomers are finding,
circling distant stars? And, how often might some of
those microorganisms evolved into creatures like us?
The easiest way to find life on Mars would be if
a multi-tentacled something from a science-fiction
COVER STORY — 25
writer’s dream jumped out from behind a rock and
waved to us: “Welcome, Earthings, here I am!” Second
best would be if a rover were to scoop up a soil sample
and see a bunch of wriggling microorganisms.
But the surface of Mars is an extremely harsh
environment, and signs of life, if it exists or ever
existed, could be hard to detect. But that doesn’t mean
there aren’t a number of well-thought-out ways to hunt
for it.
1 | LOOKING FOR STRUCTURES IN ROCKS
On Earth, this means fossils. “Dinosaur bones,”
says Jorge Vago, project scientist for the European
Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars project. “If you see
something like that, you can tell it was alive.”
But sadly, that won’t apply to microorganisms.
“You would need an electron microscope to see them,”
Vago says, “and you can’t fly that to Mars.” Even if you
could, “they are little rods and spheres and there are all
kinds of processes that have nothing to do with life that
can produce rods and spheres”.
26 — COVER STORY
That was exactly the problem in 1984, when
scientists found a 1.9-kilogram meteorite in the Allan
Hills region of Antarctica: a meteorite that proved to
be a chip blasted off the surface of Mars by an ancient
asteroid impact.
When electron microscope images showed rod-
shaped structures that looked a lot like fossilised
microbes, scientific excitement was so intense that even
US President Bill Clinton spoke about it in a White
House briefing. Then it all went bust.
“It was pretty quickly shown to be something
not related to Mars life,” says Abigail Allwood, an
Australian geologist and astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
“It was either terrestrial contamination of the rock, or
not biological.”
Since then, Allwood says, other features in the
Allan Hills meteorite have been suggested to have had
biological origins, but these too have been shot down
by arguments that they could be the result of geological
processes.
A 2.72-billion-year-old fossil stromatolite, near
Nullagine River in the Pilbara.
CREDIT: AUSCAPE / GETTY IMAGES
Issue 82
The problem, she says, is that Mars meteorites are
simply rocks, ripped out of their geologic settings.
“If we had some understanding of the context in
which the rocks formed,” she adds, “we would be able
to determine whether the biological or abiological
hypothesis was correct. The problem with meteorites is
we don’t have that context.”
This problem, however, doesn’t apply to rovers
operating on the surface of Mars, which might be able
to detect imprints left by entire colonies of microbes.
“Not one microorganism,” says Vago, “but billions of
them.”
Such formations have been found on Earth, in
places like the Pilbara Terrane of Western Australia,
where a team led by Allwood has detected features
known as stromatolites – mound-like structures
formed by mats of single-celled organisms – in rocks
3.43 billion years old
Vago suggests that similar formations could be
found on Mars, particularly in regions that were
once lake-bottoms, close to ash-spewing volcanoes.
COSMOS
“The way the ash settles is different if there is life,”
he says. “If there is no life, ash would settle at the
bottom and the layers would form roughly horizontal
horizons.”
But if there are colonies of microbes on the lake
bottom, these microorganisms could wind up trapping
sediment grains into stromatolite-like structures,
“an imprint that tells you that microbes were there”.
2 | BIOSIGNATURES IN ANCIENT ROCKS
Nearly as good as finding a fossil would be finding rocks
containing chemicals related to life.
Not that scientists would be looking for chemicals
identical to our own lipids, proteins, and DNA. Rather,
they’d be looking for remnants of whatever Mars
life might have used in lieu of such chemicals. These
remnants, which might be hardy enough to persist
billions of years, might have four traits that would
make them stand out, Vago and colleagues wrote in
2017, even if they are quite different from the chemical
An artist’s impression of InSight lander probing
surface of Mars.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-CALTECH
COVER STORY — 27
building blocks use by earthly life. These are:
• Homochirality.
Many organic molecules are asymmetrically shaped,
which means they come in “left handed” and “right
handed” versions. Abiotic processes tend to produce
equal numbers of each. Biological ones only produce
one or the other. Organic chemicals have been found
on Mars, but the Curiosity rover, which detected
them, isn’t equipped to test them for chirality.
• “Clustering” of molecular structures and masses.
Earth life tends to favour building blocks that fall
into limited size ranges. Lipids, for example, tend to
cluster in the 14- to 20-carbon range, even though
there is no theoretical reason for them not to have
more or fewer numbers of carbons. Similarly, the
five nucleotide bases used by our DNA and RNA
(four for DNA, and another in RNA) have molecular
weights between 112 and 151, while the amino acids
28 — COVER STORY
we use to make proteins range in molecular weight
from 75 to 204. “If you find that you have ‘islands’
of compounds,” Vago says, “this clustering is a
biosignature.”
• Repeating molecular subunits.
Life as we know it likes to build chemicals in pieces,
adding on sub-units one at a time. We see this in
proteins and DNA, but it also shows up in smaller
molecules, like lipids, which are assembled in two-
carbon units – meaning that they tend to have
even numbers of carbons (14, 16, 18 and so on).
Isoprenoids – components of essential oils and
pigments, including chlorophyll – are assembled in
five-carbon subunits. Even if these chemicals have
broken down over time, their degradation products
retain similar patterns. “This is something that
doesn’t happen unless life was involved,” Vago says.
• Isotope ratios.
Biological processes – at least the ones we know –
tend to work slightly differently, with compounds
containing different isotopes of important atoms
like carbon. Abiotic ones generally have no such
preference. On Earth, this is most obviously the case
with the two stable isotopes of carbon, 12C and 13C,
with the heavier 13C isotope being disfavoured.
The effect isn’t huge, but is measurable enough that
ratios of these two isotopes can be used to determine
if carbon-containing compounds are of biological or
abiological origin. It can even be used to determine if
steroids and hormones in athletes suspected of being
drug cheats are laboratory-synthesised or produced
by their own bodies. On Mars, any variation in
12C/13C ratios from background level would be a
red flag for the workings of life, not geology.
3 | SNIFFING FOR METHANE
It is possible, of course, that a future rover might scoop
up living organisms, rather than degraded chemicals
contained in ancient rocks. But that’s no problem, Vago
says. “If you have a payload that is designed to detect
the much more challenging signs of past life; if you were
to pick up a sample containing living microorganisms,
it would be a walk in the park to detect the chemical
components of those.”
But another way of searching for signs of existing
life is by testing the Martian atmosphere for methane.
On Earth, methane is mostly produced by biological
activity, ranging from cow farts to decomposing plants.
But it is also produced by geological processes, such as
the interaction of water with a mineral called olivine in
a process called serpentisation because it produces the
green-coloured rock known as serpentine.
In 2004, ESA’s Mars Express orbiter detected
Issue 82
traces of methane at various places around the planet,
but this has been frustrating, says JPL scientist Chris
Webster, because each was a one-off event, with no
discernable pattern.
Then, in 2018, Webster reported that six Earth
years of measurements (three Mars years) by the
Curiosity rover had found atmospheric levels of
methane that peaked in the summer and dropped in
autumn and winter – that might or might not suggest
the presence of methane-producing microorganisms
that wake up in warm weather, then go back into
hibernation for the winter. “This is the first time we’ve
seen something repeatable in the methane story,”
Webster says, “[but] we don’t know if it’s from rock
chemistry or microbes.”
There’s just one fly in the ointment. A few months
later, at the 2018 annual meeting of the American
Geophysical Union, in Washington, DC, Vago’s team
reported that ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter, which has
been circling Mars since 2016, has been unable to
find measurable amounts of methane anywhere in the
Martian atmosphere. This does not mean that there
couldn’t be localised puffs of it, such as Curiosity
observed in Gale Crater, but it does raise questions
about how prominent they might be on a global scale.
4 | DIG, BABY, DIG
One thing scientists agree on is that if there is methane
on Mars, it’s probably percolating up from the
subsurface, either due to seasonal changes in microbial
activity or, more likely, seasonal changes in the ability
of the surface to allow gas to escape from deeper down.
We also know that the surface of Mars is extremely
inhospitable, thanks to an atmosphere that is too thin
to block out harsh radiation and high levels of oxidising
chemicals such as perchlorates. “We use [perchlorates]
for sterilisation,” says John Moores, a planetary
scientist from York University, Ontario, Canada.
What’s needed is to peer beneath the surface,
beyond the reach of damaging radiation and oxidants.
NASA’s InSight lander, which touched down on
26 November 2018, will begin the process by
eavesdropping on the seismic echoes of marsquakes
– Martian earthquakes – the vibrations of which
can reveal much about the Martian interior. But the
results of that will be mostly of interest to deep-interior
geophysicists. The next step, says Vlada Stamenković, a
planetary scientist and physicist at JPL, is to use remote
sensing to look for places that might have water, then
drill as deep as we can.
That sounds like an immense task, but it doesn’t
actually require carrying tonnes of construction
materials to Mars and setting up something akin to an
oil derrick. Instead, Stamenković says, it can be done
with something called a wireline drill. “You can go as
COSMOS
deep as you have wire,” he says. “There are wires where
a kilometre weighs less than a kilogram.” Weight can
also be saved, he and colleagues wrote this January in
Nature Astronomy, by compressing carbon dioxide
from the Martian atmosphere and using it in lieu of
traditional drilling fluids to flush materials back to the
surface.
What might be found down there is anybody’s
guess. But in a 2018 paper in Nature Geoscience another
team led by Stamenković argued that we might drill
into a region capable of supporting not just methane-
producing bacteria, but aerobic life.
Currently, oxygen is only 0.145% of the Martian
atmosphere (compared to 21% of Earth’s), but under
temperature and pressure conditions known to occur
near the surface, Stamenković’s team calculated,
startlingly large amounts could wind up being dissolved
in briny Martian groundwater – far more than needed
to support aerobic organisms as complex as earthly
sponges.
Not that oxygen is the only thing these organisms
would need. “There are many other requirements for
aerobic life,” says David Catling, a planetary scientist at
the University of Washington, Seattle. But the idea that
there could be enough oxygen down there, today, to
support a relatively complex ecosystem is nevertheless
exciting.
5 | TRACES OF ANCIENT AIR
Whether you’re looking for present-day life or signs of
long-gone life, a major question is whether the Martian
atmosphere was ever thick enough to heat the planet
sufficiently to give it a chance to form.
There is abundant geologic evidence that Mars was
once warm enough to have liquid water. But did this
occur over a long period of time, or in intermittent
epochs? It’s an open question, says Moores.
Enter Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN
(MAVEN ), a NASA spacecraft that has been orbiting
the planet since 2014, studying how the Martian
atmosphere interacts with interplanetary space.
“We’ve been able to determine that a large fraction has
been lost,” says its principal investigator, Bruce Jakosky
of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at
the University of Colorado, Boulder.
That sounds like evidence for an initially thick
atmosphere that might have taken a while to erode by
enough to put the planet into the deep freeze. But that’s
not necessarily the case. It’s possible that the Martian
atmosphere was sometimes thick and sometimes
thin, producing the type of intermittent warming and
cooling suggested by Moores.
“Think of it as being analogous to the money in
your wallet,” Jakosky says. “You can be paying out a
lot of money, but that doesn’t determine whether you
COVER STORY— 29
Victoria Crater, an 800-metre impact crater at
Meridiani Planum, near equator of Mars.
CREDIT NASA / SCIENCE ASTRONOMY PLANET
had a little or a lot at any time. You might be constantly
replenishing your wallet from the ATM, with only a
few dollars at any time.” It’s a difference that could
have been crucial in whether the planet was ever warm
enough, for long enough at a stretch, for life to have had
a realistic chance of getting started.
6 | PICKING THE RIGHT PLACE TO LOOK.
NASA’s next mission, the Mars 2020 rover, is headed
for a 45-kilometre-wide basin known as Jezero Crater.
It was chosen because it once hosted a lake, with a river
draining in from the surrounding highlands to produce
a large delta. “A delta is extremely good at preserving
biosignatures, [be they] evidence of life that might have
existed in the lake water, or at the interface between the
sediment and the lake water, or, possibly, things that
were swept in by the river and deposited in the delta,”
project scientist Ken Farley, said in a late 2018 press
conference, according to space.com.
But places like the Jezero delta aren’t the only
ones that might preserve signs of life. Martin van
Kranendonk, director of the Australian Centre for
Astrobiology at the University of New South Wales,
suggests that it is also possible to look for life signs at
the types of places where life might have originated.
Scientists once believed that these places would
have been undersea hydrothermal vents, where
important chemicals are expelled up from deep in the
crust. But current theory says that hot-spring pools
like those in America’s Yellowstone National Park
probably make better candidates because, however
many interesting chemicals might be emitted by
undersea vents, they don’t have much time to form
more complex pre-biotics. “They just dissipate and
disappear,” van Kranendonk says.
Hot springs pools, on the other hand, present no
such problems. They also experience fluctuating water
levels that produce altering wet and dry cycles – just
the thing, laboratory experiments have shown, needed
to cause small molecules to link into ever-larger chains.
“They are complexity machines,” van Kranendonk
says.
30 — COVER STORY
Hot springs like Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park are probably better equipped to preserve life than craters
on Mars.
CREDIT: LONELY PLANET IMAGES
These hot springs also produce the mineral silica,
which van Kranendonk describes as “the Egyptian
tomb of the geological world. It perfectly preserves
features, including signs of life”.
Furthermore, they are known to have existed on
Mars, because in 2007 NASA’s Spirit rover found the
remnants of one in a location called Home Plate in the
Columbia Hills region of Gusev Crater. “We think a
second genesis is likely on Mars because it has the right
ingredients for what is now thought was the recipe on
Earth,” van Kranendonk says.
So was there or wasn’t there a second genesis on Mars?
The only evidence we currently have is that we haven’t
yet found it.
If life still exists, it’s most likely retreated far
enough underground to be invisible to the type of
orbiting instruments and rovers we’ve used to date.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Nor does the
fact that so far we’ve not found any true signatures
Issue 82
of ancient life provide much evidence that it didn’t
exist. Even on Earth, traces of ancient life are rare and
scattered.
If we someday find such traces, one of the mantras
of science is that extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence. In the case of life on Mars,
JPL’s Allwood says that this means that “every single
biological hypothesis you can come up with” is going to
have to be ruled out before it is accepted. No ifs, buts,
or maybes. Evidence of life on Mars will need absolute
proof.
It’s a tough task, but not, Allwood believes,
impossible. “I think the evidence will be there if life was
there,” she says. “It’s a matter of how good a job we can
do.”
RICHARD A LOVETT is a science writer and science
fiction author, based in Portland, Oregon.
COSMOS COVER STORY — 31

Jezero Crater, Mars.

CREDIT: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/MSSS/BROWN UNIVERSITY
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COSMOS
If Australia’s wild areas are to last,
support for traditional owners will be
critical. TANYA LOOS reports
WHY WILDERNESS
NEEDS PEOPLE
TO SURVIVE
LAST YEAR AUSTRALIA’S interior
was identified as one of the last great
wilderness areas on Earth, second only to
the extensive boreal forests of Russia and
Canada.
A few months later, the Canadians
turned more than 14,200 square
kilometres of forest lands and waters in
the remote Northwest Territories into
the Edéhzhíe Protected Area. They did so
using the concept and legislative structure
of Indigenous Protected Areas, an idea
borrowed from Australia.
Together these developments suggest
that we may be onto something in this
country, while reminding us that we
actually have a lot of work to do still.
The key to safeguarding Australia’s
remaining wilderness areas, it seems, lies
not in excluding people from them, but
the reverse. The knowledge and skills of
indigenous communities are increasingly
being regarded as essential for the
country’s ecological future.
Let’s look at the bad news first. Our
high “wilderness ranking” is in fact rather
bittersweet, because it reflects the parlous
state of wilderness around the world.
The international team of scientists
that did the assessing was led by James
Watson, professor of conservation science
at the University of Queensland, and PhD
candidate James Allen.
Part of a salt lake in the
Great Sandy Desert, Western Australia.
CREDIT: Auscape / UIG / GETTY IMAGES
They found that more than 77% of
land (excluding Antarctica) and 87%
of the ocean have been modified by the
direct effects of human activity. In all,
94% of the Earth’s wilderness, excluding
Antarctica and the high seas, is located in
only 20 countries, with 70% of it in just
five: Canada, Russia, Australia, the US and
Brazil.
Despite this, the protection of
wilderness areas per se is not included in
any country’s conservation policy.
Australia’s record, Watson points
out, is pretty grim. We have the highest
rate of mammal extinction in the world
– 22 species from continental Australia
and a further five from offshore islands
– and the highest rate of land clearing
in the developed world, particularly in
Queensland.
Industrial development in pristine
areas continues. A typical example is the
Kimberley’s Fitzroy River catchment
which is threatened by a range of human
pressures, from large-scale irrigation,
cropping and cattle grazing to mining, gas
extraction and urban development.
Known as Mardoowarra and
Bandaralngarri by the Aboriginal people
who live in the Fitzroy Valley, the river is
fundamental to the lives of the people of
six language groups. In 2011 the Fitzroy
River system was placed on Australia’s
FEATURE — 33
National Heritage List for its outstanding
cultural and natural values.
Australian conservation scientists
are a generally cautious lot, but in 2018
99 of them issued the Fitzroy River
Science Statement calling for the Western
Australian Government to honour its
commitment to create a new national
park and catchment management plan,
and to recognise the concerns described
in the Fitzroy River Declaration by the
traditional owners.
Given this background, it’s probably
not surprising that Watson is incensed that
Australia did not send an official delegate
(citing security concerns) to the recent
meeting of the Conference of the Parties to
the Convention on Biological Diversity in
Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where delegates
discussed the targets of the Strategic Plan
for Biodiversity Conservation 2011- 2020.
Signatories to the convention,
including Australia, translate the targets
into national level strategies, such as
Australia’s national reserve system.
So let’s turn to the positive part of
this story. A very large proportion of
the wilderness map that Watson and his
team developed for Australia includes
Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs), where
traditional owners who understand the
land are instrumental in what happens to
it in the future.
34 — FEATURE Issue 82

An IPA is not a change in tenure; it is a view of themselves is absolutely not as manipulated “eco-cultural landscapes”.
form of ecological land management of a stakeholders, it is as owners, users and The first understanding of this relationship
protected area with the traditional owners managers of their estate and that the between small mammal diversity and
instrumental in approving how that land government and other people can become indigenous land management only started
is managed, through an agreed plan and partners,” he says. a few decades ago.
an indigenous ranger program. It also At the Tyrendarra IPA in western In the mid-1980s, a team of ecologists
conserves the area’s cultural resources, Victoria, Rose walked me through the travelled inland Australia with skins of
including sacred sites and rock art. volcanic rock fish trap system created by rare or recently extinct mammals, seeking
The concept of IPAs was first floated the Gunditjmara people 6400 years ago, to better understand the presence of
with a range of Land Councils and making it the oldest aquaculture system mammals in this region by drawing upon
traditional owner groups at a meeting in in the world. Channels are created in the the knowledge of the people living in these
Alice Springs in 1995. Land Councils, rocks via the use of very hot fires, then areas. Their study area covered a mere
in particular, were skeptical given their placed to create ponds and weirs through 1.6 million square kilometres, comprising
years of hard land rights battles, but there the wetlands, to farm short-finned eels and several desert regions and districts,
was some interest and in 1998 the first other fish. including the Great Sandy Desert.
IPA, called Nantawarrina, was declared in Such complex engineering feats are Led by Andrew Burbidge from the
South Australia. challenging the common assumption that Western Australian Government, the team
Twenty years later, there are 68 million Australia’s First People were hunter- was surprised to discover that the decline
hectares of IPAs, comprising 45% of gatherers living in resource constrained or disappearance of many mammals, such
Australia’s conservation estate. environments. Other evidence of as the Golden Bandicoot (Isoodon auratus),
Paddy O’Leary works with traditional indigenous occupation as settler societies was directly linked to the time when
owner groups across the entire region is growing, including cultivation of people were forcibly removed or left the
through the Pew Charitable Trust, a non- tubers and grains, and an increased region. When indigenous burning ceased,
government environmental organisation, understanding of the sophisticated species disappeared in 10 or 20 years.
from a central office in Canberra. He application of fire to create resources and Without people “on country”, and the
describes the largest patch on the shape natural environments. associated Aboriginal burning, the ecology
wilderness map. In fact, the flora and fauna we of an area changes markedly. The plant
“It’s a massive interconnected desperately want to conserve today biomass increases, and extensive fires in
area, broken up into many separate was created in part by these intensively the summer months burn hot over huge
sets of IPAs, each run by their own
community, supported by local Aboriginal
organisations, and that is the exciting
story: that management is being delivered
by the traditional owners of that country.”
IPAs are typically on indigenous-
held land and sea country, but can also
be over national parks, Crown land and
sea country. IPAs are accredited against
International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN) criteria.
Gunditjmara elder Denis Rose,
who worked for the Commonwealth
Government in the 1990s and was
instrumental in the creation of the
classification of the first IPA, is keen to
emphasise that the system is not simply a
grant program.
“People might think blackfellas should
be thankful they are getting some money
to do this, but people need to understand
that Aboriginal traditional owners are
Punmu elder and IPA ranger
contributing their land for biodiversity
Minyawe Miller burning Pilbara
conservation purposes as well as cultural
country using traditional fire sticks.
heritage purposes,” he says.
CREDIT: GARETH CATT / KANYIRNINPA JUKURRPA
O’Leary agrees wholeheartedly. “It is
really important to understand people’s
COSMOS
IPA ranger Fabian Gaykamgu
pulling the weed Caltrop on
Murrungga Island, NT.
CREDIT: JOHN SKUJA, MOPRA
areas, reducing cover from predators for
the small to medium sized mammals.
Barry Traill, lead scientist and director
of the Oceans to Outback program at Pew
Charitable Trusts, explains. “Most of the
outback has fewer people on it managing
it now than in the last 50, 60,000 years.
That’s a core ecological problem because
without people, the country becomes
unhealthy. You still have the bush, but
species disappear if it is not looked after.”
In the northwest Kimberley region,
the Australian Conservancy estimates
that 45 species of wildlife are likely to
be functionally lost from the area in
the next 20 years. Its analysis found
that eradication of feral cats would be
the greatest help, but technically was
not feasible. They calculated that the
reintroduction of suitable fire regimes was
the most achievable and cost-effective way
to prevent these extinctions.
Fire and ecology study is a growing
field in Australia, and these findings reveal
complex interactions between fire history
and the resulting floristic structure, the
interactions between the critical weight
range mammals and the movements of
predators and prey in and out of burnt and
unburnt patches.
Ecologists are getting better
at understanding these processes,
particularly with the use of new
technologies, but it is also informative to
get the perspective of traditional owners.
Rarritjiwuy Melanie Herdman, former
chair of Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation
from Arnhem Land, says if we observed
her or a family member carrying out
burning, it would look like they are simply
lighting a fire in some vegetation.
“But there’s a specific time, wind
direction, where the moon sets, the right
timing for us to burn off,” she explains.
“For me, it’s an every year thing, it is just
a given.”
Yolngu people burn to open up the
country and allow access for hunting
kangaroos and goannas, or looking for
wild honey. The Dhimmuru IPA covers
550,000 hectares of Yolngu land and
450,000 hectares of sea country. To
manage the area, the rangers and the board
straddle old and new worlds.
“We use two systems,” Herdmann says
“One system is the Yolngu system – our
kinship system to land and how we look
after our country. And then in the other
side we use the tools from the balanda
world – the western world.
“Always, whether managing feral
animals such as water buffalo, mapping
certain areas of the land, rehabilitating
habitat, we are always in that both ways
mind set; it never switches off.”
At the Tyrendarra IPA, the
Gunditjmara people are working with
scientists to better understand the
hydrology of the Condah Lake system
and restore the flows to an area that has
been drained and dammed for European
farming.
Some IPAs are more successful than
others, of course, and the Country Needs
People Alliance, of which Pew Charitable
Trusts is a lead organisation, says that
indigenous ranger jobs and IPA funding do
not yet meet the scale of the need for active
FEATURE — 35
IDENTIFYING WILDERNESS
Mapping intact ecosystems can be done
on a global scale using high resolution
satellite imagery to assess forest extent,
but this approach fails when assessing
desert biomes, or indeed any areas that
are not forests.
To circumvent this, James Watson
and his team used a kind of reverse
assessment where wilderness is defined
as contiguous areas of land or ocean
greater than 10,000 hectares that are
deemed free of a number of indicators of
human pressures.
Maps created in 2016 for terrestrial
areas and in 2018 for ocean areas are
based on Human Footprint maps created
in the 1990s and updated today.
The advantage of mapping human
pressures is that you capture actions
which have the potential to damage
nature and therefore drive changes in
the ecological system, rather than just
presence or absence of an ecological
state.
Human pressures mapped in
terrestrial environments include built
environments; crop lands; pasture
lands; population density; night-time
lights; railways; major roadways; and
navigable waterways. Pressures for
determining ocean wilderness included
sixteen indicators such as shipping lanes,
fertiliser run off and fisheries.
environmental work across the millions
of hectares, nor the present demand from
traditional owner communities.
However, it is widely acknowledged
that the staged approach to developing the
IPA management plan, and the voluntary
nature of the agreement, has contributed
to its success as a model.
And that’s what impressed the
Canadians. The Edéhzhíe Protected Area
is jointly managed by the Dehcho First
Nations people and the Canadian National
Wildlife Department.
TANYA LOOS is an ecologist and science
writer based in regional Victoria.
36 — FEATURE Issue 82

