SPECIA L R EPORT

MICROPLASTICS
You eat, drink and breathe them.
What impact are they
having on your health?

DOING GOOD BETTER

An evidence-based guide
to giving to charity
WEEKLY 7 December 2019

L FE
T ME
THE UN VERSE
Everything descends Now we may
into disorder finally know why

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Watched
pots
do boil
This week’s issue
On the
cover
34 Life. Time. The universe
Everything descends
into disorder. Now we
may finally know why
News
8 Cardiovascular risk
Your cholesterol can predict
heart disease years in advance
11 UN climate meeting
Everything you need to
know about COP25
16 Phone addiction
Are a quarter of teenagers
really addicted to their
screens?
Views
23 Comment
Clare Wilson on science’s
fake news problem
24 The columnist
Graham Lawton on the
environmental impact of pets
26 Letters
Transparency on political
micro-targeting
28 Aperture
A stunning view of Bali’s
subak rice terraces
30 Culture
The best science-themed
gifts to buy this year
38 Microplastics
You eat, drink and breathe
38 Features
them. What impact are they “The average
having on your health?
household
42 Doing good better
An evidence-based guide
generates
to giving to charity around
700 billion
fragments
7 India’s lost moon lander found
10 Permafrost puppy 8 The truth
known as
about cholesterol 14 Songs of microplastics
Vol 244 No 3259 nightingales 14 Twister crystals
Cover image: Domenic Bahmann 8 Amazon enters quantum race every year”
Features
34 Life. Time. The universe
News Entropy’s push for chaos gives
structure to reality. So how come
no one knows what is?
38 Microplastics
These tiny particles contaminate
our food and our air, but how are
they affecting our health?
42 Doing good better
Your guide to evidence-based
altruism
The back pages
51 Stargazing at home
See the spectacular aurorae
52 Puzzles
COURTESY OF DR. DOUG COOK/CWR CHICKPEA PRE-BREEDING PROJECT
Cryptic crossword, a hiking
puzzle and the quick quiz
53 Feedback
Stick figures and invisible
carbon: the week in weird
54 Almost the last word
Seeing UV light and gravity
explained: readers respond
56 The Q&A
Rick McIntyre’s life with
12 Biodiversity back-up The mission to collect our food’s wild relatives Yellowstone’s wolves
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 3
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The leader
Invisible, but ubiquitous
Microplastics are in our air, food and water. Are there health implications?
“CAN’T be seen, can’t be smelled,
can’t be heard, but can be stopped.” That
warning, issued by the US Department
of Health and Human Services, is about
carbon monoxide poisoning from
faulty heaters. It could equally apply to
a newly recognised threat, except for
the last part. Microplastics can’t be seen,
can’t be smelled, can’t be heard – and
can’t be stopped.
As a result of our 50-year addiction
to plastics, microplastics are now
ubiquitous in the environment. These
tiny fragments, formed as plastic breaks
apart into ever-smaller pieces, are found
in soil, water and air. They rain down on
us 24/7 and have entered the food chain
and water supply. There is little or no
prospect of cleaning them up, and the
load will inevitably get worse as the
approximately 8 billion tonnes of
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plastic we have manufactured over
the past century or so breaks up but
doesn’t biodegrade.
Concern about microplastics has so
far largely focused on wildlife and the
environment, and there is evidence of
harms to both. But now attention is
“The 8 billion tonnes of plastic
we have manufactured over the
past century or so will break up
but not biodegrade”
turning to us. What, if anything, do these
particles do to the human body?
At this point, there are more questions
than answers. To put our ignorance
into perspective, we don’t even know
for sure that the very smallest fragments,
called nanoplastics, actually exist –
even though they are hypothesised
MANAGEMENT
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to be the most harmful to our health.
The good news is that researchers are
waking up to the potential threat and
scrambling to find some answers. The
bad news is that it will take years to
properly evaluate the problem. As yet,
funding is paltry: just a few million
euros. Plastic manufacturers who have
made a fortune out of the stuff might
consider putting a hand into their
pocket, perhaps to kick-start research
on technologies to clean up the ever-
increasing amounts of waste.
It may turn out to be a false alarm.
If microplastics posed a specific threat to
human health, perhaps we would have
seen it by now. If that feels like clutching
at (plastic) straws, that is because it is.
Even if we get lucky this time, the natural
world will be paying the price of our so-
called ingenuity for decades to come. ❚
EDITORIAL
Editor Emily Wilson
Executive editor Richard Webb
Creative director Craig Mackie
News
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Reporters (UK) Jessica Hamzelou, Michael Le Page,
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7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 5
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 News
Quantum computing Roman shipwreck
Amazon enters Thousands of ancient
the quantum storage vessels
computing race p8 discovered p9
Bushfires rage on
As fires continue to burn in Australia, an analysis predicts that linked
global carbon emissions have risen further, reports Adam Vaughan
JEREMY PIPER/AAP/PA IMAGES
BUSHFIRES across New South
Wales (NSW) have shrouded
Sydney in heavy smoke and left
residents breathing air pollution
on a par with that found in some
of the world’s most polluted cities.
About 2000 firefighters are
tackling more than a hundred fires
burning across the Australian
state, including in the Blue
Mountains world heritage area
and near Warragamba Dam,
authorities said on Tuesday.
In total, 800,000 hectares have
burned in NSW national parks
since July, including 20 per cent
of the famous mountain range,
a Guardian analysis has found.
The bushfires have been
aggravated by warm, dry
conditions linked to climate
Right to explanation
Firms could be fined
if they can’t explain
AI decisions p10
change. Thomas Smith at the
London School of Economics says
it is unusual to see the fires so
early. “You normally don’t see
these fires until January or
February,” he says
Videos show Sydney blanketed
in pollution, with local monitoring
rating the air as “hazardous”.
Levels of tiny particulate
pollution, known as PM2.5, are
similar to levels in Delhi, India,
which recently had severe smog.
Satellites have recorded plumes
of smoke from bushfires in NSW,
Queensland and Victoria crossing
the Pacific Ocean, with some
reaching as far as South America.
On Tuesday, the World
Meteorological Organization
announced that the past decade,
Sing a new song
Nightingales remix
their songs over
the winter p14
Smoke from a fire burning
near Katoomba in
Australia’s Blue Mountains
including 2019, has almost
certainly been the warmest
on record. Global average
temperatures in 2019 were 1.1°C
above pre-industrial levels, close
to the 1.5°C that the Paris climate
deal agreed to limit rises to.
There is little hope that the
goal will be met. Figures published
by the Global Carbon Project
on Wednesday show that global
carbon emissions are set to rise
0.6 per cent this year, a slowdown
on recent years due to a dip in coal
use, but still far from the cuts that
the UN has said are needed to
avert catastrophic warming. ❚
The climate election
Environmental issues
loom large in the UK
general election p20
Space exploration
NASA spies India’s
lunar wreckage
A LOST moon lander has
been found. After it crashed
down in an attempted
landing in September, the
location of the remains of
India’s Vikram spacecraft
wasn’t immediately obvious.
Now, NASA has pinpointed
the debris field with the help
of a tip from a member of
the public, after the team at
the Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter (LRO) made images
of the area available online.
“Shanmuga Subramanian
contacted the LRO project
with a positive identification
of debris,” said a statement
released on 2 December.
NASA confirmed the spot
on the moon where the
Vikram lander crashed down
by comparing before and
after photos. The debris
Subramanian spotted was
750 metres north-west of
the crash site. The LRO team
went on to identify about
20 other pieces of debris
and several impact sites.
The Vikram lander was
part of the Chandrayaan-2
mission, which launched
on 22 July and carried with
it a six-wheeled rover.
It was meant to touch down
and explore the south pole,
an unexplored region of
the moon where water ice
collects in craters covered
in shadow.
When the lander was
just 2.1 kilometres from
the lunar surface, it lost
communication with
scientists from the
Indian Space Research
Organisation and was
unable to slow down enough
for its planned landing. ❚
Chelsea Whyte
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 7
News
Health

Predicting heart disease risk

Cholesterol levels in under-45s linked to cardiovascular disease in later life
Layal Liverpool

A PERSON’S cholesterol levels “It is important because people have been widely prescribed to earlier on in life could be highly
before the age of 45 can predict might want to know how they lower cholesterol, contributing beneficial, says Betty Raman at
their lifetime risk of developing could lower their risk,” says Frank to small life expectancy gains. the University of Oxford.
cardiovascular disease. The Kee at Queen’s University Belfast, Under existing guidelines, However, statins can have
finding has prompted debate UK, who worked on the study. people in the UK and US are painful side effects, and some
about whether younger people We have known since the only prescribed statins based on researchers, including the
should be recommended 1980s that cholesterol is linked their estimated 10-year risk of Danish doctor Uffe Ravnskov,
preventative measures, such to atherosclerosis – the clogging developing cardiovascular disease, argue that there is no link
as taking statins. of arteries that can cause not their lifetime risk, says Kee. between cholesterol levels and
The result comes from an cardiovascular disease, which The study provides compelling heart disease – although this is
analysis of medical data on nearly includes heart disease and stroke. data that lowering cholesterol disputed by many. Ravnskov
400,000 people of European There are many ways a person suggests that the link between
ancestry from across Europe, can lower their lifetime risk of “There are many ways a cholesterol and cardiovascular risk
Australia and North America. this, such as lifestyle changes and person can lower lifetime in this study might be explained
The study found that when blood taking medications. For example, risk of heart disease, by stress, which younger adults
concentrations of non-HDL in the past 30 years, statin drugs including medication” are more likely to experience.
cholesterol – often known as But Tom Marshall at the
“bad cholesterol” – are higher than University of Birmingham, UK,
145 milligrams per 100 millilitres says the findings add to a body
before the age 45, a person’s of work showing that the link
relative risk of developing heart between cholesterol and heart
disease at some point in their life disease is stronger at younger
nearly doubles. ages. “This means that the relative
For concentrations between 100 benefits of treatment may be
and 145 milligrams before 45, the larger in younger people,” he says.
relative lifetime risk increases by However, Marshall says there
10 to 20 per cent (The Lancet, DOI: isn’t enough evidence yet to
SOLSTOCK/GETTY IMAGES

10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32519-X). change statin guidelines. That is

because it isn’t clear how much
A health check in your extra benefit someone would get
early 40s can predict from taking high-dose statins
your cardiovascular risk 10 or 20 years earlier, he says. ❚

Technology

Amazon gets in processors, which rely on subatomic
quantum effects. IonQ’s version
on the quantum uses trapped ions manipulated by
computer revolution lasers as quantum bits – or qubits,
which are the equivalent to bits in
THE quantum computing race has classical computers. Rigetti uses
a new competitor. Amazon has superconducting qubits, as does
announced it will partner with D-Wave, but the latter’s device is
three firms to offer online access a more limited system known as
to prototype quantum processors. a quantum annealer, rather than
Through a new service called a full-blown computer.
Amazon Braket, customers will be These various approaches to
able to test algorithms on quantum qubits all have drawbacks. “I think
processors from D-Wave Systems, for Amazon they’re looking at this
IonQ and Rigetti Computing. also as a time to see which one’s
Each of these three firms takes a really going to work,” says Peter
different approach to making such Chapman at IonQ. “Put us all on
the marketplace and see who wins.”
Because quantum computers are
finicky and expensive to maintain,
Amazon has, for now, decided to
partner with these firms rather than
compete with the likes of Google
and IBM by building its own device.
“I think it is safe to say that most
organizations will never own a
quantum computer, and will find
the cloud-based, on-demand model
a better fit. It may well be the case
that production-scale quantum
computers are the first cloud-only
technology,” wrote Jeff Barr at
Amazon Web Services in a blog.
“We share a common goal with
Amazon that more developers and
businesses need access to quantum
computing, and the cloud is the best
way to scale that,” says Alan Baratz
at D-Wave Systems.
Amazon Braket isn’t the
first cloud quantum computing
service; Microsoft and IBM offer
their own versions. The three firms
involved with Braket have also
made sessions on their processors
available separately in the past.
Amazon could yet try to build a
quantum computer. A spokesperson
says the company will develop
quantum hardware in the future. ❚
Chelsea Whyte

8 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

 Archaeology
Roman shipwreck
full of 2000-year-
old jugs discovered
Ruby Prosser Scully
GEORGE FERENTINOS ET AL.
A ROMAN shipwreck found off
the coast of Cephalonia Island,
Greece, may reveal clues about
the beginning of the Roman
Empire, such as how people
conducted trade and the
wider economy.
George Ferentinos at the
University of Patras and his
colleagues explored the sea
floor around Cephalonia
Island in the Ionian Sea
using sonar imaging.
They discovered three wrecks
from the second world war –
two ships and one plane – that
are almost intact, as well as a
large ancient Roman vessel that
they dubbed the Fiscardo, after
the present-day fishing port
near where it was discovered.
The top of the 2000-year-old
Roman wreck is full of jug-like
containers called amphorae.
Their distinctive shapes allowed
the team to date the wreck to
between the 1st century BC
and the 1st century AD (Journal
of Archaeological Science,
doi.org/ggdqcr).
At 34 metres long and
13 metres wide, the Fiscardo
is one of the largest four
shipwrecks from this period
The Roman ship may have
held 6000 jug-like containers
called amphorae
found in the Mediterranean
Sea, and the largest in the
east Mediterranean Sea,
says Ferentinos.
“It’s half-buried in the
sediment, so we have high
expectations that if we go to an
excavation in the future, we will
find part or the whole wooden
hull,” he says. This could tell
archaeologists when and where
the ship was made, where the
material came from and how
it was repaired.
Judging by the ship’s size, it
was probably carrying around
6000 amphorae at the time
it sank, he says. These were
typically used to transport wine,
olive oil, grains and other goods.
This is a monumental number,
says Craig Barker at the
University of Sydney, Australia.
The size, shape and design
of these containers vary by
location, so could reveal where
the ship was sailing to and
from – and DNA and chemical
analyses may even reveal what
was inside them. ❚
Data privacy
Mental health sites share
user data with ad firms
Donna Lu
MENTAL health websites are
sharing user data with advertisers,
including the results of tests for
depression. This means that
people seeking information or
help for mental health conditions
can be targeted with adverts while
they may be vulnerable.
Eliot Bendinelli at Privacy
International in London and his
colleagues looked at 136 of the
most popular websites in the UK,
France and Germany that provide
resources and information about
mental health conditions. The
researchers found that 76 per cent
of the websites contained third-
party marketing trackers. These
collect information about a user
and can track them as they browse
other sites. This can be combined
into a detailed profile.
Many of the pages had trackers
from Google, Facebook and
Amazon and shared information
with data brokers – firms that
aggregate information and sell
individual profiles to other
organisations – and advertising
companies.
“It’s currently almost
impossible to seek information
and help about depression
without advertisers knowing,”
says Frederike Kaltheuner at the
Mozilla Foundation in London,
who is part of the team. “Knowing
who is depressed and when allows
advertisers to target people when
they are at their most vulnerable.
Feeling low today? Here are some
diet pills.”
Advertisers target users based
on their personal data, such as
their IP address and location, and
the site they visit, says Bendinelli.
Some sites also have real-time
bidding, where information,
including a page’s content and
URL, is used to instantaneously
show a relevant ad on the page.
Several websites with
questionnaires about depression
stored users’ answers and shared
them with third parties.
When the researchers first
analysed the UK’s National Health
Service website in September,
they found that a mood self-
assessment quiz shared individual
answers, test scores and the test
URL with Adobe for analysis
purposes. However, the NHS
website has since updated its
privacy policy so users now need
to manually opt in to be tracked.
The team also found that
doctissimo.fr, one of France’s
most popular health websites,
sent unique user identifiers and
answers to a data collection firm.
“Doctissimo basically sends all of
your answers to the test to a third
party that is named nowhere on
their website, nowhere in their
privacy policy,” says Bendinelli.
“That’s a perfect example of
abusing people’s confidence.”
The research was presented
this week at the Black Hat Europe
event in London.
“It’s currently almost
impossible to seek help
about depression without
advertisers knowing”
Under the EU’s General Data
Protection Regulation, websites
and apps are required to obtain
consent before tracking users.
Data relating to physical or
mental health is considered a
“special category” and can only
be processed with explicit consent
or for relevant other reasons.
Doctissimo.fr didn’t respond
to New Scientist’s requests for
comment. Google and Amazon
say they don’t use sensitive data
for advertising and that they
prohibit advertisers from doing so
as well. Facebook says it requires
website owners to be clear about
the information they are sharing
with the firm. ❚
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 9
News
Archaeology

Prehistoric puppy
Frozen canine may be an ancestor of dogs and wolves
Jessica Hamzelou

THIS 18,000-year-old puppy,

found in the Siberian permafrost, is
remarkably well preserved – it still
has its nose, fur, teeth and whiskers.
A team at the Centre for
Palaeogenetics in Sweden has been
analysing the animal’s rib bone,
after the puppy was found last year
at a site near Yakutsk in eastern
Siberia. So far, the researchers have
determined that the animal is male
and estimate that he was 2 months
old. The puppy is now named Dogor,
a Yakutian word for “friend”.
Yet DNA tests to determine if it
was a dog or a wolf have come up
blank. If it was a dog, it may be the
oldest found. But one of the team
thinks it may be a common ancestor
of both dogs and wolves. “It’s
normally relatively easy to tell the
difference between the two,” David
Stanton told CNN. “The fact that we
SERGEY FEDOROV

can’t might suggest that it’s from

a population that was ancestral to
both – to dogs and wolves.” ❚

Artificial intelligence

Firms must explain AI decision-making

BUSINESSES and other
organisations could face
multimillion-pound fines if they
are unable to explain decisions
made by artificial intelligence,
under plans put forward by the
UK’s data watchdog this week.
The Information
Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said
its new guidance was vital because
the UK is at a tipping point where
many firms are using AI to inform
decisions for the first time. This
could include human resources
departments using machine
learning to shortlist job applicants
based on analysis of their CVs.
The regulator says it is the first
in the world to put forward rules
on explaining choices taken by AI.
About two-thirds of UK financial
service companies are using AI
to make decisions, including
insurance firms to manage claims,
and an ICO survey shows that
about half of the UK public are
concerned about algorithms
making decisions that humans
would usually explain.
AI researchers are already
being called on to do more to
unpack the “black box” nature
of how machine learning arrives
at results.
Simon McDougall at the ICO
says: “This is purely about
explainability. It does touch
on the whole issue of black box
explainability, but it’s really
driving at what rights do people
have to an explanation. How do
you make an explanation about
an AI decision transparent, fair,
understandable and accountable
to the individual?”
The guidance, which is
now out for consultation,
“A survey shows that
about half the public are
concerned about decisions
being made by algorithms”
tells organisations how to
communicate explanations
to people in a form that they
will understand. Failure to
do so could, in extreme cases,
result in a fine of up to 4 per
cent of a company’s global
turnover, under the European
Union’s data protection law.
Not having enough money
or time to explain AI decisions
won’t be an acceptable excuse,
says McDougall. “They have to
be accountable for their actions.
If they don’t have the resources
to properly think through how
they are going to use AI to make
decisions, then they should be
reflecting on whether they
should be using it all.” He also
hopes the step will result in firms
that buy-in AI systems rather
than building their own asking
more questions of how they work.
The guidance is expected
to take effect in 2020. ❚
Adam Vaughan

