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 SPACE-WIDE WEB
Tech billionaires race to
build orbiting internet
BLOOD AMBER
Revealed: True cost of
world’s most stunning fossils
SEEING DOUBLE
The village with
too many twins
WEEKLY May 4 –10, 2019

OUR FIRST
WORDS
The astounding story
of how humanity
found its voice

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 We’re looking for the best
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aimed at encouraging the best and brightest
thinkers in the world to focus on ways to
improve the health of older people.
The world’s ageing population means that in
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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with 2018 Ryman Prize winner Professor Takanori Shibata.
www.rymanprize.com
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World-leading researchers Professor Henry
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This week’s issue
News
8 Denisovans in Tibet
Our extinct cousins lived at
extremely high altitudes
12 Climate protesters
Extinction Rebellion’s plans
for negotiating with the UK
government
18 Tackling big tech
Should Amazon, Facebook
and Google be broken up?
On the cover
44 Space-wide web
Tech billionaires race to build
orbiting internet
38 Blood amber
Revealed: True cost of world’s
most stunning fossils
15 Seeing double
The village with too many twins
34 Our first words
The astounding story of how
humanity found its voice
10 New stick insects 14 Weird ice
on Titan 13 Killing crows 51 How
to become a maker 8 Landmark
Denisovan discovery
Vol 242 No 3228
Cover image: Matt Chase
NASA
Views
23 Comment
Greenland is going green
24 The columnist
Annalee Newitz on why criminals
will love e-scooters
26 Letters
Is a lack of free will behind
readers’ correspondence?
28 Aperture
A white-tailed eagle in all its glory
30 Culture Magic relies on
brain trickery, as a book and
an exhibition reveal
A note on today’s new-look magazine
New Scientist is devoted to
innovation, and occasionally
we need to turn the mirror on
ourselves. It is more than a decade
since the magazine has seen
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First off, we have slightly
updated the design, with what
we hope is a fresher, brighter feel.
9 Magma splash Our moon’s origin
Features
34 Our first words
We may finally know how
human languages arose
38 Blood amber
Exquisitely preserved fossils
are fuelling a bloody war
44 Space-wide web
The race to build an internet
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The first week in our 10-part
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4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 3
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Conflict amber
Some fossils may be scientifically priceless, but is the human price too high?

PALAEONTOLOGY often finds itself
embroiled in debates about the buying
and selling of fossils. The most notorious
case was that of a Tyrannosaurus rex
skeleton called Sue, which was the
subject of a protracted ownership
battle before being bought by the Field
Museum in Chicago for $8.4 million.
Such controversies are common. Last
month, a collector angered scientists
when he listed the skeleton of a juvenile
T. rex on eBay for $2.95 million. The fossil
had been on loan to the University of
SCENICS & SCIENCE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Burmese amber fossils from 100 million years ago,
contains stunning including dinosaurs and birds (see page
fossils but may 38). But, as we reveal, the specimens are
fund a civil war part of a lucrative and largely illicit trade
in Myanmar– in gemstones. They change hands for
huge sums of money, some of which is
funnelled back into Myanmar to fund
a civil war that the United Nations has
described as a genocide.
purchase of scientifically significant Most of the pieces of Burmese amber
vertebrate fossils is not condoned, that contain important specimens
unless it brings them into, or keeps do end up in public trust, and hence
them within, a public trust”. conform to the SVP’s guidelines. They

Kansas but may now enter a private
collection, beyond the reach of scientists.
Because of the risk of losing access,
many palaeontologists choose not to
work with privately owned specimens.
The US Society of Vertebrate
Paleontology (SVP) encourages this: its
by-laws state that “the barter, sale, or
There is an ethical as well as a scientific
dimension to this. Fossils should be part
of humanity’s collective heritage, not
playthings to be hoarded for profit.
For one globally important fossil
deposit, the debate is even thornier.
Burmese amber is the hottest property in
palaeontology, stuffed full of incredible
are scientifically priceless. But is the
human price too high? Researchers may
argue that someone is going to buy the
material, so why not them. But as with
ivory, until somebody makes a stand,
nothing will happen. It is certainly time
to bring global attention to the trade in
Burmese amber. ❚

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News
Extreme weather
More deadly floods
Dozens of people have died in Indonesia and Mozambique
as a result of storms, reports Michael Le Page
IT HAS been another week of
extreme weather around the
globe. In Indonesia, heavy rain
led to flooding and landslides in
the western part of the country
(pictured above). At least 29 people
have died, including 22 in a single
landslide in Bengkulu on the
island of Sumatra. The clearance
of forests to plant palm oil has
increased the risk of landslides.
Two people also died in flooding
in the capital Jakarta. This coastal
megalopolis of 10 million people
has long battled flooding, as the
city is sinking fast due to the
extraction of the groundwater
beneath it. Most of the city could
be underwater by 2050. This week,
the government announced plans
to move the capital elsewhere,
though several previous plans to
do this have come to nothing.
Meanwhile, in Mozambique at
least 38 people have died, 35,000
homes have been destroyed and
160,000 remain at risk as flooding
triggered by cyclone Kenneth
continues to worsen. Category 4
Kenneth was one of the strongest
tropical cyclones to strike Africa
in terms of wind speed when it
reached land. It flattened some
villages on the coast and then
stalled over the interior, dumping
immense amounts of rain.
Kenneth struck just six weeks
after cyclone Idai wreaked even
more havoc, killing at least
1000 people. It is the first time
Mozambique has ever been struck
More news online
Keep up to date with the latest science news
www.newscientist.com/news
Space
Black hole shoots
jets all over place
ASTRONOMERS have seen
a wonky black hole blasting
plasma in various directions.
The black hole, in the
V404 Cygni system some
7800 light years from Earth,
is sucking gas off a nearby
star. This gas forms a disc
of matter around the black
hole. Such discs are usually
thin and flat, but in V404
Cygni the black hole is
feeding so rapidly that the
inner region of the disc looks
more like a doughnut
(Nature, doi.org/gfz36n).
Black holes normally fire
plasma jets from their poles.
A likely explanation for the
DIVA MARHA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
wonky jets in V404 Cygni is
that the black hole’s rapid
feeding caused the gas disc
to puff up. This misaligns the
disc and black hole, pushing
jets in different directions. ❚
Ruby Prosser Scully
Opioid crisis
Australia cuts
codeine sales
SALES of codeine have
by two strong storms in one year. halved in Australia since it
Storms in the region are became a prescription-only
growing stronger due to climate drug, and the change doesn't
change, says climate scientist appear to have pushed
Jennifer Fitchett at the University people towards stronger
of Witwatersrand in South Africa. opioids, as was feared.
“We’re always very cautious not The decision to ban
to pin one particular storm to over-the-counter sales of
climate change, but in terms of the opiate painkiller came
the pattern of Idai, and now amid growing concern over
Kenneth, there’s this regional opioid deaths in the US.
intensification of storms that we While the ban in Australia
are seeing quite clearly,” she says. was popular among doctors,
Other parts of the world are critics said it could lead to an
facing extreme heat. Vietnam uptick in higher strength
recently recorded its highest ever opioid sales.
temperature: 43.4°C. The warm Since the ban began in
season usually peaks in July. ❚ February last year, 7000
kilograms less of codeine
has been purchased. Sales
of the higher strength
version have remained
the same. ❚ RPS
4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 7
News
Anthropology

Denisovans in Tibet
Landmark discovery of the first Denisovan remains outside Siberia could
help settle the debate over our own species’ origins. Clare Wilson reports
THE first fossil of our cousins the
Denisovans ever to be discovered
outside Siberia has been identified
in Tibet. It hints that fossils from
these extinct humans are more
widespread than we thought, and
may help settle a long-running
debate about our origins.
Denisovans were discovered
in 2010, when the DNA from an
ancient bone fragment found
in Denisova cave in Siberia was
sequenced. Since then, a few
other fossil fragments have been

DONGJU ZHANG, LANZHOU UNIVERSITY

uncovered in the cave, and genetic
analysis has discovered that many
people in China and South-East
Asia carry a little Denisovan DNA.
This reveals that our ancestors
must once have lived alongside
and interbred with our cousins.
Studies like these also found
that people in Tibet carry a specific
Denisovan gene that allows
red blood cells to cope with low
oxygen levels, helping people
to live at high altitude.
Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max
Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany,
wondered if any human remains
previously found in Tibet
might really be Denisovan.
“It is mind-blowing that
they could have lived
in such an extreme,
low-oxygen environment”
He and his colleagues
examined a jawbone discovered
in 1980 in Baishiya Karst cave,
in Tibet's Jiangla river valley
(pictured, right). They found
that the shape of the jaw and
large size of the teeth are different
No DNA could be extracted from in the cold parts of Eurasia, we This jawbone suggests
the fossil, but analysing collagen simply have to get used to the that Denisovans lived in
protein in its teeth confirmed the fact that we often won’t have Tibet 160,000 years ago
jawbone came from a Denisovan, any ancient DNA to work with.”
because modern humans and Hublin says several previously “We probably have lots
our other extinct cousins the discovered fossils from sites in of Denisovan remains sitting
Neanderthals have different genes China have features that don’t in museums all over the world,
for collagen (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ match those of modern humans but they have different names
s41586-019-1139-x). or Homo erectus, another ancient on them,” says Cox.
The finding could explain hominin which is, like the If Hublin is right, these fossils
the 30,000-year-old stone tools Denisovans and Neanderthals, could help settle the debate over
discovered in Tibet last year. thought to have left Africa long whether our ancestors evolved
It is mind-blowing that hominins before we did. solely in Africa, or whether
could have been living in such “I predict that most of the important steps took place in Asia
an extreme environment, says Chinese hominin fossil record too. Previous discoveries of fossils
Hublin. “Even today, Tibet is not younger than 350,000 years and in China have been interpreted
an easy place to live. There aren’t older than 50,000 is made of by some as intermediate species
many resources and there’s a lack Denisovans,” says Hublin. between H. erectus and modern
of oxygen.” humans, suggesting that we
The study is the first time that evolved in eastern Asia. But this
protein analysis has been used idea will lose ground if the fossils
as the sole way of identifying turn out to be Denisovan.
an ancient hominin, says team However, Sheela Athreya at
member Frido Welker at Lanzhou Texas A&M University says that
DONGJU ZHANG, LANZHOU UNIVERSITY

to those of modern humans. University in China. linking such fossils to Denisovans

Radioisotope dating suggested
that the fossil is 160,000 years
old at least, which is tens of
thousands of years before our
own species is thought to have
reached the Tibetan Plateau.
This technique will prove would be putting the cart before
increasingly useful for fossils the horse. We know so little
without any DNA left, says about the Denisovans’ physical
Murray Cox of Massey University characteristics and where and
in New Zealand. “As we move when they lived, she says. “We
away from hominin remains don’t know what ‘Denisovan’ is.” ❚

8 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019

Machine learning

Google’s AI mathematician
Artificial intelligence learns to prove a thousand theorems
Leah Crane

YOU don’t need a human brain to says Christian Szegedy at Google. lifetime,” says Szegedy.
do maths – artificial intelligence For now, the AI’s main “Pretty much anything that
can now write airtight proofs of application could be filling in you can state and try to prove
mathematical theorems. the details of long, arduous mathematically, you can put
An AI created by a team at proofs. Mathematicians often into this system,” says Avigad.
Google has proved more than make intellectual jumps in “You can distil just about all
1200 mathematical theorems. proofs, without spelling out how of mathematics down to very
Mathematicians already knew to get from one step to the next. basic rules and assumptions,
proofs for these particular “You get maximum precision and these systems implement

1253
theorems, but eventually the and correctness all really spelled
AI could start working on more out, but you don’t have to do the
NICOELNINO/ALAMY

difficult problems. work of filling in the details,” says

One of the core pillars of
maths is the concept of proof. It
is an argument, based on known
statements, assumptions or rules,
that a mathematical statement,
such as a theorem, is true.
To train its AI, the Google
team started with a database of
around 10,000 human-written
mathematical proofs, along with
the reasoning behind each step,
known as a tactic.
The team then tested the AI on
3225 theorems that it hadn’t seen
before, and it successfully
proved 1253 of them. The
remaining problems couldn’t
be solved because the AI had
only 41 tactics at its disposal
(arxiv.org/abs/1904.03241).
“Where we want to get to is
a system that can prove all the
theorems that humans can
prove, and maybe even more,”
Jeremy Avigad at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pennsylvania.
“Maybe offloading some things
that we used to do by hand frees
us up for looking for new concepts
and asking new questions.”
AIs like this could one day
solve maths problems we can’t
decipher, or that are too long and
complicated. But that would take
a much larger training set, more
tactics and a simpler way to plug
the theorems into the computer.
“I think it could happen in our
Google’s AI proved this many
theorems out of a list of 3225
those rules and assumptions.”
All of this happens in a matter
of seconds per proof, and the only
source of error is the translation
of the theorem into language that
the computer can understand. The
team is now working on creating
an automatic translator so that it
is easier for mathematicians to
interact with the system. ❚

Lunar science

Magma splash on Earth made the moon

THE moon may have been born and Technology and his colleagues
from a fiery magma ocean that performed a new set of simulations
covered the early Earth. that may solve this conundrum. In
The leading hypothesis for this modelling, instead of hitting
the birth of the moon is that a a solid planet, Theia hits an Earth
Mars-sized object called Theia covered in a magma ocean.
hit Earth, blasting up a cloud of The magma would splash into
debris that coalesced to become space much more easily than a
the moon. In many simulations rocky mantle, making the moon-
of this process, most of the cloud forming cloud 70 to 80 per cent
comes from Theia, making the Earth material, enough to make
moon unlike Earth. the moon and Earth match (Nature
In reality, the compositions Geoscience, doi.org/c45q).
of Earth and the moon are In this scenario, about half of
extraordinarily similar, so planetary the magma ocean would be ejected
scientists think the cloud should into space, and Theia’s core would
have contained lots of material eventually sink into the young
from our planet. Earth. The magma would eventually
Natsuki Hosono at the Japan crystallise to form rocky crusts like
NASA
“It’s not impossible that there
should be a magma ocean, but
the timing is critical if this was
the mechanism for the moon’s
formation,” says Jay Melosh at
Purdue University in Indiana.
If this hypothesis turns out to
be true, it could help us figure out
exactly when the moon formed,
says Melosh, as Earth’s surface
We think the
moon was once
part of Earth,
before a massive
collision
would need to have been molten.
The simulations also matched
two other important properties of
the Earth-moon system: the moon’s
relatively high speed as it orbits the
planet, and the fact that the moon
has more iron oxide than Earth –
this chemical would have been more
abundant in liquid rock than solid.
If this is truly how our moon
formed, it could make us rethink
other moons in our solar system,
says Melosh. We might have to
consider whether Mars had a
magma ocean when its moons
were formed by an impact, or
whether Pluto’s subsurface ocean
was closer to the crust and helped
to form its huge moon, Charon. ❚

Agency for Marine-Earth Science the two worlds have today. Leah Crane

4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 9

News
Zoology

Hiding in plain sight

Entomologists rejoice as flamboyant new stick insects discovered
Donna Lu

TWO new species of stick insect

have been found in the far north of
Madagascar. They were previously
thought to be examples of two
existing giant stick insect species.
Achrioptera maroloko
(pictured) and Achrioptera manga
were discovered when Sven Bradler
at the University of Göttingen,
Germany, and his colleagues
analysed the insects’ DNA. They
found that the species are in fact
more closely related to other types
of Madagascan stick insects than
to Achrioptera species elsewhere
(Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution,
doi.org/c4nv).
Named for their brightness – in
the Malagasy language, the word
maroloko means colourful –
Achrioptera maroloko males
develop their vivid colouration at
sexual maturity. Before then, they

DR FRANK GLAW
resemble twigs. The team believes
A. maroloko’s unusual colours may
attract females or deter predators. ❚

Ancient humans

Neanderthals may
have prized golden
eagle talons
THE claws of golden eagles
may have had a special value
to Neanderthals.
Clive Finlayson at the
Gibraltar National Museum
and his colleagues looked at
bird remains at prehistoric
human sites, which often include
cut-marked bird talons and wing
bones with feathers removed.
One Neanderthal site in Croatia
also has three talons from a white-
tailed eagle with small matching
notches, suggesting that they
were strung on a necklace.
The team noticed that cut-
marked talons and bones were
especially common from golden
eagles, with nine such finds
reported from Neanderthal caves.
For most bird species, the
number of cut-marked remains
correlated with the general
prevalence of unmarked bones.
But golden eagle talons were more
likely to show marks from human
intervention – as if they were
preferred (Quaternary Science
Reviews, doi.org/c43d).
This suggests that the claws
had symbolic value, adding
to the growing evidence that
Neanderthals had more
sophisticated lives than
we thought, says Finlayson.
However, the number of
cut-marked remains from each
species was small. And golden
eagles might have been hunted
more because they nest on cliff
ledges, which would have been
close to Neanderthal caves.
It is significant that
Neanderthals weren’t just hunting
the birds for food, says Finlayson.
“If you’re doing things with
feathers and claws, it’s going
beyond purely functional and
there’s something symbolic there.”
“Golden eagle talons were
more likely to show marks
from human intervention –
as if they were preferred”
He says that the Neanderthals
may have revered the bird. This
wouldn’t be totally unheard of,
as some modern cultures also
venerate golden eagles, and
catch the birds for their talons
and feathers.
“Everywhere that there are
historic examples of people
using eagles, they were treated
as a symbolic species,” says David
Frayer at the University of Kansas.
Neanderthals didn’t view eagles
as meat, they chose them for
their talons and feathers, he says.
“I think that’s a strong piece of
evidence that Neanderthals had
the same kinds of feelings about
eagles as more recent people.”
When modern humans came
to Europe 40,000 years ago, they
overlapped with Neanderthals,
our prehistoric cousins, for
a few thousand years before
Neanderthals went extinct.
For a long time, it was assumed
that we survived because we were
smarter, but that idea has been
challenged by recent discoveries
of Neanderthal cave art and what
may have been shell jewellery. ❚
Clare Wilson

10 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019

Ageing Analysis Cybersecurity

Bad sense of smell Banning Huawei from 5G infrastructure Around the world,
linked to death in countries are closing doors to Chinese tech firms, but there is
next decade little evidence that is necessary, says Chris Stokel-Walker
Ruby Prosser Scully