CREDIT: THEPALMER / GETTY IMAGES

COSMOS
SCIENCE IN THE
WORLD OF
FAKE NEWS
How can we deal in facts when everyone
has an opinion? STEPHEN FLEISCHFRESSER
ponders that and other questions.
IT’S AN AGE OF DIVISION, fake news and denialism.
Epistemic standards that have stood since the
Enlightenment are under siege from alternative facts,
the echo chambers of partisan and social media and
industry lobbyists and think tanks seeking to muddy
the waters about inconvenient truths.
Yet at the same time, science media, dedicated
to evidence and fact-based reporting, is seemingly
experiencing something of a golden age. There are star
scientist communicators and an increasing number of
science-specific outlets across all platforms and media.
It has never been easier or more entertaining to access
quality information about the natural world and our
ongoing quest to unveil it.
But despite this, there seems to be a rise in visibility
of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers and, of course, climate
change sceptics. Science, too, seems to be falling to a
creeping rot of doubt and false equivalency.
The very existence of debates about anthropogenic
climate change and the safety and efficacy of vaccines
stands as proof that something is off in the relationship
between science, science media and the public. The
extent of the problem is hard to gauge and varies from
issue to issue, but the case study of climate change helps
us to see the outlines.
“There is overwhelming scientific consensus that
climate change is real and that we’re driving it. Still…
just 48% of United States adults believe the scientific
consensus,” writes Liza Gross, senior editor for PLOS
Biology in the journal’s recent special collection entitled
Confronting Climate Change in the Age of Denial.
Yet Macquarie University biology professor
Lesley Hughes, a member of Australia’s Climate
Council, says that “ hard-core denialists” number
FEATURE — 37
about 6-8%, though admittedly, she adds, “there is a
larger proportion that still think it’s mostly natural
variability”.
Who are the deniers and how many? “There are
very few of them,” says veteran science broadcaster
Robyn Williams in a Fourth Estate podcast on the
topic, “and they’re of a particular type of a right wing
of politics, an alternative right, alt right. But they
have this immense loudspeaker, noise system that is
drowning out so many that it gives the appearance of
lots in number.”
Nonetheless, according the Australia Institute’s
Climate of the Nation 2018 report, while 76% of the
population acknowledge the reality of climate change,
only 56% believe it is anthropogenic, while 11% deny
its existence altogether. And the situation is similar
in the US, according to the Yale Program on Climate
Change Communication: 70% believe and 57% agree
it’s anthropogenic.
Worryingly, these figures are starkly at odds with
the scientific consensus, which, according to the
landmark 2013 research led by John Cook, sees 97%
of publishing climate scientists agreeing that climate
change is happening and is caused by our own hand.
So, what’s going wrong? Are the masses of scientists
and science communicators who so busily attempt to
engage and inform the lay public – online, in print and
onscreen – failing to adequately explain the science?
The issue might be a little more complicated than that.
The first step is to understand the public. And the
experts agree that there are “publics” rather than a
single monolithic social entity.
Craig Cormick, president of Australian Science
Communicators, has been researching these issues for
38 —FEATURE
Science “fan boys” and “fan girls” are active, but in a
minority.
CREDIT: ERIK MCGREGOR / PACIFIC PRESS / GETTY IMAGES
a book coming out later this year. He suggests “there
is a group of science fan boys and fan girls, who really
love science, and they have never had it so good”. The
fans are the major consumers of science media: they’re
engaged, scientifically literate and really f#@king love
science as the famous Facebook page would have it.
But the fans are few: most of the population are
far more disengaged. They may be interested in other
things, too busy to care, or even distrust science or have
beliefs that are not based on science. This means the
audience for science media is self-selecting fans. “Too
much science communication is reaching out to the
fan boys and fan girls,” says Cormick, “and is failing to
reach the unengaged and disengaged, who need other
framing and other stories to best reach them.”
When it comes to climate change, the public
fractures into even smaller segments. Edward
Maibach, director of the Centre for Climate Change
Communication at George Mason University in the
US, and his colleagues have argued that there are “six
Americas” when it comes to climate change. These
range from those who are most engaged to least, and
from those who most align with the scientific consensus
to those who actively dismiss it.
These same audience segments have also been
found in Australia and other parts of the world. At the
top of the range are the Alarmed and the Concerned:
egalitarian left-leaning people engaged with climate
change and aligned with the underlying science.
Issue 82
Fake news isn’t always a product of the right. This counterfeit New
York Post was produced to highlight the reality of climate change.
CREDIT: SOPA IMAGES / GETTY IMAGES
The Cautious and the Disengaged have little
interest in the issue, with the latter tending to disagree
with the scientific consensus more than the former.
Fewer are university educated and the Disengaged tend
to have lower socio-economic status. Together these
are the least engaged of the six Americas. Or Australias.
Finally, there are the Doubtful and the Dismissive.
These strongly individualist conservative folk tend
to be actively working against the consensus and are
almost as engaged with the issues as the Alarmed
and Concerned. Each of these segments of society
has different characteristics and Maibach and his
colleagues argue that science media needs to tailor the
message for each group.
These distinct “publics” have different beliefs and
values – what we might call worldviews – and they are
enormously important for the way people think about
science.
Sander van der Linden is director of the Cambridge
Social Decision-Making Lab in the UK and research
affiliate of the Yale Program on Climate Change
Communication in the US. His research suggests
that it’s not always about the science: “the social
implications of the science often motivate science
denial more than the basic science itself”.
Scientific claims can be “threatening to either their
sense of self (identity), way of living or values”, and
this drives their reaction to the science. Importantly,
the social implications of the solutions to scientifically
COSMOS FEATURE — 39

BY THE NUMBERS

65
The minimum age of the cohort
most likely to share fake news on
social media, according to research
published in the journal Science
Advances in January 2019.

45
The percentage of Americans
That there is a “debate” about vaccination suggests the who think global warming
science isn’t getting through. will pose a serious threat
CREDIT: SEAN GALLUP / GETTY IMAGES in their lifetimes, according to
a 2018 Gallup Poll.
identified problems play a huge role in whether people
accept or reject science. If a solution, which in the case
of climate change is intrinsically linked to politics,
doesn’t align with their worldview, then they are more
likely to reject the underlying science.

They may be interested in other 1772

things, too busy to care, or even
distrust science or have beliefs
that are not based on science. This
means the audience for science
The year English vicar Edmund
Massey delivered a sermon entitled
The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of
Inoculation, becoming the first recorded
anti-vaccination campaigner.

media is self-selecting fans.

Cormick agrees. “People tend to form an
opinion based on their own values, and then seek
out information to confirm that attitude,”he says.
“This explains how somebody whose values are about
economic development can say ‘trust the science on
500
GM foods, but the science of climate change can’t be
The percentage increase in demand for
trusted’.”
measles vaccinations in fiercely anti-vax
What can we conclude from this?
Clark County, Washington, following 61
There are many different audiences for science
confirmed or suspected cases of the
media and they all digest science through the lens of
disease since 1 January 2019.
their own worldview. If the science, or the solutions to
problems revealed by science, conflict with values or
beliefs that mark out important aspects of their personal
40 — FEATURE
and social identity, then this creates a cognitive
dissonance – a psychological discomfort at holding
contradictory mental content.
There are multiple ways to get around this
discomfort, depending on the audience. Reactions
run from a lack of urgency over an issue too remote
and impersonal to worry unduly over, to doubting the
science, complete disengagement or outright denial.
There is a hypothesis that the more educated climate
deniers use “motivated reasoning” to avoid cognitive
dissonance.
This means they seek out arguments and facts
to justify a position that is predetermined by their
emotions. But because of their education levels, they
are better at it than most, which helps to explain
their spirited counter-arguments. Yet van der Linden
tells Cosmos “any pre-existing motivation to deny
science does not mean that people are immune to
facts”. Motivated reasoners are thus probably “a small
hypermotivated minority”.
In the absence of such conflicts, however,
acceptance of the science is more likely. This explains
the piecemeal attitude of many people toward science
– happy to accept a socially neutral Higgs boson,
but all over Facebook denouncing the global cabal of
immunologists the moment someone suggests they
vaccinate their kids.
Given this situation, science communicators need
to frame the science and its social consequences (such
as political solutions to problems like climate change)
in such a way as to align with the worldviews of the
different segments of the public. The same story, then,
needs framing in multiple ways to align with a wider
range of worldviews. “This is why I spend my time
helping America’s TV weathercasters tell stories about
how global climate change is changing our weather here
in OurTown USA,” says Maibach.
His research suggests that people with little
involvement with science need showing rather than
telling – engaging visuals and a sense of how the
issues relate to them more personally – while those
who are more engaged but harbour suspicions or
antipathy toward science need approaching in a less
confrontational way. Van der Linden agrees: “I think
combining the basic science in a way that illuminates
its value to people’s daily lives is a better way to tell the
story of science.”
While Maibach and colleagues argue that the
engaged are quite comfortable with writing that
embraces the complexity of both the science and
resulting policy discussions, other sections of the
population require science communicators to adopt
different strategies. A key such strategy that has
emerged from a wide range of research is the use of
narrative.
Issue 82
Narrative, or storytelling, is a way of
communicating information that helps people see
larger phenomena through the eyes of an individual
with whom they can intellectually and emotionally
identify. It also helps to evaluate information.
Gross notes that in the 1970s the neuroscientist
Michael Gazzaniga identified a region of the brain
he called “the interpreter” because it tries to “fit
everything into a story, even filling in missing gaps, in
a deep-seated need to create order from chaos”. There
is evidence to suggest that our memories store our
experience in narrative form and it may be “the default
mode of human thought”.
Science communications experts Michael
Dahlstrom from Iowa State University and Dietram
Scheufele from the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
both in the US, contributed to the recent the PLOS
Biology special collection with their article (Escaping)
the paradox of scientific storytelling. And they see a
problem. “A narrative way of thinking is a distinctly
unscientific way of knowledge production because it
focuses on particular instances rather than considering
the full range of possibilities”.
In other words, people are geared to be sensitive to
anecdote but, as one paper waggishly put it, “the plural
of the word anecdote is not data”.
In important ways, this reduces scientific
storytelling to the same level as the narratives from
non-scientific groups; it must compete with the echo
chambers of partisan and social media and a rise
in individualism that threatens the very notion of
expertise.
Cormick sees this as the outcome of a poorly
articulated popularisation of postmodern relativism
that has “primed the ground for social media and
its ability to undermine the certainties that were
once relied on”. The result: a growth of the idea that
everyone’s opinion is equal.
“A downside of the democratisation of new media
and user-generated content is that emotion can trump
knowledge and experts can be found credible based
both on whether you agree with what they say and
the passion with which they say it...” he says. “In a
battle between complex science and simple emotional
appeals, you can guess which one more easily wins out
with many people.”
Peter Fray, professor of journalism practice at
University of Technology Sydney, agrees that social
media plays “the emotional side of people, not the
rational side of people”. This is partly due, he thinks,
to the fact social media systems have no arbitrators
equivalent to the editors of traditional media. In their
stead is a system of rewards based on the metric of
“likes” and “shares”, and, for some, the money that
comes from endorsements.
COSMOS
The internet gives everyone a platform – and an audience – for their views.
CREDIT: SAM MELLISH / GETTY IMAGES
This, however, doesn’t reward civil discourse or
evidence-based debate. “So, who gives a shit if my
meme is right, it’s whether someone shared it,” Fray
says. “Social media is the zenith of the idea that you can
choose your own facts.”
Although recent research has suggested that “fake
news” circulated on social media is less prevalent
than one might think, the platform encourages a false
equivalency between facts and emotions, which in
conjunction with narrative science storytelling seems
to promote unwarranted doubt. “There have always
been groups of people who doubt science, but…the
internet and the age of social media has amplified their
voice, influence and ability to selectively seek out and
credit information that bolsters their worldviews,”
says van der Linden. “Everyone now has a platform
on the internet, so it has become relatively easy to
spread doubt, rumours, myths and conspiracies online
through social networks.”
“Hence, the paradox comes into focus,” write
Dahlstrom and Scheufele. “Storytelling can
meaningfully engage audiences and make scientific
information relevant while simultaneously encouraging
a narrative way of thinking that places scientific stories
FEATURE — 41
on a similar level to any other plausible story that may
or may not support scientific truth.” And this is but
amplified in the internet age.
While the problem is real, we can’t cede the potent
art of storytelling to climate sceptics and their ilk. Is
there, then, a way to escape the paradox?
Rather than trying to communicate the findings
of science through narrative, we should attempt to
tell stories “constructed toward the goal of engaging
audiences to understand the process and credibility
of scientific reasoning,” say Dahlstrom and Scheufele.
Stories that tell us of the use of scientific method to
generate new insights and overcome problems could
“show the process of science through an individual’s
experience”.
But perhaps science communicators haven’t been
terribly successful in this regard up to now. For van
der Linden, a key element missing in the stories of
scientific method is the tale of uncertainty. Science is
driven by uncertainty: it fuels curiosity and leads to
the rigours of the very scientific method itself. This
uncertainty is the impetus for double checking, for
replicating experiments and the grillings doled out by
peer reviewers.
42 — FEATURE
The modern face of scientific opinion.
CREDIT: ROBERTO MACHADO NOA / GETTY IMAGES
This self-scrutiny, whose engine is uncertainty,
often leads to the revision of scientific findings. “But
consider this,” van der Linden says. “If one year science
says that it’s healthy to drink one glass of wine a day
and next year the consensus is that wine is bad for our
health after all, how do you think the public will react?
Instead of being praised for revising and updating
beliefs in light of new evidence, people may instead take
away that scientists don’t know what they’re talking
about, they keep changing their recommendations,
how can we trust them?”
Issue 82
And this points to a very real problem within
science itself. The standard view of science is of a purely
objective faceless collective endeavour, and scientists
have promoted this image. This hyper-objective façade
makes it difficult for the public to accept the review
and revision of scientific findings in the light of new
evidence: something is either true or not and if you
don’t know which, then you have no idea. But science
is an incredibly human cultural enterprise. It’s fallible
and emotional, while striving to be the opposite. This
is unavoidable, as science is the aggregate labour of
human beings. Perhaps a greater public understanding
of the deep humanity of science might cast one of its
great virtues, its ability to update its beliefs, in a better
light.
Or, perhaps it might serve only to amplify doubts
already harboured.
If telling the stories of the scientific method is to
be a convincing strategy, then science communicators
need to hone their craft and deal with the spectre of
uncertainty and doubt that resides at the heart of the
scientific enterprise. And perhaps narrative will help
to humanise science and make this uncertainty more
acceptable.
But there are other, less tractable, problems afoot:
one of which is active voices working to confuse the
issues. Maibach tells the following story. “Yesterday,
I was with a US Senator – a Democrat – who said:
‘The problem isn’t that Republicans don’t get climate
change. The problem is industry opposition to climate
legislation.’ What he was saying is that the fossil fuel
industry has a stranglehold over our political system.
Conservative politicians are terrified of losing their
jobs if they oppose the fossil fuel industry. So even
politicians who know better will say truly stupid things
like ‘the climate has always changed’ rather than cross
the fossil fuel industry. Their statements, in turn, then
help to convince the voters in their party that up is
down and left is right.”
Exactly how scientists and science communicators
are to counter this kind of force majeure is a daunting
question. Whatever the answer, its discovery begs
haste.
Nonetheless, perhaps the greatest challenge
facing science communicators is simply reaching
those portions of the community that do not actively
consume science media. Until science communicators
“start reaching the people who are watching the
Kardashians, they’ve got a problem,” says Fray.
A carefully framed narrative aligned with an
audience’s worldview will do little if they never read it.
So, how to reach them?
Traditional news media seems the obvious answer –
but Fray sees problems. The first of these is that “some
scientific issues fall into the realm of politics. And in
COSMOS FEATURE — 43

the realm of politics I think we use rightly or wrongly, scientific method and finding innovative ways to
I think wrongly, we use a different measuring stick of reach out to those who would otherwise not engage
what constitutes good reporting.” with scientific issues, this doesn’t necessarily mean
News media tends to use the political model of science communicators are failing altogether. There
reporting when dealing with issues like climate change are other forces at work. Perhaps the issues of climate
and vaccines. Different sides of the same debate are change and vaccination are particularly political and
relayed, and the reader is expected to make up their pose novel problems. Fray thinks so. “I don’t think we
own mind. But this political model promotes a false should judge the success of science communication just
equivalency between the two sides of the debate, by climate change. With climate change we’re not just
allowing anti-vaxxers and climate sceptics to enjoy an talking about science, but politics as well.” Industry
undeserved reverence. lobbyists and their chilling effect on politics, social
The second problem is that science reporting is media, the internet and the changing business models
not accorded “the same stature as political reporting. of news media are also major factors, as is the relatively
The function of the science story fits into the ‘gee- small stature of science reporting within traditional
whiz-Martha-look-at-that’ category of stories” often media.
designed to promote a sense of our common humanity, So, what can we – by which I mean the readers (and
rather than to genuinely writers) of Cosmos –
inform about scientific take away from all this?
issues. “When was the While many of the issues
last time a science story are beyond our control
led the news?” Fray asks or will take time and
“The moon landing.” concerted effort, perhaps
The third problem newfound self-awareness
is the collapse of the and an awareness of the
traditional business needs of others is a good
model of news media, place to start. But no one
which has taken science said such things were
reporting with it. While easy, my fellow science
you might not be able fans.
to sell an ad against a According to the
science story, he says, research, we are the
you can against a whole group least likely to
newspaper that has a understand the needs
substantial audience. of other parts of society
Without the revenue, when it comes to science.
Could science communicators learn from the success of
science reporting suffers But at least we now know
social media commentators such as PewDiePie?
and this perhaps has this: when arguing with
CREDIT: J. COUNTESS GETTY IMAGES
contributed to science someone over vaccines
communicators being or climate change, don’t
vastly outnumbered. Liam Mannix at the Sydney just dismiss the sceptic or anti-vaxxer as ignorant,
Morning Herald, for example, is one of the few, if not but rather think of the social values driving their
the only, full-time science writers at a major masthead interpretation and reception of the science. Are there
in Australia. shared values that we can we use to reframe the debate
Fray has a suggestion, however: looking to the to be more productive?
absurdly successful content producers of social media. Perhaps the very act of discussing the relationship
These are people who enjoy millions of followers and between values and knowledge will help us all to reflect
wield real influence. If we can deconstruct and analyse upon our own biases. Maybe from such seeds, and with
what makes producers like PewDiePie or John Green’s time and luck, local bickering can one day become
Crash Course so compelling and redeploy those global cooperation.
strategies in the service of science, then perhaps science
media can cast a wider net.
While it’s clear that science communicators STEPHEN FLEISCHFRESSER is a lecturer at the
can do much to improve the relationship between University of Melbourne’s Trinity College.
science and the public by tailoring stories to different
audiences, telling nuanced human narratives of the
44 — GALLERY Issue 82

ING
A RAYER
Often overlooked, bats are particularly
vulnerable to the effects of human activity.
Recent extreme weather events in Australia
devastated local colonies in the east, while in the
west industrial activity is putting their habitats
at risk. Ecologists warn that such tragedies will
have serious knock-on effects, because bats
play critical roles in dispersing seeds and thus
ensuring the health of plant communities.
COSMOS GALLERY — 45

MACRODERMA GIGAS
The ghost bat (Macroderma gigas) is, paradoxically,
one of the two largest micro-bat species in the world.
In the Pilbara region of Western Australia, the already
endangered cave-dwelling bat is further threatened
by mining operations. Scientists funded by a
collaboration between Perth Zoo, mining companies
and graziers are currently building and installing
artificial bat roosts to replace caves likely to be
damaged by excavations.
CREDIT: AUSCAPE / UIG
46 — GALLERY Issue 82
COSMOS GALLERY — 47