10 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

Animals Briefing

Savvy brown bears

stay near people to
Your guide to this week’s
keep their cubs safe UN climate summit
Michael Marshall Adam Vaughan

FEMALE brown bears with cubs What is COP25? What is the aim of the talks? What are the expectations like?
seem to hang around near people’s The Conference of the Parties: They are largely a stepping Mood music for COP25 has
homes. It may be a way to avoid United Nations jargon for stone to 2020, the most set the bar low. That’s partly
males, who would force the females the annual meeting of important year for global because the UN summit that
to abandon their young earlier. nearly 200 countries to climate efforts since the Paris Guterres organised in New York
Joanie Van de Walle at talk climate change. deal was agreed in 2015. That is in September failed to catalyse
Sherbrooke University in Canada because countries are expected significant new action by world
and her colleagues studied brown Where is it happening? to upgrade their carbon-curbing leaders. The hope is that, at a
bears living in a rolling landscape There has been a game of plans and potentially outline time when the US has begun
of managed forests, bogs and lakes musical chairs concerning their long-term plans to get to to formally withdraw from the
in Sweden. The area was dotted who is hosting. Originally, it net-zero emissions, ahead of a Paris Agreement, countries will
with houses and cabins. was Brazil, which later backed crunch summit in Glasgow next reaffirm their commitment to
Female brown bears keep their out. Then Chile stepped in, but year, COP26. In the meantime, the framework that secured the
cubs for 1.5 or 2.5 years. A female social unrest in Santiago saw the the talks in Madrid need to tidy deal. “I think COP25 can deliver,
who keeps offspring for 2.5 years conference moved to Madrid in up outstanding questions about at the very best, a promise to do
can bestow more care, perhaps Spain at the eleventh hour. the rules of the Paris Agreement. what governments agreed in
raising survival chances, but may Paris,” says Mónica Araya, a
come into conflict with males who Who is going? Like what? former climate negotiator
want to mate with her. Males may Around 30 heads of state, Largely technical stuff – but with for Costa Rica.
kill a cub outright, or drive it off. plus the UN secretary general, real effects. One issue is how
“Males would have an interest António Guterres. Climate international carbon trading Who are the key players?
in shortening the period of maternal campaigner Greta Thunberg between countries, known as The US played a vital role
care,” says Van de Walle. “We crossed the Atlantic Ocean in Article 6, will work. The key in the run-up to Paris, which
thought females might come a catamaran to attend, as she there is to ensure the rules avoid continued until Donald Trump
up with counter-tactics.” didn’t want to fly back from the double counting carbon credits. became president. Araya sees
To check this, her team used US, where she gave a passionate Timelines and clarity for when leadership in smaller nations,
GPS collars and helicopters to track and often angry address at UN countries should submit carbon such as New Zealand, which
23 male bears and 16 female bears climate talks in September. plans in 2020 should also be set. recently passed a law to hit net-
with cubs. They found that females zero emissions by 2050. But the
that only kept cubs for 1.5 years focus is on China and the EU.
had similar habitats to males, but
females that spent more time close Why are they so important?
to human homes kept cubs for The EU’s member states
2.5 years (Behavioral Ecology and could reach an agreement
Sociobiology, doi.org/dgbj). on a net-zero 2050 target on
In Sweden, hunters aren’t 12 December. The expectation is
allowed to kill family groups, so that the EU and China will make
females with cubs have little to fear. an announcement at a joint
In contrast, males and lone females summit next September in the
are fair game, so have good reason run-up to COP26, detailing their
to avoid places where people live. more ambitious carbon plans,
“It’s a really interesting in a similar way to an influential
observation to see these differences move by the US and China
in females,” says Dieter Lukas at before the 2015 Paris summit.
the Max Planck Institute for But tensions have flared
Evolutionary Anthropology in between China and the EU over
Leipzig, Germany, who has studied the latter’s recent proposals for
RAFAEL MARCHANTE/REUTERS

infanticide by male animals. a “carbon border tax”, which

However, he isn’t convinced that could complicate matters.  ❚
the risk of infanticide is what pushes
females to venture close to homes. Thunberg arrives in
He points out that cubs that go solo Portugal by boat on her
aged 1.5 years normally survive. ❚ way to the Madrid talks

7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 11

News
Biodiversity

Race to find wild relatives of crops

to help secure world food supplies
Michael Le Page

SEEDS from hundreds of wild more than 12 million seeds have The seeds are now being sent to where a wild barley was still
relatives of food crops such been collected,” says Chris Cockel, non-profit breeding organisations growing after a massive fire
as bananas and rice have been at Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank in around the world. Some will also devastated its habitat.
collected to save their valuable the UK, who also worked on the be stored in seed banks. Sometimes they were too
genetic diversity before it is lost. project. These come from about In some cases, the collectors late. In Costa Rica, collectors
This could be crucial for feeding 5000 locations and represent arrived in the nick of time. In found only sugar cane
the world as the climate changes. 400 relatives of food crops. Ethiopia, samples from multiple plantations and urban sprawl
“It was a massive effort,” says Plants sampled include a type species were taken from a region where a wild rice used to grow.
Hannes Dempewolf at the Crop of wild carrot that grows in salty that will soon be flooded by a dam. “We have made incredible
Trust in Bonn, Germany, which led water, an oat relative resistant In Chile, they found only one site progress,” Marie Haga, director of
the 10-year project. The next step to the powdery mildew that the Crop Trust, said in a statement.
is to use the wild plants to breed devastates normal oats, and a Seeds of Pterocarpus “But there is more to be done,
new crop varieties with traits such kind of bean that tolerates high rotundifolius trees and as threats to the world’s
as resistance to drought or disease. temperatures and drought. stored in the UK biodiversity mount, this work
That is important because is more urgent than ever.”
we know that if farmers keep As well as improving existing
cultivating the same varieties crops in this way, we should also
in the same way, crop yields can be conserving and domesticating
plummet as pests and diseases wild plants that are rarely grown
evolve and spread. and eaten, says Fernie. At present
What is more, climate change is the world is over-reliant on a
now also hitting food production, handful of crops, some of which
by making floods and droughts are grown in locations where
more extreme. “You have to walk conditions aren’t ideal.
faster to stand still,” says Alisdair In these places, domesticating
Fernie of the Max Planck Institute local plants – which can now be
ANDREW MCROBB/ © RBG KEW

for Molecular Plant Physiology done very rapidly – could allow

in Germany, who wasn’t involved more food to be grown in a more
in the project. sustainable way. But for farmers
This is why the Crop Trust set to diversify the plants they grow,
out to save the genetic diversity consumers will have to diversify
present in wild plants. “Since 2013, their diets. ❚

Social media

Russia’s ‘troll their permission, during October
and November 2017. The goal
factory’ has little was to see how interaction with
real impact other people on Twitter affected
their attitudes to politics.
RUSSIAN interference in Then Twitter released the names
democratic debate on social of more than 4000 accounts linked
media might not actually be that to the Internet Research Agency
effective. That is the conclusion (IRA), a firm in Saint Petersburg that
of one of the first major studies allegedly delivers disinformation on
to look at how such campaigns behalf of the Russian government.
affect public opinion. Hillygus and her colleagues realised
Sunshine Hillygus at Duke that the Twitter users they were
University in North Carolina and following may have interacted
her colleagues tracked more than with the IRA accounts.
1200 politically partisan Twitter “We were able to figure out
users on the social network, with within our sample who was
exposed to those trolls in that
window between us measuring
their attitudes at two different
times,” she says. One in five of the
people that the team monitored
interacted with IRA accounts.
Each person in the study was
measured on six political attitudes
and behaviours, including where
they placed themselves on the
political spectrum, and how they
would feel if a family member
“Tweets posted by the
accounts accounted for
only 0.1 per cent of their
Twitter interactions”
married someone politically opposed
to them. Contrary to fears expressed
in the media, people remained
steadfast in their opinions, even
after being targeted by IRA accounts
(PNAS, doi.org/df8c).
“Interaction with IRA accounts
didn’t change people’s attitudes
or behaviours,” says Hillygus.
Saif Shahin at American University
in Washington DC says he isn’t
surprised by the results, as tweets
posted by IRA accounts represented
0.1 per cent of all the liking,
retweeting and responding that the
study’s participants did on Twitter. ❚
Chris Stokel-Walker

12 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

 News
Animals
Older nightingales
keep up to date
with the latest songs
Chelsea Whyte
BY PRACTISING new songs in
their wintering grounds, adult
male thrush nightingales may be
better prepared to impress mates
in the spring breeding season.
After mating in northern
Europe, thrush nightingales
migrate to sub-Saharan Africa
for the winter. In Europe, their
songs are used to defend
territory and attract mates, but
it was unclear why they carried
on singing in the wintering
grounds. “The birds are
practising songs in Africa even
in their later years,” says Abel
Souriau at Charles University
in the Czech Republic.
He and his colleagues
recorded the songs of wild
thrush nightingales in breeding
grounds in Poland and Russia,
and compared them with the
songs heard in wintering
grounds in Tanzania.
They broke down each song
into the syllable-like elements
that make up the melodies,
looking for common patterns.
These include the pairs of notes
that often come at the start
of a song, repeated notes and
complex trills, and the rhythmic
notes typically used at the end.
These elements were in all the
VASILIY VISHNEVSKIY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
14 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
songs recorded in Poland and
Russia. But 89 per cent of the
Tanzanian songs lacked this
structure, were missing the
pauses usually found between
phrases and had high variation
in the notes and trills that make
up the song (Behavioral Ecology
and Sociobiology, doi.org/df8h).
This suggests the birds listen
to their neighbours in the spring
and then remix song elements
into new patterns in a kind of
jam session over the winter.
“What we love in nightingales
is that they sing with so much
complexity and regularity, like
classical music. But this is totally
random vocalisation – there’s no
beginning, no end. It’s more like
improvising,” says Souriau.
Thrush nightingales typically
know between 23 and 42
songs, and they usually learn
them when they are young.
“The winter songs recorded
in this study are more typical
of songs sung during early
song development and suggest
that thrush nightingales
may be singing during the
winter to improve the quality
of their song,” says Marjorie
Sorensen at the University
of Guelph in Canada. ❚
Chemistry
A strange twist to
how crystals form
Joshua Howgego
A CHANCE discovery in
a 90-year-old German
book may have completely
overturned our understanding
of how crystals grow.
The defining feature of a
crystal is that it is composed
of a pattern of atoms that repeats
in all directions with perfect
ALEXANDER SHTUKENBERG
symmetry. This neat structure
makes it possible to diffract X-rays
through crystals to reveal the
pattern inside, a technique
instrumental in understanding
the atomic structure of many
important drugs, like penicillin. Twisted crystals are
But X-ray diffraction is very making waves in the
difficult to apply to small crystals, world of chemistry
so we have long been unsure
of what crystals look like when He has now found twisting in
they begin to grow. common over-the-counter drugs,
Bart Kahr at New York including aspirin, paracetamol
University has been trying to and ibuprofen (Crystal Growth &
solve this puzzle since 2007, when Design, doi.org/df8g).
“The point was to emphasise
“I asked everybody in how something so common can be
the world about this. so poorly appreciated,” says Kahr.
Nobody knew what the His work has been “really
heck I was talking about” great at focusing on the very thin,
hair-like crystals that nobody
he came across a book published could solve and that tended to
in 1929 called “Gedrillte” Kristalle, be ignored”, says Sally Price at
which describes many tiny University College London.
crystals with helical shapes. “I find it fascinating that
Gedrillte is German for “drilled”, such twisted structures may
and so was perhaps meant be a precursor to non-twisted
to signify how the crystals crystals,” says Matthew Fuchter
resembled helical drill bits. at Imperial College London.
This was a big surprise to Kahr. “The fact a given structure grows
Crystals tend to have straight sides twisted only to then unwind as
and geometric shapes. “I asked it becomes larger is amazing.”
everybody in the world about So how do crystals go from
this,” says Kahr. “Nobody knew being twisted when they are tiny,
what the heck I was talking about.” to straight when they are larger?
He began investigating This is an “intellectual chasm”,
and soon confirmed that one says Kahr, and one that he is
type of crystal could grow in a now starting to investigate.
twist. Over the past decade, he “Twisting is surely teaching
and his colleague Alexander us what is a crystal, especially in
Shtukenberg have found about the early stages of growth, and
150 examples, and Kahr says that is foundational, so who
another 100 or so have also been knows what it could eventually
reported by other scientists. explain,” says Kahr. ❚
Dating apps Blood donation

Tinder may not

be much good for
UK’s new blood donor
finding a partner rules are safe
Chris Stokel-Walker Alice Klein

TINDER doesn’t seem to be as good NEW rules that make it easier with men have to abstain from with 102 the previous year.
at finding you a partner as you for gay and bisexual men in the sex before donating blood to Blood transfusions resulted in
might think. An analysis of the UK to donate blood have been three months, on the guidance one person becoming infected
match-making service has found found to be safe, but equal rights of the UK’s Advisory Committee with hepatitis B and another
that most people don’t meet up campaigners say they don’t go on the Safety of Blood, Tissues with hepatitis E, but this was
with others through the app and far enough to eliminate and Organs. below the required rate of no
the chances of meeting someone discrimination. Two years in, this change more than one infection per
interested in a long-term Most rich countries, hasn’t compromised the safety 1 million transfusions.
relationship are relatively low. including the US and Australia, of the UK’s donor blood supply, Several other countries have
Trond Viggo Grøntvedt at the only allow men who have sex says Katy Davison of Public followed the UK’s lead. Canada
Norwegian University of Science with men to donate blood if Health England, who presented moved to a three-month
and Technology and his colleagues they have abstained from sex the first data at a meeting abstinence period in June,
surveyed 269 students in Norway for at least 12 months, because of the AABB international and France, Denmark and the
who said they were current or men in these countries have a Netherlands have approved
former Tinder users. About 60 per
cent of the students were women.
People reported that, on average,
higher risk of getting HIV and
hepatitis from sex. In the US, for
example, two-thirds of new HIV
3 months
How long gay and bisexual men
four-month abstinence periods.
However, activist group
Freedom to Donate says these
they had been matched to more infections result from male-to- are asked not to have sex before new rules are still discriminatory
than 100 people during their time male sexual contact. donating blood in the UK because they group people
using the app. But only about half of All donated blood is tested together based on sexuality
the participants said they had ever before it is used, but it takes blood bank association in rather than individual
actually met a match in person. The time for recent HIV and San Antonio, Texas. behaviour. It wants governments
likelihood that a study participant hepatitis infections to become There was no significant to introduce individualised risk
would use Tinder to meet a potential detectable, which is why most rise in infected blood. Out of assessments that would allow
partner was the same for men and countries ask that higher-risk 2 million blood donations made men who have sex with men
women (Evolutionary Psychological donors avoid sex for a period in the UK in 2018, seven tested with low-risk sexual behaviour –
Science, doi.org/df79). of time before giving blood. positive for HIV, compared with like those in monogamous
Only about 25 per cent of study However, modern screening six in 2017. These donations relationships or who always use
participants said they had used tests can detect HIV and were discarded and no one protection – to donate blood
the app to meet someone interested hepatitis within one month received HIV-infected blood, without having to abstain.
in a long-term relationship. of a person being infected. she told the meeting. One major question that
Grøntvedt’s team also discovered In November 2017, England, In addition, 89 blood needs to be addressed before
that some 20 per cent of people Scotland and Wales shortened donations tested positive for individualised risk assessments
had used Tinder to meet a partner the time that men who have sex hepatitis in 2018, compared can be introduced more widely
for a one-night stand – although the is whether people taking pre-
participants reported they were as exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)
likely to have a one-night stand with drugs can safely donate blood,
someone they met via other means. says Brian Custer at US blood
Tinder might not be an efficient research institute Vitalant.
way of meeting a long-term These medicines lower the
committed partner, says Grøntvedt. risk of getting HIV from sex by
“But this is one study from Norway,” about 99 per cent when taken
he cautions. “We need to see more properly. But HIV can still be
cross-cultural studies.” contracted if PrEP is taken
Gareth Tyson at Queen Mary inconsistently, and the virus
University of London is sceptical may not show up in screening
that Tinder has had much effect on tests because PrEP reduces
BERND VOGEL/GETTY IMAGES

dating. “Tinder may not be rewriting the viral load in the blood,

the fundamentals of modern dating: says Custer. ❚
similar patterns continue, simply
in a new arena,” he says. There has been no rise
Tinder didn’t respond to New in HIV or hepatitis in
Scientist’s request for comment. ❚ donated blood

7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 15

News
Mental health Analysis Screen time

Suicidal behaviour No, teens aren’t addicted to smartphones Journalists

linked to two brain can’t seem to resist headlines claiming that screens are ruining
networks children’s lives, but the evidence is slim, says Clare Wilson
Clare Wilson

