Reading newspaper in English ( P.8 )

And it’s not just ignoramuses whose news is thus polluted: the recent furore over Facebook’s curation of its trending topics suggests that anyone who leans on social media for their news

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4 June 2016 | NewScientist | 3

This issue online

newscientist.com/issue/3076

Coming next week…

Fat lot of good

Has official nutrition advice caused obesity?

Britain’s oldest known

writing reveals daily

How everything will

eventually finish… and

what will come next

8 THIS WEEK

Schrödinger’s cat can be split in half Could

we vaccinate against Alzheimer’s? Stuff oflife found around comet Neanderthals’mystery cave building Cells blog with CRISPR

14 IN BRIEF

Mongol hordes beaten by weather The oldest animal ever Baby black holes Pain and pleasure memories take separate paths

Technology

20 Computers understand phone calls Smart

shirt for epilepsy How websites take your fingerprint Guessing personality from faces

There are better ways to decide the big

issues than referendums

Features

26 SPECIAL ISSUE: THE END

How you, the universe, civilisation, life, sex, disease, science, humankind and much more will cease to be

38 PEOPLE

Shari Forbes on opening Australia’s first body farm

Culture

40 The peak oilman Following the trail of

M King Hubbert, a geologist with a canny idea

41 Stand-up role Sara Pascoe on being female

42 Inside job When’s a parasite not a parasite?

Regulars

52 LETTERS Fudging of data begins early

56 FEEDBACK Noah’s ark minus a captain

57 THE LAST WORD Born to drive

“arms race of ever more luridclaims and counterclaims”.

As in any war, the first casualtyhas been truth Much dissembling

of information has taken the form

of “mathswash”, presenting vagueestimates as firm predictions withnary a caveat or error bar in sight

Other claims are misleading butcatchy – designed to spread fasterthan efforts to debunk them

The net result is that the UK’sforthcoming vote on “Brexit”

probably won’t be decided on thebasis of level-headed arguments,but by the cognitive shortcuts weturn to when we’re clueless aboutthe right thing to do (see page 16)

Truth has also been a casualty

of Donald Trump’s bid to become the Republicans’ US presidential candidate His pronouncements, often made using the megaphone

of social media, have shown little fidelity either to the real world or

to his previous pronouncements

Populists all over the world have adopted similar tactics Their opponents cannot claim they lack

Political truths

Free speech has met social media, with revolutionary results

democratic legitimacy: their verypopularity demonstrates thatthey have tapped into the anger,frustration and patriotism ofvoters who feel their concernshave been ignored Continuing

to ignore them is not an option

But the fitness for office of thesedemagogues can be questioned

Social media lets them craftmessages that fly in some circles,even if they make little sense tooutsiders Should we care if thosemessages are falsehoods – and

if so, how should we curb them?

Worries that personalisation

on the internet could create “filter bubbles”, within which people see only what fits with their existing views, have come home to roost

That turns out to mean not just convenient truths, but also myths and distortions, propagated by algorithms which score them by popularity, not truthfulness And it’s not just ignoramuses whose news is thus polluted: the recent furore over Facebook’s curation of its trending topics suggests that anyone who leans on social media for their news may be seeing a funhouse mirror of the truth

Thus the right to free speech has morphed into the ability to say and spread anything, no matter how daft or dangerous Hence the buzz around the idea of “post-truth politics” – although a cynic might wonder if politicians are actually any more dishonest than they used to be Perhaps it’s just that fibs once whispered into select ears are now overheard by everyone

We have been here before As printing became widely available

in the 1600s, there was a boom

in pamphleteering: cheap, crude publications, often denouncing political and social foes in vitriolic and slanderous terms These were important in fomenting both the English civil war and the American war of independence.The idea that the fusion of technology and media may have revolutionary outcomes – primed this time round by politicians rather than proletarians – will alarm those who prefer the status quo: there have been calls for the new media titans to be regulated

To be sure, they cannot carry on dodging their responsibilities But the ultimate answer isn’t policing social media for rabble-rousing mistruths, but bursting the filter bubbles and talking to those who disagree with us Because we need democracy to be more than just a popularity contest ■

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6 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

WHAT’S the best way to get rid of

greenhouse gases? Swiss company

Climeworks thinks the answer is

to feed them to greenhouses – and

is building the world’s first facility

to do so commercially

The firm expects to open the

plant near Zurich in September

or October Its technology will

suck carbon dioxide out of the air

and sell it to nearby greenhouses

to spur the growth of lettuce,

cucumbers and tomatoes

CO2is already taken out of

the air in enclosed spaces such as

submarines and space capsules

Climeworks will use a similar

process, called direct air capture

With this method, normal air is

pushed through a sponge-like

filter material impregnated

with chemicals called amines,

which are derived from

ammonia and bind to CO2

Climeworks will use funding

AIN’T no ocean deep enough tokeep them from you On 26 May,Microsoft and Facebookannounced plans to lay a fibre-optic cable 6600 kilometres longunder the Atlantic Ocean

Undersea cables criss-cross theocean floor, as a key part of theinternet’s infrastructure, enablingtranscontinential exchange ofdigital information

Microsoft and Facebook saytheir new cable – named Marea,which means “tide” in Spanish –will be the Atlantic’s highest-