PTEROPUS POLIOCEPHALUS
During an extreme heatwave across eastern
Australia, thousands of fruit bats (Pteropus
poliocephalus) died of heat stress and dehydration.
Some estimates put the toll as high as one-third of
the entire species. The destruction was particularly
high-profile, because many cities and towns,
including Melbourne, Adelaide and Bendigo, proudly
host large fruit bat colonies in local botanical
gardens. Wildlife authorities are researching
strategies to reduce the impact of future hot spells,
with tactics likely to include setting up mist sprays to
keep the animals cool, and expanding carer services
to better take care of orphaned young.
CREDIT: IAN WARDIE / GETTY IMAGES
FEATURE — 48
DO ELECTRIC CARS
REALLY HAVE THE
POWER OF CHANGE?
We want to save the IT’S BEEN CALLED the disruption of the
century, but the explosion of interest in the
planet while staying electric car is neither disruptive nor the
affordably mobile, last word in new-age mobility. It is merely
the harbinger of a flood of new technology
but Australia faces that will rush the personal transport
market as quickly as the silicon chip
special challenges. transformed the way we communicate.
Enveloped by fears of planet warming
NEIL DOWLING attributed to fossil fuel combustion,
reports. and with the backdrop of a planet
rapidly depleting its oil reserves, global
automotive business has plugged in and
switched on the age-old electric vehicle
(EV) and turned off interest in cars that use
oil.
Diesel cars will be banned this year
in selected European cities, among them
Bonn and Cologne in Germany and
London in the UK. Petrol and diesel car
sales will end in Norway in 2025 and in
Sweden and Denmark five years later.
Volvo says it will end diesel and petrol
production this year (making only EVs and
hybrids).
The BMW i8 is a pure EV but comes at a price.
CREDIT: PICTURE ALLIANCE /GETTY IMAGES
Issue 82
Is this now the end of a century-long
passion with the freedom of movement?
Maybe not. But it will have a different
face. You can buy electric vehicles that
run partly on fuel (hybrids), plug in to
electricity mains while running on petrol
or diesel (plug-in hybrids) to add some
fuel-free kilometres, or pure electric
vehicles that run singularly and silently on
batteries.
Twenty years ago, the alternative
personal vehicle fuels were liquified
petroleum gas (LPG), petrol diluted with
sustainable ethanol, and hybrids led by the
Toyota Prius. Spoiler alert: the hybrids
won.
A decade ago, car manufacturers
were intensely interested in battery EVs,
showing commercial viability with the
Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV and Tesla
Model S. Battery EVs were flagged as the
next personal mobility power plant until
parallel development with fuel-cell EVs
started to show production potential.
The global interest on the march away
from fossil fuel vehicles now focuses on
the pure EVs – battery and fuel cell – but
progress to the showroom is slow.
Currently, Australians have a small
choice of pure EVs: the recently-launched
Hyundai Ioniq (also in hybrid and plug-
in); two models from US EV champion
Tesla; the BMW i3 and the sportier (and at
$300,000-plus, very expensive) i8 coupe;
Renault Zoe hatchback and the Kangoo
commercial van; and Jaguar’s I-Pace SUV.
COSMOS
Tesla is the car company that has
done the most this century for promoting
EVs as a viable and stylish alternative to
conventionally-powered vehicles.
Clever marketing, a sprinkle of hype,
and the lure of cars that are fast – very
fast actually – and silent carries all the
ingredients to attract wealthy buyers who
want something technologically ahead of
the field.
Tesla’s founder and former chairman,
Elon Musk, said the car he created was
disruptive and would change the market,
and while the basics of the vehicle are not
revolutionary, he is right in the fact it has
changed the public perception of EVs.
Rival car firms watched while Tesla
moved to a three-model range and sold
201,627 cars in the US, only 20,000
fewer than Audi’s 20 models achieved in
the same market last year. Also in 2018,
Tesla dominated the US EV sector with
a 56% grip on the total sales volume of
361,307 units.
Those figures alone show the potential
of EVs and the shifting ability of buyers
to embrace electricity as their new fuel of
choice.
The industry faces a lot of pain before
the skies become completely clear,
however. The EV market in the US in 2018
was 81% up on 2017 but its share of total
vehicle sales is tiny – only 2.1%.
In Australia, pure EV sales accounted for
only about 400 units in 2018, representing
0.035% of the total vehicle market.
Combining EVs with plug-in electric
vehicles and hybrids improves the data
a bit, with the share rising to a more
optimistic 1.4% – clearly showing we have
a long way to go to shake the petrol-diesel
fuel addiction.
There are a few factors slowing the
potential growth.
• Limited EV choices. Australia
has about 350 models of cars and
SUVs (and thousands of variants
in trim, engines and so on) from 64
manufacturers. There are eight EV
models.
• “Range anxiety” (a new one for
psychologists), indicating owner
concern about running out of electric
charge and being taken home on the
back of a flat-bed truck. EV range is,
however, improving and most are
above 300 kilometres before needing
a – time consuming – recharge.
• No incentive. Yes, never again going to
a petrol bowser and paying yo-yo prices
is a great incentive but carmakers
(weirdly, not buyers) want subsidies
or financial incentives to get people
into their vehicles. Other markets have
FEATURE — 49
Tesla EVs were the early pace setters.
CREDIT: DREW ANGERER /GETTY IMAGES
varying degrees of attractive reasons to
buy an EV.
• Recharge hassle. Some prospective
owners may not have easy access to
a charging point (off-street home
parking, for example) or don’t want
the plug-in-and-wait procedure.
They may also be regular country or
holiday motorists who want range and
convenience above even any expected
benefits to the planet.
• Cost. The cheapest EV in Australia is
the Hyundai Ioniq EV at $44,990 plus
on-road costs. It is also available –
same body and equipment – as a hybrid
for $11,000 less. The disparity may be
hard to justify for many buyers seeking
an economical family car.
Manufacturers of EVs say taxpayer
subsidies are necessary to create the
impetus to guide buyers away from fossil-
fuel vehicles, but the federal government
isn’t interested in subsidising EVs for the
wealthier buyers to enjoy.
Cosmos is aware that some form of
subsidy was recently put to the federal
government by companies including
Mercedes-Benz (which releases a new EV
SUV later this year), Audi (also to launch
new EVs) and Nissan (a new Leaf coming).
In an interview early in 2019, Kia
Australia chief operating officer Damien
Meredith said the company would not seek
government financial assistance – and did
not believe it was necessary – ahead of its
launch of the Niro EV later this year.
Some markets in Europe are rich in
subsidies or concessions, including no
registration or duty on the car purchase,
access to freeway express lanes, or free
parking and charging in cities.
In China – the world’s biggest
carmaker with almost 500 EV
manufacturers and EV sales (cars, trucks
and buses) of about one million in 2018
– the manufacturers receive government
trade credits while their buyers get
subsidies ranging in 2019 from $3000 to
$10,000 per vehicle, with new EV prices
starting at about $38,000.
50 — FEATURE
The subsidies are down by up to
60% on 2018 as China believes it has
successfully kick-started the EV market
and expects momentum to continue to
grow away from petrol-diesel cars and
commercial vehicles.
EVs not only offer reduced emissions
– though consideration also must be given
to whole-of-life production of the car –
they also are a direct route to autonomous
vehicles. Electric cars can be controlled
far more efficiently and effectively by
outside sources (onboard or remote) than a
conventional petrol-diesel one
Electronics can start, drive, steer and
brake a car while avoiding accidents and
communicating with other vehicles and
traffic-control infrastructure. It’s one
of the reasons why electrically-assisted
power steering became so widespread in a
matter of years and why more companies
are adopting “drive-by-wire” strategies, in
which there is no mechanical link between
the steering wheel and wheels.
The next step into autonomous cars
starts in Australia this year with Bosch
preparing road trials in Victoria that
will take three years of work to produce
systems to be integrated in future cars.
The system, which can be implemented
in EV, hybrid, diesel and petrol-powered
cars, is aimed at fully-automated driving
on highways and freeways, targeting the
huge five-to-one ratio fatalities on country
Victorian roads.
While all this is going on in the
background, Australia’s energy pricing
and supply concerns may have an impact
on a future generation of EV-owning
citizens.
If the current sales level of about
750,000 new passenger vehicles a year is
transferred to EVs, sourcing electricity will
become a major problem.
Three carmakers interviewed for this
article were reluctant to introduce their
EVs into Australia – particularly Victoria
– for a number of reasons, including our
ability to produce sufficient electricity to
cope with expected increases in EV sales.
Although 4300 MW of large-scale
wind and solar capacity has been added
in Australia since 2014 (and the pace of
growth is increasing), a similar amount
has been lost over that period through the
retirement of coal-fired generators such as
Cars are part of the global quest for
sustainability
CREDIT: DAVID MCNEW / GETTY IMAGES
Victoria’s Hazelwood power station and
Alinta’s Northern power station in South
Australia. AGL Energy’s Liddell power
station in NSW is to be retired in 2022.
ENGIE, Origin Energy and AGL
Energy all have indicated they will make
no further investment in coal plants.
But there is hope. The Australian
Energy Regulator (AER) says forecast
power shortages over 2017-18 were
averted by generation businesses
returning mothballed plant to service,
increased wind, hydro and rooftop solar
PV generation, new plant and battery
projects in South Australia, and a relatively
mild summer.
Perhaps these are signs that this is
the end of the car as we knew it and the
beginning of a new way of travel, where
the personal element is replaced for the
masses by community travel and the car as
an asset becomes only for the wealthy. Just
like the turn of the 20th century.
NEIL DOWLING is the editor of
GoAutoNews Premium.
Issue 82
AUTONOMOUS
VEHICLES: ARE
WE THERE YET?
Sit back, relax and let the car do all the
driving – sounds like the perfect antidote to
a stressful day at work.
But new research finds people aware
of the coming autonomous vehicle trend
actually aren’t as enthusiastic as previously
thought, according to the 2018 Deloitte
Global Automotive Consumer Study.
Half the respondents in the US study
said they did not believe autonomous
vehicles (AVs) would be safe, an
improvement on a survey two years before
that said 74% were concerned about safety.
But carmakers and systems
manufacturers are unrepentant. They say
AVs are coming and probably sooner rather
than later. Bosch Australian engineers will
be sitting in a car for the next three years
driving through Victorian country roads
with barely any steering or braking input.
If you own a new car, you are probably
already part of the process. Autonomous
emergency braking (AEB) has cameras and
sensors atop the windscreen or in the grille
to “watch” the car ahead and control your
speed – a technology known as “adaptive
cruise” – and automatically brake when they
do.
It is also watching the white lines on
the road, able to provide lane departure
warnings, and is ready to nudge the
steering wheel if you try to cross the lines
(a trick known as lane-keep assist) while
checking cars on each side using blind-spot
monitoring.
Park against a wall and you can’t
accidentally hit the accelerator because of
“acceleration mitigation”, nor reverse into a
passing pedestrian or car because of “rear
cross-traffic alert”. And if you’re dozing at
the traffic lights and the guy ahead pulls
away, there’s a warning buzzer (a “lead
vehicle start alert”). Many new cars will
allow you to follow the vehicle ahead in
slow traffic, braking and accelerating and
steering without driver input for up to 30
seconds.
So you’re already there. But things will
only get easier, if maybe a little weird in the
future.
52 — FEATURE ISSUE 82
 COSMOS FEATURE — 53

FEATURE — 53

Our energy system is woefully

antiquated and based on
a preposterously rickety
19th century concept. But a
revolution in finally under way.
WILSON DA SILVA reports.

CREDIT: SCOTT MCCARTEN

54 — FEATURE
IT WAS THE YEAR the Soviet Union collapsed,
Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda, Canberra’s new
Parliament House opened, and the lauded American
physicist Richard Feynman died. The first episode of
Home and Away hit our TV screens, while in the cinema
Rain Man battled it out with Who Framed Roger Rabbit
and Crocodile Dundee II.
And while it doesn’t have quite such a recognition
factor, 1988 was also the year Maria Skyllas-Kazacos,
an Australian professor of chemical engineering,
obtained a US patent for inventing the vanadium redox
battery, or VRB.
VRBs are quite something. Unlike traditional lead-
acid batteries of the time, or the lithium-ion wonders of
today, they store and convert energy separately. They
stockpile electricity as chemical energy in two large
tanks filled with electrolytic fluids, which are connected
to electrochemical cells.
This allows the amount of electricity stored, and
the power discharged, to be handled independently.
They can be left unused for long periods with no loss
of power; and the electrolyte never catches fire, unlike
the more temperamental lithium-ion batteries in
smartphones today.
However, VRBs are not compact like those in
laptops, which is actually their strength. They’re
perfect for large-scale storage: hoarding the energy
generated by a wind farm, or warehousing energy for a
whole city. And if you want more storage, you just build
bigger tanks – there’s seemingly no limit to how big a
battery can be.
Even better, the bigger they are the less they cost
per kilowatt/hour of energy stored, and unlike other
batteries they can be refueled by pumping in fresh
electrolyte. Once refilled, they respond very quickly,
switching from storage to discharge in fractions of a
New York’s Pearl
Street station
dynamo, 1882.
CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES
Issue 82
second with efficiency levels of 80%.
Skyllas-Kazacos’s invention should have changed
the world, but didn’t. Why? Like many of the most
interesting energy storage technologies of the past
30 years, it was largely ignored because the world was
still stuck in a 19th century way of thinking about
electricity.
Luckily, that’s now changing. A revolution is finally
under way for the woefully antiquated, overly-complex
and rather fragile electricity system the world relies on
today.
But to understand why storage technologies like
VRBs are only now coming into vogue, you first need to
understand how we got into this unholy mess.
WE RELY ON STORAGE every day: stored
knowledge in books, stored memories in pictures and
stored value in money. But when it comes to energy,
we’re back in the stone age, living hand-to-mouth.
Since Thomas Edison built the first power station
at the corner of Pearl and Fulton streets in New York’s
Lower Manhattan, three blocks from the Brooklyn
Bridge, in 1882, electricity has been generated the
same way: in real-time, for immediate use.
More than 24 kilometres of insulated copper
wiring was laid below ground at 257 Pearl Street, and
six massive coal-fired generators – each weighing 30
tonnes – were installed to serve the First District, an
area of 650,000 square metres that included the old
New York Times building. Within a year, Edison’s
59 customers had grown to 472, and the electricity
generating business took off.
The Pearl Street station was also the world’s
first electricity grid, and every grid that followed
was the same basic design: a centralised power plant
distributing energy over a network of high voltage
COSMOS
The Port Augusta power station was
providing only 15% of South Australia’s
power supply before it was closed in 2016.
CREDIT: SCOTT MCCARTEN.
transmission lines, with associated transformers,
underground cables or poles and wires. To ensure
the power was always on, electricity was produced
continuously to meet demand instantaneously.
How do generators know exactly how much is
needed? They don’t, because factories and households
don’t notify in advance how much they plan to use.
So, power stations estimate demand, then generate
more than that to ensure enough headroom to cater for
sudden increases.
Balancing supply and demand is fraught with
danger: produce too little, and the whole network
falls over and blackouts ensue; produce too much,
and more energy is generated than is needed, and
therefore wasted. This, in a nutshell, is the challenge of
centralised power plants – one that only became harder
and harder as the grid expanded.
It may sound preposterously rickety, but this is still
FEATURE — 55
the electricity system of the 21st century. Sure, grid
operators now have sophisticated models to anticipate
usage, and continuously adjust the output of power
plants to meet demand; they’ve developed intricate
systems to shunt electricity across the grid in real time
to balance supply and use; and they minimise wastage
and cost by ranking available generators according
to which can satisfy demand fastest and at the lowest
cost, gradually moving up the cost scale until demand
is fully met. Nevertheless, the system is still riddled
with uncertainty, and can teeter on the edge of failure
several times a year.
In 2017, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Alan Finkel,
told the National Press Club in Canberra that he was
in awe of the 5000-kilometre-long interconnected
network that is Australia’s national electricity grid,
describing it as one of the most complex machines in
the world and “a stupendous feat of engineering”. But,
56 — FEATURE Issue 82

Solar panels on suburban waterfront homes.

CREDIT: ZSTOCK PHOTOS / GETTY IMAGES
COSMOS FEATURE — 57

8900 gigawatt-hours he admitted, “it was designed for a different world” – a

world in which electricity flowed in one direction, from
(GWh) of Australia’s centralised generators to far-flung users, and demand
power was generated rose and fell predictably. “Those days are irrevocably
gone, here and around the world,” he added.
from rooftop panels in He’s right. While the complex engineering that
2018. Another 766 GWh drives the grid in Australia (and everywhere else) may
be impressive, it’s based on a concept that was already
was produced by large- outdated – and being overtaken by technological
scale solar farms. changes – when the grid was completed in 1998.
Disruption was coming from many angles: the
growing use of renewable energy, like wind and solar,
being connected to the grid, adding intermittency; the
rapidly falling prices for solar panels, which triggered
a boom in solar rooftop installations and made solar
farms viable; and the voracious demand for laptop
computers, which accelerated the development
(and lowered the cost) of energy-dense batteries like
lithium-ion, eventually creating a secondary market for
large-scale storage.
Meanwhile, computers and high-tech electronics in
industry and in homes were changing the way energy
was used, unbundling what had for decades been a neat
and predictable pattern of usage.
Those effects were just beginning in 1998. Twenty
years later, the disruption is so immense, the grid is
having trouble coping.
In 2018, the number of rooftop solar power
generators on Australian homes passed two million,
compared with just 20,000 a decade before. There are
now, on average, six new household solar installations
every minute.
In total, 8900 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of Australia’s
power currently is generated from solar rooftops –
more than the 8000 GWh generated by the Liddell
Power Station near Muswellbrook in NSW, once the
biggest power station in the country. Another 766
GWh of electrical energy was produced by large-scale
solar farms (versus zero in 1998) and 12,668 GWh by
wind turbines, compared with just eight two decades
ago.
That’s a good thing, right? Yes – and no. The
national grid was designed to cater for centralised
power from large-scale hydroelectric, coal and gas-fired
generators. It was created not just to ensure power
was easily transferable from one side of the country to
another, but also to drive prices lower. If there were too
many plants producing power but not enough being
used, prices would fall, encouraging the most expensive
generators to drop off the grid. Conversely, spikes in
demand did the reverse: pushing prices higher and
encouraging more generators online, which eventually
lowered prices across the grid.
This worked nicely when competition was between
big coal, big gas and big hydro. But solar and wind have
58 — FEATURE
Wind turbines in the Flinders
Ranges, South Australia.
CREDIT: IAN ROUTLEDGE / GETTY IMAGES
become such a low-cost way to produce electricity, and
are now so widespread, that they have forced prices
lower on the grid – and, paradoxically, higher.
When solar and wind generators are in operation,
they are so cheap that large-scale coal and gas cannot
compete, so these dial back production or shut down.
However, power from renewables is intermittent – it
can rise and fall with little warning, such as when winds
abate or clouds diminish the intensity of sunlight falling
on solar panels. Hence, if supply falls off suddenly, and
demand stays the same, prices on the grid spike up to
encourage more generation and avoid blackouts. That
brings the big generators back to cash in.
Problem is, these coal and gas behemoths are
inflexible; they take from several hours to a whole day
to go from standstill to full power. Even when running
hot, they cannot easily or economically vary output up
or down fast enough to meet sudden peaks in demand,
such as during a heatwave.
Because all generators are paid for the power
supplied in five-minute blocks (known as the spot
price), the price of electricity sold on the national grid
can vary wildly – on rare occasions, as high as $14,000/
MWh and as low as minus $1000/MWh. But prices
stabilise over the year. The average spot price in 2018
was around $111/MWh in South Australia and $100/
MWh in Victoria, for example.
Nevertheless, it’s obvious that energy storage is
the missing link in this whole shebang. It would allow
the power generated by any technology – solar, wind,
coal, gas – to be amassed when demand is low, and
discharged when demand rises.
And it’s not like energy storage isn’t used. Globally,
there are 70 dams, with a generating capacity of at least
Issue 82
2000 MW each, where water is stored then released
gradually to drive turbines and generate electricity.
But hydroelectricity, while renewable and flexible, is
enormously costly (monetarily and environmentally)
to build, and limited by geography and access to
reliable sources of water. While those 70 dams have
a total energy output of more than 1.2 million GWh,
they required the flooding of more than 70,000 square
kilometres of land to create them.
“There was a huge lack of imagination,” recalls
Skyllas-Kazacos of her discussions with industry giants
in the 1990s, when she was trying to commercialise
the VRB patents she’d taken out for her employer, the
University of New South Wales (UNSW). “People in
the electricity sector didn’t seem to be aware of what
technology was out there. But also, everyone was
looking after their own interests, unfortunately. They
weren’t looking at the big picture.”
SUDDENLY, EVERYONE’S looking at the big picture.
Energy storage is booming: more than 10 battery
“gigafactories” are under construction around the
world (the “giga” in the name comes from the gigawatt-
hours in total production capacity).
Germany’s BMZ has opened Europe’s biggest
lithium-ion battery factory southeast of Frankfurt,
where the current production of 15 GWh a year for
cars, households and grid storage is expected to double.
In Sweden, SGF Energy plans to build a factory with
a production capacity of 35 GWh a year, while South
Korea’s Samsung wants to manufacture up to 2.5 GWh
of batteries in Hungary, and compatriot LG Chem is
building a lithium-ion battery plant in Poland.
“The tumbling cost of batteries is set to drive a
COSMOS FEATURE — 59