PEOPLE who are suicidal seem Fear not: this is likely

to have unusual patterns of brain to be absolutely fine
activity. The differences aren’t big
enough to identify people who spend so much time gaming on
may try to kill themselves. “But we their phones that they won’t stop
hope it will provide us with more to get washed or leave the house.
information about what may be That certainly would be disturbing
happening in terms of brain behaviour, but this study doesn’t
mechanisms,” says Anne-Laura tell us anything about the number
van Harmelen at the University of teens in such an extreme state.
of Cambridge. Another concern is that the
The finding comes from a studies included in the review
review of 131 brain-scan studies, were unrepresentative, says
RICHARD BAKER/GETTY IMAGES

comprising more than 12,000 Amy Orben at the University of

people. Van Harmelen and her Cambridge. That is because Kalk’s
colleagues looked to see whether team scanned the database of all
there are distinctive patterns of studies on phone use by using
brain activity in those who had “addictive” as one of the search
made suicide attempts or had terms. Studies that found low
been thinking about suicide. levels of problematic use may
Most of these studies compared KNOW any teenagers? Chances that some teens are on their have been overlooked, says Orben.
people with a certain mental health are they will have a phone on phones an awful lot. Kalk and co-author Ben Carter,
condition, such as depression, who them – and that is a big mental The researchers looked at also at King’s College, agree that
had a history of suicidal behaviour, health problem. At least, that is the studies that used surveys to assess this is a limitation but say the
with a similar group with that impression you get from recent people’s behaviour. The most findings still suggest a pattern
condition who hadn’t become headlines saying that one in four common survey includes several that requires further investigation.
suicidal, or with people without teens are addicted to smartphones. questions that could merely The other claim, that phones
mental health problems. These reports were based on a indicate high levels of phone use are making young people
The team found that two brain paper finding that 23 per cent of without it necessarily being a depressed, isn’t supported at
networks appear to function teens are using their phones in a pathological medical condition. all; the studies merely show a
differently. One of these involves problematic way. A press release Questions include whether correlation between phone use
areas at the front of the head said that this was “consistent people use their phone for longer and reported mental health issues,
known as the medial and lateral with a behavioural addiction”. than they had intended, whether not that phones are the cause.
ventral prefrontal cortex and their The paper also found that it had caused them to miss some It is plausible that feeling
connections to regions involved those with problematic use were depressed because, for instance,
in emotion. This may lead to
difficulties regulating emotions,
says van Harmelen.
three times more likely to report
feeling depressed, anxious or
that they weren’t getting enough
23%
Apparent number of teenagers
you don’t have many friends
makes you more likely to game
or talk online as a way of coping.
A second involves regions sleep. The narrative is irresistible: addicted to their phone If that is so, parents who respond
known as the dorsal prefrontal smartphones are giving our to the latest headlines by taking
cortex and inferior frontal gyrus children mental health issues planned schoolwork, or if they their child’s phone away could
system, which play a role in decision (BMC Psychiatry, doi.org/df7z). had been told by others they make things worse.
making (Molecular Psychiatry, But it is debatable whether were using it too much. Can To be fair to the researchers,
doi.org/dgbf). anyone can be addicted to their this really identify addiction? their paper does state that they
However, the differences in phone – or to using the internet Substitute “phone” for “book” have only found an “association”
these networks may just reflect that or playing computer games. Some and you can imagine a keen between phone use and mental
people who are suicidal are in more researchers say it is possible, while reader answering yes to many health issues, but the fact that
distress, rather than indicating others say it is meaningless to use of these questions. this isn’t proof of causation has
specific thoughts of suicide. ❚ the term addiction in this context. When I put this to one of the been glossed over by much of the
Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans: The new paper, which is a study authors, Nicola Kalk at media. It is almost as if journalists
116123 (samaritans.org). Visit summary of 41 previous studies King’s College London, she said can’t resist a good story about
bit.ly/SuicideHelplines for hotlines of phone use, doesn’t shed light the surveys were widely used. She teenagers and their phones.
and websites for other countries. on this question, except to confirm also cited examples of teens who You might say we are addicted. ❚

16 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

 News In brief
TONY VINGERHOETS / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Infectious diseases
Early therapy best
for babies with HIV
TREATING infants infected with
HIV as soon as possible after birth
seems to be most effective at
reducing signs of the virus.
Roger Shapiro at Harvard
University and his colleagues
studied 20 babies with HIV born
in Botswana. Ten of them had
antiretroviral therapy for HIV
rapidly, normally within a day
of birth, and the others started
treatment at around 4 months old.
The researchers then checked how
the babies were doing two years
after starting treatment.
The babies treated early had
stronger immune systems, with
fewer damaged immune cells,
and 200 times fewer dormant HIV-
infected cells, which are capable of
reactivating (Science Translational
Medicine, doi.org/df8d).
Testing and treatment should
happen early, whenever feasible,
says Shapiro. Without treatment,
18 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
Health
Gut microbes may help us
fight diabetes with exercise
THE microorganisms in your gut may
dictate whether workouts could help
you stave off diabetes, opening the
door to treatments that target them.
Type 2 diabetes is a growing
problem. It can be prevented by
lifestyle interventions, says Aimin
Xu at the University of Hong Kong.
Exercise is the most cost-effective
method, but it doesn’t reduce the
risk of diabetes for everyone.
To understand why, Xu and his
team studied how exercise affected
the microbiome and metabolism of
39 men with prediabetes – when
blood sugar levels are higher than
normal, but not high enough for a
diagnosis of diabetes.
The participants were randomly
assigned to a sedentary control
group or to a group that undertook
a three-month supervised exercise
training course. Both were told
Technology
25 to 50 per cent of children
infected with HIV die within Welcome to the
their first two years of life. dawn of robo-bin
HIV can be transmitted from
a woman to her child during WANT to turn everyday items into
pregnancy, childbirth and robotic versions? Now you can
breastfeeding. In most cases, with a smart computer program
transmission can be prevented by that designs custom 3D printed
giving treatment to the mother, parts that can be used to automate
says Shapiro. Left untreated, HIV a range of household objects.
causes AIDS – a fatal syndrome Xiang “Anthony” Chen at the
that leaves the body unable to University of California, Los
fight off infections. The condition Angeles, and his team developed
progresses more quickly in infants the tool, known as Robiot. A user
than adults because their immune shoots a short video of themselves
systems are still developing. moving an object – opening a bin
Antiretroviral therapy normally
prevents AIDS from developing
but isn’t a cure, meaning that the
drugs must be taken for life.
The latest results add to
growing evidence that early
HIV treatment leads to better
JIAHAO LI/UCLA HCI RESEARCH
outcomes for children. As a result,
the World Health Organization
now recommends testing at birth
or soon after, and initiating
treatment immediately upon
diagnosis. Layal Liverpool
to maintain their usual diet.
While all those in the exercise
group had similar levels of weight
and fat-mass reduction, only 70 per
cent had significant improvements
in glucose metabolism and insulin
sensitivity, Xu found. An analysis of
their gut microbes revealed that the
people who saw the improvements
had different microbiomes.
Next, the researchers used faecal
samples to transplant the microbes
from participants into obese mice.
Only the rodents receiving microbes
from people who responded well to
exercise saw insulin resistance and
glucose regulation improve (Cell
Metabolism, doi.org/df7q).
The findings raise the possibility
that targeting gut microbiota can
maximise the benefit of exercise
and could help doctors personalise
treatments. Ruby Prosser Scully
or angling a lamp, for example.
Robiot then analyses the motion
to create a 3D model that can
replicate the movement.
Scrutinising the video, the
program isolates the object from
its surroundings. The system can
recognise whether the object is
moving in a linear or rotational
fashion, and which parts of the
object need to remain stationary.
It matches the movements to a
repository of 3D models, choosing
the most similar. The system then
3D prints the model, including
motion sensors, which the user
can fix to the object to control it.
Six people of varying technical
ability tried the system and turned
seven objects into robots with
relative ease, including a bin
(pictured). For now, the system can
create only one kind of motion in
any model, but the team plans to
enable more complex movements
(Proceedings of the 32nd Annual
ACM Symposium on User Interface
Software and Technology, doi.org/
df72) Donna Lu
 New Scientist Daily
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Biotechnology
Really brief
They added genes to the E. coli part of the growing process, but
Modified microbes genome for an enzyme that the researchers think they may be
eat greenhouse gas converts atmospheric CO2 to able to change this in the future.
biomass and deleted genes Because E. coli is easily
BACTERIA have been rewired to needed for sugar metabolism. manipulated and already widely
live off carbon dioxide and could The researchers then left the exploited for biotechnology,
LUCAS NINNO/GETTY IMAGES

be used to produce biofuels in a bacteria for several months. After the possibilities of using it are
more sustainable way. 200 days, they found that the “endless”, says Frank Sargent
We already use strains of E. coli microbes had successfully evolved at Newcastle University, UK.
to make biofuels, chemicals and to grow without needing sugar The bacteria could use CO2
medicines, such as insulin. for food (Cell, doi.org/ggdmhq). generated by the steel or concrete
However, they are usually fed Milo says he didn’t expect to industry to make insulin, for
Climate change sugar. Ron Milo at the Weizmann be able to make such “drastic example. “This type of directed
food supply alert Institute of Science in Israel and changes” to the microbe’s evolution is already a Nobel prize-
his team have used a process natural mode of growth. winning type of science and this
Using state-of-the-art called directed evolution to make Currently, the bacteria still emit is a terrific example of why,”
climate and crop models, the bacteria consume CO2 instead. more CO2 than they consume as says Sargent. Gege Li
researchers have calculated
that, in the worst-case Ancient humans Seismology
climate change scenario,
about 90 per cent of the
global population will live Internet cables can
in countries where both sense earthquakes
farms and fisheries have
falling food productivity by FIBRE-OPTIC cables that bring us
NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

2100 (Science Advances, speedy downloads can be used for

doi.org/df8j). detecting tremors.
Nathaniel Lindsey at the
Air pollution linked University of California, Berkeley,
to hospital visits and his colleagues temporarily
turned 20 kilometres of existing
Admissions to hospital go underwater fibre-optic cables into
up when air pollution is a row of seismic sensors under the
high. An analysis of more Pacific Ocean just off California.
than 95 million US records They recorded a 3.5-magnitude
has revealed that, for every quake and discovered a new fault
1 microgram per cubic system close to the coast.
metre increase in fine An extensive underwater
pollution particles on a We may not have killed off network of these cables, which
given day, admissions went carry light, connects all the
up by more than 2000 the Neanderthals after all continents except Antarctica and
people (BMJ, doi.org/df8k). transmits telecommunications
NEANDERTHALS may have died out may not be the case after simulating data, including internet traffic.
Vaccine may spell not because of competition from the Neanderthal population. The researchers used a
end of bovine TB our species, but sheer bad luck. They tracked three processes that technique called distributed
Fossils of Neanderthals (pictured) could have made the Neanderthals acoustic sensing, which works by
A modified version of mean we know they lived in Europe vulnerable. The first is inbreeding, sending pulses of light through a
the BCG vaccine against and Asia for hundreds of thousands which can lead to a build-up of cable and analysing light that
tuberculosis could allow of years. However, their population harmful mutations. The second is returns to detect slight movement.
cattle around the world to was always small, probably just a the Allee effect: in tiny populations During a four-day experiment,
be vaccinated against the few thousand, and they died out finding a suitable mate is harder. the team measured an earthquake,
bovine form of the disease. about 40,000 years ago. Finally, there is random chance. as well as the scattering of the
At present, infected cattle At this time modern humans were For instance, unusually high death quake’s wavefronts by previously
are killed and animals entering Europe from Africa in large rates in a single year can be unknown faults in Monterey Bay.
thought to spread TB, such numbers for the first time. As a catastrophic for a small population. The method could be used to
as badgers, are culled, result, many researchers suspect The team’s simulation covered turn other cables that aren’t in
which has been a source our species was somehow to blame. 10,000 years and found these use into offshore seismic sensors
of controversy (Scientific But Krist Vaesen of Eindhoven three processes were enough to to map underwater faults and
Reports, doi.org/df8n). University of Technology in the lead to extinction (PLoS One, earthquakes more extensively
Netherlands and his team say that doi.org/df77). Michael Marshall (Science, doi.org/df8m). DL

7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 19

News Insight
UK general election

The climate election

The issue of climate change has risen up the political agenda,
but how will the UK’s parties deliver? Adam Vaughan reports
TWO ice sculptures melting under
the glare of TV studio lights has
become an iconic image of the
UK’s general election. Channel 4
News used them to represent the
absence of Conservative and
Brexit party leaders during the
country’s first TV election debate
dedicated to climate change. The
heads of five other parties sparred
on subjects including aviation,
tree-planting, energy production
and meat consumption.
It is no surprise that many
commentators have dubbed this
the climate election. Barely a day

KIRSTY O’CONNOR/GETTY IMAGES

has passed without a bidding war
on who will provide the most
renewable electricity, make homes
greener fastest or plant the most
trees (see “Millions of trees”, right).
It is quite a turnaround from
the last election campaign, in
2017. Back then, Nick Molho felt
compelled to write to newspapers
to lament the glaring absence
of climate change on the agenda.
“Obviously I didn’t need to do
that this time round,” says the
executive director of Aldersgate
Group, which lobbies on behalf
of a group of major businesses
that want stronger climate action.
There is a good reason for
the shift. During the last election,
just 8 per cent of people said the
environment was in the top three
issues facing the country. Now
polling firm YouGov puts the
figure at 26 per cent, behind only
the economy, health and Brexit.
“It’s really different to previous
elections,” says Jim Watson,
director of the UK Energy Research
Centre. “That’s welcome, because
you’re getting this competition
between the parties to come up
with plans and detail.”
So how should a voter navigate
the blizzard of claims if climate
change, rather than Brexit, is their
major concern on 12 December?
An obvious starting point is
the year by which parties are
promising to reduce the UK’s
emissions to net zero. On that
basis alone, a voter would back the
Green party, which has promised
2030. But with the Greens polling
in single digits, their chances of
forming a government are
essentially zero. Instead, we will
mostly focus on the UK’s three
main parties.
Labour has rowed back from
a similar pledge to the one from
the Greens, instead offering a
“substantial majority of our
“The net zero deadline is a
distraction. Look at what
the parties will do in the
next term of office”
emissions reductions by 2030”.
The Liberal Democrats offer 2045
at the latest, and the Conservatives
2050, which is the deadline signed
into law earlier this year.
Some say the headline date isn’t
the big issue. “Changing the date
of the target right now is less
important than getting on and
delivering it. We can always
change it later,” says Molho.
“When the target date should be
is a distraction. It [2050] is hard
enough already. People should be
looking at what the parties will do
within the next term of office,”
says Watson.
That is partly because 2050
is the date recommended by
the UK’s independent climate
advisers, and partly because
those same advisers have spent
the past few years warning that
the country is lacking the policies
to meet its carbon targets for 2025
and 2030. While the UK has made
huge strides in cleaning up
electricity generation, progress
in other sectors has been lacking.
In that case, what are the climate
pledges to look for? “The big ones
are homes, transport and industry,
as well as finishing off the
decarbonisation of the power
system,” says Paul Ekins at
University College London.
The Lib Dems would force all new
homes to be zero carbon soonest,
by 2021, four years before the
Ice sculptures stand in for
absent politicians during
a Channel 4 TV debate
Tories and a year before Labour.
There is also jockeying on who
will be strongest on upgrading
millions of existing homes.
Labour says “almost all” will meet
the “highest” energy efficiency
standards by 2030, saving an
average home more than £400
a year on energy bills. The party
boldly says that 50 per cent of heat
will be low-carbon rather than the
gas boilers most people rely on
today, up from less than 5 per cent
today. “That felt to me like a real
stretch,” says Watson.
Instead of numbers, the Lib
Dems offer “an emergency ten-
year programme to reduce energy
consumption from all buildings”,
funded with £6 billion a year.
The Conservatives’ pledge is much
lower: £2.5 billion over five years
for grants to upgrade homes, and
£3.8 billion over a decade to cut
emissions from social housing.
There is less of a gap between