A POOR sense of smell in older THE UK government is happy for will install snooping devices at governments may be asked to
people is associated with a higher equipment made by Chinese firm the behest of the Chinese give unauthorised access to their
chance of dying in the next 10 years. Huawei to be used in the UK’s government, a worry that stems networks. Although the statement
A growing body of research 5G network – just not in any of the from a belief that it is impossible to didn’t name Huawei, the company
suggests a bad sense of smell crucial parts, according to leaked operate in China without engaging later said it had been banned from
can foreshadow the onset of discussions from the National with the state and acting as an arm Australia’s 5G infrastructure.
Parkinson’s disease and even Security Council. The US and of its spy network. Similar noises have been made
premature mortality. To investigate, Australia have taken a much more It is a concern stoked by Chinese in the US. A state department
Honglei Chen of Michigan State hard-line approach, with complete plans to pass a cybersecurity law. official warned in February that
University and his colleagues bans on using Huawei kit to form This will require Chinese Huawei and other Chinese tech
analysed data from more than any part of their 5G networks. companies transferring data to companies posed a “threat” and
2000 people aged 71 to 82. What is all the worry about? store “important data” in China, shouldn’t be allowed to engage
Each person was tested to see According to telecoms firm where outsiders fear it could be with key communications
if they could identify 12 common Qualcomm, 5G mobile internet easily accessed by the state. infrastructure, such as antennas
odours, including cinnamon, lemon, gives a massive speed boost – at The UK regularly monitors
petrol and smoke. They were then least 10 or 20 times faster than Huawei’s equipment as part of the “The main fear is that
tracked for the next 13 years. our current 4G networks. As Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Huawei will install
Compared with people who devices start sharing more and Centre Oversight Board, a body snooping devices for the
scored highly on the smell test, more data, from self-driving set up to allay fears about the Chinese government”
those who identified no more than cars to phones streaming technology being tampered with.
eight odours were 46 per cent more data-rich video, speedier The apparent decision by the UK’s and mast-based equipment
likely to have died 10 years later, connections will be vital. National Security Council would used to access the network.
and 30 per cent more likely to have Countries across the world give Huawei access only to the The European Union has yet
died by the end of the 13 years. are currently planning their 5G edge of the 5G network, which to take a stance, asking each
Analysing the data, the team networks. As one of the world’s doesn’t involve the transmission member state to submit its own
found that a poorer sense of smell largest technology firms, Huawei of sensitive information, keeping cybersecurity assessment of
wasn’t linked to deaths from cancer is vying for business – but finding the core of the network “safe”. Huawei’s involvement in Europe’s
or respiratory illnesses. However, doors closed. However, other countries 5G network by the end of June.
it was strongly associated with The main fear is that Huawei have gone further. Last August, In March, a representative of the
deaths from Parkinson’s disease Australia’s communication and German intelligence service said
and dementia. There was also An engineer testing home affairs ministers said in Huawei shouldn’t be involved
a modest link with deaths from Huawei 5G kit in a joint statement there is a risk in the country’s 5G network.
cardiovascular disease (Annals of London in March that firms subject to foreign The fears may be unfounded
Internal Medicine, DOI: 10.7326/ however. Sensitive data should
M18-0775). never be sent over a public
It had been thought that a network without being encrypted
worsening sense of smell might anyway. This means that even if
lessen a person’s interest in a message is intercepted, it would
food, leading to weight loss and be nearly impossible to read.
deteriorating health. But the team Additionally, so far no evidence
found that weight loss, dementia has made it into the public
and Parkinson’s disease together domain showing that Huawei
only explained around 30 per cent has mishandled data or is tied up
of the higher mortality associated with the Chinese state.
with a poorer sense of smell. No single company should
Unfortunately, people are often be entrusted with something as
SIMON DAWSON/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY

unaware of their sense of smell critical as the 5G network because

degrading and doctors rarely test for if something goes wrong, whether
it. “In the future, as these potential intentionally or otherwise, it could
health implications are unveiled, it have devastating effects. But if the
may not be a bad idea to include a infrastructure is distributed among
sense of smell test as part of your many different firms, others can
[doctor’s] visit,” says Chen. ❚ pick up the slack if needed. ❚

4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 11

News
Climate change
What protesters want
The science behind Extinction Rebellion’s three demands
Adam Vaughan
HUNDREDS of climate change
campaigners left the streets of
London last week, after 11 days
of protests that brought parts of
the capital to a standstill and led
to more than a thousand arrests.
Attention is now focused
on the demands of the group
behind the demonstrations,
Extinction Rebellion, which is
hoping to negotiate with the UK
government. The group is meeting
with London mayor Sadiq Khan
and environment secretary
Michael Gove this week.
Any government talks
will follow an extraordinary
fortnight, which saw thousands
of schoolchildren strike for a
third time, Greta Thunberg
address MPs and party leaders,
and David Attenborough warn
NIKLAS HALLE’N/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
of climate change’s grave threat
on prime time TV.
Extinction Rebellion has three
demands for the UK. It wants
the government to “tell the truth”
about climate change, create
a citizens’ assembly to guide
action and set a target of reducing
greenhouse gas emissions to
net zero by 2025.
Rupert Read, who is part of
the movement’s political strategy
group, says Extinction Rebellion’s too close, as many of the changes
founders wanted a set of clear
and unassailable requests,
rather than a detailed manifesto.
“To not get bogged down in
a detailed programme, but to
have something everyone could
agree on,” he says.
To call a 2025 net-zero
greenhouse gas target radical
would be an understatement.
The UK’s current goal is to, by
2050, emit 80 per cent less than
it did in 1990, but the country
is already off-track for interim
targets. On 2 May, the
government’s climate advisers
are expected to recommend the
2050 target is changed to net zero. some in the group thought a later
12 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019
Achieving net-zero emissions
in six years’ time is unrealistic,
says Mark Maslin of University
College London, UK. “2025 is
require changes to infrastructure,
ownership and, of course,
11
Number of consecutive days
of protests in London
replanting trees and rewilding,
all of which take decades,” he says.
Some members of Extinction
Rebellion told New Scientist that,
while challenging targets are
necessary, it is naive to suggest
that the 2025 goal could be
achieved. Read concedes that
target, of around 2029, would be
more credible. “I’m 100 per cent
behind the 2025 demand myself,
as are most people in Extinction
Rebellion,” he says.
Read believes 2025 could be
achieved with a “green new deal”
to replace gas boilers in millions
of homes. He says that old cars
would also have to be permanently
taken off the road, and not be
replaced by electric models.
Being honest about climate
change would help reach the
2025 goal, he says. Extinction
Rebellion is demanding that
the government “tell the truth by
declaring a climate and ecological
emergency”. Energy minister
Claire Perry responded this week
that “what counts is actions”.
Read says one aspect of this
demand is about language and
Police arrest a climate
change protester on
Waterloo Bridge
conveying the scale of action
required to tackle climate change.
“Declare a climate emergency.
Tell the public this is an existential
threat. This isn’t just about the
environment, but about
everything. We will have to
change an awful lot,” he says.
A second aspect of the
movement’s “truth” demand is
about accounting. Official figures
state that the UK’s greenhouse gas
emissions have fallen 44 per cent
since 1990. But this doesn't
include emissions related to the
goods and services we consume,
nor those from international air
travel or shipping.
Thunberg attacked that
omission in her speech to MPs on
Tuesday, which she described as
“very creative carbon accounting”.
Extinction Rebellion’s last
request is the creation of citizens’
assemblies to guide climate action
and policies. Oxford City Council
has become the first local
authority to promise one.
But what if such forums reveal
that many people are actually
quite conservative about action on
climate change, as some studies
suggest? “We don’t know. We’d be
very disappointed and would have
to think again,” says Read, though
he believes the assemblies would
probably demand radical action.
Even if none of the demands
are met, the group has arguably
had an impact already. The
Labour party has endorsed it, and
politicians like Conservative MP
Boris Johnson are now talking in
detail about the action needed to
tackle climate change.
“One way of putting what
Extinction Rebellion exists for is:
‘to make the politically impossible
politically possible’,” says Read. ❚
 Briefing Wildlife

Farmers furious after losing

licence to kill millions of birds
Michael Le Page

LICENCES that allow people in the in the UK over the past 50 years –
UK to shoot 16 species of bird were that is due to farming practices
cancelled last week – a decision destroying songbird habitat.
that has upset some people.
People in the European Union What about crows?
can only usually kill wild birds if This is the most contentious area.
they have a specific licence to do Besides sometimes attacking
so, but every January, Natural vulnerable farm animals such as
England issues general licences newborn lambs, crows are the
that allow holders to target a range second biggest UK predator, after
of birds, including wood pigeons, foxes, of ground-nesting birds.
DAVID TIPLING/GETTY

Canada geese, parakeets and “There’s definitely a case for

several species of the crow family, controlling crows around
including rooks (pictured) and jays. ground-nesting birds,” says
Now that these types of licences conservationist Mary Colwell. The
have been revoked, individuals Royal Society for the Protection of
will probably have to apply for crows to protect lambs, and so are causing problems. Rather, the Birds kills several hundred crows
specific permits. on. “These general licences are aim is to get everyone to agree on a each year for this reason.
absolutely necessary at this time system that is legal, fair and based
Why did this happen? of year when crops are particularly on science, he says. If people will still be able to shoot
In February, conservationists vulnerable to pests,” said Guy birds, why is everyone so upset?
Mark Avery, Ruth Tingay and Smith of the National Farmers’ Can you give examples? It is partly because the general
Chris Packham launched a legal Union (NFU) in a statement. Crows Farmers ought to be able to licences have suddenly been
case asserting that the system are also killed to protect ground- shoot wood pigeons if they are revoked, with just two days’ notice
of issuing general licences is nesting birds such as threatened damaging crops, says Avery. They and no plan B. Natural England
unlawful. On 23 April, Natural curlews and lapwings. are the main target already – up to says it will work out alternative
England conceded they were right. 3 million pigeons are killed each measures for the lawful control
Do the conservationists want all year. By contrast, Avery says there of bird species over the next
And people are unhappy about this? the shooting to stop? is no reason why people should be few weeks. The NFU wants new
Many farmers and landowners are Absolutely not, says Avery. The able to kill jays. While they do kill licences issued as soon as possible.
furious, saying they have to kill trio accepts that landowners songbirds, they aren’t to blame for It couldn’t have happened at a
pigeons to protect crops, carrion sometimes need to kill birds that the decline in songbird numbers worse time, says Colwell. ❚

Child health

Chewing gummy University in Seoul, believe the
idea will catch on because the
bears could be a youngsters get to eat the gummy
check-up for kids bear afterwards.
Conventional devices used for
DON’T tell the dentist, but electrical measuring bite pressure often alarm
engineers want to give sweets to children because they are metallic
children to check how well they and weirdly shaped, says Lee.
can chew. Familiar materials should help,
A team has used Haribo gummy “especially knowing there is a
bears to build a cheap medical sweet treat at the end”, he says.
device to measure the pressure The device is designed to be
exerted by teeth. It could be used recyclable, with the gummy bear
MIKROMAN6/GETTY
Munching on a This happens because, when
the gummy bears are squeezed,
soft sweet could
reveal whether their conductivity changes
a child’s jaw (Sensors and Actuators A: Physical,
muscles are doi.org/c42w).
developing This new gnathodynamometer
correctly is still in early development, but the
hope is it could be used to measure
how hard children can bite, enabling
The duo ran tests with three healthcare workers to check how
adults, asking them to bite down well they have learned to chew.
on the sweet for five seconds. This is crucial for proper muscle
The results showed a predictable growth around the jaw. “Children’s

to help measure how children held between bamboo cantilevers change in voltage, which, though masticatory function is an
are developing. wrapped in conducting aluminium imperceptible to the chewer, could important indicator of their
Donghyun Lee and Beelee Chua, foil. Its name is a mouthful though: be recorded and monitored via two developmental stage,” says Lee. ❚
who created the device at Korea a gnathodynamometer. wires connected to the device. David Adam

4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 13

News
Climate change

A century of global warming

Human influence on droughts has been traced back to 1900
Adam Vaughan

DROUGHTS around the world Did emissions make

dating to the early 20th century the US Dust Bowl of
may have been made worse by the 1930s worse?
greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists have previously aerosols have declined but may
hesitated to draw links between still be playing a role.
global warming and drought, However, the researchers
due to a lack of observational expect the link between carbon
data and the difficulty of emissions and drought to become
distinguishing natural cycles increasingly clear in the coming
PHOTO 12/UIG VIA GETTY IMAGES

of dry conditions from ones that decades. “The impact of climate

are driven by climate change.
But Kate Marvel at the
University of Columbia in
New York and her colleagues
have found that the impact of
greenhouse gas emissions
on drought was clearly visible
between 1900 and 1949 (Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1149-8).
“Climate change is not a recent
phenomenon,” she says. “We’ve
known about it for a long time,
and it’s actually been happening
for a long time.”
By comparing climate models
that can account for the impact
of emissions on drought with tree
ring, rainfall and temperature
records, her team found clear
evidence that human activity
influenced droughts during the
“Climate change is not a a bunch of junk in the atmosphere
recent phenomenon, it has that blocks the sun,” says Marvel.
actually been happening From 1981 to 2017, there were
for a long time” signs of a link, but not enough to
say unequivocally that droughts
first half of the 20th century. were influenced by human-
But between 1950 and 1975, there induced climate change rather
was no evidence of an effect. than by natural variations.
The discrepancy is explained by That might sound odd, given
another human impact that had that this period coincides with
a cooling effect – the amount of a large rise in greenhouse gas
aerosols we released by burning emissions. Marvel and her team
huge amounts of coal, along with are still examining possible
other industrial activities. “We put explanations for this. One is that
change [on drought] should be
indisputable by the middle of the
century,” says Marvel.
The drying effect will not be
uniform across the world – while
many places are expected to get
drier, some are anticipated to get
wetter – but it is expected to have
severe consequences for people.
The research isn’t able to blame
individual drought events, such as
the US Dust Bowl of the 1930s, on
our emissions. “The signal [of the
human fingerprint] is really only
detectable when you look at a
global picture,” says Marvel.
She hopes the new work
will enhance the credibility of
climate models and their ability
to anticipate the impact of
future droughts. ❚

Solar system

Ice belt on Saturn’s it has seas of methane and a thick

atmosphere. However, Caitlin
Titan hides
behind the
by what we see there now.”
Titan probably isn’t geologically
moon Titan is a Griffith at the University of Arizona rings of Saturn active now, but the exposed ice
massive mystery
NASA/JPL-CALTECH/SSI

and her colleagues have used data
from the Cassini spacecraft to spot
TITAN has a huge stretch of ice signs of water ice on the surface.
near its equator and we don’t know They found one icy area around
how it got there. Most of the frigid a 500-metre-high mountain called
moon’s surface is covered in organic Doom Mons and a neighbouring
sediment that rains from the sky, pit that is 1500 metres deep.
but a strip that runs for thousands These areas have previously
of kilometres seems to be bare ice. been noted for possible signs of
On many of the cold worlds in the cryovolcanism, which could bring
outer solar system, water ice acts as ice up from under the surface.
bedrock that can become exposed. But the team also found a long,
Seeing such areas on Titan, Saturn’s straight line of ice that runs for
largest moon, is very hard because 6300 kilometres, or 40 per cent of
Titan’s circumference, that is more
difficult to explain. It should be
buried deep under organic sediment
(Nature Astronomy, doi.org/c45m).
“It’s possible that we are seeing
something that’s a vestige of a time
when Titan was quite different,”
says Griffith. “It can’t be explained
could be a sign that the moon’s
crust shifted or quaked in the past.
The ice may be embedded in
the side of cliff faces exposed by
erosion, rather than flat on the
ground, Griffith says – so don’t
brush off your skates just yet. “It
would be one of the worst moons in
the outer solar system to ice-skate
on anyway, because you have all
this gunk that’s coming down from
the atmosphere that might be
sticky and gooey,” she says. ❚
Leah Crane

14 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019

 Hear more about
surgical micro-robots at
newscientistlive.com
Demography

Robotic tube learns

to navigate inside a
Mystery of a village
beating heart with too many twins
Yvaine Ye Clare Wilson

A ROBOTIC surgical device can A SMALL village in India is 1800 people going back to the People with genes that favoured
autonomously travel to a specified seeing an explosion in the 1860s. Although they didn’t twins could have been more
location inside the heart. It uses number of twins born – and manage to pinpoint why the likely to survive the disease
only a camera for vision and has no one knows why. trend was happening, they for some reason. But the older
been used to operate on pigs. Kodinhi, in the southern state did manage to rule out a few villagers interviewed recalled
Pierre Dupont at Harvard of Kerala, now has 1000 twins suggested explanations. no such epidemic.
University and his colleagues among a population of 11,000 First, marriage within Additionally, there was no
created a robotic version of a and the twin birth rate is still families doesn’t appear to be the link between the twin birth
catheter, a thin tube widely used in increasing. “It’s out of this cause. As some genes raise the rate and where in the village
surgery. The device has a camera world,” says Lorena Madrigal at chance of having twins, it was people lived.
and LED light on its tip and is the University of South Florida. thought the village’s tradition of The only previous published
connected to a motor system The background rate of twin marriage between first cousins research on Kodinhi also
that controls its movement. births in India is about one in managed to rule out an unusual
The researchers used 2000 100, so the twin numbers in “Kodinhi has 1000 twins diet or source of water as causes.
interior heart images to train an Kodinhi stand out. in a population of Madrigal and her colleagues
algorithm to direct the catheter’s The phenomenon came to 11,000 and the rate were unable to take blood
motion. They then tested the global attention in 2009, but is still increasing” samples to see how many of
device in five pigs with leaky heart the explanation is a mystery. the twins are identical. It is
implants needing to be sealed. So Madrigal and her team and between uncles and nieces impossible to tell by their looks
At the start of each procedure, travelled to the village to see could be concentrating these because fraternal twins can be
a surgeon made an incision in the if they could find any clues genes in certain families. But very similar too, says Madrigal.
bottom of the heart. The catheter about possible genetic or the team found twins were no The team found that twin
was then inserted and tasked with environmental causes. more likely from such unions births in Kodinhi began to rise
autonomously navigating to the They spoke to households than from others. in about 1960 and have been
leak, given its position relative to that included nearly half the Another possible explanation increasing ever since.
other parts of the heart. twins in the village, and drew up suggested in previous media Although she has no proof,
In each operation, the team family trees comprising about reports was a past epidemic. Madrigal thinks the most likely
tested the catheter multiple times. explanation is that some
Out of 83 trials, it navigated to the residents were once exposed
right location 95 per cent of the to something that triggered
time. A surgeon then took over chemical changes to their DNA,
to fix the leak (Science Robotics, which they are now passing to
doi.org/c42t). their children. Her team hopes
The robotic catheter’s success to return to get blood samples
rate is comparable to that of an to shed light on this idea.
experienced clinician, says Dupont. The team presented its
By taking over the mundane task findings at a meeting of the
of reaching the leaks, the device American Association of
lowers the mental burden on Physical Anthropologists in
doctors so they can focus on Cleveland, Ohio.
plugging the holes, he says. Twins are more likely to
Currently, doctors use visual clues be born prematurely and
given by ultrasound and what they underweight, so one possible
feel with their hands to position a factor contributing to the rise
catheter. “This requires significant is that there would have been
skill and experience, and technology a greater chance of twins dying
makes it easier,” says Manesh Patel in the past due to poorer
HEMIS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

at Duke University in North Carolina. medical care, says Tim Spector

He hopes the catheter can be at King’s College London. ❚
improved so it can enter the heart
through blood vessels rather than There are an unusual
an incision, avoiding unnecessary number of twins in
damage to heart tissue. ❚ Kodinhi, India