boom in the installation of energy storage systems packs a year by the time it is complete in 2020 – enough
around the world,” analyst Bloomberg New Energy for Tesla to make 1.5 million cars annually. But when
Finance said in its November 2018 report Long-Term the factory opened in 2016, Tesla was producing just
Energy Storage Outlook. It estimates the global market under 84,000 vehicles.
for new energy storage will double six times, rising to To justify the factory’s eventual $5 billion cost, and
a total of 305 GWh a year by 2030: “This is a similar generate revenue while vehicle production was ramped
trajectory to the remarkable expansion that the solar up, his engineers redesigned the vehicle battery packs
industry went through from 2000 to 2015, in which
the share of photovoltaics as a percentage of total
generation doubled seven times.”
Here’s the thing: this revolution did not result
from a dawning of wisdom across the global electricity
The demand for batteries
industry. Although there have been some notable
for electric cars has
pioneers in California and Japan over the past 20 years,
triggered the rise in
the industry has largely sat on its hands. No, it was
energy storage systems.
the sudden demand for batteries for electric cars that
CREDIT: KATSO80 / ISTOCK.
triggered it.
Specifically, Elon Musk. The co-founder and CEO
of Tesla wanted to dramatically scale up production of
his snappy electric cars by making them much, much
cheaper. Since more than half the cost of the vehicles
in 2010 was their energy-dense lithium-ion batteries,
he concentrated on these. And Tesla succeeded more
quickly than anyone expected, reducing production
costs 73% between 2010 and 2014: from US$1000 per
kilowatt-hour (kWh) to $269 per kWh.
To shave even more costs and get down to the
magical $100 kWh “inflection point’” – at which
electric cars become cheaper than those powered
by fossil fuels – Tesla would need to scale up battery
production enormously. So, Musk took a huge bet:
he built the world’s biggest battery factory, Tesla’s
Gigafactory 1, outside Reno, Nevada.
It is designed to manufacture 150 GWh of battery
60 — FEATURE
into household versions, known as Powerwalls, and
utility-scale versions, or Powerpacks. These began
selling in 2015, and by the following year, production
was being scaled up at Gigafactory 1.
So, when South Australia was plunged into
darkness by three major blackouts in late 2016 and
early 2017, Musk saw the opening for a public relations
coup and successfully pitched to build the world’s
single biggest battery there in 100 days or it would
be free. A 129 MWh lithium-ion battery station was
built at the Hornsdale wind farm 220 kilometres north
of Adelaide, and went live in December 2017. And it
worked.
Within weeks, the coal-fired Loy Yang power plant
in Victoria tripped and went offline, risking South
Australia’s energy supplies. But the Hornsdale battery
immediately dispatched 100 MW into the national
grid – in the record time of 140 milliseconds. In fact,
the speed at which Hornsdale battery has stabilised
the grid when other generators failed, plus the extra
competition it has brought to the national grid, has
played a large part in saving the South Australian
government nearly $33 million so far.
Tesla isn’t the only player in the roaring battery
field, as the massive expansion of production by
Germany, Sweden and South Korea attests. But
it has been the most important catalyst: firstly, in
accelerating the introduction of electric vehicles,
and secondly, by proving that expensive lithium-ion
batteries could be made a whole lot cheaper.
Adelaide’s CBD was plunged into
darkness in 2016 when the electricity
transmission network failed, cutting
power to the entire state.
CREDIT: PETER SANSOM
Issue 82
When Tesla launched its first roadster in 2008, it
was only the third company producing all-electric cars
(as opposed to petrol-electric hybrids like Toyota’s
Prius), and it sold only 100 that year. Now, there are
40 manufacturers, and almost five million electric cars
are on the road. By 2030, this is expected to reach 125
million, representing 50% of car sales in China and 30%
in the European Union, Japan and India. Yet, more than
half of today’s manufacturers only entered the market
in 2014 – the same year Tesla succeeded in halving the
production cost of batteries.
Today, Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 is manufacturing 20
GWh of lithium-ion battery capacity a year – almost as
much as the whole world produced in 2012. Another
facility is under construction in Shanghai, with plans to
build a third one in Europe.
But is lithium-ion the best technology for grid-scale
storage?
THE VERY THING that makes lithium-ion batteries so
powerful is what makes it possible for them to catch
fire or explode. First developed by Sony in 1991, they
pack five times more power per kilogram than lead-acid
batteries and almost three times as much as a nickel-
cadmium. They recharge more quickly, last longer,
have a wider temperature range and are made from
components with low toxicity.
Their biggest drawback is safety. The electrolyte
fluid sitting between the positive and negative
electrodes is flammable, and only a thin plastic
COSMOS
Inside a lithium-ion battery
CREDIT: SER-IGOR / GETTY IMAGES
membrane keeps the two electrodes apart. If
overcharged, or if an internal malfunction causes a
short circuit, a “thermal runaway” can occur and the
batteries ignite. To avoid this, the batteries have a built-
in circuit breaker, or current interrupt device, which
stops charging when the voltage reaches maximum,
the batteries get too hot or their internal pressure is
too high. But this too can fail, due to manufacturing
faults or bad handling. Which is why, in 2016, the
International Civil Aviation Organisation banned
lithium-ion battery shipments aboard passenger
planes.
Fires can be devastating. In March 2018, a
discarded lithium-ion battery ignited at a recycling
facility in New York and 44 fire trucks and 198 fire
fighters had to be called out to fight the blaze. It burned
for two days and shut down four branches of the Long
Island railroad for several hours as thick smoke blew
onto the tracks.
That doesn’t make electric vehicles with lithium-
ion batteries dangerous: after all, conventional cars
are powered by flammable petrol that can literally
explode. But as the batteries become ubiquitous, their
drawbacks will become more visible.
“Lithium-ion was not fundamentally designed for
grid-scale storage,” Andrew Chung, founder of the
$200 million Silicon Valley venture fund 1955 Capital,
told Renewable Energy World. Even if costs continue
to fall, and safety concerns are discounted, lithium-ion
batteries still have a limited lifespan. “Utilities and
commercial building owners want something that will
last 20 years and operate flawlessly,” Chung said.
All batteries degrade over time, becoming less
effective the more they are cycled (charged and
recharged). Because lithium-ion batteries are still new,
FEATURE — 61
and only recently used for large-scale storage, there are
uncertainties about their longevity. A study by the US
National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2017 found
that commercially available lithium-ion batteries can
last 10 years – but only if they’re cycled at 54% of their
operating range. NASA, which has used lithium-ion
batteries on satellites that need to operate for eight
years or more, similarly extends their lifetime by never
fully cycling them.
Nevertheless, both the Hornsdale battery and
the world’s second-largest, the Mira Loma 80 MWh
storage facility outside Los Angeles (which both use
Tesla’s Powerpacks), are proving adept at overcoming
brief spikes in the demand, as well as short-term
frequency regulation that would otherwise trip the grid
or cause instability problems.
But when it comes to all round storage solutions for
the grid, it’s vanadium batteries that have the edge.
A GIANT VANADIUM redox flow battery is undergoing
trials in the picturesque German village of Pfinztal,
about 50 kilometres south of Heidelberg. Built by
engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical
Technology, it can store and discharge 20 MWh of
energy. Connected to a 100-metre-tall wind turbine
capable of generating 2 MW, it is being used to test
battery materials, design and performance, and
simulating VRB operations as part of a national grid.
But it is a minnow compared to what China’s
Rongke Power, which was established in 2008 to
commercialise the technology, is building on the Dalian
peninsula, 550 kilometres east of Beijing. A battery
complex 40 times bigger and able to store 800 MWh is
due to come fully online in 2020.
The battery stacks are being manufactured at
62 — FEATURE Issue 82

Rongke Power’s gigafactory in Dalian, China.

Vanadium is a soft, ductile,

silver-grey metal resembling
chromium in its properties.
CREDIT: SCIENCE & SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY
COSMOS
Maria Skyllas-Kazacos, inventor
of the vanadium redox battery.
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Rongke’s new gigafactory, which opened in 2016 and
will eventually have a production capacity of 3 GWh
a year. And the Dalian complex is just one of almost
30 battery installations being built across China
by Rongke, a spin-off from the Dalian Institute of
Chemical Physics, a research division of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences.
“In vanadium flow batteries, China is leading the
world,” says Huamin Zhang, Rongke’s co-founder and
chief engineer. “They are an attractive commercial
proposition because they are safe and environmentally
friendly, use recyclable electrolytes, have a long cycle
life, and last for more than 15 years.”
Skyllas-Kazacos first met Zhang in 2006, when
the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics – where
Zhang was director of energy storage – began making
enquiries about VRBs. “We noticed that there was a
lot of interest from China in our patents and what we
had been doing in Australia,” she recalls. “He really
took it on and got a lot of funding from the Chinese
government.”
UNSW licensed the VRB technology to various
companies in the 1990s, and large demonstration
projects were built in Japan and California. But it took
the expiry of the university’s original patents in 2006
for interest in VRBs to really take off.
Skyllas-Kazacos received a flurry of invitations to
international conferences in the years that followed,
serving a stint as a distinguished lecturer at the US
Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National
Laboratories in Washington State in 2009. There, she
met Z Gary Yang, then head of energy storage research,
who became excited by the potential for vanadium.
Yang turned his team’s attention to VRBs, and over
the next few years boosted their energy density by 70%,
overcame temperature stability issues and lowered
costs. In 2012, he and a colleague left the Department
of Energy to establish UniEnergy Technologies, which
began developing prototypes. With a staff of 60, the
company has since installed 80 MWh of commercial
capacity in VRBs and, in 2016, became development
partner with Rongke Power.
FEATURE — 63
It is just one of six US companies selling VRBs,
with others operating in Britain, Japan, Australia and
Austria. In Germany, engineering giant ThyssenKrupp
has launched a new VRB design with giant cells and
1 MW stacks that are modular and can be expanded
into hundreds of megawatts. Industry analysts are
forecasting annual demand for VRB systems to rise to
between 18,000 and 27,500 MWh by 2027, or about
25% of the energy storage market. “This technology
is starting to achieve cost parity with lithium-ion at a
systems level after only five years of development –
compared with the more than 25 years that lithium-ion
cells have been in production,” Vincent Sprenkle, a lead
researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory,
told a US Senate hearing in October 2017. The lab still
collaborates with UniEnergy, and Sprenkle said he
believes VRB costs could be lowered by another 50%.
Yang is convinced vanadium will trounce lithium-
ion in grid-scale storage. “They have longer lifetimes,
can be scaled up more easily, and can operate day
in, day out, with no significant performance loss for
20 years or more,” he says. And he believes Rongke
Power’s VRB complex will prove a game changer. “It
will be the largest battery installation in the world,
and the Dalian site is just one of several big VRB
installations being built in China. And there are another
30 VRB projects in 11 countries either deployed or
under construction.”
For her part, Skyllas-Kazacos is delighted to see the
rebirth of interest in VRBs, more than 34 years after
she first started working with the silvery-grey metal
that is vanadium. “For years I was very frustrated and
very upset. I got over it,” she says. “Now, I’m just happy
that it’s finally here. Our work is being acknowledged
and being put to good use. It’s great to see that the time
for vanadium batteries has come.”
WILSON DA SILVA is a science journalist in Sydney,
and the founding editor of COSMOS.
64
Researchers are rethinking models that
depict viruses as perfectly symmetrical.
ROBERT LAWRENCE reports.
VIRUSES HAVE
BELLY BUTTONS
WHILE MOST PEOPLE would not think
of a virus as a beautiful manifestation of
nature, scientists who map their molecular
shape and structure are more easily
smitten.
Like the 20 white hexagons and 12
black pentagons of a soccer ball, some
viruses consist of a set number of repeating
protein units that form an ordered,
symmetrical and almost spherical nano-
shell around their genome.
Issue 82
In the past 40 years, scientists in the
field of structural biology have developed
hundreds of beautiful three-dimensional
computer models of such viruses. Often,
the details of their composition are
mapped down to individual atoms.
In addition to visualising the stunning
order and symmetry of a virus particle
on an atomic scale, these models help
researchers understand how viruses
assemble, infect and propagate within
CREDIT: DAVID MACK / GETTY IMAGES
COSMOS
their host. But according to a new study
by a group of researchers at Purdue
University in Indiana, US, some aspects of
these models may not be entirely realistic.
Their data show that some types of
viruses have a break in their symmetry
that standard models don’t show. These
asymmetries may reveal new details about
the life cycle of those viruses.
In 1956 – only a few years after they
announced the structure of DNA – Francis
Crick and James Watson described their
theory that viruses can have a symmetrical
structure made of repeating protein units.
As with the discovery of the double helix,
their thinking was informed by Rosalind
Franklin’s prior work on virus structures;
and their thinking was correct.
Although not all viruses have a
geometric shape, we know now that a lot
of them do. A common one that many
unrelated groups share is that of an
icosahedron – a polygon with 20 sides
and 12 vertices. The form is defined by a
set number of protein units in their outer
shell.
The same year that Crick and Watson
published their ideas on virus structure,
a young student by the name of Michael
Rossman was completing his PhD at
Scotland’s University of Glasgow in
chemical crystallography – the science of
making a given sample crystallise so that
its structure can be probed with a beam of
X-rays and the mathematics of how those
X-rays diffract.
Also known as X-ray crystallography,
this approach is useful with all kinds of
molecules, including DNA, proteins and
even whole viruses that have a defined
shape. This last case is what eventually
captured Rossman’s interest.
The scientist has been at Purdue
University since 1964, building what is
probably the world’s leading research
program in the investigation of virus
structures with X-ray crystallography
and related techniques. At the age of
88, he exudes a remarkable acuity that
remains salient among his academic
peers. Foremost among them is virologist
Richard Kuhn.
Since joining Purdue in 1992, Kuhn
has partnered with Rossman on mapping
a few dozen virus structures. Rossman
and Kuhn were the first to report the
structure of the Zika virus a few years ago
– just as it was emerging into the public
consciousness.
Rather than X-ray crystallography,
they used a newer technique to do this
that has become increasingly useful in the
field of structural biology. Cryo-electron
microscopy, as it is known, can produce
high-resolution images of individual virus
particles in a frozen state from a beam of
electrons.
Recently, while pouring over some
cryo-electron microscopy images of a West
Nile virus strain bound to an antibody,
one of Kuhn’s graduate students noticed
something unusual.
“There was a fuzzy density on just one
side of the virus,” Matthew Therkelsen
recalls. “That signified to me that
there was a distinct feature in the virus
structure, which is not predicted by
symmetry.”
A typical model of the West Nile
virus will have a neatly symmetrical
arrangement of 180 protein units in its
icosahedral shell. But the fuzzy patches
Therkelsen was seeing in his data made
him question that model.
“That was the first time I considered
that the virus might be asymmetric,” he
says.
Working with the rest of the team
at Purdue, Therkelsen began plugging
his data into computer models of the
virus that did not rely on the assumption
that the shape is perfectly symmetrical.
The data aligned with those models and
revealed that, in reality, the average West
Nile virus may be a few protein units shy
of the 180 that it takes to make it perfectly
symmetrical.
Kuhn believes that this imperfection
is probably an artefact of the last step of
virus formation, when a new virus particle
separates from the membrane of a cell that
was infected by the previous generation.
“The neck of this budding particle
gets very narrow as it pinches off and
the glycoproteins surrounding the
shell begin hitting one another,” Kuhn
explains. “We think they might not grab
the right number of proteins to make an
65
icosahedron, and the result is a particle
that has a distortion on one side.”
In other words, the break in symmetry
is a lot like a belly button. And as such, it
is a feature that is probably common to
other viruses similar to West Nile. This
includes the Zika, dengue, yellow fever
and Chikungunya viruses – some of the
most feared pathogens that humans can
get from the bite of a mosquito.
Kuhn notes that other icosahedral
viruses, such as polio and common cold
viruses, may also have this asymmetry.
“[It] is an intriguing question that we are
also pursuing,” he says.
This scenario is likely. Structural
biologist Sarah Butcher of the University
of Helsinki, Finland, who was not involved
in this study, noted that evidence of
asymmetries in other virus structures has
been seen in previously published work by
her and other researchers.
“We wrote a couple of papers on how to
deal with such asymmetry, and what were
some of the reasons for it,” she says.
Along with researchers like Butcher,
the team at Purdue has also found other
asymmetries deeper within the anatomy
of the West Nile virus that change during
its development and may be related to
asymmetry in the protein shell.
As evidence that icosahedral viruses
aren’t perfectly symmetrical builds,
researchers are becoming more curious
about what these anomalies can tell us
about life cycle. For instance, in addition
to being a mark from the final point of
assembly for a virus particle, they may
also function to orient the virus during the
initial point of infection when it releases its
genome upon entering its host cell.
As such questions are investigated
further, scientists like Rossman, Kuhn
and Butcher may have cause to reconsider
their assumptions about symmetry.
“Up until now,” Rossman says, “any
such viruses that have ever been examined
have been looked at with the assumption
that they had icosahedral symmetry.”
ROBERT LAWRENCE is a science writer and
research developer based in Binghamton,
New York, US.
66 — FEATURE Issue 82

THE QUEST
TO FIND
WHAT’S
HAPPENING
TO
PAPUA NEW
GUINEA’S
CHILDREN
Children on the shoreline near Rabaul in East New Britain province.
CREDIT: JOHN BORTHWICK / LONELY PLANET IMAGES
COSMOS FEATURE — 67

Nearly half of the country’s infants are

‘stunted’. ELIZABETH FINKEL accompanied
a team of researchers who are trying
discover why.
68 — FEATURE Issue 82

AMIDST YAPPING DOGS and

swaying palms, the nervous
young mother sits at the
sturdy table set up in the
dusty yard of her village.

LOCAL HEALTH WORKERS Pele Melepia and Priscah

Hezericlad stretch out her one-year-old baby girl and
measure her length with a contraption that resembles
those used to measure foot size. The baby is also weighed
carefully on a set of digital plastic scales.
Next it is the mother’s turn. Cleared of the clunky
devices, the table is quickly transformed into a state-
of-the-art pathology lab. Atop a sterile blue paper cloth
appears a small blue box, two white strips of filter paper
and a small graduated glass rod. A large drop of blood
ebbing from the mother’s pricked finger will reveal
whether she is anaemic or carries malaria parasites. A
vaginal swab, which she has discretely provided, will
take stock of any genital tract infections.
The entire exercise has taken the four-member
team – also comprising Primrose Homiehombo,
who interviewed the mother, and Dukduk Kabiu, the
community liaison officer – half a day. The potholed
three-kilometre dirt track that leads to the village
situated within the Tokua plantation is one reason.
Waiting for the mother to return from an excursion is
another.
It’s not unusual. For the last two years the dedicated
Papua New Guinean (PNG) staff of the Melbourne-
based Burnet Institute have repeated this exercise
thousands of times to track down mothers and babies in
remote villages across the province of East New Britain
(ENB). Populated by some 400,000 people, the island is
a microcosm of the mainland, nestled to the south-west.
Villages are isolated by rugged terrain and accessing
them is often a one-to-two-day journey down potholed
dirt tracks and across footbridges, carrying equipment
and ice buckets to keep tissue samples cold.
Their dedication stems from a conviction that the
measurements and tissue samples they are gathering
will help solve one of PNG’s most pressing health
problems: the poor growth and development of its
children, commonly known as stunting.
“We need this data to advise our politicians,” Essie
Koniel tells me. A handsome, middle-aged woman from Health workers Pele Melepia and Priscah Hezericlad
a tiny fishing village in the north-west of the island, she’s prepare to take a baby’s vital statistics in a village
the Country Operations Manager for the 40-strong near Tovarur province, assisted by interviewer
team at the Institute’s headquarters in Kokopo, which Primrose Homiehombo.
has been the ENB capital since volcanic eruptions CREDIT: ELIZABETH FINKEL

destroyed Rabaul in 1994.