“The advantage is that you

can suck CO 2 out of the air

wherever you are, keeping

transport costs down”

–No need to hang up–

–Going ahead–

from the Swiss Federal Office ofEnergy to fine-tune the plant’sdesign so it runs more cheaply andefficiently during the three-yearpilot period The company hopes

it will then run as a self-sustainingbusiness The plant will collect 2 to

3 tonnes of CO2per day

“The advantage of taking itout of the ambient air is thatyou can do it wherever you are

on the planet,” says DominiqueKronenberg, chief operatingofficer at Climeworks “Youdon’t depend on a CO2source,

so you don’t have high costs fortransporting it where it is needed.”

capacity one yet, moving data at

160 terabits per second Slated to

be completed by October 2017, itwill stretch from the US state ofVirginia to Bilbao in Spain.Infrastructure like this will

“enable customers to morequickly and reliably store,manage, transmit and accesstheir data in the Microsoft Cloud”,said the companies in a release.Microsoft and Facebook aren’tthe only tech giants plotting theirown private cables In 2014,Google struck deals to build two,intended to link the US with Japanand Brazil

KEEP talking Scientists havecast doubt over evidence thatcellphone radiation maycause cancer

The US National ToxicologyProgram last week released some results from a two-year study in which more than 1000 rats were exposed to differing levels of cellphone radiation for 9 hours

a day, for the whole of their lives

No increases in brain or heart tumours were observed in female

Phones are fine

Olympics Zika threat

NEARLY 200 bioethicists have called for this year’s Olympic Games to be moved or postponed due to Zika virus.

The games are set to begin in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 5 August There are currently 32,000 probable cases

of infection in the city

In an open letter to the World Health Organization last week, the bioethicists said that more people are likely to get Zika if the games go ahead than if they are held elsewhere

or delayed until Rio has driven out its mosquitoes.

The WHO says such drastic measures won’t change the global spread of the virus, and that it can be avoided by preventing mosquito bites and blocking sexual transmission It recommends wearing insect repellent, avoiding slums and

staying in air conditioned rooms, and that visitors should use condoms

“or abstain from sex during their stay and for at least four weeks after their return”.

August falls in the southern hemisphere’s winter, meaning that the games are expected to take place during the annual low point for mosquitoes in Brazil But the letter says that cases of dengue fever, which is carried by the same mosquitoes, are much higher than usual this year, suggesting that the insects are unusually numerous and may not entirely disappear.

It also warns that visitors from the northern hemisphere could spread the virus, if they carry it home

to countries that are in the midst of the mosquito season

YOU’VE been hearing it for years,now it might really be happening:

the password is almost dead

At Google’s I/O developerconference, Daniel Kaufman,head of the company’s advancedtechnology projects, announcedthat Google plans to phase outpassword access to its Androidmobile platform in favour of atrust score This would be based

on a suite of identifiers: whatWi-Fi network and Bluetoothdevices you’re connected to andyour location, along withbiometrics, including your typing

speed, voice and face

The phone’s sensors willharvest this data continuously tokeep a running tally on how much

it trusts that the user is you A lowscore will suffice for opening agaming app But a banking appwill require more trust

It’s part of a trend towardsbuilding security and privacy intodesign, instead of making it theuser’s responsibility Kaufmansaid that the method is betterthan two-factor authenticationbecause it does not break down

if a phone signal is unavailable

Developer kits will be available

THE UK is to trial offering the HPV

vaccine to gay and bisexual men,

but campaigners are calling for it

to be given to all boys, as is done

in the US and Australia

Since 2008, girls in the UK

have been vaccinated against the

human papillomavirus, which

can cause cervical cancer But the

virus, which is spread by sexual

activity, can also trigger anal,

penile and throat cancer

The pilot programme,

announced by the UK public

health minister Jane Ellison,

will offer the shot to 40,000

men who have sex with men The

plan has been welcomed, but has

prompted calls for vaccination to

be extended to all boys in the UK

“Ideally, you must get people

before their sexual debut, and

a gender-neutral programme

would cover all the bases,” says

Carrie Llewellyn at the University

of Sussex, UK

A decision on vaccinating all

boys is unlikely to be made until

2017, when an advisory panel is

due to report on the possible costs

and health impact of such a move

But sexual health charity the

Terrence Higgins Trust believes

this is unnecessary stalling

“We’re urging them to roll it out

as soon as possible for all boys,”

a spokesperson told New Scientist. –Unpredictable situation–

rats But around 3 per cent of

males developed a brain cancer

known as malignant glioma, and

up to 6 per cent grew heart

tumours called schwannomas

(BioRxiv, doi.org/bjfm).

Michael Lauer of the US

National Institutes of Health says

the results should be interpreted

with caution The number of

cancers was small, meaning they

could be statistical blips, he says

Most of the rats in the study

were exposed to radiation levels

higher than those permitted in

current phone models, and on

average, the exposed rats lived

longer than the controls

60 SECONDS

Moth classic in action

It is a textbook example of evolution: the rise of industrial cities led to the darkening of the peppered moth —

an adaptive response to pollution and bird predation Now two studies have independently picked up a

single gene behind this trait (Nature,

DOI: 10.1038/nature17951 and 10.1038/nature17961)

Pump up the module

NASA has successfully puffed

up its new inflatable on the International Space Station –

on the second try Astronauts first attempted to inflate the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM)

on 26 May, but while pressure inside the module increased, its volume did not keep up A second attempt on

28 May did the trick.

Carbon aliens

If aliens exist on one of the most alluring worlds spotted by NASA’s Kepler probe, it’s a big thank you to carbon dioxide Planet Kepler 62f gets less heat from its star than we

do So, unless its atmosphere is packed with the greenhouse gas, any surface water will be frozen, climate simulations suggest

(Astrobiology, doi.org/bhz8).