4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 15

 News In brief
GIULIA MARCHI/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Neuroscience
Device converts
thoughts to speech
ELECTRODES on the brain have
been used to translate brainwaves
into words spoken by a computer.
Edward Chang at the University
of California, San Francisco (UCSF),
and his colleagues decoded signals
related to speech from a part of
the brain called the motor cortex.
The researchers used an array of
electrodes placed on the brain to
detect these signals, which direct
movements of the vocal tract, and
a computer simulation of a vocal
tract to reproduce the sounds of
speech from them.
The team worked with five
people who had electrodes on
the surface of their motor cortex
as a part of their treatment for
epilepsy. All five were asked to read
sentences aloud which contained
words and phrases that covered all
the sounds in English, while the
team recorded signals sent from
the motor cortex.
16 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019
Air pollution
Push to curb China’s urban
smog may be backfiring
MANY Western countries that
appear to have cleaned up their
act environmentally have actually
outsourced manufacturing to places
with laxer standards, resulting in
more pollution overall. The same
thing is now happening in China.
The country is trying to reduce
the dire air pollution in the capital
region that includes Beijing. In this
megalopolis of 110 million people,
average particulate levels are 10
times higher than the safe limit set
by the World Health Organization.
Chinese officials are moving
highly polluting industries to other
regions, but Bin Chen at Beijing
Normal University and colleagues
found this may actually lead to more
air pollution overall because of
lower environmental standards and
less efficient technologies in these
areas. The researchers calculated
Machine learning
The researchers then trained
an algorithm to reproduce the
AI creates masterful
sound of a spoken word from the art in just minutes
collection of signals sent to the
lips, jaw and tongue. ARTIFICIAL intelligence has
The team asked hundreds of learned to convincingly paint in
native English speakers to listen the style of masters like Vincent
to short phrases created by the Van Gogh and Johannes Vermeer.
algorithm from brain signals and Dinesh Manocha at the
identify the content. To help, the University of Maryland and his
listeners had lists that included colleagues taught an AI to replicate
the correct words. They identified the styles of well-known paintings
43 per cent of the generated including The Eiffel Tower, by
phrases perfectly when they had Georges Seurat, The Starry Night
25 words to choose from, and 21 by Van Gogh, oil paintings by
per cent when they had 50 choices Vermeer and Chinese ink
(Nature, doi.org/gfzvh4).
Many of the misunderstood
words were similar in meaning to
the sound of the original word, so
in many cases the gist of a sentence
was understood, says team
member Josh Chartier at UCSF.
The brain signals involved in the
BIAO JIA, CHEN FANG ET AL.
study are still sent even if a person
is totally paralysed, so a device like
this may one day be useful for
people who were able to speak but
lost that ability. Chelsea Whyte
that the increase in harmful
particulate emissions outside the
capital region will be 1.6 times the
emissions reduction achieved in the
capital region. What’s more, 3.6
times as much carbon dioxide will
be emitted overall and 2.9 times
as much water will be consumed.
In theory, having more
particulates spread more thinly
over less densely populated areas
might lessen the overall health
impact of this form of pollution,
but the researchers didn't assess
this. What they did show is that
prevailing winds will often blow
some of the extra particulate
pollution in neighbouring provinces
back into the capital region, partially
or completely countering the
reductions from moving factories
(Science Advances, doi.org/c42g).
Michael Le Page
landscapes by the Ming dynasty
painter Shen Zhou.
For each style, the AI was trained
with three to 10 reference works. It
learned to identify the properties
of brush strokes, including their
position, density, size and colour,
and what order to paint them in.
To get to grips with one style took
about 6 hours, as the AI tried to
replicate reference paintings. It
learned that the more closely its
work resembled the original, the
better it was performing.
The team then presented the
AI with a new image and tasked it
with reproducing it as a painting,
in a particular style. The image
left was the result of it reproducing
a vase of sunflowers in the style
of Van Gogh. The algorithm
generated brush strokes step-by-
step, taking about 5 minutes to
complete a single painting (arxiv.
org/abs/1904.02201).
However, while AI can master
technique, it is still no match for
human creativity, says Manocha.
Donna Lu

Really brief
DANIEL OCAMPO R, VENCEJO FILMS/PA
Mixed-up ancient
crustacean
Fossils of a mixed-up crab
from the Cretaceous have
perplexed researchers with
their bizarre anatomical
features. Callichimaera
perplexa, pictured, has
what look like the eyes
of a larva, the mouth of a
shrimp, the claws of a frog
crab and the carapace of a
lobster (Science Advances,
doi.org/c42f).
Blow to peanut
allergy treatments
Immunotherapies for
peanut allergies may
do more harm than good.
NASA/CALTECH
The therapies attempt
to desensitise a person’s
immune system by
gradually exposing them to
increasing doses of peanut
allergen. But an analysis
suggests they raise
the risk of anaphylaxis, a
dangerous allergic reaction
(The Lancet, doi.org/c42j).
Missed measles
vaccinations
An estimated 169 million
children worldwide haven’t
had their first dose of a
measles vaccine, according
to an analysis by the
children’s charity Unicef.
This includes nearly
2.6 million youngsters in
the US, 608,000 in France
and more than 500,000
in the UK.
Cultural evolution
Family of languages
may have new origin
ALTHOUGH Chinese, Tibetan and
Burmese tongues sound very
different, they are all derived from
a common source. An analysis
suggests the ancient ancestral
language that gave rise to them
might have emerged in northern
China and spread south and west.
Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan
and about 400 other languages
belong to the Sino-Tibetan group
of tongues because of their shared
origin. More than 20 per cent of all
Space
Tremor on Mars reveals more
about planet’s inner mysteries
THE first marsquake has been
detected by NASA’s InSight lander.
These tremors could help us learn
how much water is hiding within
the Red Planet.
InSight landed on Mars in
November 2018, and in December
it placed a seismometer, pictured
above, on the surface. On 6 April,
it felt the ground shake.
This quake was very small,
so it didn’t provide much detail
about the Martian interior. But it
does give us some basic information
about how marsquakes compare to
earthquakes. Philippe Lognonné at
Paris Diderot University, a member
of the InSight team, says the
New Scientist Daily
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people on Earth speak them.
Menghan Zhang at Fudan
University in Shanghai and his
colleagues wanted to find out
where this group of languages
originated. Because languages
evolve and diverge just like
species, the researchers applied
statistical tools used by biologists
to build an evolutionary tree for
Sino-Tibetan tongues.
They compared how words
that shared the same meaning
are pronounced. Generally, two
languages with many words
sounding alike are more closely
related than those with fewer
10-minute duration of the Mars
signal is longer than those seen on
Earth, which last a few minutes.
That is because the rocks on Earth
are full of water, which absorbs the
shock of seismic activity better than
dry ground, shortening the signal.
The first marsquake indicates
that the shallow subsurface doesn’t
have much water – far less than
Earth – but isn’t as dry as the moon,
where quake signals last an hour.
InSight also detected three even
smaller seismic signals in March and
April. However, wind rocking the
seismometer and meteorites hitting
the surface may have caused these,
says Lognonné. Leah Crane
similar words. The team produced
an evolutionary tree for the
languages and combined this with
archaeological evidence of how
people moved, such as the spread
of pottery and architectural styles,
to conclude the ancestral language
to Sino-Tibetan tongues arose in
present-day northern China
(Nature, doi.org/gfzvhm).
Not everyone agrees, as the
finding contradicts earlier research
which said the origin was probably
in south-west China. “It would be a
mistake to call the matter settled,”
says Zev Handel at the University
of Washington. Yvaine Ye
Medical technology
Heartbeats could
power pacemakers
A BATTERY-FREE pacemaker that
harvests energy from heartbeats
has been successfully tested in
pigs. It uses an energy harvester
wrapped around the heart that
makes electricity from movement.
It is the work of Zhong Lin
Wang at the Georgia Institute
of Technology in the US and his
colleagues. While pacemakers help
millions of people with irregular
heart rhythm, the batteries are
generally bulky, rigid, and can
have short lifetimes.
In tests, Wang and his team
found that the energy their
device harvested from the heart
exceeded that needed to power
a human pacemaker. They
used pigs in the tests because
their hearts are about the same
size as those of people (Nature
Communications, doi.org/c43f).
“The study results are very
encouraging, but there is a lot of
work to be done before it might be
used in humans,” says Tim Chico
at the University of Sheffield, UK.
He points out the device needed to
be inserted in open-heart surgery,
which is a lot more invasive than
is needed for current pacemakers.
Pacemaker batteries can last for
15 years, but the lifetime varies
depending on how much it needs
to be used. Staff and agency
4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 17
News Insight
Technology

Taking on the tech giants

Companies like Facebook and Google have come to dominate our lives.
Is it time to cut them down to size, asks Douglas Heaven
AS CAMPAIGN visions go, it is one
that most people can get behind.
US 2020 presidential hopeful
Elizabeth Warren just wants tech
companies to play by the rules.
“You don’t get to be the umpire
and have a team in the game,”
the Democrat senator told an
audience last week, describing
how she believes Amazon
exploits its market position

ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

to smother competitors.
But the way she wants to
achieve this could prove divisive.
“My administration will make
big, structural changes to the
tech sector to promote more
competition – including breaking
up Amazon, Facebook, and
Google,” she said in a campaign
statement earlier this year.
Warren is far from the first to
make this call. Over the past few
years, the companies on her hit list
have been accused of perverting
democracies, amplifying hate
crimes and stifling rivals.
“How big do these companies
have to be before they’re
considered too dominant?” says
Martin Moore at King’s College
London. “When you have more
than a quarter of the world’s
population on your platform,
that qualifies in any book.”
Still, most public figures taking
on these juggernauts – chief
among them Margrethe Vestager,
the European commissioner
for competition – have stopped
short of a break-up. Instead, we
have seen new rules, such as the
EU’s General Data Protection
Regulation, and large fines.
For example, Google has been
hit with a string of whopping fines
for abusing its market dominance
in the EU, including €2.4 billion
in 2017, €4.3 billion in 2018 – the
largest fine ever – and €1.5 billion
in March. But set against the
annual revenue of Google’s parent
company Alphabet (more than
$136 billion in 2018), they just
look like a cost of doing business.
“I don’t want to call them
parking tickets, but these are small
fines for companies that make
so much a year,” says Cristina
Caffarra, head of European
competition practice at consulting
firm Charles River Associates.
So if the fines aren’t working, is
Warren right to call for a break-up?
Elizabeth
Warren
wants to
shrink tech
firms
It has been done before. In the
1990s, the US government charged
Microsoft with gaining an unfair
advantage. By including its web
browser, Internet Explorer, on
computers running the market-
leading Windows operating
system, Microsoft was seen to
be preventing other companies’
browsers from getting a look in.
Microsoft was told it couldn’t
bundle separate software
products together and was forced
to open up Windows so that other
software developers could write
programs for it more easily.
But splitting off a piece of
software like a browser is easier
than carving up the likes of
Amazon, Facebook or Google.
Warren suggests separating
the running of a platform from
doing business on that platform.
For example, Amazon runs the
marketplace on which it sells its
own cut-price products, making
it harder for others to compete.
Benedict Evans, an analyst at
venture capitalist firm Andreessen
Horowitz in San Francisco, has
described Warren’s proposal
as “an odd combination of both
very specific and very vague”.
Evans asks if this thinking
applies to things like Apple’s App
Store. Should Apple be allowed
to sell its own apps? What about
supermarkets like Walmart and
Sainsbury’s, which have been
selling their own-brand products
at lower prices for decades – isn’t
Amazon just doing the same?
You could argue that Amazon’s
Mark Zuckerberg was
grilled by US politicians in
2018 over data scandals
unprecedented dominance of
online shopping makes things
different. For Caffarra, it is as
if Walmart or Sainsbury’s had
first bought most other retailers
before cutting prices, which
wouldn’t be allowed in the
bricks-and-mortar world.
Say you do want to break these
firms up, then. The best way
might be to undo mergers, some
of which should probably never
have been allowed, says Caffarra.
Google dominates online
advertising largely because it
bought up a string of businesses
like DoubleClick. These are now
integrated into Google’s business
and cutting them out would
damage the whole, but it wouldn’t
be impossible, says Moore.
Facebook similarly grew
to dominate social media by
vacuuming up rivals such as
Instagram and WhatsApp, both
of which helped it gain a foothold
on most of the world’s phones.
But again, it would be hard now

18 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019

 More Insight online
Your guide to a rapidly changing world
www.newscientist.com/insight
to disentangle these apps from
Facebook’s core business, which is
collecting as much data on people
as possible. The company even
seems to be trying to bolster
its defences against a break-up:
CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently
announced it would be merging
the code and data of Instagram
and WhatsApp more tightly with
the core Facebook app.
Even if you could see a way to
do it, breaking up a large company
is no quick fix. For regulators, it is
a last-ditch option, more a threat
than a viable response.
The European Commission,
driven by Vestager, has been
tougher than most on big tech.
But, legally, to consider such a far-
reaching course of action would
require it to demonstrate that a
break-up is the only way to reign
in a company’s bad conduct, which
wouldn’t be straightforward.
For these reasons, the better
option may be to double down
on regulation. Caffarra says that
calls to break up big tech are more
common in the US, where tech
firms have been left to do more
or less what they want since the
Microsoft case 20 years ago. “There
is a sense of frustration in many
quarters. Nothing is being done
Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google’s parent company
Alphabet are among the most successful on the planet – in part because
they offer services used by a significant fraction of humanity
Number of users (billions)
Facebook
WhatsApp
Facebook
Messenger
Instagram 1 by Facebook and Google are a
Alphabet
YouTube
Gmail
Amazon 0.3
SOURCE: FACEBOOK; ALPHABET; AMAZON
and nothing short of breaking
them up will work,” she says.
That may be starting to change.
Last week, Facebook warned
investors that it expected to be
fined as much as $5 billion by the
US Federal Trade Commission,
which is currently investigating
the firm as a result of the
Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
Diane Coyle at the University
of Cambridge, who co-authored
an independent review of digital
competition for the UK
€8.2bn
Total amount Google has been
fined under EU competition law
government, says regulators
could use existing powers more.
For example, in the UK, Facebook
and YouTube could be treated as
publishers and held responsible
for their content. “They’d have to
do a lot to comply,” says Coyle.
The report also argues for new
regulations, like making it easier
for new businesses to use
established platforms so that
they aren’t shut out of a market,
allowing users to transfer data
from one platform to another.
2018 revenue
2.3
$56bn
1.5
1.3
1.5
1.8
$137bn
$233bn
In fairness, Facebook, Google,
Microsoft and Twitter are part
of an initiative called the Data
Transfer Project, which works
towards this aim. But if we want
services like search or social
networks to become more like
email – with different products,
such as Gmail or Outlook, all using
the same underlying protocols –
then there is a long way to go.
Coyle also says regulators
need to think differently about
acquisitions. Treating Instagram
as just a photo-sharing platform,
and not a Facebook competitor,
was naive, she says.
“Regulation is inevitable,” says
Moore. “But we have to be careful
how we do it.” He thinks we
need a clear sense of the kind of
relationship society should have
with big tech before we jump in.
Choosing the kind of services
we want the likes of Amazon,
Facebook and Google to provide
will determine how we shape
the behaviour of the companies
through regulation.
For example, if we think – as
Warren does – that these tech
companies should be more like
utilities, then a search engine
provider might become as highly
regulated as water or electricity
firms. Or if we care most about
privacy and what happens
to our data, then we need
specific regulations to enforce
transparency or interoperability.
Once we ask these questions, we
may find ourselves re-examining
the economic model behind these
firms. Some say the billions made
result of “surveillance capitalism”,
in which services are provided in
exchange for personal data.
For Moore, dealing with this
economic model is the bigger
problem. “If you don’t, then you’re
going to get other companies just
as dominant in future,” he says. ❚
Working
hypothesis
Sorting the week's
supernovae from the
absolute zeros
▲ Slow walkers
The UK’s Ordnance Survey
is to recalculate how long
walking routes take. Its
Victorian-era formula
currently generates times
that are unrealistically
fast for many hikers.
▲ Patient physicists
The radioactive decay
of xenon-124 has been
observed. With a half-life
of a trillion times the age
of the universe, it makes
watching paint dry an
extreme sport.
▲ Donald Trump
In other rare news, the US
president has come out
in favour of science. He
declared “vaccinations are
so important” in response
to US measles outbreaks.
▼ Russian whale
A whale wearing a harness
marked “Equipment of
St Petersburg” may have
been trained by the
Russian navy. Or perhaps
it just liked visiting
cathedrals?
▼ Asteroid Ryugu
Japan confirmed it had
blasted a hole in asteroid
Ryugu, going a small way
to avenging the
dinosaurs.
JAXA
4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 19
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 Views
The columnist Letters Aperture Culture Culture columnist
Annalee Newitz on Is a lack of free will A white-tailed eagle Magic relies on brain Video games can bring
why criminals will love behind readers’ snatches a fish from trickery, as a book and history to life, says
e-scooters p24 correspondence? p26 a Scottish loch p28 show reveal p30 Jacob Aron p32

Comment

Greenland can’t go green

The Arctic is melting fast. The world needs to wake up to just how
fast, and what the impacts will be, says Adam Vaughan
Adam is New Scientist’s chief
reporter. Follow him on Twitter
@adamvaughan_uk

to act. Debate is ongoing about

when we will reach climate tipping
points where feedback processes
kick in to accelerate melting,
potentially wiping out Greenland’s
ice sheet. But the dynamics of ice
mean melting doesn’t increase
linearly as the world warms. We
also know there was a significant
Greenland ice sheet 130,000 years
ago, when summer temperatures
were several degrees warmer.
So every fraction of a degree of
warming avoided helps avert
the worst.
Some researchers are already
reviving talk of geoengineering
our way from catastrophe.
Injecting cooling sulphates into
the atmosphere could reduce
Greenland’s ice loss by 10 per cent

I
T’S not exactly a natural
icebreaker, but Earth
scientists are talking a lot
about ice right now. I met quite
a few of them at the European
Geosciences Union general
assembly in Vienna, Austria.
One particularly eye-opening
moment came when Harry
Zekollari from Delft University
of Technology in the Netherlands
showed me how his computer
models indicate that half of Alpine
glaciers are doomed by mid-
century, whatever action we now
take to curb carbon emissions.
If anything, the models seem
a conservative representation of
JOSIE FORD
satellite imagery of an Arctic
glacier slipping at a rate that was
“simply nuts”, according to one
researcher involved: 20 metres
a day, compared with 20 metres a
year in 2013. And we have recently
learned how increased rainfall in
Greenland is melting way more
ice than anyone expected.
If Greenland starts to go green,
we have a real problem. The ice
cap there is up to 3 kilometres
deep and contains enough water
to raise sea levels by several
metres. It is looking increasingly
vulnerable. A study just out in the
journal PNAS has looked at almost
half a century of data to conclude
30 years. This year’s melt season
has already begun, a month early.
So much bad news begins to
wash over you – and that’s exactly
the researchers’ main worry. Eric
Rignot, an author of the PNAS
paper, says what surprises him the
most is how much science people
need before contemplating action.
If Alpine glaciers disappear,
that’s a blow to the region’s
tourism and hydroelectric
industries. But perhaps we can
tolerate the loss of skiing holidays.
Perhaps we should anyway.
Greenland is in a different league:
an unfolding environmental
problem with incalculable,
by 2070, according to modelling
by a team at Beijing Normal
University, also presented in
Vienna. But even if that is
technically feasible, the uncertain
global impacts make it a political
no-go. Countries at a recent UN
meeting even rejected a proposal
for a simple assessment into
climate-cooling technologies.
The answer isn’t sexy: deep,
rapid cuts in fossil fuel use.
This past week, I have been talking
to instigators of the Extinction
Rebellion movement (see page 12).
The detail of their demands might
be unrealistic, but they have
created resonance. The climate

facts on the ground. A few days that Greenland’s annual ice mass global economic risk attached. certainly has tipping points.
later, NASA was highlighting loss has grown nearly sixfold in It is – still, just – not too late Can societies have them too? ❚