COSMOS FEATURE — 69

“This data is like gold,” agrees Brendan Crabb, the

Burnet Institute’s director. “We’ll never have to repeat
this study and it won’t just help the people of PNG; it
will help poor communities all over the world,” he tells
the people at the village in Tokua plantationa via liaison
officer Dukduk.
Crabb is making one of his regular visits to Kokopo,
accompanied by his paediatrician partner, Michelle
Scoullar, deputy director and public health physician
James Beeson, midwifery professor Caroline Homer,
paediatrician Chris Morgan and me – a journalist and
donor to the program.
Globally, children in poor countries experience
stunting rates of about 22%, but PNG stands out with
around 45% of its children falling well below the normal
range for height by the age of two. It doesn’t just mean
these children will be short; they are more likely to be
sickly throughout life, and less likely to reach their full
intellectual potential.
It’s not a statistic that sits nicely with Prime Minister
Peter O’Neill’s modernisation narrative.
There’s no doubt the country’s public health system
is struggling. The polio outbreak last June put PNG
on the global radar but any number of indicators bear
testament: chronic malaria, drug resistant TB and the
fact that PNG women are 35 times more likely to die in
childbirth than their sisters across the Torres Strait.
Nevertheless, stunting stands out as a problem of
special urgency. The World Bank president, Jim Yong
Kim, has highlighted stunting as “a humanitarian
disaster”. The World Health Organisation (WHO) ranks
it as a number one priority for development – and with
good reason. The prospect that a fifth ¬– or in the case of
PNG, half ¬– of the population is starting life behind the
eight ball is a dismal basis for nation-building. “People
will be left behind,” says Crabb.
While it’s clear that modernisation and rising
affluence largely eradicate the problem of stunting, in
PNG that’s a slow process hindered by rugged terrain,
earthquakes, tsunamis and erupting volcanos. For
Crabb, the question is: “What can you do while waiting
for the country to modernise?”
That’s why three years ago, the Burnet in
collaboration with the PNG Institute for Medical
Research, the University of PNG and government
partners, embarked on the landmark Healthy Mothers,
Healthy Babies (HMHB) study to winkle out some
answers.
Now, as the final data come rolling in, the combined
teams are starting to find answers and, ever so carefully,
consult with community partners to plan the first
intervention trials.
So, what exactly is stunting?
A child is defined as stunted when they are
exceedingly short for their age. In formal terms, it’s
when they fall two standard deviations below a global
average.
70 — FEATURE
Blood and other samples from pregnant mothers and their babies are being analysed in the Kokopo lab.
CREDIT: LYNTON CRABB FOR BURNET INSTITUTE
As a metric, it’s not without its controversies. But
according to Mercedes de Onis, the co-ordinator of the
WHO’s Growth Assessment and Surveillance Unit, “it
is the best overall indicator of children’s well-being and
an accurate reflection of social inequalities”.
“It’s understood to be a response to chronic
malnutrition,” says Beverly Ann Biggs, a public
health physician at the University of Melbourne who
researches stunting in Vietnamese and Australian
Aboriginal communities.
If it persists beyond the age of two or three it’s mostly
irreversible. “The body’s metabolism decides this is
all I’m ever going to get and adjusts overall body size,”
explains Morgan.
By contrast, “wasting”, another metric of nutrition
often measured by a thin mid-arm circumference, is
usually a response to an acute illness like diarrhoea and
is quickly reversed by feeding.
Chronic malnutrition often begins in the womb
with the foetus receiving insufficient nutrients across
the placenta. That in turn appears to be linked to the
mother’s nutrition even before she becomes pregnant,
as well as to the diseases she carries.
Issue 82
Besides losing height, stunted children are at
significantly higher risk of infections in childhood and
chronic diseases such as diabetes in later life. However,
the main game, says Morgan, is the impact on the brain.
It’s an energy-hungry organ and stunting compromises
its development. “It means not as clever, less likely to
finish school, less likely to hold a good job, or even to
stay out of gaol.”
The World Bank’s Kim puts it more bluntly:
“Inequality is baked into the brains of 25% of all children
before the age of five.”
If stunting is a problem of malnutrition, why then
not just ramp up the nutrition for mothers and babies?
Why is the costly HMHB study necessary at all? It’s a
question I seem to ask the researchers over and over
again during my four-day visit. After all, as I say to the
endlessly patient, soft-spoken Beeson, this is not rocket
science.
“It’s harder than rocket science,” is his riposte. “It’s
not just about understanding the medical causes. You
have to get interventions out to remote communities,
build relationships and acceptability and educate and
engage communities.”
COSMOS
And no-one seems to believe that an intensive
feeding program – a roll-out of enriched protein
biscuits, as I suggest – is the answer. Morgan points
out that past interventions of this type have delivered
little benefit. Crabb is dubious that nutrition, as far as
calorie intake, is concerrned, is the major problem here.
Measurements of mid-upper arm circumference show
that most women are receiving sufficient food, though
that still leaves open the possibility that micronutrients
are missing, says Beeson.
Surprisingly, all believe that the medical causes
of stunting are poorly understood. Beeson points me
to a recent paper that identified 18 risk factors in 137
developing countries.
The top five are foetal growth restriction (so the
baby is small for its time in the womb), unimproved
sanitation, child nutrition, infections and indoor
pollution resulting from the use of low-quality
cooking fuels such as firewood or crop residue. But the
paper acknowledges that the relative impact of such
factors differs from country to country. “It is also the
interaction between factors, for instance, between food
and infection, that is likely to be crucial, but is not well
studied,” says Morgan.
Biggs agrees: “It’s complicated; that’s where the
HMHB study comes in.”
In the case of PNG, the researchers suspect the
major contributors to stunting are likely to be malaria
in pregnancy, which interferes with the formation of the
placental blood vessels that nourish the growing foetus;
intestinal infections that cause chronic inflammation
and prevent the mother and child from absorbing
nutrients; and deficiencies of micronutrients like zinc,
iodine, vitamin A and specific amino acids. But for
the cautious Burnet team, suspicions are not enough.
Prevalence
Percentage of stunted, wasted or overweight children
under five, global 2000 and 2017 .
Global malnutrition in children under five years, published May 2018.
CREDIT: UNICEF
FEATURE — 71
“We decided to do something other than guess,” says
Crabb.
Indeed, recent studies show that rolling out
interventions based on best guesses is risky. Last
January, a Stanford University-led trial that went by the
acronym of WASH found that improving sanitation in
the households of 5000 pregnant Bangladeshi women
was successful at reducing rates of diarrhoea and deaths.
But it did not result in increases in the linear growth of
the children in their first two years.
Another study recently published by the Burnet
researchers showed that contrary to assumptions,
women who were iron deficient actually gave birth to
larger babies.
Administrators are also in no mood for rolling out
costly interventions based on best guesses. At a meeting
in the Kokopo provincial office, Nicholas Larme, the
deputy provincial administrator, captures the current
appetite for evidence when he says, “I’m a great believer
in research. Malaria [for instance] has been here forever;
what is it we can do differently?”
The HMHB aims to provide some answers. In labs in
PNG and Melbourne, researchers have been studying
tissue samples collected from 700 mothers and babies.
Are they riddled with malaria, TB or other infections?
Do they bear the chemical markers of chronic intestinal
inflammation? What are the blood levels of essential
minerals, vitamins and amino acids? Meanwhile,
questionnaires have taken stock of how well current
medical advice is being implemented. For instance,
breast feeding provides the best nutrition for babies, but
are the mothers breast feeding for the recommended
time? How often do they visit the clinics after giving
birth? Are they completing their infant’s vaccination
schedules?
Numbers affected
Number (millions) of stunted, wasted or overweight
children under five, global 2000 and 2017 .
72 — FEATURE
IF BEESON AND CRABB are the architects of the HMHB
project, it was Scoullar who built it brick by brick.
What started out as a short-term project has become
her life. When she arrived in Kokopo in 2013, she was
a newly divorced 30-something. Five years later, with
the project nearing completion, she is partnered with
Crabb, a slim, dynamic 50-something, and the mother
of their bright, bonny one-year-old twin girls. Clearly
the HMHB project has been an intensely personal
journey for both.
A visit to a birth clinic perched atop a lush hill on
the outskirts of Kokopo brings this home. Though the
clinic wins praise as one of the best equipped on the
island, thanks in part to Scoullar’s efforts, when we
visit it is the scene of a recent tragedy. During the night
Jennifer, the midwife, delivered twins but the second
twin lodged shoulder first and died before he could
be delivered. Homer, a calm, kindly woman who has
contributed to midwife training programs throughout
PNG, commiserated. She tells Jennifer it was a very
tough call and that she would not have managed any
better, and she praises her administration of the drugs
misoprostol and oxytocin to prevent the mother from
haemorrhaging.
Scoullar and Crabb were clearly affected. “All that
growth for nothing,” Crabb murmurs to me. The dead
twin had weighed nearly 3.5 kilograms. His own twin
Kokopo market.
CREDIT: ERIC LAFFORGUE/GAMMA-RAPHO / GETTY IMAGES.
Issue 82
girls barely reached three kilograms at birth. The
comparison could not have been starker. Two mothers
giving birth in countries barely an hour’s flight in
distance – yet worlds apart.
Scoullar is a gentle, intense young woman with gritty
determination. She has a natural feel for how to operate
in PNG, balancing cultural sensitivities with science
and a knowhow of how to operate in the heat, amidst
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and fractious national
politics, and with limited infrastructure.
No doubt her childhood in Tonga, Sri Lanka,
Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Pakistan – her father worked in
agricultural aid – equipped her with some useful skills.
Her teenage years living in her mother’s small NSW
country town might also explain her easy, convivial
manner. “I was related to one in four people,” she recalls.
It took all her skills to execute the HMHB plan. It was
simple enough on paper: 700 women – a statistically
robust number – to be recruited from five antenatal
clinics across ENB, with follow ups at birth, one month,
six months and 12 months.
But the implementation was tough: finding buildings,
equipment, skilled employees, designing effective
questionnaires – not to mention the logistics of turning
dusty village yards into sterile labs.
“We had to remember every single thing: blueys
[sterile blue sheets], sterile gloves, non-prick needles,
COSMOS FEATURE — 73

zip-lock bags, eskies, shade, privacy screens, tables and WHEN I VISITED with the team in early September,
chairs, a sturdy space to weigh and measure babies.” some preliminary results were rolling in from the
It was “a stressful time but the best time”. questionnaires.
Sandra Lau, a generous local businesswoman, and They don’t yet shed any new light on the science of
Nicholas Larme, then the local health officer, were stunting. Rather they show, once again, how tortuous
instrumental in helping her locate the former concrete is the path from science to successful implementation.
block restaurant that now serves as the Burnet Institute One finding was that birthing centres were not
Kokopo administrative centre, and a room at St Mary’s carrying out the recommended practice of swabbing
hospital that serves as a state-of-the-art pathology the umbilical cords of newborns with the antiseptic
lab, headed by the conscientious Ruth Fidelis. There chlorhexidine to protect them from infections. The
whirring PCR machines rapidly analyse the DNA of reason? A lack of supplies and training.
microbial samples. Back-up batteries are crucial for Morgan has also found that in the crucial days straight
keeping samples frozen, as the electricity regularly after childbirth – when 60% of maternal and 50% of
goes on the blink. Dukduk doubles up as an able lab newborn deaths occur – only 15 to 20% of mothers are
technician. The one-time bank manager was recruited availing themselves of the routine check-up that could
as a driver, but Scoullar quickly observed that he was treat life-threatening maternal and newborn infections.
capable of much more. Engaging and educating the
There are many stars amongst public does indeed appear to be
the PNG staff, including those In the crucial days “harder than rocket science”.
who gather samples from the But far from expressing
mothers and babies in villages
straight after childbirth – frustration, the researchers
and birth centres, lab workers, when 60% of maternal appear energised by their
administrators and doctors. findings. In close consultation
Their sense of purpose is
and 50% of newborn deaths with the community and the
palpable. It’s a testament to the occur – only 15 to 20% provincial health authority,
Burnet mission: not so much to they are conducting a series
carry out research as to equip
of mothers are availing of trials to test the best ways
the people of PNG to do their themselves of to implement chlorhexidine
own. swabbing as well as practical
“If they don’t own the
the routine check-up. ways to boost check-ups in the
research, they don’t own the first week after birth.
findings and the solution won’t They’ll start with small
work in the long-term,” explains Beeson. groups, monitoring as they go and learning from their
It’s a hard-earned wisdom. The history of public experience.
health is littered with fixes that have been rolled out only Certainly it’s the low hanging fruit, but this careful,
to fail. Many of the Burnet team have seen the failures stepwise implementation, with community consultation
firsthand. Beeson’s hard-earned experience comes from and testing as they go, is the template they will use as the
working in Malawi, where he pioneered studies showing next crop of revelations emerge from the HMHB study.
how malaria infects the placenta of a pregnant woman The team is already discussing what the next step
and can compromise nutrition to the growing foetus. might look like. One proposal, if the data accord with
Morgan spent decades rolling out vaccination their suspicions, is to test and treat all pregnant women
programs throughout Asia and Africa before shifting for malaria and other infections in addition to correcting
focus to iron out glitches in health systems. His the nutritional deficiencies.
connection to PNG came early, attending school there Beeson, for one, is optimistic. While the problem of
in the 1960s while his father taught in teachers’ colleges, stunting comes down to a complex interplay of disease,
then returning after medical training to work as a doctor nutrition, constrained resources and community
on and off since the 1980s. knowledge, he’s confident they will soon see “how the
Crabb himself is not clinically trained. His life’s work pieces of the puzzle fit together”.“
has centred around laboratory-based malaria research, To me, PNG has such phenomenal potential. We
specifically attempts to develop a vaccine. But he too need to find a solution.”
has a particular connection to PNG, having grown up in
Port Moresby where, as part of a development project,
his father established a printing company.
ELIZABETH FINKEL travelled to Kokopo as a guest
In her deft execution of the HMHB project, Scoullar
of Burnet Institute.
benefited from the combined quantum of many decades
of experience from the Burnet team.
74 — FEATURE Issue 82

Percentage of children under five

who are stunted, by United Nations
sub-region, 2017.

2.3
Northern
America
11.8
Central
Asia
17.3
Northern
8.0 Africa
15.2
Caribbean
14.1 29.9 Western
Central Western Asia
America Africa
7.5
32.1 35.6
South
≥30% (very high) Middle Eastern
America
Africa Africa
20 – 29% (high)

10–19% (medium)

2.5 – 9% (low)
29.1
South
<2.5% (very low)
Africa
no data

UNDERSTANDING STUNTING
THERE’S NO GETTING AROUND the fact that stunting is a
controversial and stigmatising term. A stunted plant, for
example, is not something you’d want in your garden.
To determine if children in a population are
experiencing stunting, their height, often measured at
two years of age, is compared to a global average. Those
falling two standard deviations below are deemed to
be stunted and very likely saddled with a physical and
mental handicap for the rest of their lives.
At first glance, height might seem an unlikely
predictor for matters so profound. And surely such
predictions are confounded by the fact that height is
strongly controlled by genes? Take well-nourished
Europeans: the Dutch are notoriously tall compared
to their southern European neighbours. Or compare
populations of less well-nourished Africans: the
Sudanese are far taller than central Africans.
Travel around Asia and people are uniformly smaller.
Surely, they’re not all stunted?
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO)
definition of stunting, about a third are.
So, is it valid to compare diverse ethnic populations
to a global average?
After more than a decade of fielding such concerns,
public health experts are unshakeable in their
confidence that, for adequately nourished humans, the
 COSMOS
5.3
Eastern Asia
25.7
South-Eastern
Asia
33.3
Southern
38.1
Asia
Oceania
rate of growth for all healthy infants is the same.
Their confidence stems from a set of WHO standard
growth curves introduced in 2003. Based on the six-year
Multicentre Growth Reference Study, they captured
the growth of 8500 well-nourished children from Brazil,
Ghana, India, Norway, Oman and the US.
According to WHO: “The standards describe
normal child growth from birth to five years under
optimal environmental conditions and can be applied
to all children everywhere, regardless of ethnicity,
socioeconomic status and type of feeding”.
A 2014 study, published by researchers from
Oxford University in the UK and funded by the Bill
FEATURE — 75
& Melinda Gates Foundation, supported the WHO
finding, showing that in 60,000 women living in heathy
environments, across the US, the UK, Brazil, Italy,
China, India, Kenya and Oman, the mean birth length
for full-term newborns was the same: 49.4 centimetres.
Of course, that does not mean that every well-fed
newborn on the planet will be the same length. Every
population shows a spread of heights for people at any
age.
In well-nourished populations, 2.5% of children are
likely to be stunted. But throughout Asia and Africa, the
entire growth curves are shifted to the left.
“It means the population as a whole is not meeting
its full growth potential,” says Jessica Blankenship,
a UNICEF nutrition specialist based in Bangkok,
Thailand.
The idea that people are small because of their genes
is also challenged by the fact that in poor countries the
growth of affluent children matches that of the WHO
growth curves.
Every public health worker tells a similar story.
Working as a community doctor with Tibetan hill
tribes in the late 1990s, Chris Morgan, a paediatrician
at Melbourne’s Burnet Institute, found “100% of the
people were well below normal height”. But the more
affluent population in Lhasa were much taller.
And it’s not just the affluent. Many developing
countries are making nationwide gains. Mongolia is a
stand-out, reducing its child stunting levels from 33% to
11% in 20 years.
Others, such as Laos, Thailand and Mynamar, are
making slower gains; PNG and Timor Leste appear to
have stalled. Overall, a recent press release from the US
Food and Agriculture Organisation warned, the Asia
Pacific will not reach the target set in 2012 by the World
Health Assembly to reduce stunting levels by 40% by
2025.
Nevertheless, stunting as a marker of population
health and development still throws up conundrums.
For instance, one place you would expect stunting
rates to be low is Kerala, one of the most developed
states of India with 92% female literacy and rates of
infant mortality on par with that of the US. Yet the rate
of childhood stunting is 19%, similar to that of Senegal,
a West African nation with 29% female literacy and over
four times the infant and maternal mortality rate.
As a recent online Indian article noted, “surely an
impossibility”.
Not for Blankenship, who studied in Kerala. She
suspects poor rates of breastfeeding and cultural beliefs
such as eating less in pregnancy to avoid a large baby
could be involved.
Combating stunting, she acknowledges, is complex.
“It’s not just about access to resources; it’s about
knowledge.”
76 — FEATURE Issue 82

There’s an African revolution that Australia

should join. NATALIE PARLETTA reports.

FOODS YOU’VE
NEVER HEARD OF
THAT COULD CHANGE
THE WORLD
A FOOD REVOLUTION is building in West again. Every Wednesday they would
Africa. Hundreds of women in land-locked walk seven kilometres to the local market
Mali are harvesting the diverse potential of with their produce and were lucky if they
ancient plants and working with visionary returned home at the end of the day with
entrepreneur Oumar Barou Togola to 25 to 50 cents.
create a market for them. Togola’s parents sent him to a
The venture is transforming their Canadian boarding school when he was
lives, and the resilient crops are offering a 16. He returned with university business
sustainable and nutritious food source to qualifications and a yearning to help his
the world. people. After consulting with his parents, they love growing fonio, they love farming,
There are more than 50,000 known he decided to explore Africa’s natural but it is too hard to access the market.”
edible plants on Earth, but fewer than resources while seeking ways to offer Fonio (Digitaria exilis) is thought to
300 species reach the market. The “big women opportunities to take charge of be Africa’s oldest grain, dating back to
three” – corn, wheat and rice – make up their lives. 5000 BCE. It thrives in tough conditions
a whopping two-thirds of plant-sourced “By putting women at the centre of with poor, rocky soils, little water and no
food. our society, by building the infrastructure pesticides. It has a low glycemic index,
This is unsustainable in the face of around women, this world would be a very and Togola sees it as an ideal alternative to
pests, climate change, food insecurity and different place,” he says. “It’s a must for us rice, which dominates African meals while
nutrient-poor diets, and Togola’s initiative to advance as a society.” diabetes dominates African health.
is part of a global push to put lesser known He knew consultation was important, But producing fonio used to be a labour
foods on people’s plates to boost crop so he sat down with women farmers to of love. Before Togola partnered with the
diversity, resilience and viability. identify their needs. “And they told me women farmers, they would manually cut
A “son of Mali”, Togola is the youngest
child of parents who inspired him with
their drive to support people more
disadvantaged.
His hydrologist father worked with
UNICEF, showing communities how to
access clean water. His midwife mother
dedicated herself to helping women and
children, and he was moved by witnessing
the challenges these women face, for little
return.
A typical day involves getting up
early to prepare breakfast for the family,
walking 10 kilometres to the farm,
Women have embraced
working all day while looking after the
and enhanced Togola’s
children, returning home to cook dinner,
vision.
then going to bed ready to start all over
CREDIT: ALEXEI BERTEIG / BERTEIG IMAGING
COSMOS
and dehull the plant, taking an hour to
produce just six kilograms of grain.
He invested in local equipment that
enabled them to produce more than
250 kilograms an hour – increasing
productivity more than 40-fold.
So the company Farafena was born
(the word means “African” in Bambara,
Mali’s national language), with the aim of
creating a large market for fonio and other
African food crops. Starting with just 15
farmers five years ago, it now partners with
850 women.
Business is good and the very African
produce has been embraced by consumers
in Canada and the US. But the company
has vowed that it will only ever buy 80% of
the available produce, to ensure it remains
accessible and affordable to locals.
The venture’s success has not escaped
the attention of Mali’s men, who grow
the more popular yet less sustainable
crops like rice and cotton. Having gifted
the women small parcels of land to grow
“peasant food”, they are starting to
appreciate its value.
“We did an interview with some of the
woman farmers,” says Togola, “and a few
of the husbands wanted to speak up about
what Farafena has done for their wives.
Ntiebe village, Mali, Africa.
CREDIT: ALEXEI BERTEIG / BERTEIG IMAGING
“One man told me that his wife was
able to go purchase a baguette with a can of
tuna and brought it to him for lunch. These
are things we take for granted. But oh my
god, tuna! Here it has high value in those
small villages.”
The women have created an income
that enables them to be independent
and educate their children. And young
people are in abundance; 60% of Africa’s
population is under 25.
“By women having the tools to
educate that generation, Africa will be an
incredible continent,” Togola says.
When initially discussing food
options, the company came up with a list
of potential African crops. Currently they
produce fonio, baobab and moringa but
have around 30 more on the menu.
Baobab trees are among the oldest in
the world, staunchly rooted in the ground
for 1100 to 2500 years. The African
species, Adansonia digitata, is a core
element of local culture and stories. It
produces fruit pods containing a flavourful
powder. One of the most nutritious fruits
in the world, baobab is high in potassium
and fibre and has six times more vitamin C
than oranges.
Moringa (Moringa oleifera) – also
FEATURE — 77
known as the drumstick tree, miracle tree
and horseradish tree – grows rapidly in
parts of Africa, India, Southeast Asia and
South America. Also highly nutritious,
it has traditionally been used for its
health benefits and potent medicinal
applications.
According to Togola, who has each
batch of products shipped to Canada
nutritionally tested, moringa is “the most
nutritious leafy green in the world”. In
Mali, the leaves are cooked much like
spinach or used in salads. It is also sold as a
powder which can be used for tea or added
to smoothies and salad dressings.
The leaves are rich in ß-carotene,
protein, vitamin C, calcium, potassium
and antioxidants. The fruit, flowers and
immature pods are also eaten, and the
root, bark, gum, seed and seed oil are used
medicinally.
Moringa is well suited to Australian
conditions and is currently grown in
Queensland. But Australia has hundreds of
its own edible native plants that Aboriginal
people have used as food and medicine for
at least 60,000 years, possibly double that.
“Australia has much to teach the
world about plant diversity and human
enrichment on ancient landscapes,” says
botanist Stephen Hopper.
Geoff Woodall, a native plant
agronomist from Western Australia, has
spent a chunk of his career researching the
growth potential of native root vegetables,
or tubers. It was something he heard at a
conference years ago that hooked him.
“There was some fancy chef from
Sydney who opened the conference and
he said he was sick of serving up kangaroo
with mashed potatoes and peas.
“So, while at that stage the bush food
industry was big on condiments and spices,
like a little bit of quandong jam on the side
or a bit of lemon myrtle, no-one was really
focusing on the staples.”
Of 200 tubers commonly unearthed
in southern Western Australia, Woodall
identified two or three with marketing
potential, including youlk (Platysace
deflexa), a bush carrot, and kulyu (Ipomoea
calobra), similar to sweet potato.
Woodall collaborates with indigenous
communities, encouraging them to grow
the crops and reconnect with native foods.
78 — FEATURE
The tubers are particularly suited to their
nomadic lifestyle and culture. Apart from
a little care to establish the crops, they
require very little water.
“These things are as tough as old
boots,” he says. “You plant them and
they need a bit of work to get going, but
once they’re established, they’re ready to
harvest whenever they ripen and whenever
the land owners decide it’s a good time.”
And there’s a good potential market.
“There’s easily a demand for about 300
tonnes per annum, but we’re mucking
around with a couple of hundred kilos.”
There’s also a strong cultural
component that captivates people,
Woodall says. “[People are] not just
fascinated that it’s now being cultivated;
they’re fascinated a) that it tastes quite
nice, and b) that it was an Aboriginal food.”
As well as tubers, a plethora of edible
plants thrives in Australian conditions,
including nuts, herbs, spices, warrigal
greens (Tetragonia tetragonioides – native
spinach), bush onion (Haemodorum
spicatum), phytonutrient-rich fruits, and
even native rice (Oryza meridionalis).
Grains have also received some
attention, including native millet
(Echinochloa turnerana) and kangaroo
grass (Themeda triandra). Indeed,
evidence hints that indigenous Australians
could have been the first bakers, says
Bruce Pascoe, an indigenous author and
historian.
Pascoe has been working with leading
chefs, experimenting with breads made
from native grains. Paul Iskov is among
them, and says one of the tastiest dampers
he ever made was derived from spinifex
(Triodia).
Iskov uses Woodall’s tubers. Like
other chefs, he is committed to showcasing
wild Australian foods, intact with their
stories. After working his way through
fancy restaurants around the world, he
returned home inspired to focus on native
ingredients against a backdrop of the
country’s unspoiled landscapes.
Based in Western Australia, he created
the pop-up restaurant Fervor with a menu
dominated by native ingredients served
with a unique outdoor experience for
diners.
While bush food was trendy in the
1990s, he now believes it’s a huge market
that is here to stay. But meeting demand
from restaurants and health food markets
remains challenging.
Building an industry around native
foods is a slow process. Iskov estimates
that native rice, for instance, currently
costs a prohibitive $100 or more per kilo.
One challenge is to develop cost-
effective methods to harvest and process
the crops on a larger scale. Others include
indigenous intellectual property rights
and environmental considerations. But
research is growing, and the native food
industry is rapidly gaining traction.
Like Togola and Woodall, Iskov is
committed to keeping profits in the local
communities, with a national network
of wild harvesters who collect food when
it’s in season. When they travel between
locations, Fervor chefs try to work with
traditional land owners to collect local
ingredients.
Iskov says when he and his partner
were foraging with locals along the
coastline of South Africa, they discovered
species similar to those found in Australia.
Issue 82
Fruits of the Baobab tree, Western Australia.
CREDIT: ULLSTEIN BILD / GETTY IMAGES
This is not surprising, though, given the
similar climates.
Globally, growing diverse, resilient
crops is an escalating imperative to
address challenges for sustainability,
Hopper argues. The benefits are manifold,
including better health and nutrition,
clean water, climate change adaptation,
and cultural diversity.
To that end, he writes: “Targeted
plant diversity science and cross-cultural
learning with Aboriginal people … offer
some solutions to global problems and an
important message of hope.”
With their majestic, parched
landscapes and rich cultural histories of
nutritious, resilient food crops, indigenous
Australia and Africa have much to
contribute.
And we can all draw inspiration from
Togola. Eventually, he plans to collaborate
with women from across the African
continent and showcase the diversity of
native food. “Mali is one country out of 55,
and each country is different – they have
their own crops, their own fruit and their
own legumes.”
But, he says, “it’s not just an African
initiative; it’s a global issue. Sustainability
is key – and working with women, putting
women in a position for success.
We have to all join forces and find
solutions. We are a global community; we
work together.”
NATALIE PARLETTA is a freelance writer
based in Australia.
 SPECTRUM
PEOPLE, CULTURE & REVIEWS

For Victorian artist Cameron Robbins, wind plays a key role.