Electric bumblebees

Bumblebees can detect and make sense of electric fields using the tiny hairs on their body Their mechanosensory hairs bend in response to an electric field, triggering neural activity Since such hairs are common in arthropods, many insects may

be equally skilled  (PNAS, DOI:

10.1073/pnas.1601624113).

Heimlich’s first

Ironically, Henry Heimlich who gave his name to the famous anti-choking manoeuvre, has only recently used it himself The 96-year-old retired surgeon reportedly performed the technique on an 87-year-old woman

at a retirement home who was choking on a piece of hamburger

Child with gorilla was in danger

WHEN a small child managed to get into the gorilla enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo on 28 May, the child was approached and grabbed by a 180-kilogram male silverback Zoo officials shot the animal dead, causing outrage on social media

The zoo said it had no choice.

“It was an incredibly dangerous situation for the child,” says Kirsten Pullen, head of the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums, and an expert in gorilla behaviour

“The silverback, Harambe, grabbed the child by the leg and whooshed him through the water He was using the child as part of a display

We can’t see the gorilla’s expression

so we don’t know if he is being aggressive, but the display

indicates an agitated animal, and his behaviour is very unpredictable.”

Harambe, a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla, was also seen standing over the child Many people interpreted this as Harambe guarding the child, but that’s not necessarily the case, says Pullen.

“The silverback’s job in the group

is to put himself between his family and the unknown,” she says The appearance of a child in the enclosure

is an unknown, and represents a possible threat to the group.

Gorillas have been known to

“rescue” children who fall into their enclosure, but the children had been knocked unconscious in those cases, which would not add to the tension

of the situation, says Pullen.

8 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

Joshua Howgego

BETTER smarten up if you want

to get ahead in business That’s

advice from the earliest writing

ever discovered in the UK

The message is part of a haul of

405 writing tablets unearthed in

the heart of London, metres from

Bank underground station They

date from as early as AD 43, the

year the Romans started their

conquest of Britain

The tablets reveal a rich cast of

1st-century Londoners, contain

the first ever written reference to

the city and hint at Britain’s very

first school (see “What the ancient

texts say”, below)

“It’s exceptional, really

wonderful,” says Michael Speidel

of the Mavors Institute for

Ancient Military History in Basel,

Switzerland “Looking at things in

the past is usually a bit like glaring

into a fog and we can’t really see

beyond With documents like this,

the fog clears away a bit.”

Before the Romans invaded, London didn’t exist, says Roman historian Roger Tomlin at the University of Oxford There were just “wild west, hillbilly-style settlements” scattered in the area

The documents are written inLatin and date from between

AD 43 and AD 80 They show that the city quickly became filled with

a variety of characters, including

soldiers, merchants, judges andeven a brewer

“I’ve been digging around

in London for years and neverquite imagined that in the late1st century, there was acommunity of people who are verymuch like us,”says Sophie Jackson,who manages the dig for theMuseum of London Archaeology

Aside from a few pottery shards

THIS WEEK

Britain’s oldest

writing found

Roman messages buried for 2000 years have

been unearthed beneath a London station

“I never imagined that in the late 1st century AD, there was a community of people very much like us”

WHAT THE ANCIENT TEXTS SAY

(AD 43-53) “…because they are

boasting through the whole market

that you have lent them money

Therefore, I ask you in your own

interest to not appear shabby

You will not thus favour your

own affairs…”

This seems to be business advice

It’s not clear if the “market” is real,

and refers to a forum, the centre of

Roman public life, or if the word is

being used metaphorically

(AD 62-65) “…I ask you by bread

and salt that you send as soon as

possible the 26 denarii in victoiriati

and the 10 denarii of Paterio…

Bread and salt represents hospitality in many cultures,

so this expression might be appealing to the recipient to be kind and offer a loan as a favour.

(AD 57) “In the consulship of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus for the second time and of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, on the 6th day before the Ides of January

I, Tibullus the freedman of Venustus, have written and say that I owe Gratus the freedman of Spurius 105 denarii from the price of the

merchandise which has been sold and delivered This money I am due

to repay him or the person whom the matter will concern…”

This might be Britain’s earliest IOU

Romans had a cumbersome way of defining years – naming the two consulates elected for that year – but in this case it means the document effectively dates itself.