4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 23

Views Columnist
This changes everything
Not so smart cities Internet-linked devices can improve our lives,
but all the related data gathering leaves us at risk of a new kind of
street crime, writes Annalee Newitz
B
ECAUSE I live in San
Francisco, I have been
subjected to a number
of ill-fated experiments
performed by short-lived tech
companies. The most recent
involves app-controlled electronic
scooters. With little advance
notice, a handful of companies
Annalee is a science journalist and blanketed cities in the San
author. Her novel Autonomous won Francisco area with lavishly
the Lambda Literary Award and she branded e-scooters. Anyone with
is the co-host of the Hugo-nominated the right app could ride one, then
podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. park it somewhere “properly”.
You can follow her @annaleen and Unfortunately, proper parking is
her website is techsploitation.com really in the eyes of the beholder.
Scooters wound up blocking
sidewalks, streets, gutters and
doorways. City workers routinely
had to dredge them out of a large,
Annalee’s week local lake. One company, Lime,
What are you watching? posted pictures of its broken,
I'm catching up on the waterlogged scooters on Twitter.
final season of the post- San Franciscans complained at
apocalyptic martial arts/ great length, and the city banned
motorcycle/sword epic them for several months. And yet,
Into the Badlands. so far, the experiment continues.
What are Two new e-scooter companies
you reading? recently signed a deal with the
I have just finished Eve San Francisco city government,
D’Ambra’s delightful Roman promising to do it right this time.
Women, an exhaustively Debris from trashed e-scooters
researched introduction is one unexpected side effect
to ancient Roman culture of an idea that marketers and
that happens to be about futurists call the “smart city”,
the lives of women. I’m a cosmopolitan utopia anchored
also reading Mike Chen’s to an eco-friendly power grid,
gorgeous time travel novel saturated by high-speed internet
Here and Now and Then. and with conveniences like
What are you e-scooters on every corner or
working on? autonomous cars that will bring
I’m writing a book about you takeout. The notion – a good
four ancient cities and one, to be sure – is that we can use
why people decided to software to make our cities more
abandon them. energy efficient and user-friendly.
If an office building is empty in
PORTRAIT: JANE ANDERS RIGHT: SCOOT
the evening, the smart city diverts
power from it to a stadium full of
sports fans. If there’s a traffic jam
somewhere, grab an e-scooter.
This column will appear If a storm surge is coming, your
monthly. Up next week: fully automated home will batten
botanist James Wong down the hatches for you.
24 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019
All these scenarios depend on
people covering our old, dumb
cities with devices that talk to
each other over the internet.
Those devices might be weather
sensors, gas meters, drawbridge
controllers, traffic monitors,
sanitation systems, surveillance
cameras… or e-scooters.
They might be stuck to the side
of buildings, or dangling from
drones. The point is that the city
becomes a kind of giant computer,
gathering and crunching data
from the real world.
The smart city is also
programmable. I poke a button
on my phone, and I can summon
“Renting an
e-scooter might
inadvertently
help a thief
break into
key computer
networks”
a car. Likewise, a police officer
might watch CCTV footage on
their phone, and a plumber might
shut off a water valve with theirs.
Scientists could monitor pollution
levels from miles away.
There’s just one problem.
If everything is full of remotely
accessible data, then so are
you – and that’s how a new kind
of street crime will emerge.
Let’s think about those e-scooters
again. When I use my app to get
that scooter, I’m sending a lot
of information to the company
that rents it to me. There’s my
credit card and email, of course,
but more importantly there’s
data about where I go. That
information is very interesting
to thieves with some technical
savvy. To get it, a thief injects a
little malicious code into an ad
on the scooter app. When I click
the ad, they start tracking me.
Multiply that by thousands,
and the thief can figure out, say,
who spends time at fancy private
clubs or government agencies.
In the smart city, searching for
a good mark is that easy. Want a
rich banker or a bureaucrat with
security clearance? Our thief has
a list of thousands of potential
targets. Now they can send their
chosen marks some phishing
emails to gain access to their
computer systems at work. It’s a
tried and true method: a simple
phishing scam led to the leak of
Democratic Party emails during
the 2016 US election.
And that’s how my choice
to rent an e-scooter might
inadvertently help a malicious
person break into a sensitive
computer network. Consider
what would happen if someone
with technical skills got onto the
network that controls bridges
or traffic lights. Or broke into
your house by hacking your
app-controlled heating system.
When every object in the city is
“smart”, criminals gain access to
your valuables through digital
keyholes you may not even
realise are there.
That’s especially true when
you consider the hodgepodge
way smart cities are emerging.
There is some centralised
oversight for technologies used
in infrastructure and policing.
But services like e-scooters or even
autonomous cars will probably
be created ad hoc, without much
regulation. In the smart city of
tomorrow, we won’t just need to
teach kids not to talk to strangers.
We’ll have to teach them not to
talk to hoverboards, too. ❚
 Humanity will need the
equivalent of 2 Earths to People lying down
support itself by 2030. solve anagrams in
10% less time
than people
standing up.

About 6 in
100 babies
(mostly boys)
are born with an
extra nipple.

60% of us
experience
‘inner speech’
where everyday
thoughts take a
back-and-forth
conversational style.

We spend 50% of our

lives daydreaming.

AVAILABLE NOW
newscientist.com/howtobehuman
Views Your letters

What exactly is this self-

determination, then?

6 April, p 34
From Robert Cailliau,
Prévessin-Moëns, France
My lack of free will gives me no
choice but to disagree with Tom
Stafford. Cellular automata may
look unpredictable to him, but
surely they produce exactly the
same pattern when started from
the same initial conditions,
unless a random number
generator based on quantum
physics is incorporated.
What does he mean by self-
determination, anyway? I can
“freely choose” between two
issues if no outside agents prevent
it, and then my choice is based
on a conscious or unconscious
preference. If I choose totally at
random, can it be called a choice?
My illusion of free will comes
from the absence of external
intervention, but my choices are
still determined by my past, which
shaped what I want.
Fortunately, nature is truly
random at some level: it would
all be totally deterministic and
horribly boring without that.
Also, Stafford leaves me no
choice about his Choice Engine:
this interactive essay is on Twitter,
a commercial entity based outside
of our legal space. I have no desire
to make an account there. Can we
expect to see the engine on a no-
strings-attached platform?
From Daniel Richardson,
Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, UK
Stafford is optimistic that we do
have free will to make choices. I
wonder whether he freely chose
to believe that. His genes, prior life
experience and career researching
the brain all shaped his own brain
structure to hold that belief: so
the true act of free will would be
to somehow reject his own
optimism for free will. This
is rather a paradox.
The editor writes:
Our genes and experience lead
us to agree that this paradox is
important. But…
In the summertime, when
the vitamin’s easy
16 March, p 28
From Carol Stevenson, London, UK
Linda Geddes reports on the
health perils of shunning the sun.
This was interesting, but I have a
question. How much skin should
I expose when I go out to get my
daily dose of sunshine? Hands
and face are easy, lower arms and
legs possible – but is that enough?
The editor writes:
How much sunshine you need to
get your daily dose of vitamin D
depends on your skin colour,
where you are and the time of
year. The UK's National Health
Service says that in the UK, you
can bare your forearms, hands
or lower legs in the middle of
the day from late March to early
September for short periods – but
to be careful not to burn (see bit.ly/
NHS-sun).
Machine learning is not
artificial intelligence
30 March, p 17
From Ben Haller,
Ithaca, New York, US
Three systems misclassified
medical images after the
pictures were slightly altered.
This is symptomatic of a deep
misunderstanding: algorithms
like these are not “artificial
intelligence”. No intelligence
is involved. They are merely
statistical machine-learning
algorithms that happen to be
based on neural networks.
These algorithms don’t
understand that they are
supposed to diagnose cancer.
They merely find effective ways to
distinguish the two categories of
images on which they are trained.
To avoid creating unrealistically
high expectations regarding the
intelligence of such algorithms,
it is important to refer to them
as machine-learning algorithms
rather than AIs. You should lead
the way.
Traces of the Yamnaya
in modern languages
30 March, p 29
From Susan Valdar,
Westerham, Kent, UK
Colin Barras discusses the
fascinating genetic and
archaeological evidence for the
spread of the Yamnaya people

26 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019


from the Steppes through Europe,
the Near East and India. He
curiously omits the linguistic
evidence from the reconstruction
of proto-Indo-European from
modern languages. This suggests
the same spread of people over
the same time period. It also
makes a strong case in support of
more cooperation between the
sciences and the humanities.
From Per Ahlberg,
Uppsala, Sweden
Although the Yamnaya left no
written records, circumstantial
evidence overwhelmingly points
to them being the speakers of
the ancestral Indo-European
language, which diversified into
a language family that includes
the overwhelming majority of
European languages, as well as the
Iranian family, Urdu and Hindi.
The vocabulary of proto-Indo-
European can be reconstructed by
comparing words in descendant
languages, and includes some
highly suggestive vocabulary,
oft-given examples being “horse”
(ekwos), “yoke” (yugom) and
“wheel” (kwekwlo). They hint at a
mobile people with horse-drawn
wagons. So the roots of the
descendant languages contain
the last faint echoes of how the
Yamnaya saw themselves.
To thrive, firms must
recruit new graduates
13 April, p 46
From Greta Blake, High Coniscliffe,
County Durham, UK
Your article in association with
SRG reports a shortage of science
Want to get in touch?
Send letters to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street,
London WC2E 9ES; please see terms and email at
newscientist.com/letters
and engineering skills. As the
parent of a daughter who
graduated with an upper second
honours degree in medical
engineering last year, I lament
the shortage of employers willing
to consider recruiting new
graduates. Virtually all firms in
the UK ask for applicants with
very specific experience.
Perhaps it is time that
industry realised that graduates
don't come tailor-made for their
particular requirements. Rather,
they have aptitudes and abilities
that enable them to work in a
variety of situations – if given
appropriate training.
You only have to look online to
see that my daughter is not alone
in this. My message to industry is:
if you want a conscientious, hard
working engineer who is willing
to move to any part of the country,
then there is one here.
How those indicative
votes actually worked
6 April, p 24
From Richard Mellish, London, UK
Petros Sekeris writes that a
majority of MPs prefer some deal
between the UK and the EU to no
deal, and are thus likely to opt for
one of the new options, rather
than May’s proposal – implying
that they each had to choose one
preferred option from the eight
that were on offer. Each MP could
vote for any and all options that
they regarded as tolerable. For
example, Gareth Thomas, MP for
Harrow West, voted in favour of
five of them in the first round of
“indicative votes” on 27 March. ❚
Views From the archives
50 years ago, New Scientist
was in a spin with the problem of
bringing spacecraft back to Earth
IT’S all very well getting people
into space – but how do you get
them back again? That question
was engrossing New Scientist
on 1 May 1969, less than three
months before the first crewed
moon landing. “The now familiar
last scenes of a US manned
space flight, with its full cast of
warships, helicopters, frogmen,
etc, has proved both safe and spectacular,” we wrote,
“but more convenient and controllable return routes
for astronauts are under study.”
In particular, design studies had been prepared by
NASA and the engineering company North American
Rockwell for “two reusable spacecraft which could
sprout rotors at the crucial moment during re-entry”.
After initial slowing by atmospheric friction, helicopter
blades would fold out of the spacecraft’s body, enabling
the pilot to “bring it down like a sycamore seed”.
The spies were also interested. “The craft would be
able to pursue an erratic orbit above the atmosphere,
frustrating the counter-intelligence of other nations,
and secure in the knowledge that any number of
eventual landing sites could be chosen,” the article
went on to say.
But the concept doesn’t seem to have passed
practical muster. When reusable spacecraft became a
reality with the inception of NASA’s shuttle programme
in 1981, they were brought down like hypersonic
gliders, with long, banking S-turns used to lose speed,
and a high angle of attack generating extra drag.
Part of the problem was perhaps that the space
helicopter concept involved lots of moving parts that
could go wrong. To make it more manoeuvrable on
re-entry, we suggested that “the rotors could be fitted
with small, throttleable rockets on their tips”.
That idea continued to have its adherents. On 8 May
1999, we reported that entrepreneur Richard Branson
was looking to invest in a rocket-assisted space
helicopter called Roton. A full-scale test vehicle made
three flights, but the company ran out of money in
2001. As recently as October 2012, NASA researchers
were seen dropping scale-models from the top of
Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building, to
see if free-spinning rotors might provide a means for
recovering spent rocket stages, as well as spacecraft.
There is nothing new under the sun. Simon Ings
To find more from the archives, visit
newscientist.com/old-scientist
4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 27
Views Aperture

28 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019

Like wildlife photography?
Visit the Incredible Creatures Feature at New Scientist Live
newscientistlive.com/incredible-creatures-feature

Eagle eyed

Photographer Mike Crutch

Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation

GOTCHA! A white-tailed eagle

has just plucked a fish from a
loch in Scotland. This rare sight
may become more common with
a plan to reintroduce the birds,
sometimes known as sea eagles,
to the UK’s south coast. With a
wingspan of almost 2.5 metres,
the coast-loving birds would
become England’s largest raptors.
They were widespread in the
south of England until humans
wiped them out in the 1780s. This
summer, the Roy Dennis Wildlife
Foundation and Forestry England
will embark on a five-year project
to release up to 60 young eagles
in woodlands on the Isle of Wight.
The birds’ huge range means they
will probably be spotted from the
island and the mainland, mostly
preying on fish in spring and
summer, and waterbirds in
autumn and winter.
Some farmers worry that the
eagles could kill lambs, as happens
in Scotland, where they were
reintroduced in the 1970s after the
last white-tailed eagle was shot in
1918. But Tim Mackrill, who works
with the wildlife foundation,
argues this is unlikely in lowlands,
where there is plenty of other prey,
and sheep are kept closer to farms.
He says no sheep deaths have been
reported in a similar Irish scheme.
“This iconic species used to
occur from Kent to Cornwall, but
it was eradicated because of man,”
says Mackrill. “We have a moral
obligation to restore it.” ❚

Clare Wilson

4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 29

Views Culture

Nothing in my right hand…

We need to think our brains don’t lie to us – but magic relies on
the fact that they do, finds Simon Ings

Circle, finds Maskelyne’s “anti-

spiritualist” form of stage magic
alive in the hands of illusionist
Exhibition Derren Brown. He suggests that
Smoke and Mirrors: Brown is more of a traditional
The psychology of magic magician than he lets on,
Wellcome Collection, London, dismissing the occult while he
to 15 September endorses mysterious psychological
Book phenomena, mostly to do with
Experiencing the Impossible: “subconscious priming”, that,
The science of magic at root, are non-scientific.
Gustav Kuhn Kuhn defines magic as “the
MIT Press experience of wonder that results
from perceiving an apparently
ACCORDING to John Nevil impossible event”. Definitions
Maskelyne, “a bad conjurer will of what is impossible differ,
make a good medium any day”. and different illusions work for
He meant that, as a stage magician different people. You can even
in 19th-century London, he had to design it for animals, as a torrent
produce successful effects night of YouTube videos, based largely
after night, while rivals who on Finnish magician Jose
claimed their illusions were Ahonen’s “Magic for Dogs”, attest.
powered by the spirit world Tricking dogs is one thing, but
THOMAS FARNETTI, WELLCOME COLLECTION

could simply blame a bad set on why do our minds fall for magic?
“unhelpful spirits”, or even on It was the 18th-century Scottish
the audience’s own scepticism. Enlightenment philosopher,
A gaffe-ridden performance in David Hume, who argued that
the UK by one set of spiritualists, there is no metaphysical glue
the US Davenport Brothers, drove binding events, and that we only
Maskelyne to invent his own act. ever infer causal relationships,
With his friend, the cabinet maker be they real or illusory.
George Alfred Cooke, he created an Twinned with our susceptibility
“anti-spiritualist” entertainment, signals over a distance of a couple The lure of illusions to wrongly infer relationships
at once replicating and debunking of kilometres, and, for decades is at the heart of a new between events in the world is our
the spiritualist movement’s stock- after, hardly a year passed in show in London ability to fool ourselves at an even
in-trade effects. which some researcher didn’t deeper level. Numerous studies,
Matthew Tompkins teases out announce a new type of invisible “Margery” Crandon decided to including one by researcher and
the historical implications of ray. The world turned out to have try her hand, but she reckoned former magician Jay Olson and
Maskelyne’s story in The Spectacle aspects hidden from unaided without the efforts of one Harry clinician Amir Raz which sits at
of Illusion: Magic, the paranormal human perception. Was it so “Handcuff” Houdini, who the exit to the Wellcome show,
and the complicity of the mind unreasonable of people to eventually exposed her as a fraud. conclude that our feeling of free
(Thames & Hudson). It is a lavishly speculate about what, or who, Yet spiritualism persisted, will may be an essential trick of
illustrated history to accompany might lurk in those hidden shading off into parapsychology, the mind.
Smoke and Mirrors, a new and corners of reality? Were they so quantum speculation and any Inferring connections makes
intriguing exhibition at the gullible, reeling as they were from number of cults. Understanding us confident in ourselves and our
Wellcome Collection in London. the mass killings of the first world why is more the purview of a abilities, and it is this confidence,
Both book and exhibition bring war, to populate these invisible psychologist such as Gustav Kuhn, this necessary delusion about
the story up to date, for the realms with their dead? who, as well as being a major the brilliance of our cognitive
curious truth is, spiritualism In 1924, the magazine Scientific contributor to the show, offers abilities, that lets us function…
stubbornly refused to die. American offered $2500 to any insight into magic and magical and be tricked. Even after reading
Historical accident was partly medium who could demonstrate belief in his own new book, both books, I defy you to see
responsible. In 1895, Guglielmo their powers under scientific Experiencing the Impossible. through the illusions and wonders
Marconi sent long-wave radio controls. The medium Mina Kuhn, a member of the Magic in store at the exhibition. ❚