20 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

 More Insight online
Your guide to a rapidly changing world
newscientist.com/insight
the parties on the electricity to
power those buildings. Everyone
backs renewables. Labour would
have 90 per cent of electricity
from low-carbon sources by 2030,
which includes renewables and
nuclear. The Lib Dems offer
80 per cent renewables by 2030,
up from about a third today. The
Conservatives have no headline
target, but promise a third more
offshore wind power than is
currently planned for 2030, and
support to help floating turbines.
“Voters need to look beyond
shiny promises of support for
renewable energy,” says Rebecca
Willis at Lancaster University, UK.
Petrol and diesel cars, flying and
fossil fuel production are more
important, because of the
emissions involved, she says.
All parties vow more charging
points for electric cars. Labour
and the Tories promise massive
“gigafactories” to make batteries
for them, in the style of electric car
firm Tesla. How they will make
that happen is unclear, however.
Tesla recently chose Germany
over the UK for its first European
Gigafactory.
The Lib Dems have the clearest
Millions of trees
Who would have predicted
that the UK election would
see politicians competing on
who will plant most trees? The
Conservatives have promised a
£640 million fund that should see
an “additional 75,000 acres of
trees a year” by 2025 – roughly
30 million trees a year in total.
The Liberal Democrats outbid
them with a pledge of 60 million
trees a year. The Labour
manifesto simply mentions
“an ambitious programme of
tree-planting”, but the party has
pledge on ditching internal
combustion engines: they say all
new cars sold will be electric by
2030, a decade earlier than the
UK’s existing plan. Labour is
vaguer, saying it will aim to ban
the sale of petrol and diesel cars
by 2030, while the Tories say they
will consult on an earlier date.
One clear dividing line is airport
expansion, which the Lib Dems
oppose, but Labour and the
“We’ve been waiting a long
time for proper political
debate about climate,
and now we’ve got one”
Conservatives don’t. “The aviation
stuff is the elephant in the room
for both Labour and the Tories
when it comes to the climate
emergency,” says Rebecca
Newsom at Greenpeace. For her,
another weakness for the Tories
is the “problematic” amount of
money – £28.8 billion – that they
have promised for building roads.
In other parts of the economy,
such as heavy industry, Labour
and the Lib Dems offer some
support for the clean production
of hydrogen, carbon capture and
also said it wants to plant
2 billion by 2040. The Brexit
party says it will plant millions,
but doesn’t specify how many.
Whichever party comes to
power, tree-planting needs to
ramp up massively if climate
targets are to be met. About
13,000 hectares of trees were
planted in the UK last year,
overwhelmingly in Scotland.
This is well short of the 30,000
that the UK’s climate advisers
says are needed annually for
net-zero emissions by 2050.
Working
hypothesis
Sorting the week’s
supernovae from
the absolute zeros
storage (CCS), and low-carbon
steel. The Tories are promising
£800 million for a CCS industrial
cluster by the mid-2020s.
While all the parties promise
action, they offer distinctly ▲ End of coal
different approaches. “The Ultra-polluting coal is
starkest difference is between the almost on the way out, as
way the Lib Dems have framed it, most major insurers now
which is much more focused refuse to back projects
market solutions, whereas fuelled by the black stuff.
with Labour it’s heavy public
investment and nationalisation,” ▲ Go AI
says Watson. He and Ekins aren’t AlphaGo, a Go-playing AI
convinced that state ownership developed by DeepMind,
will necessarily speed up has forced champion
decarbonisation, although Willis Lee Sedol into retirement.
says it could work. Some right- “There is an entity that
leaning commentators argue that cannot be defeated,”
it would even slow things down. he said.
The focus in this article has
been on three parties, but the ▲ Coral raves
possibility of no party getting a Music played through
majority means that the climate- underwater loudspeakers
heavy manifestos of the smaller could attract marine life to
parties could be important too. dying coral reefs. Time to
The Scottish National Party is break out the Eels, Phish
offering a “Green Energy Deal” to and Wet Wet Wet playlist.
boost renewables, including wave
and tidal, while Welsh party Plaid ▼ ISS toilets
Cymru promises a £20 billion For a brief period last
“Green Jobs Revolution”. week, both toilets on
“Given one of the possibilities is the International Space
we will get a hung parliament and Station were out of order.
the smaller parties may be in a It seems in space, no one
position to make demands, I think can hear you flush.
it does matter that those demands
are likely to include a strong ▼ Virtual reality
TOP: IMAGE SOURCE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; BOTTOM: @OLDLENTACH/TWITTER
climate programme,” says Ekins. In a sign that we really are
Beyond policies, Ekins says living in the Mootrix, a
parties should be judged on their Russian farm has slapped
previous record. In his view, that VR headsets on its dairy
favours Labour, because that party cows to help them relax.
passed the Climate Change Act in
2008 and signed the 2009 EU
renewable energy directive. Willis
disagrees. “The game has changed.
I’ve been waiting a long time for
proper political debate about
climate, and now we’ve got one.
So I think that we should judge
parties on what they’re offering
now, not on their past records.” ❚
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 21
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 Views
The columnist Letters
Graham Lawton on Transparency on
the environmental political micro-
impact of pets  p24 targeting  p26
Comment
Science’s fake news problem
A productivity-driven research culture encourages false results – but
there are welcome signs of a fightback, says Clare Wilson
C
LAIMS of “fake news”
within the UK Houses
of Parliament are nothing
new. This time, however, the
charge has been laid not at
the door of politicians, but of
scientists. And it was scientists
themselves making the claims.
They came at a meeting I attended
last week where the British
Neuroscience Association (BNA)
launched a fightback against bad
science with its “Credibility in
Neuroscience” campaign.
The problem isn’t just that some
findings turn out to be wrong. It is,
after all, the point of science to be
constantly questioning, testing
and refining hypotheses. The BNA
campaign claims that the entire
structural edifice of academia now
encourages mistakes to be made.
This starts with well-meaning
efforts by managers and funders
to judge researchers’ productivity.
That is done by gauging how many
papers they write and the prestige
of the journals that publish them,
as quantified by their “impact
factor” – basically, an average of
how often the papers they publish
are cited by other papers.
Researchers’ publication
records increasingly govern
every aspect of their career
success, including pay rises,
future jobs and funding for new
projects. In this “publish or perish”
culture, it is in their interests to
produce a blizzard of papers that
are groundbreaking and flashy,
so as to get published in high-
JOSIE FORD
impact journals. With an eye to
maintaining their impact factor,
Aperture
A stunning view
of Bali’s subak
rice terraces  p28
journals are incentivised to
publish such papers, rather than
ones that, for example, describe
attempts to replicate others’ work.
The resulting system is the
antithesis of how good science
should be done, namely by tackling
questions in a thoughtful and
systematic way and by testing and
retesting any unexpected result in
different labs and circumstances.
Prime evidence of how bad things
Culture
The best science-
themed gifts to
buy this year  p30
have become is the “replication
crisis” in psychology, where
doubts have been raised over
classic findings such as priming,
the idea that behaviour can be
changed by subtle, unconscious
cues. In psychiatry, a review
published this year called into
question two decades of work on
a link between depression and a
gene affecting the brain chemical
serotonin. “It wasn’t just that
Culture columnist
Silicon Valley lets tech
giants off easy, says
Chelsea Whyte  p32
Clare Wilson is a biomedical
reporter for New Scientist
@ClareWilsonMed
people said it mattered and it
didn’t, it’s that we built whole
castles in the air on it mattering,”
said psychologist Dorothy Bishop
of the University of Oxford at the
BNA event.
The campaign is a laudable
attempt to change this underlying
culture. As Bishop said, “We have
to do things in a way that ensures
discoveries are robust.” The aim is
to do that by lobbying universities
and funders, as well as by training
scientists in best practice, such as
data sharing and registering
studies before publication,
meaning mistakes are more
likely to be noticed.
Happily, it isn’t a lone
initiative. The recently launched
UK Reproducibility Network is
encouraging higher research
standards more broadly. Growing
numbers of bodies are signing the
San Francisco Declaration on
Research Assessment, made at a
cell biology conference in 2012, to
say they won’t use journal impact
factors in decisions on funding
and job appointments.
If the movement succeeds,
that would mean fewer interesting
stories for journalists like me to
write about, but the ones we do
cover would be more likely to be
true. “If everyone’s trying to do
groundbreaking research, you
just end up with a lot of holes in
the ground,” said Bishop. “You
don’t get anything built.”  ❚
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 23
Views Columnist
Graham Lawton is a staff
writer at New Scientist and
author of The Origin of (Almost)
Everything. You can follow him
@grahamlawton
Graham’s week
What I’m reading
I’ve just picked up a copy
of Reef Life by coral
expert Callum Roberts.
Can’t wait to dive in.
What I’m watching
The BBC adaptation of
His Dark Materials.
Brilliant, though Lyra’s
dæmon Pan is a painful
reminder of my late cat.
What I’m working on
A story about restaurants
where the food is
prepared, cooked and
served by robots.
This column will appear
monthly. Up next week:
Annalee Newitz
24 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
No planet B
Your pet’s ecological footprint From domestic cats’ ecocide of
small animals to the greenhouse gases they emit, owning a pet is
an environmental vice we must confront, writes Graham Lawton
O
NE of my cats has died,
and I am bereft. It wasn’t
the one we expected to
lose first, the saggy old ginger
tom, but the much younger one
who we thought had many years
left in him. Turns out he had a
weak heart. Mine is now broken.
I tell you this not to wallow in
grief but to raise an issue that
rarely gets an airing when we talk
about making personal sacrifices
to help the environment. I loved
my cat and I miss him, but I take
comfort from the fact that my
loss is the planet’s gain.
I have long suspected that my
cats are a major contributor to
my household’s environmental
footprint. Unlike the humans
who live there, they eat meat
every day. They also slaughter
wildlife. Though the one we lost
was a gentle soul, he was also a
ruthless killer. I have cleaned
up my fair share of decapitated
mice and shredded spiders, and
once watched, helpless and
aghast, as he killed a wren in
the back garden.
A few cans of cat food and the
odd mauled bird hardly constitute
ecocide, but summed across the
world, domestic cats are a serious
environmental menace. If you
doubt this – and I know I have
already raised some hackles –
I recommend a devastatingly
brilliant article called “The
ecological cost of pets” by biologist
Peter Marra of Georgetown
University and the Smithsonian
Conservation Biology Institute
in Washington DC.
Marra is a well-known critic of
cats. In 2016, he co-authored a book
called Cat Wars, which argued
that domestic moggies have a
devastating impact on wildlife.
His new article, published
in the journal Current Biology,
demolished my lingering hope
that the ecological impact of
my cats is negligible. In the UK,
for example, pet cats kill more
than 275 million small animals a
year. In the US, the toll is probably
in the billions. This is just pet cats;
feral cats kill even more (both my
cats were strays before we took
them in).
This predation is ecologically
significant, says Marra. It has
already contributed to the
extinction of 63 species worldwide
and continues to threaten
hundreds more. In certain
circumstances even a lone cat can
do irreversible damage. In the late
19th century, for example, the
Stephens Island wren was single-
“In the late
19th century, the
Stephens Island
wren was wiped
out by a cat called
Tibbles”
pawedly wiped out by a lighthouse
keeper’s cat called Tibbles.
In my defence, most of
these actual and threatened
extinctions are in faraway places,
not gardens in London, and the
British species of wren isn’t
remotely endangered. But that
doesn’t absolve me. The mere
presence of a free-roaming cat
can instil fear and stress in birds,
causing nesting adults to
reduce their parenting and
even abandon nests.
Some of the birds I see in my
garden, including house sparrows
and starlings, are already in
serious decline due to human-
induced habitat loss. Cats are
an extra pressure they could
do without.
If any dog lovers are feeling
smug at this point, don’t. Dogs
also stress wildlife. One study
found that areas of woodland
frequented by dog walkers
experience a 35 to 40 per cent
reduction in bird diversity
and abundance.
Pet ownership also imposes
wider environmental costs. Added
together, all the cats and dogs in
the US consume the same amount
of energy as 60 million people,
effectively increasing the
population by a fifth.
Ingredients in pet food are
often leftovers from the human
food chain, but this isn’t always
the case. Even if they are, they still
have to be processed, packaged
and transported. What comes
out the other end is an even
stinkier problem, equivalent to
the faeces of 90 million people,
generating 64 million tonnes
of greenhouse gases.
Being an animal lover and
caring about the environment
often go hand in hand. But they
aren’t compatible. I hate to say it,
but pet ownership is another
unsustainable aspect of modern
consumer lifestyles that we are
going to have to confront. It isn’t
the biggest, but it isn’t negligible.
Like almost every other
environmental vice, the problem
is getting worse as pet ownership
rises around the world.
That isn’t to say that pet
ownership is totally indefensible.
Marra accepts that it can have
major psychological and physical
benefits, and so supports
“responsible ownership”. In the
case of cats, that means keeping
them indoors at all times, which
I don’t think is compatible with
their own physical and
psychological health.
I went meat free for
environmental reasons. I’m
working on going cheese free
and car free. Going cat free will be
10 times harder than any of these,
but when the saggy old ginger tom
succumbs to the inevitable, I will
try to make that the end of it. ❚
 D SUA
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Views Your letters

Editor’s pick
Transparency on political
advertisement targeting
16 November, p 24
From Adrian Bowyer,
Foxham, Wiltshire, UK
Annalee Newitz is right that the real
problem with fake and lying political
advertisements isn’t that Facebook
and others promulgate them,
but that they allow them to be
micro-targeted, thereby avoiding
detection by the rest of us, and by
journalists in particular.
If it wanted to, Facebook could
easily avoid this problem, while
maintaining both its micro-
targeting business model and its
decision not to censor political
advertising. For the current system
to work, each advertisement must
have micro-targets specified by the
advertiser. There is no reason to
keep these secret: advertisers being
ashamed of them is no justification. and associated data archive are the systemic circulation, then There are carbon offset
The micro-target specifications among the largest in the world. bound CRISPR DNA could modify schemes, but the link between
could be indexed along with the Its data assimilation system the genome of any cells it infects. our money and trees being
corresponding advertisements. and its model of the global While this appears to be a planted that wouldn’t otherwise
The index could be searched to see atmosphere, oceans, land and ice powerful new gene-editing tool in be planted is tenuous. My family
the advertisements that had been are the world’s most advanced. plants, there is a risk that it might is planting trees in Portugal at €15
targeted at any group of people. With this foundation, an edit human genes as well. Until we per tree: 680 would cost €10,000.
Most of the software needed to do extension to the international learn more about it, regulators Possibly we will never plant all of
this is already part of the system. research institution you envisage ought to keep this genie firmly them, but we count each we plant
could surely be managed without sealed up inside its squirt bottle. as 13 hours of carbon offset, even if
too much delay. Can the next UK we do nothing else.
We have a model of global
government provide the required That figure of 680 trees is an
climate cooperation now Tree planting is something
global scientific leadership? underestimate, because as CO2
Leader, 23 November we can do for the climate levels have risen, the oceans have
From Austin Woods, London, UK 10 August, p 18 been compensating to some
You ask us to imagine an
Keep this genie sealed up From Adam Osen, extent by absorbing CO2. The
international research institution in its squirt bottle please Harlow, Essex, UK oceans will release some of this
dedicated to climate change, 9 November, p 7 Your article on ways of removing when we remove CO2 from the air,
bringing together “the best From Michael Phillips, carbon dioxide from the however we do it.
minds from climate science, New York, US atmosphere was fascinating. But we will do other things
energy technology, economics, Michael Le Page reports genetic Options included bioenergy, as well as planting trees, even as
social science and beyond”. engineering of plants using a carbon capture and storage and individuals, which may balance
The European Centre for spray-on mix of carbon dots and sequestration of carbon in the soil. things out.
Medium-Range Weather DNA coding for a CRISPR system. The only one on your list that
Forecasts, based in Reading, UK, This could be hazardous to ordinary people can do is to plant
Can a group of AIs actually
is an international institution humans. Like many nanoparticles, trees. But how effective is this?
supported by 34 states. It employs carbon dots easily penetrate the An average person in a simulate a chaotic world?
around 360 highly qualified staff skin, and they are increasingly developed country releases 5 October, p 38
from more than 30 countries. used for drug delivery. about 14 tonnes of CO2 a year and From Ben Haller,
More than 60 of its professional A human exposed to that the average tree absorbs about Ithaca, New York, US
staff operate the Copernicus spray could be at risk of droplets 22 kilograms a year. So to be Graham Lawton claims that a
Climate Change Service of the entering the body through the carbon neutral just by planting type of simulation called multi-
EU’s Copernicus Earth observation skin or nasal mucosa, or inhaled trees, the average person would agent artificial intelligence is
programme. Its supercomputer into the lungs. If carbon dots enter need to plant 680 trees a year. about to upend the world with

26 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

“highly detailed” simulations of
“entire artificial societies” with
“extraordinary accuracy”. For
argument’s sake, let’s grant
that we can construct such
simulations – even though we
cannot yet simulate even a single
artificial intelligence.
Could such an assemblage
ever accurately predict the future?
What, for example, will the world
look like in five years? That might
depend on whether Donald
Trump gets impeached, whether
India and Pakistan get into a
nuclear war over Kashmir,
whether the UK leaves the EU,
whether there is a pandemic
of a new zoonotic disease…
What is going to accurately
simulate future events like these?
Even in much smaller scenarios,
such as refugees in a Norwegian
city that Lawton mentions, I
suspect that social dynamics are
chaotic and cannot be predicted.
We are rather sceptical
of this ‘helical engine’
19 October, p 15
From Rory Allen, York, UK
David Burns’s idea for a “helical
engine” with no propellant is
ingenious. He imagines a movable
ring, whose mass is much greater
when it slides in one direction
than the other. But transferring
energy to the ring to increase its
velocity and hence, by the rules of
relativity, its mass also transfers
mass, and therefore creates
momentum. It seems to me that
the transfer of energy to and from
the source exactly cancels out the
transfer of mass by the ring.
From Tony Blake,
Adelaide, Australia
It looks hard to find any fault with
Burns’s design for propulsion
without a propellant, but
centuries of experience tell us
that, in all attempts to get around
the conservation of energy, an
increase in energy somewhere
is always balanced by an exactly
equal decrease somewhere else.
My guess is that this proposal
will turn out to be neglecting
some effect in general relativity.
I suspect that the answer to the
apparent anomaly might be found
in D. W. Sciama’s beautiful paper
“On the Origin of Inertia”, in which
he justifies Mach’s Principle – the
idea that the inertia of local
masses is an effect of all the
masses in the rest of the universe.
Several layers of the deep
mystery of consciousness
21 September, p 34
From Ed Subitzky, New York, US
Michael Graziano asks how the
brain, a material thing, produces
what are called qualia – the
redness of a rose, the stabbing of a
pain, the aroma of brewing coffee.
As basically a materialist, I am
forced to be quite puzzled by
qualia. There are two implications
in the question itself: a brain really
exists; and qualia really exist. It
seems to me that perhaps the only
way we know that the first is true is
because the second is true.
If qualia were in some way
not real, we couldn’t know that
we have a brain to produce
them. Perhaps we shouldn’t
draw a sharp distinction between
qualia and materiality.
From Derek Bolton,
Sydney, Australia
To me, consciousness means that
narrative that runs in my head,
like a film with added senses.
Graziano appears at first to take
the same view, but then conflates
it with concepts that probably
belong to a “lower” layer.
A key fact about this narrative,
as found by Benjamin Libet, is that
it runs about half a second behind
reality (11 August 2012, p 10). This
suggests a model of at least these
three layers: independent parallel
processes, analysing inputs and
competing for attention; a
resolution layer that selects
actions based on the competing
Want to get in touch?
Send letters to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London
WC2E 9ES or letters@newscientist.com; see terms at
newscientist.com/letters
drives and embodies attention
and the “global workspace”; and
a narrative layer, synthesising
inputs and chosen actions into
experience. A delay is necessary
because different sensory inputs
have different processing path
lengths. Maladjusted delays may
well be responsible for room-
spinning and speech-slurring
when drunk, and for déjà vu.
If this is correct, it reopens the
question of what consciousness is
for. I suggest it comes into its own
when we need to stop and think.
It provides a feedback to the lower
levels, allowing more sustained
consideration of a subject.
I think I can think without
language, as can my dog
Letters, 26 October
From Max Starkey, Avignon, France
Peter White argues that some
people without language can
think (Letters, 7 September)
and David Werdegar insists that
thought does depend on language.
That exchange on the subject
reminded me, being bilingual,
of questions I am often asked:
“in which language do you think”
and “in which language do you
dream”? After much thought, the
answer is neither. I think (and
dream) in concepts and images.
Language is only used to
communicate those concepts and
images. Sometimes, people in my
dreams do speak a language.
From Frank Siegrist,
Gland, Switzerland
People with a severe form of
aphasia may not identify a spoon
as a means of transporting food,
and therefore require help with
feeding, writes David Werdegar.
He concludes that thought
depends on language.
I am always surprised how easily
my dog identifies the hatch at the
back of any car, even of a make and
model she has never seen, as the
place she should be let in. In any
flat she straight away identifies
the kitchen as the place where her
water and food bowls should be.
Clearly dogs’ brains work with
abstract concepts. Concluding that
they therefore possess language
would be a bit of a stretch.
Hypnosis and achieving
goals in life and letters
9 November, p 34
From Terry Klumpp,
Melbourne, Australia
I write this letter in a state of
hypnosis. Now I’m going deeper
still, repeating, as you suggest,
an “affirmation” that helps me
achieve my desired outcome.
“This letter will be published.
This letter will be...”
From Kris Ericksen,
Wellington, New Zealand
Helen Thomson describes the
potential of self-hypnosis. What
is the difference between this
and mindfulness meditation?
They seem, to me, to involve
exactly the same processes.
The editor writes:
There are certainly many
parallels between the two
and there is likely to be shared
neurobiology. For many people,
the states of mind are very similar.
The biggest difference seems to
be that the end point of mindful
meditation is generally focused
on letting go – of worries, say –
and attempting to be fully in the
present. Self-hypnosis is much
more goal-focused, concentrating
on things you want to achieve. ❚
For the record
❚ Meat and dairy production
accounts for 85 per cent of the UK’s
total agricultural footprint, in the UK
and elsewhere (26 October, p 24).
❚ When Scottish greyface ewes
are injected with male levels of
testosterone, it is their daughters
that show the symptoms of
polycystic ovary syndrome
(23 November, p 16).
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 27
Views Aperture

28 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

Losing paradise?