(AD 60-62) “…ABCDIIFGHIKL, MNOPQRST…” (shown right)

This looks like writing practice,

so could be evidence of Britain’s first school

that have been scrawled on, the next-earliest known example of writing in Britain is the huge cache of inked wood scraps and wax tablets excavated from the Vindolanda fort near Hadrian’s Wall in northern England

The earliest of these is at least

40 years later than some of the new haul This “pushes the written record almost back to the

conquest”, says Andrew Birley,director of the Vindolandaexcavations

Examples of Roman writing arerare because ancient stationerytends to degrade easily TheLondon tablets survived because

of a quirk of fate In the mid-1stcentury, the course of the Thamesran about 100 metres furthernorth, and the area between the

–Clues to Roman London–

modern sites of the Bank of

England and St Paul’s Cathedral,

where the dig is, was a hilly area

bisected by the river Walbrook

The dig was started as part of an

archaeological assessment before

building new offices

Underground river

During excavations between 2010

and 2014, Jackson’s team found

the river Walbrook – underground

The waterlogged ground 6 metres

down was free from oxygen,

saving artefacts from oxidation,

which normally degrades them

The team found 400 shoes and

the leather backs from six dining

chairs But the prize discovery

was the wooden tablets These

were once filled with wax,

which people would scratch

messages into with an iron stylus

Sometimes the scratches would

leave traces on the wood behind

It was tough deciphering these

traces, says Tomlin, because the

wax on tablets was replaced, and

there are often several sets of

scratches on top of each other

So he took pictures of the tablets

illuminated from four directions

and superimposed the images to

get sharper resolutions

The messages hold clues to

what society was like at the time

The tablets from the Vindolanda

fort typically see people

addressing each other as dearest

brother or sister The London

tablets, used for keeping records,

as notebooks and for letters, will

reveal how urban society was

organised, says Birley

It’s the earliest evidence of

writing in Britain so far No

evidence of writing by the Celts

who lived there at the time has yet

been discovered

However, merchants operated

in Britain before this, and

probably communicated with the

Romans “So it is still technically

possible that somewhere in

Britain we might get a collection

of earlier material,” says Birley

“But I have to say that’s

extremely unlikely.” ■

In this section

■Could we vaccinate against Alzheimer’s?, page 10

■ Brexit: how the most irrational vote ever will be decided, page 16

■ Computers guess personality from faces, page 22

HOW’S this for a quantum magic trick? A clever experiment keeps Schrödinger’s cat alive – and dead – after being sawed in half The stunt could help knit quantum circuits into

a working computer.

Fortunately, the technique was tested not on a real cat, but on electromagnetic waves, which can be analogous to the cat in Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment.

Quantum particles can exist in a superposition of states, or two modes of being at once A photon, for instance, can simultaneously be polarised vertically and horizontally

This superposition holds until someone makes a measurement, at which point the photon picks a state.

Schrödinger argued that if quantum rules applied in the macroscopic world,

a cat stuck inside a closed box could be both alive and dead at the same time – at least until you open the box.

Microwave photons trapped in a box can be coaxed into a so-called

“cat” state Normally, electromagnetic waves in the box will oscillate in strength, like a pendulum sweeping back and forth But it’s possible to

introduce the opposite wave, creating

a cat state in which two contradictory things are happening at once.

“A mechanical analogue of this would be a pendulum that is simultaneously oscillating to the left and to the right,” says Chen Wang, then at Yale University.

Wang’s experiment goes a step further, though His team prepared two cavities of aluminium in which microwave photons could bounce around Then they connected the cavities with a channel: a superconducting sapphire chip and aluminium circuit, across which electrical signals could travel.

Think of that chip like an on-off switch When the switch is on and the channel is open, microwaves inside a cavity connected to it would oscillate

at a different frequency than they would if the switch was off.

This being the quantum world, though, it is possible to have the linking bridge be both on and off at

the same time “Once that happens, both cavities will have two frequencies at once,” Wang says The magician’s flourish is to sever the link and show that the two sides are still connected – with a whole, functioning, half-alive, half-dead cat shared between two boxes, like the magician’s assistant smiling and waving after being sawed in half Wang’s team switched the chip to completely “off” and tested whether the two cavities were still working together To find out whether he had a cat state, though, he couldn’t just open the box and look.

“You can always ask the question, are you dead or alive?” Wang says

“But this question doesn’t tell you whether it is a true quantum superposition, or whether you prepared half the chance of a dead one and half the chance of a live one.” Instead, the team had to ask a question that would reveal the cat state without disturbing it They measured the number of photons

in each box, knowing that cat states made from electromagnetic waves should always turn up with an even number of photons.

Measured separately, the two boxes sometimes contained even numbers of photons and sometimes odd But both boxes added together always turned out even.

“That shows you that when you combine the two boxes, you get a true Schrödinger’s cat state,” Wang says

(Science, doi.org/bhz5).

The idea of building a cat state in just one cavity is a few decades old, and helped win Serge Haroche a Nobel prize, points out Myungshik Kim of Imperial College London.

“You might think oh well, that’s a small extension of what Haroche did,”

he says “But it’s an interesting extension.” Kim suggests linking two cavities in a cat state could help with the problem of precisely measuring the phase of light.

The real pay-off, Wang hopes,

is that entangled cavities could be the building blocks of computers that exploit the properties of quantum superpositions to blaze through calculations at lightning speed Joshua Sokol ■

Schrödinger’s cat can survive being split in two

–Useful in quantum computing–

“The two sides are still connected, like the magician’s assistant after being sawed in half”

10 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

THIS WEEK

Anil Ananthaswamy

OUR brain’s defence against

invading microbes might cause

Alzheimer’s disease – which

suggests that vaccination could

prevent the condition

Alzheimer’s disease has long

been linked to the accumulation

of sticky plaques of beta-amyloid

proteins in the brain, but the

function of plaque has remained

unclear “Does it play a role in

the brain, or is it just garbage

that accumulates,” asks Rudolph

Tanzi of Harvard Medical School

Now he has shown that these

plaques could be defences for

trapping invading pathogens

Working with Robert Moir at the

Massachusetts General Hospital

in Boston, Tanzi’s team has shown

that beta-amyloid can act as an

antimicrobial compound, and

may form part of our immune

system (Science Translation

Medicine, doi.org/bhzt).