30 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019


Finding their way
From ants to birds, how do animals use their senses to guide
them to food and breeding grounds, wonders Michael Bond
Book
Incredible Journeys:
Exploring the wonders
of animal navigation
David Barrie
Hodder & Stoughton
THERE seems to be no limit to the
resourcefulness with which insects,
birds, fish and mammals navigate
their way through the world.
Consider the desert ant. After
meandering hundreds of metres
from its nest, the ant manages to
scuttle home in a straight line across
unfamiliar ground. Honeybees use
an internal clock and sensitivity to
polarised light to remember the
location of food, communicating it
to their hive through their famous
waggle dance. And there is the
Arctic tern, taking a round trip from
the north Atlantic to Antarctica of
more than 70,000 kilometres.
David Barrie’s Incredible Journeys
is brimful of such wayfinding
wonders. But it is as valuable for
what it reveals about our ignorance.
KIM TAYLOR/NATUREPL.COM
No one knows how those terns stay
the course across vast expanses
of open ocean, nor how juvenile
European cuckoos find their way
to their wintering grounds in Africa
for the first time without a guiding
parent. Pigeons are known to have
a keen sense of smell, but, despite
decades of research, we can’t agree
if they use it to navigate.
The consensus is that many
animals can sense Earth’s magnetic
field, but how they use it remains
unclear. “There are three radically
different theories, any or all of
which may prove to be correct,”
writes Barrie, adding that “some
entirely different mechanism...
may be at work”.
Many biologists have spent their
lives wrestling with these mysteries,
and their obsessive ponderings
and ingenious experiments are as
fascinating as the behaviours they
study. Take Rüdiger Wehner, one
of the greatest authorities on the
navigational abilities of ants. He
The waggle dance is
how honeybees share
key information
Don’t miss
Visit
made his breakthrough discovery –
that they orientate using an inbuilt
“sun compass”– by painting over AI: More than human is
parts of their tiny compound eyes spread across several
and watching their response. levels of London’s
Matthias Wittlinger, intent on Barbican Centre from
finding out how ants calculate 16 May, bringing artists
distance, had the idea of attaching and scientists together to
miniature stilts to some subjects ask big questions about
and shortening the legs of others our machines, our minds
to see if this affected the length of and our selves.
their journeys. He found that his
stilted ants overshot the nest while Watch
the amputees pulled up short, thus
confirming his idea that they were
counting their steps.
All this is enough to make
anyone with the vaguest interest in
science want to grab a magnifying
glass and head for the desert.
Thanks to the likes of Wehner,
Wittlinger and Karl von Frisch
(who deciphered the honeybee Dr. Strangelove or:
waggle dance), we now know a How I learned to
lot more about how animals get stop worrying and
TOP: AI: MORE THAN HUMAN POEMPORTRAITS BY ES DEVLIN, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST / DR STRANGLOVE :TCD/PROD.DB / ALAMY / A. T. WILLETT / ALAMY
around and their acute sensitivity love the bomb
to their surroundings. A 4K restoration of
Barrie’s passion makes him an Stanley Kubrick’s comic
engaging guide, flitting from fact to cold war masterpiece
anecdote like a butterfly hunting for comes to selected UK
nectar. He is no less animated about cinemas from 12 May.
the skills of early humans, who
explored most of our planet and Read
colonised much of it “without the
help of any tools, apart from their
finely tuned senses and native wits”.
In the age of GPS, it is easy to
forget that modern humans possess
the same senses and wits, though
we use them less and less. How our
brains form the cognitive maps that
allow us to remember routes and
places is as mysterious – and in The Moon: A history
many ways as remarkable – as the for the future is
migration of the Arctic tern or the Oliver Morton’s sly
dead reckoning of the desert ant. and unsentimental
Let’s hope that by the time spatial assessment of our
neuroscience has revealed more lunar adventuring to
about our wayfinding faculties, date, and the moon’s
we still know how to use them. ❚ possible future. It comes
out this week from
Michael Bond is a science writer Profile Books.
based in London
4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 31
Views Culture
The games column
Time-travelling tourists One of the accidental extras of well-researched
games like Assassin’s Creed is the sense of historical time and place they create.
Some even let us play at translating ancient hieroglyphics, says Jacob Aron
Jacob is New Scientist’s
deputy news editor. He has
been playing video games for
25 years, but still isn’t very
good at them. Follow him
@jjaron
UBISOFT ENTERTAINMENT
I WAS approaching the Parthenon
in Athens when an awesome sight
Games stopped me in my tracks. Standing
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey before me was a gigantic statue of
Ubisoft the goddess Athena, glittering in
Released on 5 October 2018, splendour as it towered three
for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One storeys overhead. “Hang on a
and Nintendo Switch minute,” I thought. “Is that really
Heaven’s Vault meant to be there?”
Inkle Yes, it turns out, but only
Released on 16 April 2019, because I was standing in Athens
for PC and PlayStation 4 circa 400 BC, as painstakingly
recreated in Assassin’s Creed
Odyssey. The Athena Promachos
sculpture, long since destroyed,
was one of the wonders of its time,
and is a perfect attraction for the
time-travelling tourism offered
by the Assassin’s Creed series.
The draw of these popular
games, of which there are now a
lot, is their sense of time and place.
I have explored Renaissance Italy,
Victorian London and ancient
Egypt, and in each game I find
myself putting aside the story
just to wander around, taking
in the sights.
This ability to explore at your
leisure is something unique to
video games as a medium. The
film Gladiator may bring the
32 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019
Colosseum of ancient Rome to life,
but you only get to look where
director Ridley Scott wants you to.
By contrast, Assassin's Creed:
Brotherhood gives you the run of
the entire city at the turn of the
16th century.
Of course, you could simply
read a book and let your
imagination run wild, but actually
“I have explored
Athens circa 400 BC,
Renaissance Italy,
Victorian London and
ancient Egypt”
navigating a space brings a whole
new perspective. It sounds silly,
but part of the appeal of Assassin’s
Creed for me is realising that
history has history, as shown by
the crumbling Colosseum in
Brotherhood, which by that time
had been ancient for centuries.
Not content with ambling
around early Greece, I have also
been trying my hand at fictional
archaeology in Heaven’s Vault, by
a small UK developer called Inkle.
The 3D world of the game is far less
The Athena Promachos
sculpture, as seen in
Assassin’s Creed
sophisticated than Assassin’s
Creed, but when combined with
the 2D-animated characters
this gives the whole thing a
charmingly lo-fi feel.
You play as Aliya Elasra, a
researcher at the University of Iox,
as you attempt to decipher a lost
language written in cryptic
hieroglyphics. The game involves
travelling around The Nebula – a
collection of moons joined by
“rivers” of oxygen, hydrogen and
ice – gathering inscriptions and
attempting to translate them.
These translation efforts start
out as pure guesswork: in an early
example, you are presented with
two words, the first of which could
be “friend” or “holy”, while the
second might mean “beloved”
or “Emperor”. From there, you
can make some reasonable
inferences – perhaps that extra
squiggle transforms “Emperor”
into “Empress”? Or maybe that
short glyph between two other
words simply means “and”?
As you build translations
upon translations, your choices
determine how the plot of the
game unfolds. It is incredibly
satisfying to see a word that you
translated in one context crop
up in another, reaffirming your
choice. Equally, it is frustrating
when you realise a word cannot
possibly fit, potentially undoing a
whole chain of translations –
though thankfully the game lets
you go back and change your
mind at any point.
While I have never spent any
time attempting to crack a real-life
ancient language, I imagine the
experts encounter similar bouts of
success and failure. Heaven’s Vault
won’t get you an archaeology PhD
but it is well worth your time. ❚
 Where did we come from?
How did it all begin?

And where does belly-button fluff come from?

Find the answers in our latest book. On sale now.

Introduction by Professor Stephen Hawking

Features Cover story
Finding
our voice
The origin of language is one of the biggest
mysteries of human evolution, but it looks like
we’ve finally cracked it, says David Robson
I In search of
N THE beginning was the word, and the
word was… what? At least since biblical
times, we have puzzled over the origins
of language. It is, after all, one of the few traits
that distinguishes humans from all other
animals. Even among the hundreds of other
primate species, not one has a communication
system that comes close to it in its flexibility
and infinite range of expression. Without
language, our greatest achievements –
including almost everything you see
around you – would have been impossible.
Unfortunately, this chapter of our story is
written in invisible ink. The archaeological
record can only offer circumstantial evidence
of language until writing began just a few
thousand years ago. This has led some to
argue that the search for language’s origins is
pointless. In 1866, the Paris Linguistics Society
even banned discussions of the subject – a
prejudice that continued among scientists for
nearly 100 years.
Fortunately, modern evolutionary theorists
are less easily deterred. In work that combines
findings from archaeology, anthropology,
cognitive science and linguistics, we are
finally beginning to track down when and
why we found our voice. The idea that is
emerging could solve not just one, but two
enduring mysteries about human evolution.
Let us first consider the timing. Given the
dearth of hard evidence, some researchers
have claimed that language arrived rapidly
40,000 years ago, when there was a creative
explosion of cave paintings and symbolic
culture, demonstrating the abstract thinking
that language requires. This explanation was
never wholly convincing, however. Humans
had already migrated and dispersed into
separate groups by this point, so it would have
34 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019
the first words
Language may not leave fossils but clues
of an evolving talent for communication
can be found in the artefacts and anatomy
of our ancient ancestors
3.3 MILLION
YEARS AGO
Oldest known stone tools imply
hunting and coordinated activity
2 MILLION
YEARS AGO
Homo erectus evolves. It lives on
the savannah, hunts and butchers
large game and develops cooking.
However, it lacks anatomical
adaptations for speech
1.6 MILLION
YEARS AGO
Tools become more complex,
including skilfully crafted
hand axes
1 MILLION
YEARS AGO
Ambush hunting indicates
sophisticated cooperation
and planning
required a simultaneous cognitive shift in all
the populations across the globe. Sure enough,
accumulating evidence about the evolution of
key anatomical changes that made us capable
of speech leaves little doubt that language
must have far deeper roots.
For a start, other great apes have large air
sacs in the throat. These help them make
booming calls to scare off rivals, but inhibit
the production of the distinct vowel sounds
crucial to human speech, according to acoustic
simulations by Bart de Boer at the Free
University of Brussels in Belgium. Our earliest
ancestors had such sacs, but they aren’t found
in Homo heidelbergensis – the common
ancestor of Neanderthals and modern
humans – which evolved 700,000 years ago.
Both Neanderthals and modern humans
also show a large number of nerve pathways
from the brain, through the spine, to the
diaphragm and the muscles between the
ribs. These provide the refined breath
control necessary for precise vocalisations.
In addition, both species have characteristic

changes to part of the inner ear, giving greater
sensitivity to sound frequencies within the
range of the human voice – an essential
adaptation allowing subtle changes in
utterances to convey different meanings.
Then there is the FOXP2 gene, which
influences the brain’s wiring and plasticity
in areas controlling speech. It is widespread in
mammals, but we carry a version that enables
us to make the finely controlled movements
of our face and mouth required for coherent
speech. Neanderthals share a very similar
version of the gene, which suggests they,
too, were capable of complex articulation.
Given these converging findings, de Boer
and others are now convinced that speech of
some kind had emerged by at least 400,000
years ago, when humans and Neanderthals
diverged. It may even have started hundreds
of thousands of years before that, they argue,
when our ancestors first began displaying
more sophisticated cooperative behaviours –
MATT CHASE
possibly 2 million years ago or more when
stone tools imply people were hunting.
Language and speech arise from a complex
mix of physical, social and cultural influences
that evolved in a piecemeal fashion, says Dan
Dediu at the University of Lyon, France. “[So]
we are bound to find degrees of language and
speech going back to Homo erectus.” Stephen
Levinson at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands agrees.
“Homo erectus’s hunting and toolmaking
abilities indicate some kind of advanced
communication system,” he says.
Singing and signing
Establishing exactly what pushed us along
that evolutionary path has been much harder.
Most ideas fall into one of three camps.
Charles Darwin provided the first – and
most provocative. In The Descent of Man, he
argued that human ancestors passed through
a kind of musical protolanguage. Like bird
song, these calls had no specific meaning,
but were used by males to attract mates. In
this way, our vocal flexibility first emerged
“Speech of some kind
had emerged by at least
400,000 years ago, and
possibly far earlier”
through sexual selection, with competing
males developing more complex songs to beat
their rivals. Only later, as human intelligence
grew, did those sounds slowly become
associated with certain meanings.
Darwin pointed out that another group of
primates – gibbons – sing to attract mates.
And modern science offers some hints of an
intimate connection between language and
music in humans. Brain scans, for instance,
reveal that they are processed by overlapping
neural networks. But evidence that language
and music emerged through sexual selection
is weak, since you would expect to see large
sex differences in these abilities as a result.
There are other possibilities, however. Perhaps
the driving force wasn’t male display, but an
equal duet between mates, or even singing by
parents to calm their babies.
Nevertheless, many researchers don’t buy
these arguments. Instead, some propose a
gestural protolanguage in which the first
language-like communication arose through
hand movements. The idea is attractive for
many reasons. It might explain why all
humans, including those who are blind,
move their hands as they talk, often without
realising they are doing so. Similarly, the
spontaneous emergence of sign languages
among groups of hearing and speech-
impaired people indicates an instinct to
use our hands when our voices fail us.
Levinson is a fan of this theory, noting that
Homo erectus, despite lacking the anatomical
changes seen in later species, could have used
gestures to coordinate hunting activities. Non-
human primates can be surprisingly dextrous
with their hands and some, in captivity, have
even been taught to communicate using
complex signs, but tend to find it harder to >
4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 35
learn to reproduce specific sounds. Gestures
may therefore have been a much easier means
of communicating ideas at the beginning of
language evolution. That would have prepared
our brains for some of the challenges of
language, such as the capacity to connect
symbols with meaning, without making
huge demands on our primitive voice boxes.
As compelling as these arguments are, the
gestural protolanguage can’t neatly explain
why we made the switch to primarily vocalised
language. That question brings us to the third
idea. The notion that language first emerged
through onomatopoeia – or imitating the
sounds of things – is perhaps the most
intuitive of the three possibilities. After all,
even children will mimic a neigh or a howl, say,
to signify a horse or a wolf. Yet historically, this
option had been the underdog, thanks to a
couple of seemingly insurmountable issues.
First, it requires a talent for vocal mimicry.
Yet our early ancestors lacked the anatomical
and neural adaptations needed for controlled
vocalisations. However, it is now emerging
that non-human primates have more breath
control and vocal flexibility than was thought.
Some orangutans can learn to whistle, for
instance, and reproduce sounds of a certain
pitch. This suggests that our early ancestors
may have been capable of crude imitation
without too many anatomical changes.
Meaningful sounds
A second objection is that onomatopoeia is too
limited to form the basis of a protolanguage.
How would our ancestors have signalled silent
concepts, such as a particular plant or tool, or
something more abstract, like directions to a
river? What sound would they use to represent
a quiet animal like a rabbit? Hand signs, by
contrast, could outline the shape of something
or its means of movement – another argument
for the idea that gesture came before speech.
But recent research suggests mimicry
is more versatile than we might assume.
Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison and Marcus Perlman at the
University of Birmingham, UK, set up a
competition in which participants had to
convey a range of concepts – such as “cook”,
“gather”, “knife” or “fruit” – using made-up
vocalisations. The scientists then played
the recordings to a new set of participants,
who had to guess the meanings. Contrary to
expectation, they performed far better than
chance, suggesting that some inventive
onomatopoeia (such as the “whooshing”
of a blade) can communicate a much wider
36 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019
700,000
YEARS AGO
Homo heidelbergensis
evolves. It shows the first
sign of being anatomically
adapted for speech
400,000
YEARS AGO
Neanderthals evolve. They
develop a sophisticated home
life and hunting practices.
Adaptations for speech
can be found in their genes,
brains and anatomy
300,000
ADRIANA VARELA PHOTOGRAPHY/GETTY
YEARS AGO
Homo sapiens evolves. It is
the first species fully adapted
for language. Increasingly
complex technology, culture
and social organisation
imply developments in
communication
range of concepts than once imagined.
With so many pros and cons for each
120,000 hypothesis of protolanguage, we may seem
YEARS AGO no closer to finding an answer than the Paris
Early signs of pigment Linguistics Society was in 1866. But what if
use suggest emergence all three ideas contain elements of truth?
of symbolic culture After all, several of the 7000 or so languages
spoken today – including some of Australia’s
Aboriginal languages and Paamese in
Vanuatu – use elements of song, hand signs,
40,000 imitated sounds and words interchangeably.
YEARS AGO “I would guess that languages must have
The “cultural revolution” always been multimodal to some degree,”
includes an explosion of cave art, says Dediu. So perhaps, instead of offering
clothes making and ritualistic competing explanations, these three ideas
burial, demonstrating abstract might work together to provide a unified
thinking required for language theory of the origin of language. That is
exactly what anthropologist Jerome Lewis of
University College London is now proposing.
Like Darwin, Lewis believes singing was the
10,000 first step to freeing up our vocal cords. In place
YEARS AGO of sexual selection, however, he suggests it
Agriculture begins emerged for protection. This idea is inspired
by his work with Bayaka societies in central
Africa, where people take turns to sing all
night to ward off predators. Their intertwining
5000 voices, singing at different pitches, make the
YEARS AGO group sound larger, and potentially more
Oldest known writing dangerous, to animals in the surrounding