Photographer David Lazar

NESTLED in the shadow of Bali’s

Mount Agung, these serene
terraces in Karangasem have
produced rice for centuries using
a sustainable irrigation system
called subak.
As climate change drives
water scarcity globally, subak
is inspiring sustainable design.
This stunning image appears
in Lo-TEK: Design by radical
indigenism, a book by Julia Watson
in which she calls for greater
recognition of subak and other
indigenous technologies as
models of sustainability.
Subak began over a thousand
ago. Then, water temples were
built near mountains and rivers,
and connected to canals, allowing
priests to control water flow.
Pastures were drained and left
fallow, letting the soil regain
nutrients and preventing pests.
Today, each parcel of semi-
flooded land is managed by a
farmer who joins a subak co-op,
a self-governing community that
ensures water is fairly distributed
for irrigation. Bali has some 1200
subak, each comprising up to 400
farmers, and democracy is at their
heart. When water is scarce, which
is happening more frequently
due to increased tourism, co-op
members decide how to spread
resources. Such practices are often
linked to the Balinese concept of
Tri Hita Karana, “three ways” of
achieving happiness through
harmony with god, other people
and the environment. ❚

Bethan Ackerley

7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 29

Views Culture

A treasure trove of science

themed seasonal gifts
Stuck for ideas on what to give the science-lover in your life?
These are the cultural gems that staff at New Scientist recommend

EMILY WILSON, editor I loved his A Short History of Nearly a global blackout leads everyone
I AM biased because they are our Everything, and he brings his to forget who The Beatles are.
columnist, but Annalee Newitz’s inimitable style to Body. He revels Except for one singer-songwriter,
new novel The Future of Another in the wonder of the machine who steals their songs and rockets
Timeline (Orbit), in which that is us, and since we all have to fame. The film shows how he
feminists zip through history deals with the guilt, but it is warm,
via time machines that look like “Weather asks why we funny and perfect for Christmas,
rocks, is fantastically fresh, and even if the sci-fi element isn’t
aren’t doing more to
would make a great stocking filler. the most thought-through.
Ditto Margaret Atwood’s The
stop climate change. I would like a copy of We Are the
Testaments (Chatto & Windus), So why do I still fly? Weather: Saving the planet begins
which was more of a delicious Don’t ask” at breakfast by Jonathan Safran
page-turner than I had expected. Foer (Hamish Hamilton). The book
Children of Time and its new one of these incredible machines, asks why we aren’t doing more
sequel Children of Ruin, both by why wouldn’t you enjoy this? to stop climate change. So why
Adrian Tchaikovsky and published I would like a subscription to do I still fly everywhere? Don’t ask.
by Tor, would also make a great HBO so I can watch The Inventor,
gift as a pair. They are quite a documentary about Elizabeth ROWAN HOOPER, head of features garden, so I would like The Wildlife
old-fashioned sci-fi, but what’s Holmes, who developed “the Fans of the Alan Moore/Dave Pond Book: Create your own pond
not to like about that? And they Apple of healthcare”, and attracted Gibbons classic graphic novel paradise for wildlife by Jules
are livened up by the delightful billions in investment even Watchmen should like the Howard (Bloomsbury). Santa
imagining of a world run by bright though none of her blood HBO drama series of the same willing, I will add the documentary
but totally unherdable octopuses. tests seem to work properly. name. It is true to the original’s Apollo 11 (Prime Video) and the
For me, I would like tickets How did she pull this off? edgy spirit. The setting is an album PROTO by musician Holly
to the new Star Wars, please. alternate timeline where Herndon in collaboration with an
JASON MURUGESU, intern renewable energy has long AI named Spawn (4AD).
JOSHUA HOWGEGO, features editor Yesterday, a sci-fi film written by replaced fossil fuel – and Robert
I would give Bill Bryson’s The Body: Richard Curtis and directed by Redford is US president. ELEANOR PARSONS, chief subeditor
A guide for occupants (Doubleday). Danny Boyle is a fun gift. In it, I want to build a pond in my Ever since I read Caroline Criado
Perez’s book Invisible Women:
Exposing data bias in a world
Other stocking fillers designed for men (Chatto &
Windus), I have been giving it
Waters of the World Shelley’s classic visits a Haynes, the purveyors of Moving to Mars Plans to everyone I know. It is an eye-
Sarah Dry describes how future full of AIs and bots. car manuals since 1965. for settlement of the Red opener, exposing the hidden sex
understanding weather Planet, also on show at bias, from medicines that work
taught us about climate. Future Cities Paul Why Trust Science? Naomi London’s Design Museum. differently in women to voice
Dobraszczyk explores the Oreskes challenges easy assistants that don’t recognise
Thinking 3D Daryl Green politics and psychology answers. On Fire Naomi Klein’s set women’s voices. Funny,
and Laura Moretti’s visually of castles in the air, and of essays makes the case exasperating and anger-inducing,
arresting book shows how suburbs under the sea. Murmur Will Eaves’s for the Green New Deal. there is something for everyone.
we see and depict depth. fictionalised account Tickets for Tutankhamun:
The Human DNA Manual of Alan Turing’s last The Moon Oliver Morton Treasures of the golden pharaoh at
Frankissstein Jeanette Melita Irving contributes to years won this year’s fashions a visionary, London’s Saatchi gallery would
Winterson’s twist on Mary this offbeat series from Wellcome book prize. compelling armchair visit. give me a perfect holiday outing.
I could admire the bling the young

30 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

 Don’t miss

and persuade others to dig into its

forensic analysis of capitalism’s
latest turn – putting us all under
surveillance to exploit the
marketplace of human behaviour.

ALISON GEORGE, features editor Read

Anyone over 7 would love Make
Your Own Optical Illusions: 50
hands-on models and experiments
to make and do by Clive Gifford
and Rob Ives (Frances Lincoln).
To remind me of what I am
missing, I would like Chasing the
Sun: The new science of sunlight
and how it shapes our bodies and
minds by Linda Geddes (Wellcome).
Environmental Justice
in a Moment of Danger
by Julie Sze (University of
California Press) is an
essential primer revealing
the hope to be found in
the legal progress made
by environmental
campaigns.

SIMON INGS, Culture editor

Figuring, a collection of essays by
EVGENYATAMANENKO/ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES

Maria Popova (Canongate), makes

pharaoh was buried with to help
him in the afterlife.
RICHARD WEBB, executive editor
I would give New Scientist’s Why
Do Boys Have Nipples? And 73 other
weird questions that only science
can answer. It is the first kids’
version of our Last Word books,
and pure fun, from why roller
coasters make us dizzy to whether
wearing glasses makes us smarter.
for a powerful gift. Women
dominate this history of efforts to
better the world, from astronomer
Maria Mitchell, who paved a way
for women in science, to Rachel
Carson, whose Silent Spring Visit
launched the environmental Kang Jungsuck is Artist
movement. of the Year at the Korean
A Place That Exists Only In Cultural Centre UK in
contrasting approaches. Turning Moonlight (Kerber Verlag), a book London. His work, on
the Boat for Home: A life writing of provocations by cosmologically view from 10 December,
about nature (Chatto & Windus) minded British artist Katie uses film, video-game
by Richard Mabey is a vintage Paterson would delight me. Its design, writing and
collection that shows the hundred-odd descriptions of sculpture to explore tech,
evolution of his thinking, perfect imaginary artworks  (some doable, gaming culture, K-pop,
for chilling out. And a real chiller, others wildly poetic) are printed and wider society.
Ness by Robert Macfarlane and with ink containing ground-up
Stanley Donwood (Hamish asteroids.
Hamilton), inspired by a bleak
JULIA BROWN, Back Pages editor
“Angela Saini’s book is Abigail Beall’s The Art of Urban

I would like Paul Steinhardt’s
The Second Kind of Impossible:
The extraordinary quest for a new
form of matter (Simon & Schuster).
It is about his quest to find the
source of the “quasicrystal” (a
type of matter deemed impossible
in nature) that turned up in an
Italian museum collection. I first
heard about it almost a decade ago
at a talk Steinhardt gave, and was
captivated by the impossibility of
the tale’s twists and derring-do.
LIZ ELSE, associate editor, Culture
I enjoy nature writing, so would
give two books with wildly
MIDDLE: © THE ARTIST, PHOTO: COLIN DAVISON © 2019 BALTIC; BOTTOM: SONY PICTURES
Astronomy: A guide to stargazing
a must-read for all who
wherever you are (Trapeze) would
challenge the rise of be an enchanting gift. New
racism today and want Scientist’s Stargazing at home
the facts” series is based on the book, which
is packed with interesting info Watch
shingle spit off the Suffolk coast. It about everything you can see in Aquarela crosses
is a modern myth, peering through the night sky. There is help with oceans and continents to
the folkloric hagstone at our spotting things, crucially without explore the spirit, power
troubled present and the old time. special kit. and beauty of the watery
I would love a copy of Shoshana I would like a copy of Angela element. Russian
Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Saini’s book Superior: The return of film-maker Victor
Capitalism: The fight for a human race science. I saw her speak about Kossakovsky’s ravishing
future at the new frontier of power race at New Scientist Live and she documentary opens at
(Profile). Paperback please, was inspiring. This book is a must- selected UK cinemas
because I would like to carry this read for all who challenge the rise from 13 December.
hefty book with me to reread it of racism and need the facts. ❚

7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 31

Views Culture
The TV column

The inside story Silicon Valley, HBO’s hit series about the US IT industry, has laugh-
out-loud moments and gratingly awful characters, but it lets the tech giants off
their moral responsibilities too easily, writes Chelsea Whyte

Pied Piper staff watch

their CEO fumble a speech
to Congress on privacy

although I found the comedy

a little overdone at times.
Those laughs came with a
twinge of painful reality. In the
opening scenes of the first episode
Chelsea Whyte is a reporter of the new series, the CEO of
for New Scientist, based in Pied Piper, Richard Hendricks,
Portland, Oregon. Follow her is walking into a hearing at
on Twitter @chelswhyte Congress – an obvious parody
of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent turn
in front of a committee. An aide
tells him she likes his tie and he
responds, “Thanks, I tied it
myself.” I snorted and then
rolled my eyes at the all-too-real
HBO

depiction of someone completely

THESE days, when I think about
the social media platforms I spend
TV a lot of time on – and the people
Silicon Valley who run them with little concern
HBO for the privacy of my personal
data – I get a bit sad and a lot angry.
So, on the advice of a colleague,
Chelsea also I decided to watch the final season
recommends... of Silicon Valley, an HBO sitcom
that parodies the culture that
TV brought us everything from an
Veep extremely silly $400 “juicer” that
HBO squeezed bags of pre-cut fruit
Vice-president Selina Meyer and veg slower than you could
and her motley crew of by hand to widespread election
truly ridiculous aides try interference and the beginnings
to get through the day of the breakdown of democracy.
without ruining her I hadn’t watched the previous
political image too badly. five seasons, but it was clear
They rarely succeed. enough which tech companies
and leaders were being skewered
Film in each scene. As with Veep, an
The Social Network HBO comedy about a bumbling
Directed by David Fincher vice-president and her idiot staff,
Adapted from Ben Mezrich’s it is cathartic to laugh at how
book The Accidental moronic decisions might be being
Billionaires, this film takes made within organisations that
a more realistic look at touch all our lives.
the scheming that goes While the details in Silicon Valley
on behind the scenes of can seem outlandish, it turns out
a tech company. that some are based on reality.
For example, one of the most
gratingly awful characters in this
season is a coder who rollerblades
around a meeting room. He thinks
it makes him look cool – of course,
it doesn’t. The show’s writers lifted
this from a real meeting they had
at Google, which they described in
an interview they gave The New
Yorker several years ago. At the
time, they deemed it “too hacky
“While the details in
Silicon Valley can seem
outlandish, it turns out
that some are based
on reality”
to use on the show”. Now, though,
it fits really well with the broad
comedy that the sixth season of
the show turns on.
The standout performance is
by Zach Woods, who plays chief
operating officer Jared Dunn at
Pied Piper, the fictional start-up
the show follows. He is both
reliably funny and capable of
bringing a measure of realism
to the absurdity.
Overall, there were some
genuine laugh-out-loud moments,
out of their depth, being called to
account for the societal problems
digital media have exacerbated.
Later in the season, Dunn and
Hendricks stumble into creating
a truly upsetting and wildly
unethical data-mining system
based on recordings gathered
from microphones on gaming
headsets. This is shown as a moral
person trying to do “the right
thing” and accidentally putting
the data his company collects in
danger of being misused. But by
portraying it as a misstep, instead
of a decision made with clear
minds and an obvious prioritising
of money over privacy, it felt as if
in the course of trying to skewer
the heads of giant tech companies,
the writers let them off the hook.
What Silicon Valley gets right,
though, isn’t the stuff about tech
or the digital economy, but the
human interactions. I am sure I
am missing quite a bit without the
full back story on these characters,
but the emotional moments of old
friends reconciling after a fight or
coming through in a pinch are the
best parts of the show. They had
me cheering the dolts on, even if
I don’t know them very well. ❚

32 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

Features Cover story
Driver of
disorder
Entropy’s inexorable push towards chaos
seems to give structure to the universe,
says Michael Brooks. So why can nobody
agree on what it is?
A
LL the King’s horses and all the King’s
men couldn’t put Humpty together
again. Everyone knows the sorry tale
of Humpty Dumpty, but have you ever noticed
that the rhyme makes no mention of an egg?
In fact, the ill-fated protagonist only assumed
egg-man form when he met Alice in Lewis
Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, after
which broken eggs became indelibly associated
with irreversible damage. So perhaps Carroll
deserves to shoulder a share of the blame for
scrambling our ideas about entropy.
Entropy is typically thought of as a measure
of disorder or randomness, and it is bound up
with thermodynamics – the branch of physics
that deals with heat and mechanical work.
Its propensity to increase forever has granted
it exalted status as the pithiest answer to some
deep questions, from what life is to how the
universe evolved and why time moves ever
forward like an arrow. And yet just like
Humpty, entropy gets messy as soon as
you crack its surface.
For a start, there is no single definition.
But even if we understand it broadly as a
measurement or quantity, our current
conception of entropy doesn’t work to describe
the things it purports to, not least the universe.
“It’s all very confusing,” says Anthony Aguirre
at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Now, Aguirre and others are going back to
the drawing board in search of a universally
valid version of entropy anchored in our most
fundamental theory: quantum mechanics.
They hope to put our understanding of the
34 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
universe’s mystifying directionality on firmer
footing – or nudge it off a wall.
We might even be in for something akin to
the Copernican revolution, when we realised
that Earth orbits the sun, rather than the other
way around. “That changed the way we view
the universe,” says Wojciech Zurek at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
“From then on, one could make connections
between phenomena that previously seemed
unconnected. It’s the same with the new way
of looking at thermodynamics.”
It all started in Carroll’s day, during the
industrial revolution, when Victorian
engineers were desperately trying to figure
out why their coal-powered steam engines
were so inefficient. Entropy was essentially
a mathematical way to quantify heat that
wasn’t available for doing useful mechanical
work, such as driving a piston. In the 1860s,
Rudolf Clausius defined it as the amount
of heat energy you could put into a system
without raising its temperature by a degree.
Ludwig Boltzmann soon made it a bit more
precise. He knew that the mechanical work
done by a hot gas like steam came from the
motion of the molecules, but he also
recognised that it was impossible to calculate
how every individual atom or molecule in a
given system moves. So he suggested working
with probabilities. Thus Boltzmann defined
entropy in terms of the number of different
possible ways in which molecules in a closed
system could be arranged. The more possible
arrangements, the greater the entropy.
 UNBREAKABLE LAWS
First law of thermodynamics
Broadly speaking, energy can’t be
created or destroyed. Any energy added
to a system goes into raising its internal
energy and allowing it to perform work.

Second law of thermodynamics

The total amount of entropy in a
closed system can never decrease.
This is often expressed as the
universe tending towards disorder.