To test whether beta-amyloid

defends us against microbes that

manage to get into the brain, the

team injected bacteria into the

brains of mice that had been bred

to develop plaques like humans

do Plaques formed straight away

“When you look in the plaques, each one had a single bacterium

in it,” says Tanzi “A single bacterium can induce an entire plaque overnight.”

This suggests that infections could be triggering the formation

of plaques These sticky plaques may trap and kill bacteria, viruses

or other pathogens, but if they aren’t cleared away fast enough, they might lead to inflammation and tangles of another protein, called tau, causing neurons todie and the progression towardsAlzheimer’s disease

“The stickiness of amyloid

is both a godsend and a curse,”

says Samuel Gandy at the MountSinai Hospital in New York

“This work is really importantfor showing that amyloid can

be related to infection,” saysBrian Balin at the PhiladelphiaCollege of Osteopathic Medicine

in Pennsylvania His work

has implicated Chlamydia

pneumoniae as a possible

trigger for beta-amyloidformation, and other researchhas implicated the herpes virus

But until now, there has been nogood explanation for why theplaques form and accumulate

Support for the immunedefence idea comes from work

by Jacobus Jansen of MaastrichtUniversity in the Netherlands

Using MRI brain scans, his teamhas found that people in the earlystages of Alzheimer’s disease havemore permeable blood-brainbarriers, suggesting that theymay have developed the diseasebecause their brains were more

vulnerable to attack (Radiology,

vaccines could head them off

“You could vaccinate againstthose pathogens, and potentiallyprevent this problem arising later

in life,” says Moir

If many microbes are involved,immunising against them all will

be hard, says Jansen “But if thefrequency of certain pathogens

is quite high, there might be apossibility.”

It won’t be easy though Balinsays developing vaccines againstherpes and chlamydia has provendifficult “People have been tryingfor many years now.”■

Additional reporting by Alice Klein

–Plaquing up the works–

A FROSTY comet could have delivered

the ingredients for life on Earth The

European Space Agency’s Rosetta

spacecraft has spotted an amino acid

on the comet it orbits – confirming

that a ball of ice and dust can hold

one of life’s major building blocks.

Amino acids are the building

blocks of proteins, which control

essential reactions in living cells

Building blocks

of life spotted

around a comet

means that all the major types

of prebiotics have been discovered

on the comet (Science Advances,

doi.org/bjfn).

“The beauty of it is that now

we see all the ingredients which are needed for life in one place,”

says Kathrin Altwegg, who directs Rosetta’s chemical detector.

How Earth got its prebiotic molecules is a mystery, because

the developing planet was probably too hot to support them But once Earth cooled down, comets with molecules trapped in ice could have delivered the necessary ingredients Ralf Kaiser of the University of Hawaii at Manoa was not surprised to see glycine near 67P Lab simulations

a decade ago showed how these reactions can happen, he says, but

“it’s a really nice confirmation” Rosetta is now just 5 kilometres above the surface of the comet Analysing data from this low orbit could reveal more complex components Conor Gearin ■

Astrobiologists have long wondered whether they could have reached early Earth on the backs of comets

or asteroids.

Now Rosetta, which has been orbiting comet 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko since 2014, has definitively seen the amino acid glycine in the gas cloud surrounding the comet The probe also picked up phosphorus, a component of DNA.

Previously, the spacecraft had found alcohols, sugars and oxygen compounds, which are also needed for life and cellular structure The addition of glycine and phosphorus

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12 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

Colin Barras

THEY worked by torchlight,

following the same procedure

hour after hour: wrench a

stalagmite off the cave floor,

remove the tip and base, and

carefully lay it with the others

Today we can only guess as

to why a group of Neanderthals

built a series of large stalagmite

structures in a French cave – but

the fact they did provides a rare

glimpse into our extinct cousin’s

potential for social organisation

in a challenging environment

Gone are the days when we

thought of Neanderthals as

crude and unintelligent

Archaeological evidence now

suggests they were capable of

symbolic thought, had a basic

knowledge of chemistry,

medicine and cooking, and

perhaps some capacity for speech

A reassessment of evidence

from Bruniquel cave, near

Toulouse in south-west France,

suggests even more Neanderthal

sophistication In one chamber,

336 metres from the cave entrance,

are enigmatic structures,

including a ring 7 metres across,built from stalagmites snappedfrom the cave floor

Natural limestone growths havebegun to cover the ring structure,

so by dating these growths ateam led by Jacques Jaubert atthe University of Bordeaux couldwork out an approximate age forthe stalagmite constructions

(Nature, doi.org/bhzs).