forest. Similar behaviour has been found
among the San people in southern Africa
and Indian forest societies, he says.
Lewis suggests that singing became used
for defence after our ancestors descended
from the trees. “Trees offer a very secure
environment for avoiding large predators,”
he says. When we started to walk upright
and came into savannah-like landscapes, we
would have been vulnerable to a frightening
array of large cat predators, says Lewis.
The first songs would have sounded
completely different from the refined music
that we sing today, but chanting in a chorus
would still scare away animals and help
protect vulnerable groups. “And this business
of vocalising and changing tones to disguise
numbers would have led to the sort of vocal
dexterity that is crucial to the evolution of
more sophisticated vocal boxes and speech
articulators,” he says.
This, in turn, would have enabled a growing
talent for mimicry, which might have aided
hunting. Modern hunter-gatherers often
imitate the sounds of forest animals to draw
their prey towards them, says Lewis. They also
use vocalisations such as bird noises to locate
different group members in the forest as they
coordinate movements. Employing mimicry
Our urge to mimic the
sounds made by other
animals seems to have
been one of three
cornerstones of
language evolution
in hunting would have given our ancestors an
immediate evolutionary advantage. It would
also have established the idea that a voiced
sound can represent something meaningful.
People could then have used those same
sounds during storytelling and mimed
performances, perhaps to teach novices how
to hunt. “Re-enactments play a crucial role in
transmitting the sort of knowledge you
require for collective hunting,” says Lewis.
“This unified theory of
language solves two
of the biggest mysteries
of human evolution”
This, in his view, was the tipping point.
Once pantomimed communication arose, the
sounds and gestures could quickly become
more structured and stylised, eventually
establishing an agreed lexicon between
speakers that resembled modern language.
There is substantial evidence to back up this
last development. Various lab experiments
have asked participants to use gestures and
improvised vocalisations to communicate
ideas to successive groups. As these get
passed from person to person, they become
more systematic, a process that appears to
make them more efficient and easier for new
speakers to learn. Likewise, in communities
where people who are hearing and speech-
impaired haven’t been taught a recognised
sign language, their DIY signing initially lacks
formal grammatical structures. However,
over just a couple of generations, more
standardised rules emerge.
Bonding exercise
Lewis’s general idea has been well received
by other researchers. “I think the musical
protolanguage, in tandem with iconic gestures
and iconic vocalisations, is a compelling
theory,” says Perlman.
Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford
also embraces the idea that music helped
language evolve. “The breath control required
for singing is crucial for language production,”
he says. “Language postdates wordless
singing, and probably by quite a long way.”
He also backs Lewis’s proposal that those first
songs helped our ancestors avoid predators –
but with a twist. Singing together, he points
out, stimulates the production of endorphins,
hormones that promote social cohesion. So it
would have allowed our ancestors to live in
larger and larger groups, giving them strength
in numbers. “Singing evolved to bond groups
because bonded groups keep predators at bay,”
says Dunbar.
Lewis, for his part, agrees that group
bonding was an important function of those
early musical vocalisations. In his view, this
also helped create the shared trust that is
essential for language to take off. “Suddenly
you get a feeling of ‘us’,” he says. Words, after
all, would be useless unless most people are
using them honestly and cooperatively for
the shared interests of the group.
If correct, this unified theory solves two of
the biggest mysteries of human evolution:
the origins of language and singing. It would
also be another testament to Darwin’s genius.
Although he argued that speech originated
via a musical protolanguage, he also
described how gesture and onomatopoeia
could have helped attach meaning to our
early utterances.
Words may not fossilise, but hundreds of
thousands of years after language emerged,
we may finally be ready to write their story. ❚
David Robson is a science writer based in London.
His book, The Intelligence Trap, is out now
4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 37
Features
Blood amber
A trove of exquisitely preserved fossils is changing what
we know about the age of the dinosaurs. But getting
hold of them may mean fuelling a bloody war.
Graham Lawton investigates
38 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019
SCENICS & SCIENCE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Y
OU have to remind yourself that you are
looking at an animal that lived alongside
dinosaurs. In my hand is a piece of
amber. I hold it up to the window to get a
better view of the tiny corpse inside: a spider,
legs splayed out behind its body. It looks like
it died yesterday. But it has been mummified
for almost 100 million years.
Under the watchful eye of curator Claire
Mellish, I pick up another piece of reddish,
translucent amber. It is stuffed full of insects.
She tells me it is one of seven slices of the most
fossil-rich piece of amber ever found: a fist-
sized nodule containing 454 different species.
I am at the Natural History Museum in
London for a behind the scenes look at some
Burmese amber. Until recently, this cache –117
pieces, collected when Burma, now known as
Myanmar, was part of the British Empire –
was the only research collection in the world.
But in the past decade or so, scientific interest
has exploded. Burmese amber is one of the
world’s hottest palaeontological treasures,
crammed with fossils from a crucial – and
“I came to minority Kachin people have been struggling
for independence since 1962. Right now, the

marvel at
situation is very intense. “You don’t go into
Kachin. There’s a war on, and it’s getting
hotter,” says Jarzembowski.

exquisite amber. Amber starts out as resin, which oozes out

of conifers and other tree species in response

I left with a tale

to injury or attack. Small animals often get
trapped in the goo, along with feathers, leaves

of destruction,
and fungi. Very occasionally, resin fossilises

HKUN LAT
and becomes amber. When heated and
compressed after being buried under sediment,

hatred and the viscous and volatile gum polymerises and

hardens into a substance resembling Perspex.

bloodshed”
hitherto quite opaque – time window. It
has yielded invertebrates, plants, flowers,
mushrooms, birds, snakes, frogs and
even dinosaurs.
“It’s an entire tropical ecosystem,” says Ed
Jarzembowski, an amber expert at the Nanjing
Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in
China, who happened to be visiting the
museum that day. But he also tells me it is
now a war zone. I came here to marvel at a
palaeontological cornucopia. I left with a
darker story of ethnic hatred, smuggling,
environmental destruction, diabolical
working conditions and bloodshed.
Burmese amber, or burmite, has been a
prized gemstone for centuries. The entire
world supply comes from Kachin, the
northernmost state of Myanmar. The richest
deposits of all are found in a remote jungle
valley called Hukawng, which is Burmese for
“the place of the devil”.
The name is apt. For most of the 70 years
since Myanmar’s independence from the UK,
Hukawng has been a no go area. The ethnic
Whatever was trapped fossilises too. “It shows
you an ancient world in photographic detail,”
says Mellish. “They don’t look any different to
how they would have been in life.”
Fossils in amber, known as inclusions, are a
window on long-lost ecosystems. Baltic amber,
for example, dates back around 44 million
years to a time when Europe was a subtropical
archipelago. Found primarily around the
Baltic Sea, this amber contains the most
diverse fossil assemblage in the world, with
more than 3000 species. These build a vivid
picture of a steamy oak and pine forest with
lakes and rivers, abuzz with flying insects and
crawling with geckos, spiders, mantises,
termites, scorpions and stick insects.
Baltic amber is durable and transparent, and
so ideal for scientific study. Other ambers are
less so. On my visit to the museum, I saw
samples from Mexico, the US, the Dominican
Republic and elsewhere. Most looked like
boring, brown pebbles.
Burmese amber, however, is glassy and
translucent, making it another invaluable
window on the past – albeit one that took
a long time to open.
The amber first came to scientific attention
in 1892 when Fritz Noetling, a German
employee of the Geological Survey of India,
was on the lookout for exploitable resources in
British Burma. He noted that the amber was
stuffed full of insects and other inclusions, and
reckoned that it was about 40 million years
old, roughly the same age as Baltic amber.
In comparison to Baltic amber, which
can be easily mined in large quantities and
frequently washes up on beaches, Burmese
amber was in the middle of a hostile jungle.
If Noetling had ambitions to exploit the
deposit, they quickly waned.
A few years later, a local amateur naturalist
called R. C. J. Swinhoe started sending samples
to entomologist Theodore Cockerell at the
University of Colorado. Cockerell identified
38 new species of insect, three arachnids and
(Above) A buyer
checks a piece of
amber at a market
in Kachin State,
Myanmar
(Left) Translucent
amber like this
originates in
Hukawng valley
in Myanmar
a millipede, and reported that there were
many more he couldn’t identify. “The fauna is
very remarkable,” he wrote in a 1922 letter to
the journal Nature. Based on the fossils, he
suggested that the amber was older than
originally thought, possibly 100 million years
old. If so, that would make it very interesting.
In the early 20th century, the fossil record of
insects from the late Cretaceous – between
100 to 66 million years ago – was all but non-
existent. It was a frustrating gap given
flowering plants were new on the scene and
an evolutionary explosion was in full bloom.
In 1921, Swinhoe donated his collection to
the British Museum. It was the only such
collection in the world. But for some reason
it got filed away and forgotten.
And then came Jurassic Park. The plot of
the 1993 movie hinges on extracting dinosaur
DNA from a 100-million-year-old mosquito
preserved in amber. “On the back of that,
the museum decided that we needed a
palaeoentomologist to look at the collection,”
says Mellish. >

4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 39

 “The research
According to Andrew Ross of National
Museums Scotland, the number of species
described from Burmese amber has been

is hazy, if not growing exponentially. In 2000, there were

60. In 2018 alone, another 320 were added.

totally silent, At the last count, there were 1192 in total.

The deposit has also been dated using

about exactly
modern isotopic techniques, which place it
at 98.8 million years old, plus or minus half
a million years.

where the Most of the fossils are insects and other

small bugs, but there are larger organisms too.

amber finds
Among the invertebrates are crabs, scorpions,
cockroaches, armoured spiders, dragonflies,

come from”
millipedes, a snail, a hairy cicada, a
grasshopper and a mite wrapped in spider silk.
One piece contains a spider attacking a
wasp, a rare example of fossilised behaviour.
There are plants, including flowers in the act of
releasing pollen. All are preserved exquisitely.
There are also marine animals, including an
ammonite and a shrimp, suggesting that the
forest where the amber formed was by the sea.
Most thrilling of all are the vertebrates.
Scraps of reptile skin and isolated feathers
were already known from the Natural History
Museum collection. But in the past two years,
a breathtaking menagerie of animals has been
discovered. In 2016, a team led by Grimaldi
unveiled a collection of 12 lizards. A few weeks
later, a rival group described two tiny wings
HKUN LAT

from hatchling birds, which presumably

The go-to guy was Alexandr Rasnitsyn of
the Palaeontological Institute in Moscow. He
visited London and quickly added to the roll
call of species, identifying spiders, a scorpion,
a snail and some reptile skin.
Around the same time, the Kachin
Independence Organisation and its military
wing, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA),
signed a peace treaty with the Myanmar
government. Soon afterwards, the owner
of a small Canadian mining company called
Leeward Capital went to Kachin in search of
riches, and ended up in the Hukawng valley.
Amber was Leeward’s plan C, after plan
A (gold) and plan B (platinum) failed to pan
out. Plan C also went badly at first. The world
market was flooded with Baltic amber, so the
company sent samples to David Grimaldi at
the American Museum of Natural History in
New York. He was reportedly “amazed” and
bought 3600 kilograms of raw amber. Chinese
scientists soon got in on the act. The Burmese
amber rush was on.
Over the next few years, interest ballooned.
tumbled out of their nests and got stuck in
resin. Next came part of the tail of a small,
feathered dinosaur, complete with skin, bones
and plumage. The past year has seen a rush of
vertebrate fossils: the hand of a gecko, two
entire juvenile birds, four frogs and a snake.
The fossils appear to have formed in a tropical
forest on the coast dominated by redwood
trees, which produce prolific amounts of resin.
Stuck in time
“At this moment, it’s the best glimpse we get
of the middle of the Cretaceous,” says Ryan
McKellar of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum
in Regina, Canada, who co-wrote the papers
announcing the dinosaur and snake finds,
among others. “There’s a gap in the fossils in
sedimentary rock, and Burmese amber helps
fill that gap. It helps us understand things like
how flowering plants rose to dominance and
how insects diversified alongside them.” But
this understanding comes at a heavy price.
Spend any time delving into the Burmese
amber literature and you soon hit a frustrating
information fog. The papers are often hazy, if
not totally silent, about exactly where the
finds come from. The reason for this has a
lot to do with the uncertain and often
controversial providence of the specimens.
Today, Burmese amber has a long and
treacherous journey before ending up as
gemstones or museum pieces. After being
mined by hand in the Hukawng valley, it is
laboriously transported out of the disputed
territory to a bustling market on the outskirts
of Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin (see map,
page 43). Most of the amber is bought by
dealers from the neighbouring Chinese
province, Yunnan. From there it is smuggled
over the border to a bazaar in the city of
Tengchong, which is a magnet for dealers
from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
Tengchong used to specialise in jade, but is
increasingly dominated by amber. In 2017,
the Chinese government named Tengchong
the “city of amber”.
“What I learned in my research is that
virtually all of the amber is imported into
China without going through customs on
either side,” says Alessandro Rippa of the

40 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019


Center for Asian Studies at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, who visited Tengchong and
Myitkyina to do research on the amber trade.
Scientists who have visited Tengchong
are united in their awe. “I’ve never seen
anything like it,” says Jarzembowski. “There’s
stall after stall after stall of amber, and you
know everything you’re looking at is an
undescribed species.”
“It’s spectacular,” agrees McKellar, who
visited last year. “I had no idea of the scope
until seeing it in person. There are four or five
streets of amber vendors, dozens and dozens
of people selling it by the kilogram. It’s mind-
blowing.” Many of the pieces are huge, the size
of a human head, he says, suggesting that even
more spectacular discoveries may be coming.
“We don’t face the same size limitations that
we do with other amber deposits. There’s the
potential to get whole animals.”
Most of the amber is destined for gemstone
markets, but some ends up in researchers’
hands. Scientists don’t routinely scour the
markets themselves, but know people who do.
HKUN LAT
Makeshift tents
surround the amber
mines, which are
fiercely fought over
At any point along the pipeline from mine to
market, savvy dealers will pull interesting-
looking specimens to one side and offer them
to potential buyers in the scientific world.
The linchpin of this operation is a
palaeontologist called Lida Xing at the China
University of Geosciences in Beijing. In recent
years, he has built up a network of amber
dealers in Kachin and Yunnan who tip him off
when something interesting crops up. “They
will send photos, videos. The photos from all
angles, with details. If I feel that there is
scientific value, I would recommend museums
to buy,” Xing told New Scientist by email.
One of the best customers is the Dexu
Institute of Palaeontology, a not-for-profit
museum in Chaozhou, China. Since it was
established in 2013, it has bought more than
150 important Burmese amber fossils,
including the dinosaur tail, which it loans to
scientists like McKellar. Dexu’s website says,
tantalisingly, that “we also have other equally
important but not yet published amber
specimens”. The Chinese Academy of Sciences
Working conditions
are so dangerous as
to be “inhuman”
according to one
palaeontologist
has also poured money into buying up
Burmese amber, says Jarzembowski. His
institute has 30,000 pieces.
McKellar, who is a visiting fellow at Dexu,
says that it and similar institutes are doing a
great service by ensuring that scientifically
important specimens end up with researchers
rather than “vanishing” into private
collections. But he accepts that they often
don’t know exactly where their fossils come
from. “If you buy material, you’ve lost control
over stratigraphy, or where the specimens are
from in the geological record,” he says.
Very occasionally, however, scientists do
know exactly. But finding out takes a lot of
effort and bravery.
In the summer of 2015, Xing met a contact
in the market in Myitkyina. This man showed
Xing a piece of polished amber about the size
and shape of a dried apricot, containing what
appeared to be a plant stem. Xing examined
it with his hand lens and realised it was
something much more interesting: a section
of vertebrate tail, compete with feathers. >
4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 41