Boltzmann’s entropy worked surprisingly

well to describe thermal systems such as steam
engines – and it is still hard at work, with
physicists and chemists using it on a daily
basis. But difficult questions were raised as
early as 1867, when James Clerk Maxwell
devised a thought experiment in which a
crafty demon lurked inside a box of molecules
divided in two. The molecules start off evenly
mixed, with no difference in temperature
between the compartments, and thus no
ability to do useful mechanical work. But the
demon uses its knowledge of the molecules’
movements to separate hot ones from slower
cold ones by opening a door between the two.
That posed a problem. The demon seems
to have rendered the system ready to do work:
open the door and the energetic molecules
will be able to push a piston. In other words,
the demon has reduced the system’s entropy,
violating the second law of thermodynamics,
which holds that the entropy of a closed
system will always increase over time.
This is considered the most far-reaching
and robust law of nature. “The second law
cannot be violated, never, in no situation,
under no circumstances,” says Sebastian
Deffner at the University of Maryland,
Baltimore County. “Every time we run into an
apparent violation, we find we have overlooked
a contribution to the entropy production.”
That was certainly the case with Maxwell’s
demon. What had been overlooked turned
out to be a vital component of how we now
understand physical systems: information.
The demon can only perform its trick if it
can store information about the molecules
and their movements. It can’t have an
infinitely large memory, so it will have
to discard some information – and in the
DOMENIC BAHMANN

1980s, physicist Charles Bennett calculated

that this has a physical effect involving
an increase in entropy. So the very process
that allows the demon to reduce entropy >

7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 35

 RUNNING
ON FACTS
An engine driven by information
is, quite frankly, hard to imagine.
And yet consider this: there is no
way to process information without
physical systems using energy.
This includes erasing information:
wiping a hard drive has an energy
cost. Turn this observation on
its head, and information starts
to look like a potential way to
fuel machines.
Imagine you have a device that
holds information in binary, 1s and
0s, and that it is blank (meaning it is
all zeroes). This is an ordered state,
much like the cold environment
of a heat engine – something
that converts thermal energy into
mechanical energy. “You can in
principle build a device that would
convert this state to the mixture-of-
1s-and-0s state,” says Christopher
Jarzynski, a chemist at the
University of Maryland. Such a
device would use, say, heat energy
to change this state, and the
conversion represents an
acquisition of information. The
physical act of the zeros changing
into ones and zeros could be
harnessed to do something
mechanical, like lift a mass against
gravity or charge a battery. “You
can extract work from a thermal
reservoir by the very act of writing
information onto a blank memory
slate,” says Jarzynski.
That could prove useful in
scenarios where there is no other
practical way to fuel a process.
Experiments have already backed
up that principle. Now the challenge
is to explore the possibilities,
creating machines fuelled by
information. That might be
something akin to the biological
machines that process genetic
information, or quantum-scale
sensors that use their information
intake to power motors or other
mechanisms.
36 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
inside the system increases it elsewhere.
The second law emerged unscathed again,
“Entropy is not
but entropy changed. Bennett’s insight something that
revealed that it isn’t just about heat, or the
numbers of ways molecules can be arranged, has a fixed,
or work. Deep down, entropy seems to be
about information. This has some intriguing
objective value
implications for how information might
ultimately find use as a fuel (see “Running
prior to being
on facts”, left). It has also raised new questions measured”
about how information relates to the second
law and the big-picture processes of the
universe – questions that have forced
physicists to revisit their understanding
of entropy yet again.
A revision is long overdue, according to
Zurek. He has always been suspicious about how physical systems behave and interact,
Boltzmann’s framing. The consideration of all but also promises to reinstate entropy as
possible states was, Zurek says, “an inspired a real measurable quantity.
ruse”: although it has been useful, there is no Zurek is not the only one daring to ask hard
real-world justification for it. When dealing questions of the answer to almost everything.
with finite systems such as an engine or a Aguirre, together with his UC Santa Cruz
chemical reaction, he reckons it makes no colleagues Dominik Safranek and Joshua
sense to frame things in terms of the infinite Deutsch, is also working on a new version,
possible ways you can arrange molecules. again with information at its core. They call it
For Zurek, this is nothing short of a “fudge” “observational entropy”, since it is designed to
that has lulled us into a false sense that we take account of the amount of information
understand the behaviour of physical systems. that can be gained when you perform a series
He suspects the reason Boltzmann’s statistical of measurements on a quantum system.
tricks worked was because what we call entropy Intriguingly, the observational entropy of a
is secretly something to do with quantum system will change depending on the way an
physics. The quantum world is probabilistic,
with properties definable only in the statistical
terms that Boltzmann stumbled on. Hence
the idea that there might be something in
this most fundamental theory that gives rise
to Boltzmann’s version of entropy.
Quantum roots
And so Zurek has set out to reframe our
current, information-based conception
in terms of quantum physics. His scheme
centres on quantum entanglement, where
physically distinct systems have shared
properties that mean a measurement on
one can affect the outcome of a subsequent
measurement on the other.
Last year, he showed that it is possible
to derive thermodynamics by considering
quantum systems that are entangled with
their environment. Essentially, that means
a system’s entanglement determines the
amount and the nature of the available
information about its state, which gives
a measure of its entropy. It is a significant
step: rooting information and entropy
in quantum mechanics not only gives
CREDIT
new depth to our understanding of
observer chooses to perform a sequence of
measurements. “It’s not something that has a
fixed, objective value prior to those
measurements,” says Safranek.
This, he explains, is because in quantum
mechanics, the properties of any object or
system are undefined until they are measured.
What’s more, the Heisenberg uncertainty
principle says that measuring one property
changes other, unmeasured properties – so the
order in which you make measurements will
affect the observational entropy in a system.
This is a serious re-casting of how we think
about entropy, but it still connects with the
classical concept, where the outcomes of
measurements are linked to probability
and possible configurations of the system.
It is early days for these ideas, and there is
much to work out. Nonetheless, the physicists
behind them hope that redefining entropy in
quantum terms can put our understanding of it
on firmer ground. You might wonder what there
is to gain. After all, no one is saying that the tried
and trusted second law of thermodynamics
no longer applies. But Aguirre is enthusiastic
about what this redefinition could mean.
“I believe that it will have significant pay off,”
he says, and he isn’t alone.
“The main hope is that quantum
thermodynamics might shed some new light
on the old problems,” says Vlatko Vedral at the
MAARTEN WOUTERS/GETTY IMAGES
Conceived to improve
steam engines,
entropy is thought
to explain why time
moves forward
University of Oxford. “The arrow of time is
one of them, but both the origin of life and
the expansion of the universe have also been
mentioned in the literature.”
The connection to life might seem odd. But
scientists have long puzzled over whether the
cellular mechanisms inside living organisms
can be seen as exploiting entropy. In recent
years, it has even been proposed that life might
have its origins in increasing entropy. The idea
is that the tendency of atoms to structure
themselves in a way that increases entropy
inevitably produces complex structures,
including living things. It is a speculative idea,
but a clearer picture of entropy’s true nature
may help put it to the test.
An equally thorny issue is the arrow of time.
The fact that time moves forwards, not
backwards, is reflected in the fact that certain
actions are irreversible – you can’t unscramble
an egg or unspill a cup of coffee. We often think
of this as the cast-iron rule, enshrined in the
second law, that entropy always has to increase.
The reasoning seems simple: there are more
ways to arrange identical molecules in a
scrambled egg than in the neat, ordered
situation where the yolk sits within the
albumen. But such a conclusion involves
questionable assumptions, says Safranek:
“In certain situations, it’s not clear which
state should be considered more ordered.”
Deffner agrees. People often assume that
disordered systems have more states, but that
isn’t necessarily true, he says. “You can easily
construct examples where the number of
possible states increases – increasing the
Boltzmann entropy – but the states come
in a very ordered and structured manner.”
What’s more, Aguirre says that many
attempts to apply entropy on a cosmological
scale are questionable because entropy as
currently defined applies only at near
equilibrium states, where the system has
settled into an unchanging configuration.
NEIL HARVEY/GETTY IMAGES
“Fundamentally, nothing is in equilibrium,”
he says. “The universe is certainly not.
In fact, almost every process in the universe
we care about relies on the universe being
out of equilibrium.”
Deffner reckons this undermines the
argument that the arrow of time comes from
entropy increasing. The two are equivalent, he
suggests: maybe we only see time flow because
things move inexorably towards equilibrium,
which is a process that increases entropy. “The
increase of entropy is just a mathematically
convenient reformulation of the universally
observed arrow of time,” Deffner says.
The prevalence of this sort of circular
reasoning is one reason that Aguirre is excited
about observational entropy, which doesn’t
make assumptions about equilibrium. “There
hasn’t been a quantum version of Boltzmann
entropy until we did this work, but we now
have a description of what the entropy of
that universe looks like. It goes up, too, so
that’s a good step towards thinking about
issues such as the arrow of time.”
Zurek points to practical benefits, too – not
least that quantum entropy will help us better
understand and exploit the properties of
quantum machines such as nanoscale
sensors and quantum computers. “This is an
emerging field that is of great importance to
nanotechnology and quantum information
processing,” he says. And if information really is
a resource to be treated like heat or mechanical
work, the insight might even give rise to an
array of technologies as revolutionary as those
that seeded the first industrial revolution.
“Maybe quantum [entropy] can do for us what
steam did for the Victorians,” says Deffner. ❚
Michael Brooks is a consultant
for New Scientist. His latest book
is The Quantum Astrologer’s
Handbook
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 37
Features
Plastic
measures
Microplastics now contaminate the food we eat and
the air we breathe. The race is on to see if our health
is at risk, reports Graham Lawton
T
HIS morning I tried to count how many
plastic objects are in my house. I got as
far as the bottom drawer in my kitchen
cabinet – which contained 147 assorted plastic
boxes, lids, cups, straws and disposable
cutlery – then gave up. I had to get to work.
Good job I didn’t get down on my hands
and knees with a microscope to look for really
small bits of plastic, because I would never
have left. By some estimates, the average
household generates 6 kilograms of plastic
dust every year, around 700 billion fragments
known as microplastics. Like snowflakes, every
one is different. Every one may also be harmful.
They aren’t just indoors. “They are
everywhere,” says Dick Vethaak, an
environmental toxicologist at the Deltares
research institute in Delft, the Netherlands.
“In the water, in food, in the air – you are
surrounded by a cloud of them. Everything
is contaminated.” More are created every
day and they will be with us for centuries.
Big plastic debris has been on our radar for
years. Yet this is just the start of something
more insidious. Plastic waste doesn’t
biodegrade but it does break down,
fragmented by wind, waves and sunlight into
ever-smaller pieces. They may be too small
to see, but they are still there, worming their
way into every nook and cranny of the
environment – including our bodies.
This, in a nutshell, is the pervasive problem
of microplastics. But beyond knowing that
they exist and are everywhere, we are woefully
ignorant about them and their potential
38 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
impact on us. That is why the search for
answers is taking on a new urgency.
It is widely assumed that microplastics are
harmful to the environment and ongoing
research suggests that this is a fair assumption.
But when it comes to human health, we are
flying almost blind. “It is only just very recently
that we recognised that we are dealing here
with a health issue,” says Vethaak.
The scale of the plastic waste problem is hard
to wrap your head around. In 2017, a team at
the University of California published a paper
called “Production, use, and fate of all plastics
ever made”. It estimated that since plastics
were invented, we have manufactured around
8.3 billion tonnes of the stuff. Some 5 billion
tonnes of that has been dumped in landfill
or discarded into the environment.
To put that in perspective, the Great Pyramid
of Giza is thought to weigh around 5 million
tonnes. Imagine 1000 Great Pyramids made
of plastic rubbish and you are getting the
picture. And it keeps on coming. Every year
around 4 to 12 million tonnes of plastic waste
enters the marine environment.
8.3
Yet it isn’t at all clear how worried we should
be about this deluge. Three state-of-the-art
reports published earlier this year revealed the
billion
depths of our ignorance. The first, by the SAPEA Tonnes of plastic ever produced
consortium of scientific academies from across
Europe, reviewed all the available evidence.
On the question of human health, it concluded
that “little is known… and what is known is
surrounded by considerable uncertainty”.
That review fed into an even more

comprehensive report by the European
Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific
Advisors. It came to a similar, inconclusive,
conclusion: “Research on microplastics and
their potential threats to humans is in its
infancy and is complex – a lot remains
uncertain.” The third, by the World Health
Organization, which is specifically about the
hazards of microplastics in drinking water,
described the evidence base as “limited”
and “insufficient”.
One major challenge is the almost limitless
diversity of microplastics. In terms of size,
they are thought to span at least seven orders
of magnitude, from 5 millimetres down to a
nanometre or maybe less – known as
nanoplastics. Shape varies enormously too,
SARAH WILKINS
from perfect spheres to bobbly lumps, jagged
shards and pointy fibres.
Then there is their chemical composition.
“They consist of hundreds or even thousands
of different polymers,” says Vethaak.
Microplastics also contain additives such as
plasticisers and flame retardants, and have
the capacity to absorb contaminants from the
environment, like hydrocarbons, pesticides
or even metals. To complicate matters further,
each particle is surrounded by an “eco-corona”
of organic matter and microorganisms.
“Almost every particle has its own identity,”
says Vethaak.
All that diversity makes them fiendishly
hard to study. “They are a class of pollutants
rather than a type, and this complexity makes
it difficult to predict and explore the health
effects,” says Stephanie Wright, who leads
microplastics research at the UK Medical
Research Council Centre for Environment and
Health at King’s College London.
That isn’t to say that we are completely in the
dark. There is a body of existing work to draw
on and scientists are filling in the gaps as fast as
they can. Toxicologists agree that, in theory,
there are two main routes by which
microplastics might get into the human body:
ingestion and inhalation.
They also agree that, in theory, there are
5
billion
Tonnes of plastic now in landfill or
discarded into the environment
three potential hazards: physical, chemical
and microbiological. The first comes from the
particles getting lodged in organs and tissues
and causing damage and inflammation. The
second is from toxic chemicals leaching out
into the body. These could be the remnants
of chemicals that are used to make plastics,
additives in the plastics such as flame
retardants, and pollutants soaked up by
plastics from the environment. The third
comes from the pathogenic microbes that
appear to grow enthusiastically on the surface
of plastic particles.
All of which sounds troubling. But the key
words are “in theory”. As yet there is almost
no evidence of actual health effects, let alone
long-term risks.
Consider the microplastics we swallow,
which is probably the way most get into our
bodies. Microplastics have been detected in
drinking water and food; bottled water
contains up to 106 particles per litre, and beer,
sea salt, seafood, honey, sugar and teabags have
also been found to be contaminated. Shellfish,
which feed by filtering seawater and which we
eat whole, including their digestive systems,
are a rich source. A portion of mussels typically
contains 800 microplastic particles.
Microplastics also rain out of the air and
onto our food. One estimate suggests that >
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 39
we ingest more than 68,000 particles a year
from this source. If there was any doubt that
we regularly ingest them, a study last year put
that to rest. It looked at samples of human
faeces from around the world and found
microplastics in all of them.
But how much we swallow and to what effect
is unknown. The ones in our faeces are actually
the least of our worries, says Heather Leslie of
Vrije University Amsterdam, because they are
simply passing through. What we really need
to worry about is whether microplastics
damage the lining of the gut, or are absorbed
into the bloodstream.
According to Ingeborg Kooter of the
Netherlands Organisation for Applied
Scientific Research (TNO) in Utrecht, what
isn’t clear. “Do they have an effect on lungs?
The honest answer is that there is not much
knowledge,” says Fransien van Dijk at the
University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Ditto the risk from microbes that colonise
plastics. According to Ana Maria de Roda
Husman of the Netherlands National Institute
700
for Public Health and the Environment in
Bilthoven, microorganisms grow extremely
well on microplastic surfaces and are
billion
“probably” vectors of bacterial and viral Number of microplastic particles
disease, as well as antibiotic resistance genes. generated in an average house per year
Chemical toxicity is also murky. According
to an analysis by the European Food Safety
Authority, one portion of mussels can deliver health from [micro and nanoplastics] at
small doses of known toxins including present.” The World Health Organization noted
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polycyclic that humans have ingested microplastics for
aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and bisphenol decades with no signs of serious health effects.
A (BPA). However, it found that the quantities Routine monitoring of microplastics in
are negligible compared to what we ingest from drinking water isn’t necessary, it said.
other sources. But this is just one analysis. The Scare over? Far from it. This relaxed stance
sheer diversity of compounds that could be surprises and dismays many researchers
dumped in our bodies by microplastics means working in the field. “I’m a critic,” says Vethaak.
we have still only scraped the surface. “It would have been better if they said, ‘Sorry,

68,000
Number of microplastics we eat in a
year from particles falling on food
we know about the behaviour of small particles
suggests that uptake across the gut wall is likely
to be very limited, with only 1 to 2 per cent of
the smallest nanoplastics getting across. That
may not seem much, but smaller nanoplastics
are more likely to be hazardous. “They can
more easily pass the membranes and enter
blood circulation and maybe even pass the
blood-brain barrier or the placenta,” says
Vethaak. “In principle.”
The problem is that when you get down
to the really tiny particles, we have no idea
how many we are exposed to or have in our
bodies. As far as we know, plastic breaks down
into smaller and smaller pieces so it is a fair
Per cent
As for biological effects, animal studies
have been done but – no surprise – they
aren’t very informative. Most involve aquatic
organisms and, although they often find
toxic effects, the experiments typically use
very high concentrations of clean, spherical
microplastics that aren’t representative of
real-world exposure.
Despite these uncertainties – or perhaps
because of them – scientific authorities have
been quick to damp down speculation of a risk
to public health. SAPEA concluded that “we
have no evidence of widespread risk to human
All plastics lead to the sea
Not all microplastics in the ocean come from the
break down of litter. Here are other leading sources,
as a percentage of total plastics in the sea
35
30
25
the data is very limited, we don’t know
anything about these very small particles,
we need more research’.”
“I think we’re making a certain error of logic
called the ‘appeal to ignorance’ fallacy,” says
Leslie. “Absence of evidence [of harm] is not
evidence of absence. The last thing we need
now is another large-scale, long-term threat
to human or ecological health.”
Leslie is one of a group of researchers
urgently working to reduce that absence of
evidence. Earlier this year, she received funding
from ZonMw, the Netherlands Organisation
for Health Research and Development,
to find out whether microplastics enter
the bloodstream. Hers is one of 15 quick-
turnaround projects funded by ZonMw to
the tune of €1.8 million. These will report their
results next year and those with interesting
findings will be given more money to follow up.
The research is an attempt to shed light on
five key concerns over micro and nanoplastics
and health: risk from food, risk from

bet to assume that they exist at nanoscales.
Yet analytical methods aren’t sensitive
enough to detect them in the environment
on this scale. In fact, according to the SAPEA
inhalation, effects on the immune system,
20
whether the particles reach the brain or cross
15 the placenta, and their potential as carriers of
pathogens. The projects are all ongoing, but
SOURCE: doi.org/dfbz

10
consortium report, we can’t confirm that some presented interim results at the Plastic
nanoplastics even exist. 5 Health Summit in Amsterdam in October.
It is a similar story for inhaled plastics. Although preliminary, they don’t make for
0
The upper airways are good at clearing out comforting reading.
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small microplastic particles, says Kooter, but Take a project led by Nienke Vrisekoop at the
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nanoplastics might penetrate deep into the University Medical Center Utrecht on how the
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lungs and possibly cross into the bloodstream. immune system responds to microplastics.
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Even if they do, the biological consequence She says previous research has shown that in
Pe