CREDIT: CAMERON ROBBINS

ZEITGEIST

OUT THERE
Paul Davies 84
Creative chaos,
REVIEWS wind and art
The Chronicles of Evolution 87
ARTIST CAMERON ROBBINS doesn’t draw. Instead, he builds
SCIENCE CLUB wind-powered machines that draw for him, producing work so
Build your own bee hotel 94 extraordinary that MONA in Tasmania gave him his own gallery.
Richard Watts reports.
NEW WRITING
The birth of immunology 108
80 — SPECTRUM Issue 82

ZEITGEIST

WHEREVER THE WIND BLOWS – from Hobart’s Museum of

Old and New Art (MONA) to a floating residence on Lake
Tyers in Victoria’s East Gippsland – Cameron Robbins can be
found installing and finetuning his wind-drawing machines.
Each is carefully designed to respond to wind speed and
wind direction, transferring these often-subtle changes to
paper, glass, metal or concrete via a complex array of axles,
bearings and pulley wheels, and a pen mounted on a wire arm.
Robbins likes to think of them as instruments. “The word
‘machine’ has connotations of something automatic like a
washing machine or a dishwasher, where you push a button
and it does its thing. It’s certainly not like that with my drawing
instruments,” he says.
And like other musical instruments – such as the clarinet,
which he plays in weekly sessions with a jazz band – they take
time and application to master.
While the instruments draw by themselves once set up, they
require constant care and observation if they are to maintain
their maximum creative output. Otherwise they rather just go
through the motions, and things can get a bit samey.
“It’s not automatic – you have to practice; you have to
set the thing up to respond and interact to various situations,
and you have to refine your technique,” he says. “That’s
when creative things can happen: when you’re on top of the
technicalities, and then this whole world of expression opens
up.”
A trained sculptor who has worked creatively with fire,
water, steam and sunlight, as well as across such other artistic
disciplines as photography, video and installation, Robbins
also has a fascination for natural dynamics, inspired by a
teenage love of surfing and later by his discovery of chaos
theory.
He recalls the work of James Gleick, whose popular book
Chaos: Making a New Science introduced the public to many of
the key principles of chaos theory in the summer of 1989-90.
“Chaos theory really came into being through the
development of computers. As they got more powerful,
they were able to crunch very large reiterative processes like
feedback systems and other things that happen in nature, but
which are so complicated that they’re very hard to analyse
mathematically. So chaos theory was actively trying to describe
things like turbulence in a stream, for instance.”
Robbins’ wind-drawing instruments capture the results of
such turbulence.
Some of the artworks recall the discoveries of French
mathematician Henri Poincaré, whose research on the three-
body problem (a challenge faced by early physicists when
trying to compute the influence of three astronomical bodies
upon one another) helped lay the foundations of chaos theory.
“I suppose the thing that really got me into the idea of
creating a rotary mechanical drawing instrument was an idea
– which came from chaos theory as well – about the Earth’s
orbit,” he says.
COSMOS SPECTRUM — 81

Above, left and right:

Cameron Robbins’ complex
creation at work at Hobart’s
Museum of Old and New Art,
Tasmania.
CREDIT: JESSIE HUNNIFORD / MONA
82 — SPECTRUM
ZEITGEIST
“As we go around the sun, every New Year’s Eve we’re
actually at a different spot in the orbit because the Moon
keeps pulling us around as well … so every year we’re making a
different line, and over thousands of years that becomes woven
like a rope, if you can imagine it.
Issue 82
“Poincaré actually made a cross-section through that skein
of orbits and discovered these beautiful figures within that
cross-section: very swirly and like a fluid turbulence pattern.
And this is what chaos theory was doing, uncovering these
extra layers in the universe and in the ways in which energy
COSMOS SPECTRUM — 83

and later develop these into carefully engineered functioning

prototypes and reliable traveling drawing instruments,”
he explains.
“To develop such a thing into a more permanent
commissioned work, the prototype is taken to the architects,
engineers and machinists to scale up and strengthen.
“I have to evaluate many different materials to perform
in conditions from mountain-top gales to ocean waves to the
slightest indoor draughts. I have to glean material and process
knowledge from many sources: the Bureau of Meteorology,
lab scientists, marine engineers, yachties, artists, bicycle
engineers, metal workers, builders, jewellers and others.
“Once I see how a new instrument idea reacts to the
environment, I can see what might be involved with creating
a fully functioning version – a second iteration that is
transportable, that someone else could set up, and robust for
the open environments.”
Robbins has finetuned his process over 30 years and
more, and his instruments are designed to last for decades.
The massive permanent work at MONA has 25-millimetre
stainless steel axles and 500-millimetre diameter wind cups.
“It’s got a lot of grunt – it’s a V8 drawing machine, and
it’s designed to last through the gales of the Roaring Forties
of Tasmania,” he says. “But it also has to be sensitive enough
to carefully transcribe the slightest breeze, when smoke rises
almost vertically. It’s been a very interesting process of balance
to work that out.”
Designing and installing instruments designed to work for
decades also means Robbins must consider his own mortality,
as well as questions of ownership.
“With the MONA instrument it is a 50-year drawing
project. I’m working with MONA to develop a process
whereby we’re producing five-metre-long wind drawings
over the 50-year period … I’ve been training staff to work very
carefully with the instrument.
“In this case, assistants must run the instrument and change
the paper and change the pens, and adjust various parameters
according to the weather conditions. People are always texting
me with photographs and I’m sending instructions and I’ve
had to write operating manuals.
Drawing machines “The drawings are works by me because I have developed
by Cameron Robbins this instrument and invented this dual-axis wind-drawing
hard at work at system. It’s a very extended, very remote drawing tool of mine.
Hepburn Windfarm in But because it’s going to be drawing for 50 years, I’ve been
Central Victoria. negotiating what to do in the event of the artist’s demise.”
And that’s quite confronting, he adds with a laugh.
CREDIT: CAMERON ROBBINS

flows, and I found that was where I wanted to head.”
Robbins creates initial sketches for his instruments then
spends time in the studio developing them.
“As an artist in the studio, I first make ad-hoc mock-ups:
assemblage using found, repurposed and collected materials,
RICHARD WATTS is a writer, broadcaster and critic, and host
of the Melbourne radio station 3RRR’s flagship arts program
SmartArts.
84 — SPECTRUM Issue 82

PAUL DAVIES is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist

OUT THERE
and best-selling author.

Are we all
descendants
of Martians?
COSMOS SPECTRUM — 85

ASTROBIOLOGY IS BASED ON THE HOPE that life is

widespread in the universe. There are two ways this might
be the case. One is that life is easy to incubate and so will pop
up wherever planets resemble Earth. The other is that life’s
origin requires very rare and special conditions, but that once
it gets going it spreads around the universe, a theory known as
panspermia, meaning “seeds everywhere”.
The basic idea of panspermia goes back to antiquity, but it
was placed on a modern footing by the Swedish chemist Svante
Arrhenius in the early 20th century. In the 1970s it was refined
by the British astronomer Fred Hoyle and his collaborator
Chandra Wickramasinghe. The theory remains highly
controversial in the original form, with naked microbes wafting
across interstellar space, which we now know is saturated with
deadly radiation.
But there is one convincing version of the theory. From
time to time, Earth and Mars take a hit from a comet or asteroid
Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927)
with enough force to blast rocks around the solar system. Some
in his laboratory, 1909.
terrestrial rocks will fall on Mars and vice versa – my university
CREDIT: PRINT COLLECTOR / GETTY IMAGES
has half a dozen Mars rocks that landed as meteorites.
If Earth and Mars can trade rocks, surely they can trade
life too? Shielded within a rock, a hardy microbe could easily
withstand the harsh environment of outer space and so arrive at
the other end still viable.
When I suggested this in the early 1990s I received
nothing but derision. It was objected that microbes wouldn’t have a few favourable aspects as an incubator of life; certainly
survive being kicked off a planet, or the fiery plunge through early Mars was no less congenial than early Earth for biology to
the atmosphere. However, it has been shown that the Mars get started. But whichever way around it was, it seems that if we
meteorites generally do not show signs of shock heating, only ever find traces of life on Mars, chances are it will just be good
the outer layer of a meteorite becomes incandescent, and it all old terrestrial life. Fascinating though that may be scientifically,
happens so fast that the interior doesn’t get hot. Today, these it would fail to answer the much deeper question of whether
objections have largely melted away life is easy or not to start. Ideally we would like to find a second
genesis of life on Mars, thus answering the question in the
affirmative.
If Earth and Mars can trade rocks, The spread of life between near-neighbour planets could
be common throughout the universe. But what about longer
surely they can trade life too? journeys? Calculations show that some Earth ejecta will reach
the outer moons of the solar system, such as Europa, although
the probability of a successful transfer of life isn’t promising. It
The bombardment of the planets by comets and asteroids will also happen from time to time that ejected Earth rocks will
was far more severe in the past, especially before about 3.8 be flung out of the solar system altogether by the gravitational
billion years ago, after which it tailed off somewhat, although it field of Jupiter. But now the numbers are very unfavourable:
has never ceased entirely. Evidence suggests that until about 3.5 the chances of a terrestrial rock ever hitting another earthlike
billion years ago Mars was warm and wet and far more earthlike planet beyond the solar system are tiny, and even the hardiest
than it is today. As we know there was life on Earth at that microbe would be unlikely to survive a journey of millions
time, it seems inevitable that the transfer of viable organisms of years. On the other hand, our sun was born amid a cluster
from Earth to Mars would have occurred, thus seeding the red of closely-spaced stars, so if life was established quickly
planet with Earth life. Of course, the same mechanism works in somewhere in the cluster, there is a possibility that it could have
reverse; indeed, it is easier to knock rocks off Mars because of spread rapidly between the nascent planetary systems.
its lower gravity and thinner atmosphere. If life on Earth did arrive from elsewhere, the problem
All of which raises the intriguing question of whether life on of how and where it first arose gets shifted off into unknown
Earth may have started on Mars and come here in impact ejecta, territory. Whether kicking the can down the road – or across
implying that we are all the descendants of Martians. Mars does the galaxy – amounts to good science is debatable.
86 — SPECTRUM

CONVERSATION STARTER

CREDIT: ALFRED PASIEKA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

UNDERSTANDING HOW the human brain works is

almost certainly the most challenging scientific problem NON-FICTION
of our time. How can three pounds of tissue perform The New Mind Readers: What
mental feats that outstrip the ability of the world’s most Neuroimaging Can and Cannot
powerful computers while consuming less energy than Reveal about Our Thoughts
a dim lightbulb? RUSSELL A POLDRACK

Princeton University Press

RRP $69.99
COSMOS
Really looking at
the big picture
IN THE RENAISSANCE it was possible to
be at the forefront of nearly every field of
study, from philosophy to astronomy, if
one was lucky enough to have the brains,
time and money to do so. All were
nascent, having comparatively small
stores of knowledge.
In the early 21st century, this is
no longer conceivable. It is barely
possible for experts in the most niche
sub-subdisciplines to keep up with the
torrent of publications on their topic
alone. We are scattered, knowing much
about specific things, and little beyond.
So, it is a wonderful reminder of
what’s really going on in the world when
someone drags our attention away from
the minutiae to the big picture. Sydney
Brenner’s 10-on-10: The Chronicles of
NON-FICTION
Evolution tells a tale of such grandeur
Sydney Brenner’s 10-on-10: The Chronicles of
that it is mapped on a logarithmic scale
Evolution
of years before the present: the story of
SHUZHEN SIM and BENJAMIN SEET (eds)
humans, and life, from the Big Bang to
the Anthropocene.
Wildtype Books.
The book is the result of a lecture
RRP $59.80
series conceived by Brenner, the Nobel
laureate who is currently based in
Singapore as scientific advisor to the
chairman at the Agency of Science,
Technology and Research (A*STAR)
and an adjunct professor at the Lee Kong
Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang
Technology University.
Brenner is a giant of his field of
molecular biology who, among many
accomplishments, won the 2002 Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine for
pioneering the use of the nematode
worm Caenorhabitis elegans as a model
organism. This is now ubiquitous as a
tool to understand animal and human
biology in labs worldwide.
In 2016 Brenner established
the Evolution Club in Singapore to
“discuss evolution in all its variety and
complexity”. The plan was to present
10 seminars over 10 months that
would cover 10 billion years: hence the
SPECTRUM — 87
REVIEWS
logarithmic scale. Sydney Brenner’s
10-on-10: The Chronicles of Evolution,
documents those seminars in
23 chapters.
It begins where the universe did
– with the Big Bang – and it is fitting
(given that half the book is devoted to
questions of human evolution) that this
chapter is written by John D Barrow, the
English cosmologist and mathematician
who, with the almost infamous Frank
Tipler, has championed the notion of a
“anthropic cosmological principle”.
This principle basically states that
the universe, against all odds and in the
most unlikely manner, is finetuned in
such a way that intelligent observers
(us) exist within it. Barrow, however,
goes further to suggest that the universe
has these unlikely qualities because
intelligent carbon-based lifeforms are
necessary in some way.
This teleological position is popular
with the religious elements within the
scientific community and it is there in
the background of Barrow’s chapter. In
this context, however, it seems charming
rather than philosophically problematic,
as it focusses his tale of the beginning
(and the end) of the universe squarely
on life and its place in the cosmos, thus
binding it neatly to the other chapters.
From there, things become much
less controversial. Hyman Hartman
outlines how clay may have helped in
the development and evolution of the
genetic code itself and Jack W Szostak
describes our best understanding of
abiogenesis: how lifeless chemistry gave
rise to living beings.
We are treated to a tour of the
development of cellular complexity,
of how multicellular life arose, and
subsequently of the rise of vertebrates.
We see life dragging itself ashore to
colonise the terrestrial world and the
subsequent advent of mammals.
This part of the book is gloriously
88 — SPECTRUM
REVIEWS
enamoured of the Big Picture. Each
chapter tells a tale of epic moments
in the evolution of life and especially
those that led to us. These events are
so big that sometimes we lose sight
of them for all the minor details; you
might know full well that at some
point organisms gained spines, but it is
unlikely that you know the up-to-date
story of this, or where to find it. And
this is what The Chronicles of Evolution
does so well: it puts those stories at
your fingertips and beds them down in
context.
The rest of the book is more directly
concerned with human evolution.
Francis Thackeray sketches our
understanding of hominin evolution,
and Svante Pääbo, the doyen of all
things Neanderthal, tells us of their
genetic legacy in modern day humans.
We learn of the origin of our large
brains and how they facilitated our
intelligence and human languages.
From there the book moves into
questions of cultural evolution,
technology and information and finally
to the philosophical consideration
of the very process of evolution that
generated us. This part of the book
is more restricted in scope and more
centred on us, but nonetheless marks
important milestones in the human
story.
The book is superbly visual, with
beautiful imagery and thoughtful
infographics throughout. The hard
cover edition even has a dust jacket
that folds out to reveal a poster-sized
whimsical illustration of the history of
life.
Although there are things to
quibble over here and there, The
Chronicles of Evolution is an absolute
delight, and for those weary of the
hyper-specialisation of the modern
scientific enterprise, it comes as a
lovely reminder of the larger narrative
that holds all the details together.
— STEVE FLEISCHFRESSER
Issue 82
READERS OF A CERTAIN age and ancestry may
remember when the word “billion” meant something
different by an order of magnitude depending on
whether it was a British one or an American one.
Apparently, these days they are the same thing – a
thousand million, the US position – but dim memories
or simple uncertainty regarding the current status of
very big numbers don’t assist in making reading this
slim volume an undiluted exercise in joy.
And that’s a pity, because it could use a bit of
help. Kernighan is a professor of computer science
at Princeton University and a prolific author. Sadly,
though, his previous works have titles such as
NON-FICTION Software Tools in Pascal and The Unix Programming
Millions Billions Zillions: Environment, which may give the astute reader a clue
Defending Yourself in about the contents of this one.
a World of Too Many In pointing out that big numbers are different –
Numbers beyond our ability to derive an immediate, intuitive
by BRIAN W. meaning for them – he makes a valuable observation.
KERNIGHAN Much of his approach to changing that understanding,
however, constitutes lifting items from newspaper
Princeton articles in which the journalist got a figure wrong,
RRP $44.99 usually by a big margin.
Thus, articles which should have quoted trillions
in fact used the term billions, and those that should
have dealt in billions instead cited millions – meaning
consequent figures were wrong by a factor of a
thousand.
And that’s worth pointing out, because sloppy
research and sloppy editing help no one. But
Kernighan uses the approach over and over, creating
a repetitive narration that loses its gloss quite quickly.
Demonstration becomes drone.
The school-bookish structure of the work, too, does
it no favours. A volume on the intricacies of computer
programming may well benefit from each short chapter
concluding in a section labelled “Summary”, but
in a collection of pieces ostensibly aimed at grown-
up general readers it comes across as clumsy and
condescending.
All this is a shame, really, because a cracking read
on how to navigate mathematical terms and functions,
especially in relation to how they are bandied about in
politics and policy, often with intent to deceive, would
be really valuable.
Thankfully, thus, way back in 1995, John Allen
Paulos, from Temple University in Philadelphia, wrote
a book called A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper
(Penguin). Go get it. Its references are dated, but its
substance is brill.
— ANDREW MASTERSON
COSMOS
DAVID HU IS THE curious scientist who wondered
why his baby boy’s wee went for so long as it
drenched him from the changing table without
warning. He proceeded to measure his own wee
duration and that of animals ranging from mice to
elephants as revealed in his hilarious TEDx talk
Confessions of a Wasteful Scientist.
His wife shouldn’t be surprised. When they met,
he was intrigued by her toy poodle’s shaking motion
as it tried to remove the sticky notes he had plastered
it with for a scientific experiment. He credits this as
his foray into the physics of animal movement.
The study of animal motion has intrigued
NON-FICTION non-biologists since the non-intuitive paradox
How to Walk on Water of how dolphins can swim despite mathematical
and Climb up Walls: calculations predicting that they can’t – a theme
Animal Movement and the repeated throughout the book.
Robotics of the Future Readers like me, whose brains turn to mush at
by DAVID HU the sight of a physics formula, will not be daunted.
Hu masterfully explains scientific revelations such
Footprint Books as how insects walk on water, snakes slither and
[Published by Princeton mosquitos survive rainstorms using rich tales of
University Press] discovery and analogies that brim with satisfying
RRP $54.99 “aha” moments.
Yet readers more confident with physics
principles won’t be disappointed with this
comprehensive review of animal motion and its
applications.
Through Hu’s eyes, you will see the world in
DURING HIS LIFE , Stephen Hawking was many
things: a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, best-
selling author and, by general consent, the most
significant scientist since Isaac Newton.
And now he’s a coffee-table book. Not that
there’s anything wrong with that.
On both personal and professional levels there
was so much complexity to Hawking’s life that
trying to examine it in anything less than, say, seven
hefty volumes would seem like a very risky task.
Here Joel Levy, an accomplished science
journalist, chooses to take a short and snappy,
NON-FICTION episodic approach to his subject’s life and career.
Hawking: The Man, The This signals a certain lightness of touch – although
Genius, and the Theory not, it must be said, a frivolous or wilfully shallow
of Everything one – that turns the limitations of the “gift book”
by JOEL LEVY form into an advantage.
In lavishly illustrated, easily digested segments,
Andre Deutsch Levy tackles Hawking’s private life – his childhood,
RRP $30 student years, relationships, and academic
successes.
SPECTRUM — 89
REVIEWS
an entirely different way. A peek into the trials
and tribulations of scientists intrigued by the
evolutionary mysteries of how and why things move
makes a captivating and entertaining read.
We learn how Hu transported six snakes inside
his shirt on a train so he could watch them slither
around his apartment, and how scientists trudged
through mudflats collecting worms and overcame
fear of heights to drop flying snakes from a 10 metre
tower.
We hear of failed experiments like eager students
trying to catch urine from dogs with plastic cups
before accosting zoo animals with absorbable pads,
camera and stopwatch.
Funny and fascinating, the research also has
real-world applications. For instance, insights from
jellyfish movement enhanced noiseless submarine
propulsion. Analysis of snake motion could help
robots climb trees or enable minimally invasive heart
surgery. Eyelash aerodynamics could prevent dust
settling on solar panels to optimise their efficiency.
At times I questioned the usefulness of potential
applications like minimising energy expenditure
when walking – although this could benefit
people who are rehabilitating or optimise robotic
movement. On balance, I think Hu has undoubtedly
dispelled accusations of being a “wasteful scientist”.
— NATALIE PARLETTA
Other sections look at his disease diagnosis
and progression, the technology behind his voice
encoder, and his gradual transition from brilliant
scholar to celebrity scientist to national treasure.
As well as such biographical details, however,
Levy makes sure his readers know full well why
Hawking was, and remains, so influential.
In clear, unfussy language he explains all the key
concepts in the scientist’s life, from M-theory to
model-dependent realism to top-down cosmology.
Short and sweet, these entries alone are worth the
price of admission.
Hawking is a delightful book, because of its
content and its structure. It would make a most
acceptable gift for anyone with an interest in
physics or fame, from high school students to
hobbyists.
Or, of course, for oneself.
— ANDREW MASTERSON
90 — SPECTRUM Issue 82

REVIEWS

NON-FICTION
The Atlas of Botany
by FRANCIS HALLÉ, with ÉLIANE
PATRIARCA
Translated by ERIC BUTLER

MIT PRESS
RRP $49.99

FRANCIS HALLÉ IS an accomplished

botanist who has spent 40 years travelling
around the world in search of strange and
wonderful plants.
He is also a talented artist, with a
beguiling naïve style. In this book he
recounts some of his more memorable
discoveries, accompanied by lovely
illustrations.
The combination of fact, travelogue,
anecdote and hand-drawn art gives the
result a notably old-fashioned edge, an
echo of the nineteenth century “gentleman
scholar”. This, however, is no bad thing.
The Atlas of Poetic Botany is a
book that, like botany itself, invites
quiet, meandering contemplation, the
appreciation of beauty and, as the pages
turn, a sense of wonder.