(Above) Local
markets have stalls
upon stalls of amber;
many contain
exquisite fossils
(right)
He bought the piece on behalf of Dexu,
although won’t say how much for, and later
showed it to McKellar. It turned out to be from
a feathered dinosaur, probably a juvenile
theropod (the same group to which T. rex
belongs). “I was blown away. This is the sort of
thing that we always hope to find,” McKellar
told a Canadian radio station in 2016.
Xing had previously tried and failed to get
to the amber mines. Now he was even more
determined. A few days later, he pulled off
the seemingly impossible: smuggling himself
from Myitkyina into the Hukawng valley.
The trip was arduous and risky. The 1994
ceasefire between the KIA and the Myanmar
military – officially called the Tatmadaw – had
collapsed in 2011, and hostilities had resumed.
The mines were now under the control of the
KIA, for whom gemstones are an important
source of revenue. A transboundary road
opened a few years ago, making it easy to get
from China to Myitkyina. But crossing into
KIA-held territory is a different story.
Travelling on forged identity papers and in
42 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019
HKUN LAT
HKUN LAT
disguise – he wore local clothing and smeared
his face with a yellow pigment used by the
Kachins as a sunblock and insect repellent –
Xing and his contact drove for 7 hours on near-
impassable roads, through numerous army
checkpoints. When they ran out of road, they
crossed a river on a wooden boat and then
covered the final few kilometres by elephant.
According to Xing’s account, the “mine”
turned out to be a shanty town of around
3000 tents, each covering a narrow mineshaft
up to 10 metres deep. The miners were living
in bamboo huts among the shafts. Xing
described conditions in the mines as “very
dangerous, inhuman”. The miners work
with no safety equipment and often die of
suffocation or in collapses. After 3 hours
collecting amber and rock samples, he
and his guide left and made the gruelling
return journey.
While he was there, Xing said he met the
dealers who had sold the dinosaur tail to his
contact and was taken to the mineshaft it
came from. He says he was thus able to
confirm the precise origin of a Burmese
amber fossil.
Xing also says he is satisfied that he
obtained the specimen legally and that he
exported it to China with a permit issued by
the appropriate authority, the Myanmar Gems
Enterprise. All of Dexu’s Burmese amber
specimens are obtained legally, he says.
New Scientist has tried to confirm this
directly with Dexu, but hasn’t had a response.
Buying Burmese amber inevitably raises
ethical issues. Since hostilities resumed in
2011, the amber mines of the Hukawng valley
have been at the centre of an increasingly
bloody resource war.
The Kachin Independence Organisation
heavily relies on natural resources, mostly
jade and gold but also amber, for its revenues.
It also taxes those using the smuggling routes
into China. As the territory’s de facto
government, it uses the funds for schools,
hospitals and infrastructure, says Hanna
Hindstrom, a senior campaigner and
Myanmar resources expert at NGO Global
Witness. The independence organisation
doesn’t publish any figures about its revenues
and spending, she says, but it undoubtedly
also uses the money to buy weapons.
The Tatmadaw also craves control of the
mines and smuggling routes, both to squeeze
the Kachin Independence Organisation and
to keep the spoils for itself. According to
Global Witness and other NGOs, its generals
have a long and ruthless history of making
personal fortunes from jade and other natural
resources. That is one reason why an equitable
peace is so hard to broker.
Soon after the ceasefire was broken, the
Tatmadaw was at it again. “The jade mining
areas were attacked and controlled by the
Burmese army from 2013 to 2015,” says Steven
Tsa Ji, head of a coalition of civil society
organisations called the Kachin Development
Networking Group. The KIA made up for the
loss by expanding its amber operation, he says,
but the Myanmar army came for those too.
Last year, the UN Human Rights Council
sent an independent fact-finding mission to
Kachin to document the conflict. Its report
makes for gruesome reading. In June 2017, the
Myanmar air force dropped leaflets onto the
amber mines warning local people to leave
the area within 10 days. It then launched a
military offensive. For the next five months,
the Tatmadaw subjected the villagers to an
indiscriminate campaign of murder, torture,
rape and arson. The offensive stopped during
the rainy season, but resumed in January 2018
with an aerial bombardment supported by
Perilous journey
Burmese amber fossils are mined in dangerous
conditions before being smuggled out of conflict
territory along arduous mountain routes
Ledo road (connecting India and China)
Rough dirt road with military checkpoints
Footpath
To India
Hukawng Tanai Hka
valley
TANAI
Amber mines
6 km
To Myitkyina
and Tengchong
heavy artillery and ground troops.
The UN report says the Tatmadaw’s overall
objective was to “destroy the KIA’s economy
by appropriating amber and [other] mining
resources under their control”. According to
Tsa Ji, this mission succeeded.
The UN’s conclusions are damning:
the military operations were illegal under
international law and Myanmar’s commander-
in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, and
his top military leaders should be investigated
and prosecuted for genocide, crimes against
humanity and war crimes.
The amber mines are also a cesspit of
human rights and environmental abuses.
“Poor working conditions are pretty much
a trademark in all the mines in Kachin state
and environmental regulations, where they
exist, are largely ignored,” says Hindstrom.
Amber is only part of the resource war, and
scientists are far from the only people buying
it. But it is impossible not to conclude that
they are complicit, if not actively involved,
in a trade that helps to fund a war. “I think the
China
Kachin state
India
Myitkyina
Tengchong
Myanmar
Laos
Rangoon
Thailand
money coming in from China has fuelled
the conflict indirectly,” says Jarzembowski.
“We don’t know for certain, but I wouldn’t
be surprised. There’s loads of money.”
Research costs
Dexu and other collectors don’t disclose how
much they pay for specimens and scientists
say they don’t know, although McKellar
guesses a good vertebrate specimen would
fetch “in the order of thousands of dollars”.
Jarzembowski also reckons “thousands” and
that the snake specimen was probably “very
expensive”. The dealers are canny and play
labs off against one another to inflate prices,
he says, while the Chinese Academy of
Sciences will pay whatever it takes to secure
important specimens. According to unsourced
estimates published in Canadian newspaper
the Financial Post, the dinosaur tail could
“easily” have fetched $100,000 and the legal
amber trade is worth at least $1 billion a year.
I asked McKellar if he and his colleagues
Hollywood tale
Could we really extract
100-million-year-old dinosaur
DNA from mosquitoes
preserved in Burmese amber,
à la Jurassic Park? Sadly, almost
certainly not. According to Claire
Mellish of the Natural History
Museum in London, insect
fossils in amber are hollowed-
out exoskeletons with the soft
innards long decayed. Even if
tissues survived, DNA wouldn’t.
“The half-life of DNA is
something like 500 years and
we’re talking about specimens
that are 99 million years old,”
says Ryan McKellar of the Royal
Saskatchewan Museum in
Regina, Canada.
Even if the storyline of
Jurassic Park is fanciful, the
film’s impact on palaeontology
has been very real: after the
movie’s success, institutions
around the globe began taking
a closer look at their amber
collections and unearthing
new finds.
were aware of the conflict, and amber’s role
in it. He paused and sighed: “To some extent.
It’s a shame, but it’s sort of beyond our control.
I don’t see us directly fuelling it. It has escalated
over the past three or four years. A lot of the
samples we are dealing with were collected
before there were problems in the region.”
For now, the amber mines are under
the control of the Tatmadaw, although
Hindstrom and others predict that the KIA
will try to wrest them back. A peace process
aimed at ending all of Myanmar’s ethnic
conflicts is under way, but the KIA has
refused to participate.
Already this year, 79 scientific papers have
been published on Burmese amber. The flow
of specimens continues and rumours circulate
of ever more spectacular fossils. Tengchong
amber market is as busy as ever. One of the
most prized stones on offer is a deep red
colour, known locally as xuè pò. Translated
into English, it means “blood amber”. ❚
Graham Lawton is a staff writer at New Scientist
4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 43
Features
The
space-wide
web
Tech billionaires are racing to build an orbiting internet
that is accessible anywhere on Earth, says Mark Harris
A
ISHTAN SHAKARIAN knew there was
money to be made from the internet.
So she took a spade into the woods
near where she lived, about 50 kilometres
outside the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. The
75-year-old hoped to dig up copper wiring to
sell for scrap. Instead, she cut through a fibre-
optic cable – worthless to her, but priceless
to the millions of people in neighbouring
Armenia left staring at blank screens for
12 hours. She had cut off the country’s internet.
The 2011 incident shows how easily this can
happen with underground cables, and those
under the sea are even more vulnerable. Every
few days, an earthquake, anchor or boat
damages one of the roughly 430 sea-floor
cables. Tonga went offline for nearly two weeks
in January after an underwater cable was cut.
In some ways, as an isolated island nation,
Tonga is lucky to have this connection.
The cost of laying cables to remote places
means only about 10 per cent of the planet’s
surface has terrestrial communication links.
According to the UN, nearly half the world’s
population has never been online.
To reach them, and ensure everyone has
a reliable connection, billionaires like Elon
Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson plan
to reinvent the internet – to free it from its
Earthly roots and build a wireless web above
our heads. Balloons in the stratosphere,
constellations of satellites, cruising drones –
there is no shortage of ideas. Pull this off and
humanity’s greatest information repository
would find a dazzlingly futuristic home. To
make it work, we just need to deploy some old
technology, albeit in a highly unusual way.
The internet is a gigantic network of
computers. When you type an address into a
browser, you are instructing it to connect with
44 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019
another machine that could be anywhere in
the world. Most of those connections are via
cables. Even smartphones only use radiowaves
to connect the last few hundred metres to
a cabled cell tower. But longer stretches are
possible. Satellite internet today often uses
relay stations far enough from Earth that they
remain in a steady “geostationary” orbit:
as seen from the ground, they are in a fixed
position. Pinned 35,000 kilometres above the
equator, they can serve a wide swathe of land.
But the 70,000-kilometre round trip adds
a lag of half a second or more to signals, an
annoyance that disrupts voice calls and makes
multiplayer online gaming or high-speed
financial trading impossible. On top of that,
download speeds are slower than modern
cable connections and subscriptions are
pricier. The set-up also requires a large dish
and a clear view of the sky.
One alternative that tech companies have
recently considered is the stratosphere. From
around 10 to 50 kilometres up, this layer of the
atmosphere is high enough for a transmitter
there to serve a city-sized area below, yet low
enough that a phone could communicate
with it without the need for a receiver dish.
Better still, putting things in the
stratosphere is easy compared with space.
Hungry for extra customers, Facebook and
Google built prototype solar-powered drones
that could loiter about 20 kilometres up for
weeks, beaming down the internet. But these
projects are now on hold following crashes
and damage when landing the feather-light
aircraft. Other companies, including Boeing
and Airbus, are working on similar drones,
but the technology is far from proven.
JASON RAISH
Google’s next idea sounds kookier still:
a train of gracefully floating balloons
 delivering data to those below. The balloons,
which provided connectivity following
natural disasters in Peru and Puerto Rico,
have been spun out into a company called
Loon that plans to launch a commercial 4G
service in Kenya soon. However, balloons are
unlikely to do much for most of the offline
billions as many places lack reliable winds or
convenient launching places. If you are a tech
billionaire with a global vision, only a truly
worldwide service will do.
Luckily, there is a middle way. What if
we put transmitters lower than the lonely
geostationary orbits with their unpleasant
lag, but higher than the stratosphere with
its fickle weather?
There is a price to be paid for using this low
Earth orbit (LEO). From the surface, satellites
in LEO appear to zip from horizon to horizon
in about 10 minutes. For continuous service,
then, you need multiple satellites flying in
quick succession and enveloping the globe,
all sending signals from one to another in a
smooth relay. The firms Iridium, Globalstar
and Orbcomm each have a few dozen LEO

“Only about 10 per cent of

the planet has terrestrial
communication links”
satellites that already offer basic, slow
internet services. Get the tech right and
turning these limited services into something
transformative becomes a numbers game.
And if there is one thing tech billionaires
think they understand, it is scale.
This occurred to Bill Gates years ago. In the
1990s, he backed a start-up called Teledesic
that envisioned a mega-constellation of
840 LEO satellites relaying radio signals from
one part of Earth to another. The company
had big plans: to deliver affordable broadband
to 95 per cent of the world’s surface.
It never happened. Teledesic folded in 2002
without launching a working satellite, having
neither developed the technology, nor raised
the billions of dollars required. But a fresh
generation of billionaires is ready to try again,
buoyed by cheaper launch costs and new,
more powerful technologies.
Take OneWeb, a company backed by Airbus,
computer chip-maker Qualcomm and
entrepreneur Richard Branson. It put its first
six satellites – costing $1 million apiece – into
orbit in February. The firm says 600 satellites
connecting users to 40 or so ground stations
should be in place and providing a service by
2021. Yet OneWeb’s satellites only plug gaps in
cable internet. The last leg of each data packet’s
journey to the user may be through space, >

4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 45

 but at other times it travels through the same Traffic in the sky
wires as the rest of the internet. Companies have tried to provide internet infrastructure from distant orbits
Other companies are trying something and the stratosphere – with mixed results. But a new wave of projects at
more ambitious (see “Traffic in the sky”, right). mid-altitudes could finally deliver planetwide broadband
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Canadian company
Telesat and Luxembourg-based LeoSat all 35,000 km
plan to create an end-to-end, space-based Geostationary satellites
internet system in the early 2020s. Each of Provide an internet signal from space,
their fast-moving satellites must be able to but this takes a long time to travel,
creating a communications lag

Medium Earth ortbit 2000-35,000 km

communicate with others in their respective
networks, relaying data in hops from one side
of the world to the other. All three companies
Teledesic
have the same idea of how to do it: lasers. 2000 km
In the 1990s, a firm called Teledesic
Theoretically, lasers are a smarter way to
aimed to deliver the internet from a
communicate in space than radio waves, lower orbit. However, it folded before
says astronautics engineer Kerri Cahoy at launching any satellites
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They
1400
are more energy efficient, so transmitters and
receivers don’t need to be so large. “Physical OneWeb
size can be smaller with a laser system,” she This company has already launched
says. Lasers also sidestep the issue of working its first few satellites, but without
within the increasingly crowded radio inter-satellite links, its internet service
could be slower for some users
1200
“SpaceX is aiming to have
Telesat
40 million subscribers to This Canadian firm is planning faster
its space internet by 2025” laser internet satellites. It recently
signed a deal with rocket company
Blue Origin to get them launched
1000
Low Earth ortbit below 2000 km

spectrum. Radio transmissions are highly

regulated and the frequencies that would be
most practical for small receivers are already Iridium
taken. In contrast, laser beams, with their tight Internet services have been
focus, almost never cause interference with available from this firm for years,
other services and are largely unregulated. but they are slow and pricey
They are also fast. Imagine a financial 800
trader in London wanting to access the latest
Amazon
from the New York Stock Exchange. If her
Secretive project Kuiper was
connection were routed through SpaceX’s
recently revealed to be a plan
planned constellation of nearly 12,000 for 3200 internet satellites
Starlink satellites, data might reach her in
45 milliseconds, according to calculations
?
600
by computer scientist Mark Handley at Starlink
University College London. That is half the SpaceX’s venture aims to create a
time it currently takes via fibre-optic cable, an network of nearly 12,000
advantage that could be worth millions. SpaceX satellites linked using lasers.
expects its laser internet to attract 40 million Many will fly in a very low orbit, to
minimise communication delays
subscribers and $30 billion in revenue by 2025,
with the surface
with Starlink eventually helping to fund Musk’s
other dream – of colonising Mars. 340
But lasers have their own problems. The
Drones
Stratosphere 10-50 km

main one is successfully pointing a beam

Separately, Facebook and Google built
with the thickness of a human hair at another
solar-powered drones to provide the
satellite speeding past at thousands of internet. Both projects are now on hold,
kilometres an hour. though others are planning similar drones
Still, this isn’t totally virgin territory. As
early as 2001, the European Space Agency
established the first inter-satellite laser link, Loon
between large satellites in low Earth and A sister company of Google, Loon
geostationary orbits. And in 2013, NASA used is planning to provide the internet
lasers to beam a picture of the Mona Lisa 20 via its balloons to people in Kenya,
Earth
starting this year
from Earth to a spacecraft circling the moon.

46 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019

 Cahoy is now working on a mission called
CLICK that will pack lasers capable of high-
speed communication over hundreds of
kilometres into satellites the size of Rubik’s
cubes. These satellites will use wide-angle
lasers as beacons to locate each other, then
activate narrower beams for their high-
bandwidth link. NASA is due to launch two
of them in 2020 to test the idea and Musk
could be using similar technology for
Starlink. SpaceX already has two prototype
laser satellites in orbit – though each is the
size of a car. It plans to start deploying
commercial satellites this month, the first
of hundreds of launches in the years ahead.
High-speed dance
Linking two satellites with lasers is one thing.
Maintaining connections between thousands,
24 hours a day, is another entirely. “Talking
to the satellite in front of or behind you in
an orbital plane is actually pretty easy,” says
Cahoy. “When you try to go from your plane
across to another plane, that gets a little bit
more challenging.”
SpaceX’s planet-spanning constellation
will feature criss-crossing orbital planes with
satellites whizzing past each other at high
speed. Choreographing this dance entails
knowing exactly where each spacecraft is at
any moment, and where it is heading. In an
agreement signed last year, the company
asked NASA for technical support in choosing
GPS hardware and in running the agency’s
orbital calculation software on Starlink’s
on-board processors.
The company also plans to have more than
7500 of its satellites orbiting at an altitude
of just 340 kilometres, far lower than any
existing communications satellites. That will
keep transmission delays to a bare minimum
and reduce power needs, but it will also subject
the satellites to increased drag from wisps of
the atmosphere. Without regularly firing their
thrusters, the satellites would be dragged
Cutting the cord
SpaceX’s Starlink project
aims to create an almost
totally wireless internet
WEBSITE’S
SERVER
RADIO
WAVES
ANTENNA
What goes up,
must come down
If all the planned mega-constellations
are built, there would be 10 times as
many operating satellites orbiting
Earth as today. When each runs out
of fuel, typically after around five
years, a nudge downwards from a
thruster will send it to a fiery death
in the atmosphere. But some steel or
titanium components can survive all
the way to the ground, with enough
energy to injure or kill. Up to 10
satellites might re-enter every day.
The US Federal Communications
Commission calculates that the
fragments from SpaceX’s Starlink
satellites alone would rival the
number of meteorites that naturally
hit Earth’s surface each year. SpaceX
has since redesigned its satellites
so that nothing should survive
re-entry, but other operators have
yet to follow suit.
down and burn up within weeks. Even so, each
Starlink is expected to last just six years or so
before exhausting its propellant and heading
Earthwards (see “What goes up, must come
down”, above). To sustain its fleet, SpaceX
will have to commit to the task of continually
replacing all the satellites that re-enter the
atmosphere – as many as five a day after the
first six years.
An even bigger issue is how consumers
will access the LEO satellites from the ground.
Although lasers are likely to operate at eye-safe
infrared frequencies, the beams would be
blocked by even mild cloud cover. So all the
laser satellite projects plan to use radio waves
to communicate with the ground from orbit,
which means using pricey steerable antennas
(see “Cutting the cord”, below).
LASER
RADIO
WAVES
COMPUTER
This skewers any claim that space internet
systems are about getting the poorest people
online, says media scholar Lisa Parks at MIT.
Even the pizza-sized receiver that Musk says
SpaceX is developing will cost $100 to $300.
This will be “prohibitive for unconnected
users in much of the world”, she says. “While
connecting the unconnected sounds good
from a marketing perspective, there is little
clear evidence that such a model can deliver
profits to companies and investors.”
There is also scepticism that many users in
richer nations have an appetite for additional
gadgets and subscription plans. “By the time
any of these constellations is fielded and ready
to supply a paying service to real customers,
we’re going to have 5G infrastructure in
Western countries, and Africa is going to
be covered in 4G towers,” says aeronautics
engineer Zac Manchester at Stanford
University in California.
However, some think that wireless
companies will welcome mega-constellations
as partners rather than rivals, sharing satellite
signals so that customers can access space
internet from their phones, without having
to buy an expensive antenna.
Another potential benefit for those
living in repressive countries is that satellite
internet could theoretically skirt censorship
measures such as China’s Great Firewall.
It is unclear how that would play out,
however. When Musk raised this possibility
in 2015, he suggested that SpaceX wouldn’t
serve users in such countries. “Any country
could say it’s illegal to have a ground link,”
he said. “We could conceivably continue
to operate, but then they have a choice of,
do they shoot our satellites down, or not?
China can do that.”
Elsewhere, a space-based internet could
be simpler and more reliable than accident-
prone cables. Invisible beams of light are
largely immune to hacking or tapping, and
if one or two satellites fail, replacements
could be quickly launched.
But betting on space lasers puts an awful lot
of eggs into one basket. A powerful solar storm
or a cascade of satellite collisions, as depicted
in the film Gravity, might damage or disable
entire constellations in a blink. However, in a
world already dominated by a small number
of tech firms, perhaps the most disturbing
aspect of tomorrow’s mega-constellations
would be having power over such critical
infrastructure concentrated in just a few
hands. If you thought the story of Aishtan
Shakarian’s shovel was worrying, imagine
having a few powerful individuals in control
of the space internet’s off switch. ❚
Mark Harris is a technology journalist based in Seattle
4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 47
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 IN
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REMARKABLE SCIENTISTS
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Radiation Oncologists Researcher BioDomain

Shell Graduate Program
The Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Alabama at
Birmingham is currently recruiting for Radiation Oncologists at the level of <Zg]b]Zm^lZk^lhn`ammhÛeeZl\b^gmblmihlbmbhgbgLa^ee
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http://uab.peopleadmin.com/postings/3796 ar]kherlbl%lheb]Zg]ebjnb]iaZl^_^kf^gmZmbhg%mhfhe^\neZk

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and family-friendly environment in which all faculty and staff can excel and achieve work/life balance
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Medicine. The individual will carry out funded research projects related to new
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immunology, cell biology, proteomics, biochemistry, mouse models. The selected
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DISCOVER WHAT YOU CAN
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Please forward a cover letter, an updated CV, and the names and contact information of ACHIEVE AT SHELL
3 references to:
Joseph Holoshitz, MD, Professor of Internal Medicine,
University of Michigan School of Medicine, 5520 MSRB1
1150 W. Medical Center Drive, Ann Arbor, MI , 48109-5680

Email: jholo@med.umich.edu Shell is an Equal Opportunity Employer - Minorities/Females/Veterans/Disability

newscientistjobs.com 4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 49

 Scientific Reviewers:
Physical Sciences, Life Sciences & Psychology
(Work-from-home)
Cactus Communications is a leading provider of scientific communication services to more than 198,000 clients across
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We engage a team of highly skilled editors who are experts in various academic fields. Cactus Communications has
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The back pages
Puzzles Feedback What does… Almost the last word Me and my telescope
Quick crossword, Ad in space and AI Liana Finck? Dog senses; insomnia Marcus du Sautoy
a quiz and a teaser astrology: the week A cartoonist’s take and blindness: your answers our
about infinity p52 in weirdness p53 on the world p53 queries answered p54 questions p56

How to be a maker Week 1

Do try this at home

Forget buying stuff, it is far better to build things yourself. Hannah Joshua’s
10-part series will give you the skills you need to become a maker

What you will “I WISH someone would make one of

need next week those” – many of us have said this at
3 crocodile-clip some point, pining after an invention
wires that doesn’t exist.
9V battery Maybe it is a way to automate
LEDs your window blinds or communicate
Assorted resistors with your houseplants. Whatever you
have in mind, you don’t have to pitch
your idea to a millionaire business
mogul in order to bring it to life. You
just need to get making, although it
might be a while before you are
communicating with plants.
The maker movement has
been steadily growing over the past
Next in few years. It harks back to a time
the series when it was commonplace to fix
1 Introduction things – a skill many of us have

DAVID STOCK FOR NEW SCIENTIST

2 Electric candle lost – but augments this outlook with
How to build modern tools like microprocessors
a circuit and 3D printers. It also counters the
notion of tech as disposable, focusing
3 Toast notifier
on ways to repair devices and reuse
4 Rate-my-stay
parts. In all, it is about the satisfaction
device
and empowerment that comes from
5 Propeller car
designing and creating your own
6 Magic eight ball
solution to a problem. Make online
7 Theremin
This is all well and good as a Projects and extra pictures will be posted each week at
8 Sound-sensitive
philosophy, but what if you can’t newscientist.com/maker Email: maker@newscientist.com
disco ball
tell a screwdriver from a spanner
9 Rubbish sweeper
or you simply have no eye for The only tools you will need are The maker movement’s emphasis
10 Biscuit bot
electronics? It can be intimidating what you might find in the cupboard is on involvement and inclusivity.
to stare at a pile of wires, wood and under the stairs. As for components, Everyone can make. There are
whatsits and try to imagine what you can salvage them from broken maker spaces – open workshops
they might become. That’s where electronics and then top up with providing access to equipment –
New Scientist comes in. This weekly cheap bits and pieces from a local as well as events and “hackathons”
column is going to give you a crash hobby shop, or get them online. encouraging the world to tinker.
course in the skills you need to break You can make the devices we By the end of the series, you will
into the world of making. suggest, or invent your own. Your have the skills you need to build a
Over the next 10 weeks, we are creations can be fun or functional – biscuit buddy robot that can ferry
going to take you from nobot to ideally both. People have designed snacks between rooms of your house.
robot, in a series of easy steps. In each everything from lights powered by So, your homework is to dig out a
instalment, we will teach you about gravity and ways to make tech more toolkit and acquire the components
a different technique or component, accessible for those with disabilities, on the list (top left). See you next
and give you a mini project to make. to tweeting coffee pots. week to start making! ❚

4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 51

The back pages Puzzles

Quick Crossword #30 set by Richard Smyth Quick quiz #01 Puzzle set by Hugh Hunt
1 Which German city
houses the European Space
Agency’s main mission
control centre?