They are roughly 175,000 yearsold, which means they easilypredate the arrival of modernhumans in Europe They were built

at a time when Neanderthals werethe only hominins in the region

The stalagmite structures are

50 centimetres high in places,says Jaubert They are builtfrom around 400 individualstalagmites with a combinedweight of about 2 tonnes

“That must take time [to shift],”

he says – although exactly how long it took the Neanderthals to

build the structures isn’t clear

“As often in prehistory, measuringtime is not easy.”

What we do know is that thestructures were built in dark,challenging conditions and thebuilders had no natural light

to help them Indeed, Jaubert’steam found traces of fire atseveral points around and onthe structures

The simplest explanation isthat the structures served as somesort of shelter or refuge – perhapsthe stalagmite “walls” supported

a roof of perishable wood, forexample But there are no otherartefacts and very few signs ofdomestic activity in the chamberbeyond the presence of a charredbone fragment possibly from abear or large herbivore

That draws comparisons withmuch later cave sites such asChauvet, a 30,000-year-old site

of modern human occupationthat is rich in cave art butcontained a mere handful ofartefacts So perhaps Bruniquel –like Chauvet – served some ritualrole If so it would provide more evidence for the Neanderthal’s capacity for symbolic thought

Paola Villa at the University

of Colorado in Boulder says the new work lends weight to her view that Neanderthals should beconsidered on a similar intellectualplane to modern humans ■

THIS week I beat an invading virus, copied all my DNA, and split in two.

#blessed #yolo #celllife.

What would our cells say if they could blog? We’ll soon know: the CRISPR gene-editing technique has been adapted to make cells log what happens to them, written inside their own DNA.

Such CRISPR-based logging could have a huge range of uses, from smart cells that monitor our health from within, to helping us understand exactly how our bodies develop Darren Nesbeth, a synthetic biologist at University College London, says this is an exciting technology that could record the biography of a cell For example, immune cells could

be engineered to patrol a person’s body, recording what they see and reporting back when recaptured CRISPR-based logging was developed by Timothy Lu and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology They designed a system allowing CRISPR

to be activated in a cell whenever

it encounters a particular event – such as exposure to a chemical When this happens, CRISPR generates mutations in a specific region of the cell’s DNA, effectively leaving a mark to log the event Analysing how many mutations there are reveals roughly how many

of these events have occurred.

To show that the technique works, Lu’s team engineered cells that could monitor inflammation levels When they put these monitor cells into mice, those that were in mice that had been provoked to have higher levels of inflammation logged more mutations

(bioRxiv, doi.org/bhzv).

Geneticist Gaetan Burgio at the Australian National University in Canberra says the technology could

be used to understand exactly what happens to a cell when a virus or bacterium invades “The method shows great promise,” he says Michael Le Page ■

–Created 175,000 years ago–

Cells use CRISPR

to blog about their lives

THIS WEEK

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Watch out for magnificent seabirds, walrus and polar bears

14 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

IT HAS always mystified historians

After a string of major victories, the

Mongol army suddenly retreated

from central Europe in 1242

Some argue that Mongolian

politics forced the withdrawal,

while others credit the strength of

fortified towns But Europe could

have been rescued by its own bad

weather, an analysis of tree rings

and historical documents finds

The Mongol cavalry fed its

horses on the grassy Eurasiansteppe, says Nicola Di Cosmo ofPrinceton University A warmclimate in the early 1200s madethe grasslands lush and this, inturn, helped the Mongols extendtheir empire into Russia, he says

But Hungary has a high watertable compared with the rest ofthe steppe and floods easily

Analysing tree rings in the region,

Di Cosmo and his colleagues

found that Hungary had a cold,wet winter in early 1242 thatturned Hungary’s central plaininto a huge swamp

Lacking pasture for theirhorses, the Mongols fell back todrier highlands and then to Russia

(Scientific Reports, doi.org/bhxt).

While climate wasn’t the onlyfactor in the retreat, it would

be a mistake to ignore it, says

Di Cosmo “It’s like saying thewinter in Russia had no effect

Fear and pleasure work their

way separately into memory

ONE region, two routes Memories of pleasure and fear

are laid down in the same part of the brain, but along

different pathways.

Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and his team

gave mice a pleasurable experience using cocaine, or

frightened them with electric shocks After death, the

team washed away the fatty materials in the mouse

brains, making them transparent Dyes that highlighted

previously active cells allowed them to see which

networks of neurons were involved in each experience.

Although both types of memory were laid down in

the medial prefrontal cortex, they were stored along separate paths or axonal projections, which in turn

linked to different brain regions (Cell, DOI: 10.1016/

j.cell.2016.05.010).

This could have implications for treating mental health disorders, says Deisseroth Some drugs, as well as transcranial magnetic stimulation, target the prefrontal cortex “Now we know the signals for fear and pleasure can be transmitted by different axonal projections, new targeted treatments might be envisioned,” he says.

Joff Lee at the University of Birmingham, UK, agrees that the finding might lead to better treatments If we do not target the right neurons, drugs intended to reduce fear may inadvertently also affect how we process pleasure, Lee says.