40 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

 Wear and tear of tyres
on roads is a leading
source of microplastics
mice, microplastics can be detected in the liver,
kidney and gut, which means they are likely to
come into contact with the immune system.
To find out what might happen in humans,
she added polystyrene microbeads to dishes
containing immune cells called neutrophils,
which engulf and kill bacteria and other
invaders. Some of the microplastics were pure,
uncontaminated plastic; the neutrophils just
ignored them. But spheres coated with blood
plasma – to mimic how they are likely to be
encountered by the immune system after
circulating in the bloodstream – triggered
the neutrophils to attack and engulf them.
The neutrophils then died. “We find quite
extreme effects,” says Vrisekoop.
The implications for human health are
worrying, she says, though there are still many
unknowns, such as whether the microplastics
trigger repeated neutrophil attacks in a chain-
reaction immune response. “That really
requires further research,” she says.
Vrisekoop now plans to investigate
whether microplastics ingested by mice
activate their immune system. She and
collaborators at the Amsterdam University
Medical Center are also developing an assay to
measure microplastic loads in human tissue.
GETTY IMAGES
800
Number of microplastic particles
in a portion of mussels
“There’s really a lot of work to be done,” she says.
In another early finding, toxicologists at
Utrecht University discovered that cultured
human placenta cells can absorb polystyrene
beads that are 200 nanometres across. A third
study found that lung tissue incubated with
microplastics died.
These are preliminary results and hardly
add up to a comprehensive case against
microplastics. For one thing, the full relevance
to human health is still unclear. But many
researchers in the field say that there are
already good reasons to believe that chronic
exposure is detrimental to our health. “I don’t
want to scare people; some of the data is
comforting,” says Vrisekoop. “But some
of it is worrying too.”
Vethaak accepts the World Health
Organization’s line that if there was a serious
risk from microplastics we would be seeing it
already. But he nonetheless suspects that they
are contributing to the epidemic of chronic
inflammation that has been linked to diseases
such as neuro-degeneration, cardiovascular
disease, diabetes and cancer. “We are exposed
maybe only to low concentrations, and maybe
these particles are not so toxic themselves, but
it is lifetime exposure and there is potential
that they may accumulate in organs. And we
know that they have the potential to cause
inflammation,” he says.
Bad to worse
What, then, can be done? Vrisekoop advises
avoiding plastic packaging and urges food
manufacturers to do their bit by offering
plastic-free alternatives.
We could also do more to eliminate some of
the sources of microplastic pollution, such as
banning single-use items, says Vethaak. The
personal care industry has already committed
to eliminating microbeads from toiletries and
cosmetics next year, which will choke off
around 10 per cent of the microplastics
entering the sea from rivers.
But these are a microdrop in the ocean.
Given how much plastic rubbish is already
out there, microplastic pollution will continue
to rise for the foreseeable future as this waste
breaks down. “Even if we stop plastic pollution
right now, there will still be increasing levels
for decades,” says Vethaak. And existing
microplastics won’t vanish, but keep on getting
smaller – and potentially more dangerous – as
they circulate from water to air to soils and
ultimately into our bodies.
One thing everybody agrees on is that there
are more questions than answers. Vethaak
says he sees progress, but there is a long way
to go. “I think it will take many years, maybe
even a couple of decades, of research before we
come up with some hard evidence or a better
understanding of what’s happening,” he says.
“Is there a risk? I don’t know. But I think we
should find out ASAP. I think there is no time
to waste.” ❚
Graham Lawton is a staff
writer at New Scientist.
Follow him on Twitter
@GrahamLawton
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 41
 Features

How to do good
When we donate to charity,
we want it to make a difference.
Joshua Howgego investigates
whether an evidence-based
approach can help

T
HE Athena Hotel in Blackpool, UK,
looks like any ordinary seaside guest
house. Behind the net curtains, it is
anything but. The guests, who typically stay
for months, have been selected because they
share a common mission, one so important
that they can’t waste precious time cooking,
doing laundry or holding down a normal job.
They have come to Blackpool to save the world.
This is the world’s first hotel for “effective
altruists”, people who take an evidence-based
approach to helping others. It was purchased
in 2018 with the proceeds of a cryptocurrency
investment to allow data-driven
philanthropists to dedicate themselves
to improving and saving as many lives as
possible. And yes, Blackpool was chosen for
a reason. The 17-room hotel was a bargain at
£130,000, freeing up the proprietor’s cash to
subsidise the various projects being pursued.
When I first read about this place, I felt a
twinge of guilt. Like many of us, I like to think
I am a good person. I spend a few evenings a
ARCHIVE HOLDINGS INC/IMAGE BANK/GETTY IMAGES

month volunteering with a charity that helps

people with debt problems. I give money to my
church. And I buy the occasional sandwich for
homeless people. Learning about the hotel
made me wonder if I could do good better.
Investigating how turned out to be a
discombobulating experience. My principles
were challenged in ways I never expected, and
I ended up pondering some bizarre questions,
not least how to think about the future of

42 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

…better
humanity. One thing is for sure: doing good
is more complicated than you might think.
The origins of effective altruism can be
traced to a thought experiment devised in the
1970s by philosopher Peter Singer. Imagine
you walk past a shallow pond and see a child
drowning. Should you wade in and save the
infant, even though it means getting your
clothes muddy? Most people will answer yes
in a split second. But if we do it in this case,
Singer argued, why wouldn’t we do the same
for people dying of malaria or from unsafe
drinking water or any other of the easily
preventable poverty-related conditions that
persist in parts of the developing world?
Singer’s point was clear. If you are born in
the West, this throw of the dice makes you one
of the richest 5 per cent of people in the world
and gives you the chance to save thousands
of lives with almost zero effort. All you have
to do is give away a small proportion of your
income. Even the money otherwise spent on
a coffee would make a difference.
In 2009, Singer set up an organisation called
The Life You Can Save to encourage people to
“Even the money
spent on a cup of
coffee could make
a difference”
donate to charities that have the greatest
impact. His argument inspired several similar
organisations. There was Giving What We Can,
which encourages people to give 10 per cent
of their income to places where it will do the
most good for the rest of their lives. Then came
80,000 Hours, which gives advice on how to
get the maximum altruistic effect from the
hours the average person will spend working
in their career. The idea that we can wield
evidence and reason to maximise the effect
of our philanthropy caught on and today
there is a global community of effective
altruists, many of whom meet at international
conferences to discuss strategy.
Extreme lengths
Effective altruists take many different paths.
Some move to countries where they can live
more cheaply and thus give more money away.
Some choose an approach called earning to
give, where they get high-paying jobs so they
can give more to effective charities. Others
conduct research to better understand
which altruistic approaches work. One
of the Athena Hotel’s guests, for instance,
studies the sentience of invertebrate animals.
His idea is that encouraging people to think
more about the suffering of other animals
can change how we treat them.
A few people take effective altruism to
extreme lengths. In her book on the subject,
Strangers Drowning, journalist Larissa
MacFarquhar wrote about a young man she
calls Aaron Pitkin. He chose the cause of
chicken welfare on the basis that it was a sure
way to alleviate a huge amount of suffering.
The trouble was that he pursued the cause
so single-mindedly that it affected those close
to him. He fell in love with a woman named
“Jen”, who already worked for a charity, and
they began a life together, committed to doing
good as a couple. Gradually, however, Pitkin
became more extreme, insisting they both
adopt a frugal lifestyle and a strict vegan diet.
Eventually, he refused to divert any time from
the cause – even to do the dishes or spend time
with Jen. When she asked him for a portion of
his substantial inheritance to pay off the credit
card debts that were tormenting her, he
said no. After a couple of years, they separated,
and Jen went to Paris to gorge on cheese.
I didn’t know what to make of Pitkin. On the
face of it, he wasn’t a nice guy. But part of me >
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 43
 couldn’t help thinking he was morally right.
As a practising Christian, I am well aware
of Jesus’s insistence that his followers should
love their neighbour as themselves. If I took
that seriously, shouldn’t I be putting the needs
of people in poverty above those of my family,
who live in relative luxury? Perhaps I should
even get a room at the Athena?
The thought led me to “Moral saints”,
an essay in which philosopher Susan Wolf
argued against the idea that our lives should be
dominated by a commitment to improving the
welfare of others. Her point was that doing so
“Should you save
the lives of five
strangers or one
person close to you?”
would diminish or even exclude non-moral
characteristics, making life “strangely barren”.
logic. And that’s fair enough, according to
Larry Temkin, a philosopher at Rutgers
University in New Jersey, because there is
more than one way to decide if an action is
good, including how it affects our family and
friends. We have special obligations to certain
people, says Temkin, without which we would
be unable to sustain the trust and mutual
cooperation on which societies depend.
All of which comes as a relief. I quite like my
wife and children and don’t want to abandon
them. But accepting that I don’t need to devote
myself entirely to strangers is not to say that
I couldn’t do more to help them. Indeed,
effective altruism as originally conceived was
about achieving the greatest effect from not a
lot of effort. Perhaps it can help me make more
of the time and money I already give.
When I have considered that goal in
the past, I have always turned to GiveWell,
a non-profit organisation that ranks the
most effective charities, in terms of lives
saved or lives improved per dollar, according
to what it considers the best possible data,
including randomised controlled trials. Its list

NYANI QUARMYNE/PANOS PICTURES

Ultimately, Wolf wrote, life wouldn’t be worth
living if we were all relentlessly altruistic.
It is also far from clear that a strict utilitarian
approach is the best way to be morally good.
Let’s imagine a scenario in which you have to
choose between saving the life of five strangers
or that of someone close to you. Utilitarian
principles say you must go for the strangers
because saving five lives is better than saving
one. Most people would be appalled by such
PETER DAZELEY/GETTY IMAGES
of top-rated charities includes the Malaria
Consortium, for example. According to
GiveWell’s analysis, the programme that gives
antimalarial medication to young children
substantially reduces cases of the disease and
costs $6.93 to deliver to one person for four
months. That is a lot of good for very little cash.
I’m not the only one persuaded by GiveWell’s
logic. The organisation estimates that it helped
direct $149 million into the coffers of the
Countless charities
compete for your
money, but which
will use it best?
charities it champions in 2017. The question is
whether it really does offer the best way to
choose where to donate.
Caroline Fiennes, who runs Giving Evidence,
a consultancy specialising in evidence-based
philanthropy, points out that GiveWell has by
its nature been biased towards charities whose
outcomes are easily measurable. This tends
to mean those that provide health-based
interventions. Yet there are many other actions
that seek to reduce adversity or poverty that
don’t easily lend themselves to empirical
scrutiny. How do you measure the impact
of an organisation that aims to eliminate the
structural origins of inequality – by tackling
corruption, say? Or evaluate a charity that
campaigns for environmental action?
“It used to drive me mad that GiveWell only
looked at interventions that were direct service

delivery,” says Fiennes, who sits on the board

that selects the charities recommended by The
Life You Can Save. “That approach rules out so
many other ways of doing good.” Others,
meanwhile, have raised the prospect that
GiveWell could push us towards a more

44 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019


centralised form of giving, where a select
few charities monopolise donations.
GiveWell has recently said it is aiming
to begin investigating philanthropy where
the outcomes are less easy to measure.
Meanwhile, Will MacAskill, a philosopher
at the University of Oxford, insists that
effective altruism in general is broadening
its scope. “Perhaps even most of the effort in
the community now is on things where it’s
much harder to measure impact,” he says.
GiveWell is certainly not the only game in
town. In 2015, Dean Karlan, an economist
now at Northwestern University in Illinois,
helped set up ImpactMatters in an attempt to
give a broader range of charities the chance to
have the amount of good they do accurately
evaluated. Instead of insisting on the most
rigorous research, it looks at the charity’s
own data on the outcomes of its programmes
and checks to see if its general approach
is supported by independent studies
elsewhere. This allows it to assess all manner
of charities. “We have no criticism of GiveWell,”
says Michael Weinstein, the president of
Funding mosquito
nets is recognised
as one of the most
effective ways to
save lives
ImpactMatters. “What they do, they do well.
But we want to do 1000 impact estimates
by the end of 2019, whereas they do more
like two or three assessments a year.”
Making more evidence available has to be
a good thing. But I wonder if relying on these
sorts of evaluations makes us too passive.
More broadly, what if divorcing altruism from
“Thinking in terms
of maximum impact
can lead to some
strange conclusions”
emotion, as many effective altruists
recommend, is ultimately unhelpful?
Jamil Zaki, a psychologist at Stanford
University in California, has argued that
effective altruism is “misguided” because it fails
to account for empathy’s role in motivating
and maintaining philanthropy. He points to
evidence that the positive feelings people get
from donating to a cause they feel strongly
about or volunteering with a charity, where
there is engagement with the people you seek
to help, can encourage more persistent giving.
MacAskill doesn’t buy this. “I think there’s
only a superficial tension between empathy
and effective altruism,” he says. “It’s really
a failure of empathy if you can only empathise
with people you’ve interacted with.”
What he and other effective altruists
do accept, however, is that GiveWell’s
recommended charities should serve merely
as a baseline. Indeed, MacAskill points out
that finding new and unusual approaches
to maximising your impact, even where the
chances of success are less than perfect, is
increasingly important to the movement.
The trouble is that thinking in such terms
can lead to some peculiar conclusions.
Are all lives equal?
To see why things can get strange, remember
the thought experiment about the child in the
pond. It taught us that two lives separated in
space ought to be treated equally. You can apply
similar thinking to the time dimension. If you
could save one life now or 10 lives in 30 years,
should you not choose the latter?
Effective altruists increasingly seem to think
so. In 2012, GiveWell partnered with Good
Ventures, a foundation set up to give away
some of the huge wealth of Dustin Moskovitz,
a co-founder of Facebook, and his wife Cari
Tuna. This, in turn, led to the formation of the
Open Philanthropy Project, which is focused
on unusual modes of giving – and committed
to offering long-term support to high-risk
projects, provided the potential pay-offs are
sufficiently large. In practice, that has come
to include funding research that could prevent
existential threats to humanity, such as
pandemics, catastrophic climate change
and – most controversially – an apocalypse
caused by rogue artificial intelligence. Indeed,
in 2017, Open Philanthropy agreed to give
$30 million over three years to San Francisco-
based OpenAI, whose stated mission is nothing
short of “discovering and enacting the path to
safe artificial general intelligence”.
The reason for this is that many effective
altruists have become convinced that they can
do vastly more good in the future. They argue
that, in terms of sheer numbers of lives, the
stakes are enormous. The most important
moral imperative, therefore, is to prevent
anything that could kill vast numbers of
people in the centuries to come. >
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 45

Gaining
currency
Many charities provide services
to people in poverty. It could be
medicine, advice, tools or books.
That may sound like a better
option than giving hard cash
because you can be reasonably
sure of the outcome. If you
vaccinate a child, you know they
have biological protection. If you
give the child’s mother some cash,
you don’t know what happens
next. Or so you might think.
In 2008, four Harvard and MIT
graduate students banded
together to give very poor families
in Kenya $1000 over about a year.
The project quickly attracted
media attention, and the students
went on to found the charity
GiveDirectly. By 2017, it had
funnelled about $30 million
directly to poor people in a
handful of countries in East
Africa – and it has been keeping
track of what the money does.
The results suggest that giving
directly does lift people out of
poverty, at least in the short term.
A randomised trial conducted in
Rarieda in Kenya, for example,
showed that people who had
received money earned $270
more in the following year, on
average, than people who
had not. It seems that rise can
be attributed to the recipients
making sound investments,
such as buying land or resources.
In fact, when it comes to
fighting poverty, cash transfers
are backed by some of the most
compelling evidence out there.
Dozens of high-quality studies
show that they work. It is hardly
surprising, then, that GiveDirectly
appears on the list of the world’s
most effective charities compiled
by non-profit organisation
GiveWell (see main story).
46 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
WASIF MUNEM/AGENCE VU/CAMERAPRESS
I can see the logic, just as I could with Pitkin’s
joyless dedication to chicken welfare. But I am
not convinced. I know with near certainty that
I can save lives by giving to charity, whereas
there is a risk that organisations like OpenAI
are fighting a threat that never materialises.
Fiennes is among those who shares my
suspicion about making AI a priority. “I think
that’s absolutely a surreal conclusion,” she says.
Open Philanthropy still gives more to global
health projects than to existential risk research,
“Many people are
now focused on
preventing a possible
AI apocalypse”
says spokesperson Michael Levine, although
he expects the balance to shift as AI research
gathers steam. Levine also acknowledges that
trying to solve the problems of future
generations isn’t obviously going to do
more good than acting on existing problems.
“We tend to agree that future generations
could be more prosperous than us, and in a
better position to solve their own problems
than we are,” he says. “But that assumes that
those futures come to exist at all. That’s why
we’re interested in the prevention of an event
that would cause a global extinction.”
I won’t be donating to avert an AI apocalypse
Effective
altruists are
turning their
attention to
existential
threats such as
climate change
any time soon. But having evaluated my own
altruistic habits, I do feel compelled to revisit
my decision to give only to charities backed
by the most exacting evidence.
I have resolved to give half of my monthly
donation fund to GiveDirectly, which transfers
cash straight to poor people in developing
nations (see “Gaining currency”, left). That not
only feels right, but is also well-supported by
evidence, including multiple randomised trials.
Indeed, GiveDirectly appears in GiveWell’s list
of recommended charities. The other half will
go to Innovations for Poverty Action, a group
that funds research into the interventions that
do the most good. For all that I have sought
to scrutinise effective altruism, I do think it is
worth testing new approaches.
As for the hotel in Blackpool, I’m still
intrigued, but the twinge of guilt has gone.
Effective altruists are to be commended for
making us think harder about how to do
good, and I don’t buy the idea that they are
cold and calculating. After all, they are
compelled to act by an urge to help people.
But now that I understand how they reach
their more outlandish conclusions – not least
the importance of saving the lives of people
in the far future – I feel better about my own
approach to doing good in the here and now. ❚
Joshua Howgego is a features
editor at New Scientist
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50 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019

The back pages
Puzzles Feedback Twisteddoodles Almost the last word The Q&A
Cryptic crossword, a Stick figures and for New Scientist Seeing UV light and Rick McIntyre’s life
hiking puzzle and the invisible carbon: the A cartoonist’s take on gravity explained: with Yellowstone
quick quiz p52 week in weird p53 the world p53 readers respond p54 wolves p56

Stargazing at home 2 Week 5

See the spectacular aurorae

A dark winter night is best for seeing the northern and southern
lights, says Abigail Beall, as long as you head for a high latitude

THE best chance to see Earth’s

Abigail Beall is a science writer
in Leeds, UK. This series is
based on her book The Art of
aurorae is during the long winter
nights at high latitudes, which is
why they are also known as the
polar, northern or southern lights.
It is almost winter in the northern
hemisphere, although it is
summer in the southern
hemisphere, of course – but read
on to find the best places to spot
the aurorae when winter arrives.
The aurorae are generated

ALL CANADA PHOTOS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Urban Astronomy @abbybeall by the solar wind – a stream of
charged particles travelling from
the outer layer of the sun, or
What you need corona, and slamming into Earth’s
A dark winter night magnetic field. This acts like a
at high latitude shield around the planet that
deflects most of the particles.
For next week But at its weakest points around
Binoculars may be helpful the poles, some can penetrate
into the upper atmosphere, where
they collide with and excite gas
molecules. As these molecules
de-excite, they release the photons
of light that make the aurorae.
The type of excited molecule,
along with the altitude of the
Next in the series collisions, determine the colour
1 Mercury transits the sun of the aurorae. The most common
2 How to watch the Leonid colours are pale yellow and green
meteor shower from oxygen molecules around
3 Venus and Jupiter 120 to 180 kilometres up. Less
in conjunction frequent are red aurorae,
4 Mercury at its greatest generated from oxygen around
elongation 200 km above the ground, while
5 How to see the red-purple aurorae come from
Northern Lights nitrogen below 100 km.
6 Find the Andromeda Most of us will have to travel
galaxy closer to the poles to catch a
The most distant glimpse of the aurorae, with
object visible to the Iceland, northern Scandinavia,
naked eye Yukon in Canada and Alaska
7 How to see Santa (the popular locations in the northern
ISS) on Christmas Eve hemisphere. For the southern
Stargazing at home online
Projects will be posted online each week at
newscientist.com/maker Email: maker@newscientist.com
hemisphere, Patagonia and the
Falkland Islands are good, along
with southern New Zealand,
and Tasmania and Victoria
in Australia.
The best aurorae happen when
solar activity is high. This is hard
to predict, although websites
and organisations that monitor
the sun can give a forecast for
the coming day, or even week.
The US National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration
website, for example, provides
observations for the past three
days along with 30-minute
predictions of the sun’s activity.
This is measured using the
planetary K index, or K-p, on a
scale from 0 to 9. The greater the
K-p value, the higher the activity.
If it is a clear, dark night and the
sun looks like it will be active, get
yourself to a dark spot as far from
any light pollution as possible.
Then you need to wait and let
your eyes adjust. But don’t expect
aurorae in the stunning, bright
colours shown in photos. Seen
with the naked eye, the aurorae are
much subtler, and can be tricky to
spot the first time you try. If you
are in an area popular for aurora
watchers, consider going on a tour
with a guide who can show you
exactly what to look for and help
you capture those all-important
photographs.  ❚

7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 51

The back pages Puzzles
Cryptic crossword #20 Set by Sparticle
   
 Hospital in Paddington,
 


  the morning?