2 Asperitas, cavum, cauda

GNIZAY/SHUTTERSTOCK
and murus were officially
recognised as types of what
by the World Meteorological
Organization in 2017?

3 What name is given to #01 The book of numbers

Across
1 Sci-fi franchise about an
Einstein-Rosen bridge (8)
5 In psychology, the
human mind (6)
10 Typically, the third
conspicuous earthquake
wave to reach a
seismograph (1,4)
11 PC range launched by Apple
in 1984 (9)
12 Relating to a specialist
field (9)
13 Opposite of zenith (5)
14 Device for amplifying a very
weak signal (6)
15 Wild cattle, extinct since the
17th century (7)
Down
1 Dissolved substance (6)
2 Chile pine (9)
3 Proof in number theory
that the sequence of
prime numbers contains
arbitrarily long arithmetic
progressions (5-3,7)
4 1994 sci-fi action film (4,3)
6 Tectonic boundary between
the Pacific and North
American plates (3,7,5)
7 Suspended mass of droplets
18 ___ mechanics, theory in
physics to describe nature at
the smallest scales (7)
20 Mary ___ (1913–96), UK
palaeoanthropologist (6)
22 Category of young star (1-4)
24 Cipher also known as a
zigzag (4,5)
25 Female sex hormone (9)
26 German submarine or
Unterseeboot (1-4)
27 In a flower, the tip of a
pistil (6)
28 Medical condition
characterised by high levels
of nitrogen compounds in
the blood (8)
9 Genus of flowering plants
known as squills (6)
16 Facility low in dust and other
particulates (5,4)
17 Scaly or scale-like (8)
19 Optical illusion caused by
bending light rays (6)
20 Gottfried Wilhelm ___
(1646–1716), German
mathematician (7)
21 Big ___, first world war siege
howitzer (6)
the delusional belief that you
are actually dead?
4 The US chemist Linus
Pauling won the Nobel prize
in chemistry in 1954, and
eight years later in what
other discipline?
5 “The hobbit” was
the catchy name given
to a small-statured,
extinct hominin species
found in 2003 on what
Indonesian island?
Answers below
Cryptic
Crossword #05
Answers
Across 1 ABSOLUTE ZERO,
7, 8 BETA CAROTENE,
9 GAMETE, 10 AVERSE,
11 NOD, 12 TEENY, 14 ESSAY,
16 CUE, 18 SCABBY,
20 SALARY, 22 SYLLABLE,
23 MUSK, 24 SUPERLUMINAL
Down 1 AVERAGE, 2 SPACE,
3 LICHEN, 4 THREAD,
5 ZITHERS, 6 RUNTS,
13 NEBULAE, 15 AEROSOL,
16 CYMBAL, 17 ESTEEM,
19 COYPU, 21 LEMON
Quick quiz #01
Answers
Homo floresiensis
5 Flores, hence its official name
Meera plans to write a book (in English)
containing all the whole numbers from
zero to infinity in alphabetical order. She
knows this will take her a very long time,
but she makes a start. She figures that first
on her alphabetical list is the number eight.
After a while, she tires of the task and
jumps to the last page and starts working
backwards. She reckons that the last entry
will be zero.
Curiously, even though this book will take
forever to finish writing, it is possible to
state which number will be listed second,
and which will be second-last. What are
those two numbers?
By the way, when Meera wants to write
numbers bigger than the quadrillions
(numbers with 15 zeroes) she strings
numbers together, for example “one billion
trillion” or “five million million quadrillion”.
Answer next week
Did you know...
The average
cumulus cloud
weighs roughly
500 tonnes

or crystals (5)
testing
23 Nintendo games character against nuclear weapons
8 Anaesthetise with who first appeared in 4 Peace, for his campaigning Tell us what you think
(C2H5)2O (8) 1990 (5) 3 Cotard’s syndrome Email us at
Answers next week crossword@newscientist.com
2 Cloud
1 Darmstadt
puzzles@newscientist.com

52 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019

The back pages Feedback
Sky’s the limit
With almost every corner of Earth
now saturated with adverts,
companies are advancing on the
final frontier to get us to notice
their products. Elon Musk was
the first to boldly go where no
advertiser has gone before, sending
his Tesla Roadster into orbit around
the sun last year – perhaps to test
the car’s autopilot function in an
environment where there are
fewer objects to collide with.
Now the Russian company
StartRocket plans to launch clusters
of cubesats to create “orbital
billboards” by reflecting sunlight,
forming shiny logos that would
be visible in the sky at dawn and
dusk. According to the website
Futurism, food and drink firm
PepsiCo planned to use this service
to promote a “campaign against
stereotypes and unjustified
prejudices against gamers” on
behalf of an energy drink called
Adrenaline Rush.
However, it appears that PepsiCo
has since canned the project, fearing
a public backlash. Astronomers
are among those pleased that
the billboard won’t go ahead.
Feedback is inclined to agree,
while wondering whether we have
missed a valuable opportunity to
test the hypothesis that there is
no such thing as bad publicity.
Astrology 2.0
New Scientist readers may be
forgiven for thinking astrology,
like religion, cash and printed
magazines, would face a struggle
to survive in the 21st-century
economy. Not so – in fact, it is a
$2.1 billion industry just waiting to
be disrupted by digital technology.
The New York Times reports
that astrology has “traded its
psychedelic new-wave stigma
for modern Instagrammy witch
vibes, and those vibes are very
popular with millennial women”.
Spotting an opportunity to make
money, venture capitalists have
invested millions in apps like
Co-Star, which lets users compare
their birth charts with those of
What does Liana Finck?
their friends or enemies to help
them understand conflicts.
For those doubting the science
behind them, Co-Star’s horoscopes
are algorithmically generated and
based on data from NASA. So that’s
all right then. It must be galling
for professional astrologers to be
usurped by artificial intelligence,
but they must have seen it coming.
News for the unenthused
Newsreaders could be next in line
to lose their jobs to automation.
Readers may recall the story of
a dancing robot described by
Russia-24 TV as the most advanced
in the world, which turned out to be
a man in a robot suit (5 January).
The mishap has apparently
not dented the Russian media’s
passion for technology. The same
broadcaster has now employed a
humanoid robot to read the news
following a high-level robotics
conference. This time, there was no
doubt that the droid in question was pharmaceutical science class how is responsible for the legislation,
mechanical in nature. Nevertheless, to synthesise MDMA, otherwise failed to assuage doubts about
the reaction from viewers was less known as ecstasy. its commitment to online privacy
than enthusiastic. Iwamura is now being when it issued a press release
“From the headpiece, I thought investigated by drug enforcement announcing the new date for
[actor] Dmitry Pevtsov was stung by officers and could face up to the scheme’s implementation.
bees and then got drunk. But it was 10 years in prison, according to The email was sent to more than
a robot. Horrible,” wrote one viewer news reports. Feedback hopes the 300 journalists with their addresses
quoted by The Daily Telegraph. authorities show leniency in light visible to everyone on the mailing
“The first few seconds only of his outstanding contribution list. “It was an error and we’re
provoke a gag reflex. It’s frozen to higher education. evaluating at the moment whether
with a gaze through the centuries that was a breach of data protection
like a drug addict’s,” another wrote. law,” digital minister Margot James
Pornography leak
“It feels like a dead thing.” With told the BBC.
the news screens that Feedback The UK government is pressing In the meantime, the scheme
is watching stuck on a seemingly ahead with its plans to implement seems leaky in other ways. Social
never-ending Brexit loop, this age-verification checks on media sites that allow sexually
seems like just the ticket. pornography sites, with the law explicit images, such as Twitter and
now set to come into force on Reddit, won’t have to administer
15 July. As New Scientist previously the age-check scheme as more
Living the high life
reported, the move will create than a third of a site’s content
With increasing numbers of databases of pornography users in must be pornographic to qualify.
graduates struggling to find work the UK held by private firms (30 This suggests an easy way for
after finishing university and March, p 20). Critics warn this will pornography sites to skirt the
complaining that their degrees be a huge target for blackmailers. new requirements: simply post
haven’t given them the skills they The Department for Digital, two videos of puppies for every
need for the workplace, we need Culture, Media and Sport, which one of pornography. ❚
teachers that can create a buzz
around learning. We assume
this was the motivation behind Want to get in touch?
Japanese professor Tatsunori Send your stories to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street,
Iwamura’s reported decision London WC2E 9ES or you can email us at
to teach students in his feedback@newscientist.com
4 May 2019 | New Scientist | 53
The back pages Almost the last word
Bring me sunshine
Can a blind person still benefit from
the positive effects of natural light
on circadian rhythms and mental
well-being? I lost my remaining
light perception 10 years ago and
since that time I’ve had insomnia.
This would suggest that the answer
to my question is no, but maybe I
just need to get out more.
Linda Geddes,
author of Chasing the Sun
Bristol, UK
The reader may have non-24-hour
sleep-wake disorder, which is
common in people who have no
light perception whatsoever.
In every cell of our body, there
are molecular clocks that regulate
the timing of pretty much every
physiological process, from the
release of hormones to the activity
of immune cells. These clocks run
on roughly 24-hour schedules,
though some people are closer
to 23 hours, others more like 25.
The way we stay synchronised
to the 24-hour day is through
signals from light-sensitive cells
at the back of the eye called
intrinsically photoreceptive
retinal ganglion cells. When light
hits those cells each morning, it
acts like the reset button on a
stopwatch: the brain adjusts its
timing, then signals to the body’s
molecular clocks to do the same.
In some people who are blind,
those cells are damaged, and this
connection is broken. As a result,
they revert to their genetically
determined timekeeping. People
with a 23-hour clock would wake at
8 am one morning, 7 am the next,
then 6 am and so on. Because of
this, they often experience
insomnia. It is worth seeking
advice from a certified sleep
consultant, as melatonin
supplements can be an effective
treatment, if diagnosed.
People who are blind still
benefit from sunshine to make
vitamin D. There is also mounting
evidence that sun exposure
tweaks our immune cell activity
and blood pressure, which could
benefit our health.
54 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019
The bongo is known for its
stripy coat – but why can’t
we have patterned hair?
approach may be detectable to the
dog inside when you are quite a
distance away.
The dog may also sense your
footfalls through the ground, as
ANUP SHAH/NATUREPL.COM
sound or seismic waves will travel
from outside to inside through
any convenient conduit, such as
sewage pipes, electric wiring or
fibre cabling.
Dogs are also very time aware. If
This week’s new questions: your walk is at a similar time each
day, the barker will be expecting
Why do some animals have patterns of hair colours such as you and your dog, and so be alert
stripes or spots, and why can’t I have stripy hair? for the other signals.
Tom Middleton Shrewsbury, Shropshire, UK My dog, Sparky, who is almost
totally deaf, is still able to “sense”
Which is better for the environment: using a heated hand dryer the movement of people and
for 30 seconds, or using two disposable paper hand towels? vehicles outside. He can
Sam Kirwan Greystones, County Wicklow, Ireland distinguish different people’s
footsteps. He rarely barks, though,
as he may well have come to
presume that humans can’t hear
Canine connection 60 kilohertz, far higher than anything, either.
our upper limit, so any high Dogs are pretty smart, sensually.
While quietly walking my small frequency noise you produce What is amazing is that they don’t
dog, we often pass houses where may be imperceptible to you but get annoyed with us, who aren’t.
the dog inside, which is out of sight, perfectly audible to a dog. Plus,
begins barking. How does the dog some dogs can hear sound down Richard Woods
know to bark if it can’t see, smell or to -15 decibels, much quieter than Halstead, Essex, UK
hear us? the lower limit for humans, which The behaviour of our shih-tzu,
is 0 decibels by definition. So even Rupert, suggests that dogs’
Pam Lunn if you can’t hear yourself walking, heightened senses are key to
Kenilworth, Warwickshire, UK nearby dogs almost certainly can. this. If I come up in the lift at our
I wouldn’t assume that the apartment block and leave the lift
barking dog is unable to smell Steve Swift talking to someone, he barks from
your dog. The houses you are Alton, Hampshire, UK behind the closed door, 15 metres
passing aren’t hermetically sealed. Our dog, Alfie, can detect the post away. If I am not talking, he
Dogs can detect scent molecules at van from about 100 metres away, doesn’t bark.
very low concentrations in the air. demonstrating that his hearing is He will bark at either of our
very much better than a human’s. daughters arriving, long before
Peter Holness What I can’t work out is how he they have reached our door. But
Bengeo, Hertfordshire, UK reliably detects my wife on her way he never responds to anyone
Canine hearing can be acute. My home from work at a distance of else coming out of the lift, so
dog, Arby, knows the “acoustic 3 kilometres or more. he must be highly sensitive, and
signature” of his metal bowl. also responding specifically to
A “ting” from the most minute Tony Holkham the sound of my voice. He doesn’t
morsel dropped in that bowl Blaenffos, Pembrokeshire, UK bark at visitors unless they
brings Arby rushing to it from A dog’s sense of smell is vastly come in through the door and
any part of our house. superior to ours, and your are strangers.
Adam Gray
Manchester, UK Want to send us a question or answer?
You are probably not walking as Email us at lastword@newscientist.com
quietly as you think. Dogs can Questions should be about everyday science phenomena
hear frequencies up to around Full terms and conditions at newscientist.com/lw-terms
 WHAT IF TIME STARTED
FLOWING BACKWARDS?

WHAT
IF THE
RUSSIANS
GOT TO
THE MOON
FIRST?

WHAT IF DINOSAURS
STILL RULED THE EARTH?
AVAILABLE NOW
newscientist.com/books
The back pages Me and my telescope
First up, do you have a telescope?
Yes, and it is called mathematics. Ever since
we have been looking up at the night sky,
mathematics has been a powerful tool to
navigate the cosmos. Trigonometry helps us
to work out how far the planets are from the
sun. The laws of motion tell us when to
expect an eclipse and even told us about a
missing planet: Neptune.
As a child, what did you
want to do when you grew up?
I wanted to be a spy.
Explain what you do
in one easy paragraph.
A mathematician is a pattern searcher. In my
own research, I am trying to understand
the world of symmetry. Are there hidden
patterns that might help us to discover new
symmetrical objects?
What does a typical day involve?
I don’t have a typical day! But it might
involve some hours in deep mathematical
meditation at my desk.
What do you love most
about what you do?
There is an extraordinary buzz about unlocking
an eternal truth about the universe. The “aha!”
moment that you get when you make a
mathematical discovery is very addictive.
What’s the most exciting thing
you’ve worked on recently?
I have spent the past few years writing a book
about the impact of machine learning and AI
on creativity.
Were you good at science at school?
I was good at the abstract, theoretical stuff,
but my experiments always went wrong and
no one would be my lab partner. That’s why I
chose maths.
If you could send a message back to
yourself as a kid, what would you say?
Don’t worry that you can’t spell, they’re going
to invent this thing called a spellchecker.
56 | New Scientist | 4 May 2019
Marcus du Sautoy is professor of mathematics
and the public understanding of science at
the University of Oxford and is known for his
work popularising maths
What’s the best piece of
advice anyone ever gave you?
Creativity comes in waves. When you’ve hit
your first peak, there will inevitably be a fallow
period before the next peak arrives.
If you could have a long conversation
with any scientist, living or dead, who
would it be?
I’d love to chat to the French revolutionary
Evariste Galois, who created the language of
symmetry, and try to persuade him not to
take part in the duel that killed him aged 20.
What’s the best thing
you’ve read or seen in the
VACLAV VOLRAB/SHUTTERSTOCK
past 12 months?
The Alps. I went hiking hut to
hut, inspired by reading Robert
Macfarlane’s beautiful book
Mountains of the Mind.
Do you have a weird hobby and, if so,
please will you tell us about it?
I have a games collection. Wherever I travel,
I like to seek out the local game that people play.
How useful will your skills “There is an
be after the apocalypse?
Mathematics is our best tool for making
extraordinary
predictions and planning for the future. It will
probably tell us when the apocalypse is due.
buzz about
Because you only need pen and paper to do unlocking an
mathematics, we should be able to carry on
after the apocalypse has struck. eternal truth
OK, one last thing: tell us something
about the
that will blow our minds… universe”
There isn’t just one infinity. There are infinitely
many infinities, some bigger than others. This
discovery by the 19th-century mathematician
Georg Cantor certainly blew my mind when I first
encountered it. ❚
Marcus du Sautoy’s latest book is The Creativity Code
(Fourth Estate). Read his thoughts on whether AI can
ever truly be creative in next week’s issue
PORTRAIT: OXFORD UNIVERSITY IMAGES/JOBY SESSIONS
AI-powered Genomic map
of rare diseases

drug discovery This is a genomic map of 3,039

rare diseases with genetic
causes. The spiral graphic

for rare diseases represents the human genome.

It’s formed of 2,071 segments,
each containing 1.5m DNA
base pairs. The green dots
There are over 7,000 rare diseases. Only 5% show where the genetic
have an approved treatment. Using traditional mutations are located for each
of these diseases.
drug discovery methods, it will take a very long Inspired by the work of
time to find treatments for all these diseases. Martin Krzywinski ‘Genes that
make us sick’.
Here at Healx, we are changing that.
Number of diseases

healx.io | info@healx.io 1 10 20 30+