Mongol hordes beaten by rainy weather

Gas giants’ gravity could herd meteors

A RARE cosmic balancing actcould create spectacular meteorshowers The effect requiresclockwork precision – but it may

be responsible for some of thebest showers in recent memory.The Perseid meteors, whichoccur every August, come fromfragments of ice and rock ejected

by comet Swift-Tuttle From

1989 to 1994, the meteors came

in bright, oddly staccato bursts.Now a team led by Aswin Sekhar

at the University of Oslo in Norwaythinks they know why: a raregravitational dance betweenthe Perseids, Saturn and Jupiter

At key points in the Perseidstream, meteors may clump due tonudges from what’s called a three-body orbital resonance (arxiv.org/abs/1605.06340) The showers ofthe early 1990s may have occurredwhen Earth passed through aclump of Perseids herded together

by the resonance – but the nextsuch event may not be until 2111

Vaccinations rise, web searches fall

NO NEED to Google it Chickenpox vaccination programmes have meant that fewer people are looking up the disease online.Australia, Germany and the US have been immunising children against the varicella zoster virus for more than a decade, but the success of these initiatives is hard to pin down

Now Kevin Bakker of the University of Michigan and his colleagues have found that between 2004 and 2015, Google searches for chickenpox fell in various countries once they began

immunising against it (PNAS,

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1523941113).Compared with clinical reporting, such “digital epidemiology” is much quicker and cheaper, Bakker says

IN BRIEF

jackals clean up

GOLDEN jackals are often seen

as a pest, blamed for the death of

livestock and wild animals as they

move from south-central Eurasia

into northern Europe But they are,

in fact, saving countries millions

of euros in waste management.

“We want to change people’s

opinions about jackals,” says

Duško C´irovic´ at the University of

Belgrade, Serbia “They are blamed

for hunting wild and domestic

animals, but we found that they

are only eating the carcasses and

remains left by people.”

C´irovic´ and his colleagues

analysed the stomach contents of

606 golden jackals (Canis aureus)

in different areas of Serbia that

had been shot or killed on roads.

They found that most of the jackals’

diet was made up of the skin or

intestines of domestic or wild

animals that are usually discarded

by farmers or hunters They also ate

small rodents – which are crop pests.

Considering the jackal population

in Serbia, the team estimates that

they remove 3700 tonnes of animal

remains and 13.2 million crop pest

rodents every year, a service that

would cost half a million euros.

Based on estimates of Europe’s total

jackal population, the overall figures

could be as high as 13,000 tonnes

of animal remains and 158 million

rodents, they claim (Biological

Conservation, doi.org/bhxn).

Compare the meerkat - in the wild

IN THE race to the top of the breeding tree, meerkats pig out to boost their own growth in response to a rival gaining weight.

In the strict social hierarchy of meerkats, a dominant pair all but monopolises breeding Up-and- comers of both sexes can wait for years for the top spot to free

up – and when the time comes, it’s usually the fattest meerkat that wins.

“Those that become dominant and keep their rivals down hit the reproductive jackpot,” says Alex Thornton at the University

of Exeter, UK.

Tim Clutton-Brock at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues conducted an experiment

in 14 breeding groups in the Kalahari desert They took 48 pairs of same-sex siblings and bulked up selected lighter siblings with doses

of boiled egg for three months When faced with a rival fattening

up, meerkats actively increased their own food intake – and subsequent growth rate.

Also, when a meerkat becomes dominant, it grows bigger if its nearest rival is close to its own

weight (Nature, doi.org/bhxc).

EVEN giants were small once

Two blobs spotted in the distant,ancient universe may be the seeds

of the supermassive black holesthat now dominate the core ofevery galaxy

We think that massive blackholes existed when the universewas less than a billion years old

But we don’t understand how theygrew so large in such a short time

Either they formed frommassive stars and fattened up atbreakneck speed by swallowinggas, or they had a head start – bybeing born more than 100,000

times heavier than the sun

Now a team led by Fabio Pacucci

at Scuola Normale Superiore inPisa, Italy, thinks it has found twoexamples of the latter: baby blackholes that formed directly from

a collapsing gas cloud withoutbecoming a star first

The team screened distantgalaxies for red objects that alsoemitted X-rays Light from near ababy black hole still enshrouded

in a gas cloud would emerge ininfrared wavelengths, so redness

is a good indicator that you’vefound one Another clue is

X-rays – which typically comefrom gas falling onto black holes –passing through the gas cloud.The team found only twocandidates for baby black holes

in thousands of ancient galaxies(arxiv.org/abs/1603.08522) This ispuzzling given that supermassiveblack holes are in almost everygalaxy in the modern universe.But Mitchell Begelman at theUniversity of Colorado in Bouldersuggests you wouldn’t need manybaby black holes for a supermassiveone to take root at the heart of abig galaxy like the Milky Way

Bloated baby black holes spotted in the distant universe

Sea sponge may be oldest living animal

DEEP in the waters off the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands lurks a behemoth A sponge the size of a car has been discovered that could be hundreds, if not thousands, of years old

Daniel Wagner of the NOAA Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument and his colleague spotted the giant, a member of the Rossellidae family, during an expedition last year

Images of the sponge taken at

a depth of just over 2100 metres revealed that it was 3.5 metres long, 2 metres high and 1.5 metres wide The stable, relatively undisturbed habitat

of the conservation site has probably aided the sponge’s

unfettered growth (Marine

Biodiversity, doi.org/bhxx).

“A lot of organisms in deep seas grow very slowly, so they need their habitats to remain stable over a long time to be able to grow larger and larger,” Wagner says

“Sponges don’t have things like growth rings that can be used to estimate age My best guess is that this is likely a very old sponge on the order of century to millennia.”