— ANDREW MASTERSON
COSMOS SPECTRUM — 91
92 — SPECTRUM
DESTINATION
The Endeavour, boldly going nowhere
IN CALIFORNIA, the saying goes, they do everything on a huge
scale, and if the California Science Centre in Los Angeles is any
indication, the assertion is true.
Situated on Exposition Drive near a number of other
significant cultural institutions, including the city’s natural
history museum and the Californian African American Museum,
the Science Centre comprises enormous buildings dedicated to
permanent displays of biological and engineering marvels.
Of special interest, however, is the Samuel Oschin Pavilion,
opened in 2012. This cavernous area is dedicated to exhibits
exploring the theme of space travel.
NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour has pride of place, dwarfing
pretty much everything else and allowing visitors to get up close
and personal with the literal and symbolic embodiment of a key
Issue 82
MUSEUM
California Science Centre,
Los Angeles, USA
period in humanity’s ongoing quest to explore what lies beyond.
The pavilion includes several other space-related exhibits
and environments, including a Space Shuttle engine, a workshop
built for astronauts to use while aloft, the Rocketdyne Operations
Support Centre (which was used during shuttle launches) – and
even Endeavour’s toilet.
Admission to the permanent exhibitions at the Science
Centre is free, although temporary blockbuster installations may
attract a fee. The place is open every day of the year between
10am and 5pm, except for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New
Year’s Day.
For more information visit californiasciencecenter.org
— ANDREW MASTERSON
CREDIT: FREDERICK J. BROWN / GETTY IMAGES
COSMOS
Fulsome prism blues
THE ACT OF BUYING a small prism –
easily available from educational suppliers
and science-themed gift shops – is a
gesture that resonates with historical
significance.
After all it was Isaac Newton himself
who in 1666 manipulated one, such
that white light entered one side and a
multicoloured stream flowed from the
other. It was a potent demonstration that
led to the understanding that changing
the wavelength of light – by bending its
path as it passes through an object – causes
different degrees of refraction and thus the
revelation of the rainbow.
Living as he did in a world without
electricity and thus in an environment
free from multiple sources of artificial
illumination, it would be quite reasonable
to expect that Newton achieved his prism
trick rather more easily than most of us can
in the world today.
Upon buying a prism – small, made of
glass or plastic, with a triangular base and
rectangular sides – and getting it home,
it is perfectly natural to try to generate
a spectrum. Some people, of course, do
this in homage to Newton, while others,
perhaps, are more intent on reproducing
the image from the cover of Pink Floyd’s
album Dark Side of the Moon.
Either way, for many it quickly
becomes apparent that in the modern
world the task is easier said than done.
The room needs to be completely dark – a
remarkably difficult state to achieve in a
21st century house. Quite often, heavy
drapes and gaffer tape need to be procured
and deployed.
The beam of light also needs to be
very narrow. Most torches, it is quickly
discovered, send out beams wider than the
SPECTRUM — 93
ARTEFACT
CREDIT: MEJNAK / GETTY IMAGES
prism, masking the effect.
Shopping trips in search of tiny torches
frequently result, prompting the question:
where do you buy a torch with a beam so
narrow that its only conceivable purpose is
to bounce through a prism in a dark room?
Thus often, by the time the necessary
preconditions for one of the foundation
demonstrations of classical physics have
been met, exhaustion and frustration may
be more prominent than enthusiasm.
In the end, though, it is all worth it. The
spectrum stabbing out from a gorgeous
little piece of geometric glass is a beautiful
and breathtaking sight, even in miniature.
It looks like an act of magic – except, of
course, we know that it isn’t. It is an act of
science.
And that’s the whole point.
— ANDREW MASTERSON
94 — SCIENCE CLUB ISSUE 82

SCIENCE CLUB

A female Megachile aurifrons sealing off her nest at a garden bee hotel.
CREDIT: KIT PRENDERGAST
COSMOS
HOW TO ATTRACT
NATIVE BEES
TO YOUR GARDEN
KIT PRENDERGAST looks at ways to help bees help us.
WHEN AUSTRALIANS hear the word bee, the European
honeybee (Apis mellifera) usually springs to mind. Few
people are aware that we have native bees – even though
there are over 2000 different species of them.
It’s this diverse group of indigenous bees that we
really need to look out for, not only because they are
part of our natural biotic heritage as Australians, but
also because they are superior pollinators for most
of our native flowers compared with the introduced
honeybee.
THE INCREDIBLE DIVERSITY OF AUSTRALIAN
NATIVE BEES
Our native bees are diverse in size, appearance and
lifestyle, but few look anything like honeybees. Most
are much smaller, with some in the most species-rich
group, the Euryglossinae, mere millimetres long.
They come in a range of colours and patterns: there
are bees with blue and black bands on the abdomen
(various Amegilla species), black bees with fuzzy red
foreheads and rouge behinds (many Megachile), and a
whole group that is black with white and yellow mark-
ings reminiscent of wasps (Hylaeus).
Some native bees are much hairier than honeybees
(some Trichocolletes and Leioproctus, for instance), but
a sizeable proportion completely lack pollen-carrying
hairs because they have evolved to swallow pollen and
regurgitate it back at the nest (Hylaeinae and Euryglossi-
nae). Native bees are relatively docile, and there are even
“stingless” bees, comprising the tribe Meliponini.
COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB— 95
MISGUIDED MESSAGES IN SAVING THE (HONEY)BEES
The mass media popularity of the European
honeybee is a problem when it comes to
conservation efforts because recommendations for
honeybees don’t hold up for native species that are
very different in their ecology and behaviour.
As evidenced by their domination and successful
expansion around the world, honeybees are very
adaptable. They are super-generalists, able to
forage on a plethora of flowering plant species
from all parts of the globe. They are not too fussy
about what they’ll forage on, so they can be moved
in to pollinate mass-flowering crops. And they are
colonial, so they can be managed in hives.
In contrast, most Australian native bees have
clear preferences for particular flowers, and some
have become so highly specialised they will only
forage on a restricted range – sometimes plants
from a single genus. They also are mainly solitary,
which makes them more vulnerable than honeybees.
Apart from 11 species of stingless bees, our
native bees cannot be kept and managed in hives.
Apart from the stingless bees, and unlike honeybees
that nest in large tree hollows in the wild, native bees
nest in the ground or in small pre-made cavities in
trees created by wood-boring beetles.
The domination of honeybees, with their
divergent biology, means that much information
about how to “save the bees” fails to cater for native
species.
96 — COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB
Planting Callistemon (bottlebrush) is a good way to attract native bees,
such as this Megachile (or Schizomegachile) monstrosa male.
So, what can we do to help? An important first step
is bee-friendly garden design.
PLANT FLOWERS – BUT ONLY NATIVES
Contrary to popular opinion, planting more different
species of flowers can negatively impact on native bees.
This is because of their restrictive dietary preferences.
Many flowering species offered at garden centres are
unsuitable.
The Australian continent was isolated for millions
of years from the rest of the globe, so our flora and
fauna evolved without influences from other biota,
Issue 82
leading to a tight mutualism between plants and
pollinators.
Only a subset of native bees will visit exotic and
introduced flowers. This means we need to focus on
what we plant. Research suggests that key drawcards
for our native bees are our two most common native
plant families: Myrtaceae and Fabaceae. The Myrtaceae
include our iconic eucalypts (Eucalyptus, Corymbia,
Angophora) and bottlebrushes (Callistemon), while
Fabaceae include native pea plants (for example,
Jacksonia and Hardenbergia).
If you’re going to plant daisies, choose natives such
COSMOS
CREDIT: KIT PRENDERGRAST
as Everlastings. If you’re into fruit trees, opt for Lilly
Pilly.
Too many exotics will reduce a garden’s
attractiveness to native bees, so it’s important to plant
large patches of predominantly native plants; and don’t
get rid of those gum trees!
NESTING HABITAT FOR BEES: BARE SOIL AND
BEE HOTELS
As well as food, native bees need a place to nest, and
we can help here too. Many species nest on the ground,
so gardeners should keep pavements, paths and other
COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB— 97
impervious surfaces to a minimum – and avoid fake
grass (which has the added negative of leaching plastic
chemicals into the environment).
Limit mulching and tilling to avoid covering up and
destroying native bee nests. For the bees that nest in
cavities, retain trees in and around your yard.
BUILD A BEE-FRIENDLY BEE HOTEL
Another way to encourage nesting is with bee hotels.
Building and installing them is simple and fun, and they
provide a great way to observe bees.
However, it’s important to know what native bees
actually need. Many of the bee hotels you’ll find in stores
are not based on scientific studies of bee nesting; instead
you’ll just get wasps, spiders and cockroaches living in
them. Here are a few pointers to getting it right.
Bee hotels are commonly made from bamboo or
wood. For bamboo, bundle together a number of stalks
of the right length and diameter then back them into
a large bamboo piece or a larger container, such as a
protein powder container. For wood, opt for native,
untreated specimens and drill holes in them.
The length and the diameter of the holes matter. If
they are too short they will limit the number of offspring
the bees can produce per nest and make them more
prone to attack by parasitic wasps.
The hole diameters can’t be too wide, however,
because many native bees are quite small. I’ve found
seven millimetres is most preferred, but suggest offering
a range of size from three to 10 millimetres.
Make sure one end of the hotel is closed off. Don’t
drill all the way through the wood or have bamboo pieces
that are hollow the whole way through.
Location is important: hang your hotel about a metre
or a metre-and-a-half off the ground in a sunny spot
where it is not hidden by vegetation.
LEAVE TOXINS OUT
Bees are susceptible to toxins, so avoid using pesticides
and herbicides. Native plants will not only encourage
native bees, but also predatory and parasitic wasps that
provide free natural bio-control of insect pests.
BUSHLAND REMNANTS ARE INDISPENSABLE
Although we can encourage native bees to our gardens,
they are not ecological replacements for natural
habitat. We really need to preserve and restore large
patches of bushland where native vegetation dominates
in and around our cities.
KIT PRENDERGAST is a native bee scientist, a PhD
candidate at Curtin University in Western Australia,
and author of the book Bee Hotels for Native Bees.
She can be contacted at kit.prendergast21@gmail.
com or via her Facebook group Bees in the ´burbs in a
biodiversity hotspot.
98 — COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB Issue 82

TOP 6

Academic papers that aren’t

quite what they seem

STEPHEN FLEISCHFRESSER explores

the murky, but sometimes funny,
world of the hoax journal article.
COSMOS
The old maxim that academics must “publish or perish”
very much holds true. The best way to get your research
out there is to produce papers that appear in journals or at
learned conferences – ideally both.
Proper journals operate through “peer review”, meaning
that nothing appears in print unless an expert in the field
agrees it is of sufficient merit to be published. But then
not all journals are proper journals.
Throw into the mix the common disagreements over
philosophies, disciplines or academic approaches, and you
have an ideal environment for academic hoaxes. Here are
six of the best.
THE SOKAL HOAX
In the 1990s, a form of philosophy commonly called
postmodernism (although academics more correctly
refer to it as post-structuralism) was all the rage. It
often claimed, among other things, that the sciences
were “socially constructed”: that is, that our scientific
knowledge reflects society and its concerns, rather than
nature. This obviously upset a lot of scientists, who
spend a lot of time trying to understand nature.
Alan Sokal, a physicist with both New York
University and University College London, was one
of them – and he decided to fight back. In 1996, he
wrote an article claiming that quantum gravity (the
attempt to understand gravity from the perspective of
quantum mechanics) was indeed socially constructed.
He used a lot of postmodern jargon and produced a
paper that he thought was complete nonsense. He
called it Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.
Sheesh.
He then submitted it to a well-known postmodern
journal, called Social Text, which duly published it. On
the day it was published he revealed his hoax, which
he said was designed to see if Social Text had high
academic standards and good scholarship – a test they
seemed to have failed.
However, it wasn’t really a fair test, as Social Text
COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB — 99
was not a peer reviewed journal, and Sokal later came to
slightly regret the deception of his experiment, though
he stood by its results.
PREYING ON THE PREDATORS
“Predatory journals” pretend to be high quality
peer-reviewed journals, when they’re really just scams
out to make money. It can be difficult to tell the differ-
ence between real and predatory journals, however,
and many academics have been tricked. But sometime
the tables are turned.
Gary Lewis, a senior lecturer in psychology from
Royal Holloway University in London, decided to
prank a predatory journal that emailed him out of
the blue. He concocted an utterly mad paper about
British politicians and the hand they used to wipe their
behinds. It argued that conservative, or right wing,
politicians would wipe with their left hand, and left
wing, or progressive, politicians would wipe with their
right.
He described himself as a researcher from the
Institute of Interdisciplinary Political and Faecal
Science and told the publishers, Crimson Publishing,
that the paper had been peer reviewed by Dr I P Daly.
Unbelievably, Testing inter-hemispheric social priming
theory in a sample of professional politicians – a brief
report was published in full.
100 — COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB Issue 82

TOP 6

iOS WRITES A CONFERENCE PAPER

Perhaps the next most important part of academic
life after publishing is the conference, and there are
predators here too. Some charge huge amounts, despite
being organised by scammers who know absolutely
nothing about the topic. And they are ripe to be
pranked.
When Christoph Bartneck, an industrial designer
who works on the interaction of humans and computers
and robots at the University of Canterbury in New
Zealand, received an email asking if he’d like to submit
a paper to the International Conference on Atomic and
Nuclear Physics, he smelled a rat – and decided to do
so.
He knew nothing about physics, so he let the
autocomplete function of his Apple devices do the
work for him. He started sentences using words like
nuclear or atomic and let the iOS software complete
them. Obviously, it made no sense whatsoever: even
the title was crazy – Atomic Energy will have been made
available to a single source. What? The first line of the
paper is awesome: “Atomic Physics and I shall not have All the names in the paper come from Seinfeld
the same problem with a separate section for a very characters and the whole paper was completely fake.
long long way.” The journal agreed to publish it if he paid $799. He also
Nonetheless, within three hours the paper had been didn’t pay.
accepted and Bartneck was asked for $1099. He didn’t Another MedCrave publication – International
pay. Journal of Molecular Biology: Open Access – also
got pranked. The psychology blogger known only
POP CULTURE THEMED PRANKS as Neuroskeptic submitted an article about the
Sometimes people really like to have fun with midichlorians found in each cell that help people
predatory journals. John H McCool (his real name) is connect to the Force. If that sounds familiar, it’s
an editor of scientific writing and a huge fan of the old because it’s straight from the Star Wars prequel
comedy show Seinfeld. He too received an email out movies.
of the blue inviting him to submit a paper to a suspect It’s completely full of nonsensical Star Wars
journal, in this case the MedCrave Group’s Urology & references and is basically plagiarised from the
Nephrology Open Access Journal. Wikipedia page on Mitochondrion, the small, very real
He’s an editor, not a doctor – and certainly organelles found in each cell of our bodies. Even worse,
not a urologist. However, there was an episode of he admitted to doing this in the paper itself. They still
Seinfeld in which Jerry Seinfeld’s character gets published it.
caught by a security guard while peeing in a parking
lot. He pretends to have a medical condition called SOKAL REVISITED
uromycitisis, a real condition, to get out of trouble. So, While postmodernism isn’t terribly popular anymore,
McCool decided to write a paper about a “patient” with some still feel the need to attack the scholarship of
a similar condition. areas of the arts and humanities. Very recently three

CREDIT: LISA LAKE / GETTY IMAGES

COSMOS
authors – Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor
from Portland State University in the US, James
Lindsay, a writer with a PhD in mathematics, and
Helen Pluckrose, the editor of the digital magazine
Areo – spent a year trying to get hoax papers published
in areas concerned with studies of race, gender,
sexuality, body size and culture.
They say these areas, which they call “grievance
studies”, are the descendants of postmodern thinking
and therefore have very poor scholarship. Out of the
many nonsense papers they wrote and submitted to a
range of journals, four were published, another three
accepted, four were to be revised and resubmitted,
one was still under review and nine were rejected. The
topics of the papers ranged from bodybuilding for the
overweight to feminist astronomy.
Although they may have exposed problems with the
standard of scholarship in some of these areas, some
have argued that the experiment didn’t really prove
anything, and critics see the way they went about it as
deceptive and unethical. Boghossian is actually under
investigation by his University for breaching ethics
guidelines.
COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB — 101
TOP 6
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld, providing both
entertainment and academic inspiration.
WHEN SEVEN WORDS ARE ALL YOU NEED
This is my favourite. In 2005, computer science
professors Eddie Kohler from Harvard University and
David Mazières from Stanford University, both in the
US, became so sick and tired of predatory journals
and conferences spamming their inbox that they
put together a 10-page fake article that they would
automatically send off to any predators that emailed
them.
The result is a simple as it is naughty. The entire
article, including the graphs and flow charts, is made up
of only seven words: “Get me off your f@#king mailing
list”. Computer scientists found it so funny that it
spread far and wide.
Things begin to get really hilarious when Peter
Vamplew, an associate professor in IT at Federation
University Australia, sent off Kohler and Mazières’
original paper to the International Journal of Advanced
Computer Technology.
The predatory journal had emailed him with an
invitation to submit a paper, and immediately accepted
it for publication. I think we can guess that it isn’t peer-
reviewed.
DID YOU KNOW?

ILLUSTRATION – Shawnee Willis

COSMOS
The man who
was certain of
uncertainty
TO MOST PEOPLE German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s
major contribution to science is eponymous.
“Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle”, sometimes
rendered less elegantly as Heisenberg’s theory of
indeterminancy, is one of those quasi-poetic formulations
that appeal to readers well beyond the boundaries of formal
science, in part because it neatly symbolises the fundamental
weirdness of the quantum world.
And while such familiarity guarantees the enduring fame
of the physicist, who was born in Wurzburg in December
1901, it also serves to obscure some of the more controversial
aspects of his career.
Heisenberg was the son of academic parents and entered
the prestigious Maximillians-Gymnasium, run by his
grandfather, in 1911, graduating nine years later.
He entered the University of Munich in 1920. Two years
later, at the University of Gottingen, he met up with another
giant of quantum physics, Niels Bohr. After earning his PhD,
he travelled to Copenhagen and joined Bohr at the latter’s
institute.
The primary issue that concerned both scientists was
the evident deficiencies in the existing model of the atom –
formulated by Bohr and New Zealander Ernest Rutherford
only a few years earlier. Although the model was robust in
many respects, it could not accommodate an increasing
amount of experimental data.
The key to refining a new model, Heisenberg intuited,
was strangely banal. Contrary to existing ideas, he
determined that it was impossible to actually visualise an
atom. This was not because of any limitations inherent in
technology or human perception – it was a fundamental limit
of the physical universe.
Hence the famous uncertainty. Electrons, particle
physicists agreed, had two properties: location and velocity.
Heisenberg’s great insight was to realise that it was
impossible to measure both. The more accurately location
was determined, the less information was available about
speed, and vice versa.
Interestingly, when Heisenberg published his findings,
he was quickly contradicted by another physicist with an
eponymous claim to fame: Erwin Schrödinger, of undead
cat fame.
While the former scientist described electrons as
particles, the latter described them as waves. Later it was
found that the two apparently irreconcilable models were in
fact mathematically identical, and the foundation doctrine of
wave-particle duality thus confirmed.
COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB — 103
Werner Heisenberg was
a giant of particle physics,
but questions remain about
other aspects of his life.
Niels Bohr,
with whom
Heisenberg
collaborated
CREDIT:
WIKIMEDIA
Together, Heisenberg and Bohr became known as the
architects of the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum
mechanics, and travelled widely across Europe and the US.
In 1933, together with Schrödinger and Paul Dirac,
Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize. By then, he had
returned to Germany – to the University of Leipzig – where
he would remain for several years. Unlike many other
prominent German academics, he chose not to leave when
Hitler came to power.
Although he claimed to be uninterested in politics, his
actions suggest otherwise. As a young man he had joined the
anti-Communist youth league and publicly supported the
suppression of a workers’ revolt in Bavaria in 1919.
In the highly charged atmosphere of 1937 he was
denounced by the SS, but defended by the organisation’s
leader, Heinrich Himmler.
In 1942, he became the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Physics in Berlin and worked on one of Hitler’s
personally directed projects, centred on nuclear fission. His
reasons for doing so have been much debated ever since, and
opinions are divided over whether he took the role to further
or forestall the development of an atomic weapon.
At the end of World War II, he was arrested by the Allies
and imprisoned for six months, after which he was allowed
to return to his work. Shortly afterwards, he was appointed
director of what soon became the Max Planck Institute,
where he remained until he retired in 1970.
In his last years he disavowed many of the ideas
underpinning particle physics, suggesting instead that
“fundamental symmetries” of the type described by Plato
were a more promising avenue of research. He died of cancer
in 1976.
— ANDREW MASTERSON
104 — COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB Issue 82

DEBUNKED

Can prayer help the sick?