ACROSS
1 Eisenhower’s National Tax
Agency internalised
accepted numbers (7)
5 Pass eternity in possession
of a good thing (5)
8 Mimic Morag’s redesign and
make like a square? (13)
9 Orange man abandons
digression (3)
10 How baleen is shaped
for use in corsetry? (9)
12 Statistics about omnivorous
Western mustelids (6)
DOWN
1 Feedback I transmit
principally about
bad pun (5)
2 Rex usually put a sign over
nosy Ran’s bananas (13)
3 Wicker bassinets made by
Reverend Spooner for large
amounts of power (9)
4 Watches a boson undergo
rapid fluctuations (6)
5 Fuss over odd old man (3)
6 Solemn mouse is ridden
roughshod (7-6)
Answers and the next quick crossword next week.
52 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
   on the morning of Friday



 

13 Rotten bunch made
to balance out (6)
15 “Turn lead into gold,”
mutters an engineer (9)
16 Kiss goodbye to the first
artificial satellite (3)
18 Rapper fills froyo glass
regularly with time? That
calls for scepticism! (5,5,3)
20 Claim that entertaining
Nazis is cheeky (5)
21 I reused stew leftovers (7)
7 Storm leads to the entire
monastery meeting
unwelcome visitor (7)
11 Weakens English
identity on both sides
of worker uprising (9)
12 South Africa locks up
regional rulers (7)
14 Unaccompanied minor in
trip to facilitate growth (6)
17 Nasty lecturer
exhibits flair (5)
19 Set down sexual partner
in a vulgar manner (3)
Quick quiz #31 Puzzle set by Hugh Hunt
1 What was discovered
#33 The mountain pass
28 September 1928 in
the basement of St Mary’s Aaron has spent the night camped at the
foot of a mountain, while Bonnie camped
London? at the summit. In the morning, Bonnie sets
off down the path to base camp at exactly
2 You have around 270 the same time as Aaron begins his ascent.
at birth, reducing to 206
in adulthood. What are At midday they pass each other and nod
we talking about? a greeting, both of them maintaining their
constant walking pace. Bonnie gets to the
3 The “eightfold way”, a bottom at 4pm and sets up camp, but it
phrase used by US physicist
isn’t until 9pm that Aaron finally reaches
Murray Gell-Mann in 1961
the top.
to explain a plethora of new
particles, led to the insight
What time did the two hikers set off in
that they are made of what
smaller constituents?
4 What does the Saffir-
Simpson scale measure? Answer next week
5 The chemical compounds
10 7 2 6 5 4 1 9 3 8
C2H6, C2H4, and C2H2 differ
by a single letter. Which? #32 Rearranging books
Answers below
Solution
Quick
10 7 2 6 5 4 1 9 3 8
Crossword #46
Answers
ACROSS 1 Rods, 3 Carcinogen,
10 Bigfoot, 11 Richter, At least seven moves are needed to get the
12 Futurama, 16 Alloy, books in order.
17 Tungstate, 18 Ileostomy,
21 FOCAL, 23 Jelly, 24 Molecule,
You can tell this by noticing that seven
27 Hitachi, 28 Android,
29 Ground zero, 30 Uber numbers (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9) are to the
right of the next number up (2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9,
DOWN 1 Riboflavin, 2 Digital, 10) and so have to be moved at some point.
4 Automation, 5 CERN,
6 Nucleus, 7 Gattaca, 8 Norm,
9 Torrey, 14 Ankylosaur, This rule works for any size of list.
15 Hellbender, 19 Electro,
20 Silicon, 21/13 Fields medal,
22 Coulomb, 25 Shag, 26 Fizz
Quick quiz #31
Answers
ethane, ethene and ethyne
5 Their fourth: they are
4 Hurricane intensity
3 Quarks
average human body
2 The number of bones in the
overnight by Alexander Fleming
bacteria accidentally left out Get in touch
Penicillium fungi in a Petri dish of Email us at
the antibiotic properties of
crossword@newscientist.com
1 Penicillin; more precisely,
puzzles@newscientist.com
The back pages Feedback
Where were we?
Some weeks ago (16 November),
Feedback introduced readers to
an online community of savvy
travellers content to get their thrills
by using the what3words mapping
service. Some of you have been
motivated to join them, but not
all have been satisfied.
Tim Rowe writes: “I was not
surprised that ‘use.homeopathic.
remedies’ got me nowhere at all. I
am more concerned that ‘read.new.
scientist’ and ‘subscribe.new.
scientist’ didn’t get me anywhere
either. I’m beginning to wonder how
reliable a guide that website is.”
Stuart Ardern has managed to
glean some useful information from
the site, however: he points out that
“dark.matter.location” is in the
Russian wilderness some way
north-east of Moscow. We have
sent our best reporter to look into it.
Stick figures
Give me a lever long enough
and a place to stand, said Greek
mathematician and noted bath-
taker Archimedes, and I can move
the world. Sure, Archie, sure, but I
bet you can’t take my photograph
at the same time.
Now, if only he had possessed
what is being called “the world’s
longest selfie stick”. Spelfie, a
UK-based company, is offering
customers the ability to contact a
satellite orbiting Earth and have it
take a photograph of the planet’s
surface from space. It’s an
incredibly valuable service if you
like your pictures taken from a
great distance, to not really have
much of you in them and to be
occasionally obscured by clouds.
Of course, as the keenest-eyed
among you will already have
noticed, the selfie stick in question
is entirely imaginary. Or, at least,
we think so – the publicity
material makes no mention
of a 36,000-kilometre-long rod
whooshing across Earth’s surface
as its camera end passes overhead.
Which raises the vexed question
of what exactly constitutes a selfie.
Surely the human subject of the
photograph is required at some
stage to physically interact with
Twisteddoodles for New Scientist
the camera?
Nevertheless, Feedback is
excited enough about this new
opportunity for self- (or spelf-?)
promotion to overlook such
inaccuracies. On the plus side,
36,000 kilometres should be far
enough away to obviate the nose-
expanding distortion effect
associated with traditional selfies.
Past caring
Not content with saving the
present, Swedish climate activist
Greta Thunberg is now on a mission
to save the past.
That is the only possible
conclusion to draw from an 1898
photo being shared online that
shows a young woman working
at a gold mine in Canada who bears
an uncanny resemblance to Greta.
There are no recognised SI units
for facial similarity, unfortunately,
but Feedback would unscientifically
declare the two a nearly 100 per
cent match. “There are no carbon Words words words
The inevitable explanation is emissions,” it read. “If there were,
that the photograph, currently in we could not see because most Just the other week, it seems,
the possession of the University of carbon is black”, it – for some Feedback was champing (note: not
Washington in Seattle, represents reason – went on. literal champing) at the bit (added
the first known evidence of time We are grateful to the author of note: no actual bit involved) at the
travel. It stands to reason: after all, those words for splitting a hair so news that Collins Dictionary had
if you had access to a time machine, fine that Feedback had assumed crowned the two-word phrase
wouldn’t you take advantage of its circumference was bound by “climate strike” as its 2019 word of
your modern-day knowledge by a single atom. the year. Now we have to relive that
digging for gold? It would also be a Carbon emissions aren’t, of moment all over again thanks to the
fabulously ethical way of supporting course, composed exclusively of Oxford Dictionaries’ decision to
your current-day climate activism, carbon. In a similar vein, we feel bestow its parallel honour on the
only contributing to climate obligated to point out that term “climate emergency”.
emissions that already exist. humans cannot, in fact, shed What’s going on, dictionaries of
The only suspicious element crocodile tears, no statements can the world? Is there a word shortage
in this whole business seems ever be made by the White House we’re not aware of? Or is it simply
to be that Greta is in colour while as it is a building with no record that you are using your elevated
this 19th-century gold miner of sentience, and word salad isn’t platforms to draw attention to a
appears to be almost entirely strictly a vegetable dish made vital issue, the salient points of
monochrome. Stay tuned as from phonemes, but rather a which are unfortunately not easily
we investigate further. meaningless garble invoked in condensable into one-word
the service of a ridiculous point. slogans? Well, answer us: is it?
Invisible carbon Possibly – but possibly not – Oh. It is? Right then. That seems
concerning climate change. fine to us. Carry on. ❚
An article in The Australian caught
Feedback’s eye this week – or, to be
more precise, a pull quote in an Got a story for Feedback?
image shared on Twitter that can Send it to New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street,
ultimately be traced back to an London WC2E 9ES or you can email us at
article in The Australian. feedback@newscientist.com
7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 53
The back pages Almost the last word
Shrinking gravity
The first law of thermodynamics
is the conservation of energy.
The first law of geology is that
rocks fall downhill. Falling rocks
gain energy. The energy must
come from gravity. So why doesn’t
gravity get less every day?
Oliver Knott (age 12)
Olney, Buckinghamshire, UK
When rocks are taken uphill,
they gain gravitational potential
energy from whatever brought
them up. When they fall down,
this becomes kinetic energy,
which is released as heat or used
to break the rocks when they
reach the bottom. The energy
doesn’t come from gravity,
it comes from whatever brought
the rocks up. So gravity doesn’t
diminish over time.
Robert Willis
Nanaimo, British Columbia,
Canada
Rocks build up potential energy,
usually over eons, as the ground is
pushed up by tectonic movements.
This transfers some of a tectonic
plate’s kinetic energy into potential
energy in the now-higher rocks.
At some point, probably due to
erosion, they fall back down,
quickly converting their potential
energy back to kinetic energy.
This is then transferred back to
the underlying tectonic plate as
the rock hits the ground. The
plate stores the “new” potential
energy until the next upheaval,
when it starts again.
Spencer Weart
Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, US
To convince yourself gravity
doesn’t diminish over time, try
this. Take something heavy in
your hand and move it up and
down with your eyes closed,
while imagining it is attached
to the floor by a spring that you
are stretching and relaxing. The
“spring” is the gravitational field.
When you raise the rock, you put
some energy into the field. When
you lower it, the field gives back
the energy. This doesn’t change
54 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
This week’s new question
Gambler’s fallacy When using an online casino, how can I tell
whether prizes are awarded by chance, albeit with the odds
stacked against me, or by an AI that knows how frequently
and by how much I, personally, have to be baited to maximise
the casino’s revenue? Dave Neale, Truro, Cornwall, UK
the strength of the spring that
pulls on other rocks or on you.
Mark J. Bridger
Oxford, UK
The question bears on the
accelerating expansion of the
cosmos caused by dark energy.
Because things are moving
apart, the gravitational potential
energy in the universe should be
increasing. Yet kinetic energy is
also increasing, seeming to break
the overall energy conservation
principle. An alternative is that the
accelerating expansion is itself a
kind of “falling”, a motion caused
by gravity. That might suggest the
existence of a greater gravitational
universe outside our own.
Super seers
I have heard that it is possible
for some people to see ultraviolet
light. Is this true, and if so, how is
it possible?
Richard Swifte
Darmstadt, Germany
The human retina is sensitive
to the ultraviolet (UV) spectrum
down to about 300 nanometres,
Are the odds in online
gambling personalised
for each competitor?
from wavelengths of around
380 nanometres (violet) to
750 nanometres (red). Most people
can’t easily see light shorter than
380 nanometres because the lens
of the eye absorbs it. If the lens is
missing or removed, often due to
FENG YU/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
cataracts, light below the violet
range isn’t blocked and can be
detected down to around
310 nanometres. Without the
lens to focus light, these people
are far-sighted and need corrective
lenses to focus at short distances.
Insects can see ultraviolet
light, and some other animals
have vision in this range too.
Bob Butler
Llangoed, Anglesey, UK
Some years ago, after being
admitted to hospital with
sepsis, I developed uveitis, an
but the lens of the eye filters it out. eye inflammation that could
This adaptation perhaps arose to have caused permanent loss of
protect the retina from the more vision. The lens of my right eye
damaging UV. It also avoids the was removed and replaced with
increased blurry effect of having an artificial one. The new lens
too wide a spectral range, since meant I could see better through
different wavelengths focus at this eye than I ever had before.
different distances from the lens. On leaving hospital, I decided
Artificial lenses are designed to I deserved a pint of bitter. Standing
block UV. But people born without at the bar of my local pub, I noticed
a lens, or who have a lens removed that their device for detecting
and not replaced, sometimes counterfeit banknotes was
report seeing ultraviolet as a emitting very bright bluish light.
whitish-violet light. One example I mentioned this to the barman,
is the Impressionist painter who looked at me with a very
Claude Monet, who developed quizzical expression but made no
bad cataracts in later life and comment. I then realised that he
eventually had his left eye’s lens couldn’t see the light: it was visible
removed. His subsequent works through my right eye alone.
heavily feature bluish colours, It seems that the natural
often thought to be the result lens in the eye has a filtering
of him seeing UV. effect as a protection against
ultraviolet light. I owe the staff
Brian Horton of the emergency eye clinic my
West Launceston, thanks not only for saving my
Tasmania, Australia eyesight, but also for my ability
Normal colour vision ranges to see UV light.  ❚
Want to send us a question or answer?
Email us at lastword@newscientist.com
Questions should be about everyday science phenomena
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Study will test theory that
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7 December 2019 | New Scientist | 55

The back pages Q&A
Rick McIntyre worked in Yellowstone
National Park from 1994 to 2018 as a
naturalist and wolf researcher.
His insights show that humans and
wolves can behave in remarkably
similar ways
As a child, what did you want to
be when you grew up?
I loved everything about dinosaurs, so I wanted to be
a vertebrate palaeontologist.
Were you good at science at school?
I did well enough. Reading Walden; or, A Life in the
Woods by Henry David Thoreau inspired me to work
in a nature-related career.
What is it about wolves that
you find so interesting?
I worked at Denali National Park in Alaska for
15 summers after college and originally was most
interested in grizzly bears. I saw them nearly every
day. But I found that wolves had much more
interesting behaviour, such as how they live in
extended family groups and work together
to hunt, raise their pups and defend their
territory from rival packs.
What is the most exciting thing
you’ve worked on in your career?
Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995.
I would set up a spotting scope, find the local pack
and invite visitors to have a look. It was a very
emotional experience to watch a wolf pack
travelling, hunting and playing in Yellowstone after
being absent for 69 years. People would cry and hug
me in thanks for showing them.
What achievement are you most proud of?
I have helped many thousands of people have the
experience of seeing wild wolves for the first time.
56 | New Scientist | 7 December 2019
Do you have to overcome any particular
challenges in your work?
I still go out every day well before dawn to observe
the wolves in Yellowstone, regardless of snowfall or
subzero temperatures. It gets harder and harder to
deal with cold weather.
Has your field of study changed in the time
you have been working in it?
In past decades, most studies on wolf behaviour
were done with captive packs due to the challenges
of observing free-roaming wolves. Restoring wolves
to Yellowstone enabled me and others to see many
generations of wolves live out their lives in the wild.
If you could have a conversation with any
scientist, living or dead, who would it be?
Charles Darwin. In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, “Wolf 21 was
he wrote: “Happiness is never better exhibited than by
young animals, such as puppies… when playing together, invincible in
like our own children.” I would like to discuss what I have
learned about similarities in social behaviour in wolves
battle, but
and humans and get his insight. always let his
What is the best thing you have read or seen rival go, just as
in the past 12 months?
I have been reading books by primatologist Frans de
the wolf that
Waal and found his writing about the social behaviour
and intellectual abilities of primates relevant to wolves.
raised him
For example, I would say that wolves have a theory of used to do”
mind, as do primates.
Can you tell us about Wolf 8, the subject
of your new book?
Wolf 8 was one of the smallest wolves introduced to
Yellowstone and didn’t seem to have much potential.
But after an alpha male was killed on the day his mate
gave birth, 8 befriended the pups. The mother wolf
wanted help, so she let 8 into her pack, despite his
inexperience. He became a great alpha male and raised
the pups as his own. He also defeated another alpha
male despite his larger size and unexpectedly let the
wolf go rather than kill him.
One of the pups 8 raised was wolf 21. He was
invincible in battle but, as he had seen 8 do, he always
let the other wolf go. 21 was attentive to his pups and
spent a lot of time playing with them. He even appeared
to have a sense of humour and would do things like fall
over for no reason, like a comedian doing a pratfall.
How useful will your skills be after
the apocalypse?
If people have to go back to living in small groups and
cooperating to survive, I think I could apply a lot of what
I learned from wolves to that situation.
Rick McIntyre’s book The Rise of Wolf 8: Witnessing the triumph
of Yellowstone’s underdog is out now (Greystone Books)
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