IT HAPPENS WITH such regularity that, in the US at least,

it has become a cliché. Every time there is a mass shooting,
or a tornado hits a town, or an epidemic surges, people in
positions of power offer up hopes and prayers for the victims.
This, of course, begs the question: do prayers have any
effect?
It’s an important consideration, given that in modern
American politics prayers are generally deployed instead of
other interventions, such as, for instance, gun control laws,
climate policy or affordable healthcare.
So, have the healing effects of prayer ever been put to the
test by scientists? Yes, a few times, and the results are, at best,
uncertain and, at worst, counter-productive.
Most tests have focussed on medical conditions and
treatment, which are naturally easier to monitor and quantify
than, say, the mental health of mass shooting victims and
witnesses. Cardiac surgery has been a particular favourite.
In 1999, a team led by William Harris from the Sanford
School of Medicine at the University of South Dakota set up a
double-blind trial to test the efficacy of prayer on 990 patients
admitted to a coronary care unit (CCU).
On admission, the patients were randomly assigned into
two groups. The names of members of the first groups were In 2009, the Cochrane Library – an organisation that
given to groups of religious believers, who prayed for them specialises in systematically reviewing other research – took a
daily for four weeks. The second group received no prayers. close look at the matter, poring over the methods and results
The results showed that the patients in receipt of prayer of 10 studies that investigated the clinical power of prayer.
had 11% fewer setbacks than those that did not. There was no Lead author Leanne Roberts actually came from a religious
difference in length of hospital stay between the two groups. background, holding a position at the Southwark Diocesan
Writing in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, Harris Office at Trinity House in London, UK. Despite that, she and
and his colleagues noted there was “no known way to ascribe her colleagues came away unimpressed by the data.
a clinical significance” to the result, but added that further “These findings are equivocal and, although some of
studies should be conducted. the results of individual studies suggest a positive effect of
One such was done in 2006 and reported in the American intercessory prayer, the majority do not and the evidence
Heart Journal. This had a more complex set-up. It involved does not support a recommendation either in favour or
patients admitted to six US hospitals, and randomly assigned against the use of intercessory prayer,” they wrote.
to three groups. They added that they were not convinced enough even by a
The first had people praying for them, but were told such couple of apparently positive outcomes in a few of the studies
a thing “may or may not” happen. The second received to feel it was worth recommending further trials.
no prayers, but were told the same thing. The third group They concluded that they “would prefer to see any
received prayer and was told that it was definitely happening. resources available for such a trial used to investigate other
All up, 1800 patients were involved. questions in health care”.
The results were curious. The two groups who did not And that, perhaps, is an outcome we can all hope for.
know whether or not they were receiving prayers had almost
identical levels of complications – 51% and 52%. The group — ANDREW MASTERSON
which knew for sure people were putting in a good word for
them with God fared significantly worse, with a 59% rate of IMAGE
complications. Rich Johnson of Spectacle Photo / Getty Images
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106 — COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB
Defined: how to talk about ET
An expert committee sought
consensus on astrobiology terms,
with only limited success.
NICK CARNE reports.
Issue 82
WHETHER OR NOT you can hear people scream in space,
there’s plenty of screaming (as in disagreement) about space
and the way we describe it.
So much so, in fact, that the SETI Institute (as in Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) felt the need to convene its
Ad Hoc Committee on SETI Nomenclature to make a few
decisions on definitions.
The resulting recommendations make interesting
reading, starting with what can only be described as a bit of a
disclaimer.
“This is a consensus document that the committee
members all endorse; however, in many cases the individual
members have (or have expressed in the past) more nuanced
opinions on these terms that are not fully reflected here …,”
the document says.
Which is kind of a nuanced consensus.
Then follow nine pages with 24 terms defined, ranging
from the simple (alien, intelligence, extraterrestrial) to the
complex (Schelling Point, Fermi Paradox, Drake Equation)
to the acronym heavy (CETI, SETA, METI, Active METI,
Artifact SETI).
Starting at the top, SETI as a noun is: “A subfield of
astrobiology focused on searching for signs of non-human
technology or technological life beyond Earth. The theory
and practice of searching for extraterrestrial technology or
technosignatures.”
COSMOS
Extraterrestrial is defined with the rider that the
terminology is complicated by the interplay between
Earth and the wider solar system, while alien is defined
but not loved. It is to be avoided as a noun and is not even
recommended as an adjective. Definitions of intelligence are
“slippery and much broader than technological”.
Based on the agreed definitions, natural and artificial
seem pretty straightforward, but even here there is a note
referring to slipperiness because they are “not even well
defined for observable phenomena on Earth”.
We’re in clearer air with beacon: “Any ‘we are here’ sign
or signal deliberately engineered by a technological species
to be noticed, recognised, and understood by another
technological species as evidence or proof of the first
technological species’ presence.”
A dial tone or door bell is a “content-free beacon” –
as in we’re here, but with nothing to say at this time.
Settle or colonise are pretty clear, but the Committee
notes that some shy away from the latter term because of
connotations of the global exploits of European powers in
past.
Few out and out disagreements are revealed, which is
probably what nuanced consensus brings. However, there are
strong suggestions that certain terms are not well regarded.
SETA (Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts), for example,
is “deprecated” because it should be considered a subset of
COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB — 107
SETI rather than a distinct activity, while METI (Messaging
Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is straight out “controversial”.
“Some consider it to be logically continuous with SETI,
and others consider it to be a distinct activity,” the document
says. “To some it also includes replies to future hypothetical
incoming transmissions, and theoretical work on how to
communicate with ETI, but others consider these to be
distinct from METI.”
In contrast, Kardashev Scale, Fermi Paradox, and Drake
Equation all appear uncontroversial, with a definition and
some guidance on usage provided.
For those planning a SETI discussion in the near
future, note that Schelling Point (an equilibrium in a non-
communicative cooperative game such as a mutual search)
is considered to have “priority over and is to be preferred to
terms in the literature that have not caught on such as mutual
strategy of search, synchrosignals, or convergent strategy of
mutual search”.
Also, Rio 2.0, a proposed update of the Rio Scale (which
was developed by astronomers to express their estimates
of the importance of a report of detection or contact with
an extraterrestrial species) has not been adopted by the
International Academy of Astronautics and so currently has
no official status.
Take that all as you will. You can read the report in full at
https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.06857.
CREDIT: TIM MARTIN / GETTY IMAGES
108 — COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB
In this excerpt from his new book
The Breakthrough, Charles
Graeber traces the beginnings
of immunotherapy.
THE
BREAKTHROUGH
IN TERMS OF modern Western medicine, the idea of
using the body’s own immune system to kill cancer
traces back through the end of the nineteenth century
and a seventeen-year-old girl named Elizabeth Dashiell.
“Bessie” was the pretty and self-possessed daughter of
a Midwestern minister’s widow. She was also the very
close pal of the only son and namesake of the founder of
Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller Jr. There’s never any
mention of romance in their relationship – Rockefeller
referred to her as a sort of sister or soulmate – but
their steady flow of letters and their habit of taking
Issue 82
Immunoglobin G antibody molecule.
CREDIT: PASIEKA / GETTY IMAGES
long carriage rides along the Hudson River suggests
the crushy intensity of youth, which only intensified
with their separation during the summer of 1890,
when Dashiell left New York for a cross-country train
journey.
She returned in late August complaining of only one
small injury. Her right hand had been caught in the seat
lever of her Pullman rail car and was now swollen and
discolored. She couldn’t sleep with the pain. Finally,
Johnny Rock’s family suggested New York Hospital,
where Bessie would be examined by a twenty-eight-
COSMOS
year-old bone specialist and surgeon freshly released
from Harvard Medical School, Dr. William Coley.
Coley was a rising star in the surgery department, a
skilled and caring clinician with a youthful enthusiasm
for new ideas, such as germ theory and Joseph Lister’s
latest advances for controlling infection through
sterilization techniques and vigorous handwashing.
These modern notions rendered surgery far more
survivable for patients; they might have also put the
young surgeon in a state of heightened awareness of
both the astonishing invisible microbal world around
him and the promise of further scientific advances on the
horizon. Coley considered that he had entered medicine
“at the most opportune time in a thousand years.”
The young surgical intern examined Bessie
Dashiell’s hand. He noted a slight swelling “half the size
of an olive,” like an extra knuckle where her metacarpal
met the pinkie. He thumbed the mass; it did not move,
but it was tender, and the girl winced. Coley carefully
palpated Bessie’s jawline
and armpits and found them
unremarkable. Her lymph
glands weren’t swollen. That
suggested that the problem
wasn’t an infection; there was
no immune response.
As a bone specialist and a
surgeon, Coley’s best guess
was that her pain and swelling
resulted from inflammation of
the sheath-like sac that covered
the bone of her little finger. To
be certain, he needed to cut.
Coley took his scalpel and drew Author Charles Graeber
a line down the girl’s finger, CREDIT: Earl Mcgehee / GETTY IMAGES
parting flesh and membrane
down to the bone. He noted that he did not find the
great reservoir of pus he would expect from infection,
and that the membrane was hard and gray. His diagnosis
was periostitis, a subacute bone ailment. Dr. William T.
Bull – his mentor and a legendary surgeon known as the
Dapper Dan of the operating theater – agreed, and the
young woman was sent home to let time heal this wound.
But over the following weeks, Bessie Dashiell’s Pullman
pinch continued to worsen. And that didn’t make sense.
If all the symptoms resulted from the initial insult to the
bone, they shouldn’t have been getting worse.
Coley performed a second exploratory surgery on
Dashiell, scraping more of the tough gray matter from
thebone.Buttheswellingandpaincontinuedtoincrease,
and Dashiell began to lose sensation in one finger, then
others. Now the young surgeon had to consider a more
dire diagnosis and yet another surgery. This time Coley
cut a slab of the gritty gray matter from Bessie’s finger to
be analyzed. A few days later, a report messengered from
a New York Cancer Hospital pathologist confirmed his
COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB — 109
suspicions: Under the microscope, the “granular” gray
stuff Coley had been scraping off Bessie Dashiell’s bone
was revealed as cancer. Specifically it was a sarcoma,
and it was spreading. What little feeling Bessie had left
in her fingers now radiated as pain. Coley prescribed
morphine.
Sarcoma was a relatively rare form of cancer, a
disease that affects the connecting tissues of the body
such as the tendons and joints and ligaments. (It’s
distinct from what is commonly called carcinoma, which
affects essentially everything else.) Treatment options
for cancer, especially those of the bone, were extremely
limited in 1890. The only means the surgeon knew to
get rid of the cancer was to cut off the hand itself.
Coley hoped to cut beyond the clean margins of the
disease, while leaving the girl some useful length of arm.
But the cancer had already spread. What had started
in her pinkie now proliferated grotesquely through the
landscape of her young body. Small buckshot-like nodes
began to appear in one breast,
then in the other. Soon, they
were in her liver, and Coley was
able to feel a large solid mass
growing above the young girl’s
womb; perversely, he described
it as being the size of “a child’s
head.”
Bessie Dashiell’s decline
was shockingly rapid. By
December the young woman’s
porcelain skin pushed out
everywhere in hard lumps.
Her liver was enlarged, her
heart was failing, and she was
skeletally thin, surviving only
on brandy and opium. The
frail, drug-addled creature was almost unrecognizable
as the pretty, plucky young woman who had walked into
his offices only two months before, fresh from a cross-
country adventure. There was nothing for the young
surgeon to do but bear witness and provide the comfort
of opiates. Dashiell died at home on the morning of
January 23, 1891; Coley was at her bedside.
Coley would later admit that her death had been
for him “quite a shock.” Partly it was her youth, and his
– he was new at the job, and only ten years older than
Dashiell. And partly it was the rapidity of this disease,
and his helpless flailing in the face of it. Perhaps his
surgeries had even hastened the disease by scraping
it loose into her bloodstream. Maybe he had made her
suffering worse by trying to save her.
Despite his modern surgical refinements and
degrees, Coley had offered Bessie Dashiell little that
wasn’t available in the blood-slick chairs of street-
side barber surgeons or the numbing comforts of the
barroom. He was determined to find a better way.
110 — COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB Issue 82

Technological advances were rapidly ushering in the

new century; each morning paper seemed to herald a
stunning new scientific advance. In the previous ten
yearsKarlBenzhadinventedagasoline-poweredengine,
Charles Parsons had invented a steam turbine, and
George Eastman developed plastic photographic film.
Less than a mile from Coley’s medical offices, Nikola
Tesla and Thomas Edison were in a furious competition
to build power stations capable of illuminating whole
city blocks. It felt as though the whole world would soon
be lit and the shadows of ignorance banished.
The records of everyone who had ever walked or
limped or been carried through the hospital’s doors
were written in copperplate longhand in oversized
ledgers. Coley turned the heavy pages, scanning the
progress notes on every patient who had presented with
a disease resembling Bessie Dashiell’s. This was tedious
work; the records ran chronologically, page after page,
book after book. By immersing himself in the collective
experience of cancer patients and their presentations,
Coley thought, he might better understand the fatal
course of Bessie’s cancer. And if he was lucky, he might
find an exception to it.
Seven years deep in the patient logs, Coley’s
attention caught on an unusual case history. It belonged CAR T cell cancer immunotherapy

to a thirty-one-year-old patient named Fred Stein, a

German immigrant and house painter. He had arrived
at New York Hospital in the winter of 1885 with a
disfiguring egg-sized mass bulging from his left cheek
near the neckline. This was far larger than the one Bessie
Dashiell had on her hand, but it was the same sarcoma.
Dr. William T. Bull, the head surgeon at New York
Cancer Hospital, had operated on Stein to remove the
mass. When it came roaring back, Bull operated again.
Yet again it reappeared and grew until it was as big as
a man’s fist. Bull performed a total of five operations
on the man over the course of three years. It was
impossible to remove all the tumor, and the case was
considered “helpless.” Skin grafts were attempted but
were unsuccessful, leaving an open wound, which soon
became infected with erysipelas.
Erysipelas was the name given to an infection caused
by bacterium known as Streptococcus pyogenes, the bane
of nineteenth-century hospitals. Under the microscope
the bacterium appeared as little chains, like a bead
necklace cut into small lengths. On the ward, carried by
the wind or bedding, these infection seeds infested open
wounds and blossomed in the bloodstream. Infected
patients broke out in fiery red rashes that started at the
face and neck and spread rapidly, followed by raging
fever, chills, inflammation, and, usually, death.
Erysipelas was the most deadly postop killer in
the nineteenth-century hospital and still ominously
referred to as St. Anthony’s Fire, as it had been since
the Middle Ages. The name referred to the speed of
the infection’s spread, its burn-like symptoms, and the
desperation of the infected, who prayed for a miracle.
Fred Stein – deathly ill from an inoperable tumor,
an open surgical wound on his neck, and infected by
erysipelas – was assumed to be doomed. Instead, as the
fire spread and Stein’s fever raged, his surgeons noted
something unusual. His tumor mass appeared to be
melting away.
According to his hospital record, Stein survived the
fever only to relapse again a few days later. He continued
recovering and relapsing. Each time he slipped back
into fever, his remaining tumor masses seemed to be
withering and shrinking. Four and a half months later
both the infection and the cancer were gone, and Stein
walked out of the hospital. It was presumed that he had
returned home to the immigrant slums of New York’s
Lower East Side, but his address was never recorded in
the hospital records. That had been seven years earlier.
What had become of Stein or his cancer since, nobody
had bothered to find out. The only evidence of his
existence and “miraculous” cure were the notes in the
ledger. Coley was intrigued. Here he had two patients
that had presented with the same disease and been
treated by the same methodologies at the same hospital,
under the watch of the same physicians. And yet these
patients had experienced wildly different outcomes.
Dashiell had done well in surgery but died anyway.
Stein had done poorly in surgery, become infected, and
survived. It was so counterintuitive, it was tempting
to look for causality. Had Stein survived because he’d
become infected?
COSMOS
CREDIT: PASIEKA / GETTY IMAGES
Either the observation on Stein was incorrect, or
this incongruity offered a glimpse of something not yet
understood. The only way to know more was to examine
Fred Stein himself. And Fred Stein had last been seen
walking out the stone gates of New York Hospital seven
years before. Now, he could be anywhere, including
underground. William Coley had landed upon a medical
adventure. It would prove to be his strong suit.
Like many of his late-nineteenth-century
contemporaries, Coley believed that the answer to the
big questions of science were out there, somewhere,
waiting to be discovered. The thinking wasn’t so
different from that of contemporary scientists using
supercomputers to mine new insights from dumps of
old data – except in the late nineteenth century, the
answers were more likely to be uncovered via machete
or microscope. That same year, radiation and X-rays
had been discovered, and several new elements had
been attached to the periodic table. Fridtjof Nansen
was attempting to reach the North Pole. Sir Richard
Burton was bringing back tales of sea-sized lakes in the
center of Africa. And now here was Coley, young and
trained and ready. Coley wasn’t one for the quiet sit-
and-study routine of academic research; he had a quest
to undertake.
Coley was a Connecticut Yankee from an old New
England family, but he wasn’t a complete stranger to the
newer faces of 1890s immigrant America. While still a
student he’d worked aboard a brigantine on the rough
Atlantic passage between the Azores and the wool mills
COSMOS SCIENCE CLUB — 111
of coastal Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and his
wards at New York Hospital treated the huddled masses
arriving from every corner of the globe. Many settled in
the tenements in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a ghetto
segregated from uptown society by the hard line of
Fourteenth Street, but just south of the hospital.
After putting in a shift, Coley (now the personal
surgeon to Rockefeller) took a hansom cab downtown,
climbed out in his tailored English suit, and started
walking the streets made famous to uptown slum tourists
by photographer Jacob Riis’s 1890 book How the Other
Half Lives. Coley himself wrote little about his forays
in search of Fred Stein, and so it’s difficult to imagine
whether it plays as comedy or drama. Probably it was
both. It took weeks of combing the tenements, walking
up and down stairs, knocking on doors, describing and
gesturing. But finally, improbably, on a second-floor
landing, a door opened to his knock and William Coley
found himself face-to-face with the man himself.
A photograph of Fred Stein, provided in Coley’s
published report in the medical literature, shows
a tall, gaunt man with the glandular severity of an
Old Testament hermit. His hair was black with high,
chopped bangs like a kid might do with safety scissors.
High, polished cheekbones framed a goatee that
extended like a black curtain from nose to collar, years
of growth pulled and cut square. You must assume the
mouth. Only the back of his hair was long, a cascading
mullet that only partially covered the puckered scars of
disease, surgery, and infection.
If Coley was surprised he did not say. The
real surprise was that Stein was not only alive but
apparently enjoying excellent health. After some initial
awkwardness and comically pidgin German, the young
doctor was able to persuade Stein to return with him
to New York Hospital to be examined by his original
physician, William T. Bull. Bull confirmed this was
the same Fred Stein on whose notes he had written the
terminal prognosis and discharge, dated 1885.
Something had changed Stein’s cancer, and with
it his fate. The only observable something between
Stein’s failed cancer surgery and incredible cancer
remission was the bacterial infection. If that infection
had somehow cured a case of “undoubted sarcoma,”
Coley wrote later, “ . . . it seemed fair to presume that the
same benign action would be exerted in a similar case if
erysipelas could be artificially produced.”
And Coley couldn’t wait to be the one to artificially
produce it.
CHARLES GRAEBER is an earth scientist and writer
based in the US. The Breakthrough is published by
Scribe Publications. For your chance to win a copy
see page 112.
112 — END POINT Issue 82

WHERE IN THE COSMOS? MIND GAMES

Send us a pic
of where you’re
reading Cosmos to Who Said? NO.8
win a prize pack!

The notoriety of which palaeontologist gave rise

to the tongue-twister, “She sells seashells by the
seashore”? (4,6)

WHAT BETTER SPOT TO WATCH OUR FABULOUS WORLD IN ACTION AND

ENJOY SCIENCE?
15-week-old Alba Freeman Woodward with her mother Laura Woodward
INSTRUCTIONS
in Faraday, Victoria.
Put the answers to each of the clues in columns
from 1 to 10. Row v reveals the answer.

CLUES AND COLUMNS

QUESTION
COMPETITION 1 Which German mathematician in 1854 put
Whose Law? Decode where s =
forward a system of non-Euclidean geometry
including the notion that parallel lines meet
only at infinity? (7)
2 Who discovered that magnetism could affect
rays of light and has the SI unit of capacitance
named after him? (7)
3 What is the common name of the only species in
the genus Echinosorex? (7)
4 What is the population of an organism that has
HINT:
adapted to certain environmental conditions?
This scientist introduced atomic theory into chemistry and also worked on
(7)
colour blindness.
5 What is the fusion of a relatively large female
gamete with a small male gamete? (6)
6 What are the group of compounds also known
Email your answer to:
as rose ketones and used in perfumes? (6)
competitions@cosmosmagazine.com
7 What is the property of radiant energy to
with your name and address by April 1, 2019.
produce chemical changes? (8)
Three correct entries will win a copy of
8 What animal did Dian Fossey find in the mist?
The Breakthrough by Charles Graeber, from
(7)
Scribe Publications.
9 What part of science deals with the classification
You can read an excerpt from this exciting of things or concepts? (8)
book, starting on page 108. 10 What is a polygon with ten sides? (7)
COSMOS END POINT — 113

SOLUTIONS: COSMOS 81
CODEWORD

Cosmos Codeword NO.8

Codeword requires
inspired guesswork.
It is a crossword
without clues. Each
letter of the alphabet
is used and each letter
has its own number.
For example, ‘A’ might
be 6 and ‘G’ might be
23.
Through your IT FIGURES
knowledge of the
English language you
will be able to break
the code. We have
given you three letters
to get you started.

WHO SAID?
Fred Hoyle

COMPETITION WINNERS
ALL PUZZLES DESIGNED

AND COMPILED BY
WHOSE LAW?
SNODGER.COM.AU
Flux goes from regions
of high concentration to
regions of low concentration,
with a magnitude
that is proportional to the
It Figures NO.8 4 The bottom left square is the only corner
which does not contain a single digit square
concentration gradient.

number. Adolf Eugen Fick

5 The last two numbers in Row C are twice as (or as we mistakenly had it,
INSTRUCTIONS
big as those directly below them. Flick)
Using the clues below
6 The numbers in Row B are written in
place the numbers 1
ascending order. Congratulations!
to 16 correctly in the
Three lucky winners will
grid. How many clues
LEVEL 2 - SENIOR ANALYST receive a copy of Moon:
do you need?
7 The product of the outer two numbers in Art, Science, Culture by
Row B is 165. Alexandra Loske and Robert
LEVEL 1 - CHIEF SCIENTIST 8 The smallest number in the second column Massey.
1 A 3x3 square within this grid lists all the is 8.
even numbers. Richard Willert,
2 The numbers in Row D have the third LEVEL 3 - LAB ASSISTANT Rochedale South QLD;
largest sum which is 26. 9 The product of the middle two numbers in Brenna Cook,
3 The largest prime number ends a column Column 1 is 33. Adelaide SA;
which lists three consecutive descending 10 14 does not share a row or column with any of Katerina Nguyen,
multiples of 4. its single digit factors. Canley Heights NSW
114 — END POINT Issue 82

PORTRAIT

Charlie Huveneers,
Shark Scientist

THINKING OF SHARKS tends to evoke images of the great

white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), entrenched in popular
culture by the movie Jaws. But there are more than 500 known
species, and there is much more to learn about them.
Shark expert Charlie Huveneers of Flinders University
in South Australia is on a mission to unravel the many
mysteries that surround the ocean’s mighty predators, and
to dispel misconceptions around conservation and shark
attacks.
His work contributes to scientific knowledge about
shark ecology and biology. He also works with industries
to identify the impact of fishing and cage-diving on their
movements, migration and reproduction.
In 2007 Huveneers co-led a national acoustic tagging
and monitoring project and is still heavily involved in it. He
has studied many different species, including wobbegongs
(Orectolobidae), bronze whalers (Carcharhinus brachyurus)
and grey reef sharks (Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos).
He has been fascinated by sharks since the age of 12.
“The ability to work with these charismatic animals and
learn more about them is what attracted me,” he says.
During his PhD at Macquarie University in Sydney,
Huveneers focussed on the wobbegong’s vulnerability to
extensive fishing. “They only produce every three years,
which is quite slow,” he explains, “and they take 10 to 15
years to reach maturity.”
As a result of his work, the state government imposed
new regulations and the “wobbie” is no longer at risk of
extinction.
More recently, Huveneers has been researching white
sharks and monitoring their movements. He is working with
the cage industry on South Australia’s Neptune Island to
help ensure its sustainability.
“I’d like to be able to contribute to increasing knowledge
of these animals in a way that will make a difference,” he says.

— NATALIE PARLETTA

IMAGE: Charlie Huveneers

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