The discovery of the sponge at the site underscores the need to protect the area, the team says

16 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

Gut instinct

THE EU referendum could be the most irrational yet Uncertainty over consequences, andcontradictory economic and political information, mean that voters will be swung even more than usual by feelings and biases that have nothing to do with the issues at stake

“Polls show that knowledge about the EU in Britain is low,” says John McCormick, who studies

EU politics at Indiana Purdue University Indianapolis

University-“To a large extent it’s going to be

a domestic protest vote”

He predicts that instead of EU considerations, many voters will

be guided by their entrenched views on immigration, the Conservative government and political figures such as DavidCameron, Boris Johnson andNigel Farage

In this, the EU referendum is similar to the UK’s Alternative Vote referendum in 2011, in which voters were asked if they wanted

to replace the first past thepost voting system with the

“alternative vote” The result was no: 68 per cent to 32 per cent.Surveys conducted in the weeks before showed that many people didn’t understand what the alternative system was or what would change were it adopted Yet many voted anyway, led by their perceptions of party leaders – whether they thought them competent or likeable, for example.This is the kind of cognitive shortcut that psychologists have found we all use in the face of

How Britain will decide

On 23 June, the UK public will decide whether the country should leave the

European Union Despite politicians claiming otherwise, no one knows the

consequences of Brexit So with reliable information hard to come by, what will

determine whether Brits put a cross in the Remain or the Leave box?

overwhelming or uncertain

information The problem is that

they aren’t necessarily accurate

and may be completely irrelevant

One of the most common

shortcuts is “status quo bias”

This is the tendency of people

who aren’t politically engaged

or who are confused about the

possible consequences to vote

against change It has played a role

in many referendums including

the alternative vote, says Paul

Whiteley at the University of

Essex, UK, and is likely to be even

more important in this one

Brexit is more important for

the future of the UK than a switch

to the alternative vote, he says, so

more people will feel they have a

duty to vote even if they really

don’t know what to do

One of the greatest unknowns

is how the current widespread

mistrust of political elites will

play out This has contributed to

the success of Syriza in Greece and

Podemos in Spain, as well as the

rise of Donald Trump and the

election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader

of the UK’s Labour party Anger at

political elites – including those in

Brussels – may be more influential

than traditional concerns such as

how the EU affects British values,

says Stephen Reicher at the

University of St Andrews in the UK

“What so many politicians fail

to understand is that, in this

anti-political age, politics as usual

doesn’t work and that doing

things that might conventionally

doom you now doesn’t,” he says

“It might even help you,

something Trump has mastered

to perfection.” Michael Bond

What the polls say

POLITICIANS like to say that the

only poll that matters is the one

on election day, but opinion polls

shape the narrative of a vote

“The polling sets the territory

for the debate,” says Anthony

Wells at polling firm YouGov

“If the polling shows Leave might

win, all the media talk will be

about contingency plans.” That could push people into worrying about the uncertainty of Brexit and opting to remain, somethingthat happened in 2014’s Scottish independence referendum

A consistent set of neck polls is likely to galvanisepeople to get out and vote, butthe Leave camp has an advantagewhen it comes to voter turnout,

neck-and-as older people are both morelikely to vote and to be in favour

of Brexit One thing a close poll won’t do is encourage tactical voting – while in a general electionvoters may switch allegiance to athird party to block another, thatcan’t happen in a referendum

Whatever the result, pollingfirms can’t afford to get it wrong

They are still licking their woundsafter an industry-wide failure topredict a Conservative majority

in the UK’s 2015 general election

A report into that failure,published in March, concludedthat companies had relied onbiased samples that under-represented Conservative voters

Unfortunately for pollsters,forecasting the results of areferendum brings its ownchallenges “For a referendum,there isn’t a previous one fouryears ago that you can base thingson,” says Wells

There are some assumptionspollsters can make, such as voterswho have previously supported the

UK Independence Party are verylikely to be in favour of Brexit But

in general the EU issue cuts acrossparty lines, says John Curtice ofthe University of Strathclyde inGlasgow, UK, making predictioneven more fraught.Jacob Aron

Your Facebook feed

THE power of social media toinfluence politics is one of thenarratives of our time – Obama’s

US presidential win in 2008 washailed as the Facebook electionand the debate over how muchsocial media jump-started theArab Spring still goes on But cansocial media messaging reallymake up or change minds on anissue as unemotive as Europe?

Campaigners think it’s worth

a punt Paul Stephenson of thecampaign group Vote Leave saysFacebook is the prime socialmedia platform “Both campaignshave £7 million to spend and we’ll

be putting a large chunk of that inFacebook,” he says

On the face of it it’s a good bet Inthe 2015 UK general election, theConservatives spent £1.3 million onFacebook adverts, targeting peoplewho lived in the 40 constituenciesthey needed for a majority

But despite the myriad ups that analyse what likes, sharesand comments really mean, it’shard to find out whether thisconverts to votes In the case ofthe 2015 campaign, “all we can do

start-is correlate Facebook spend withthe results in those seats that weretargeted”, says Darren Lilleker atBournemouth University, UK

Doing well on social mediadoesn’t always lead to a win,however In the 2014 Scottishreferendum, the Yes campaignwas ahead on social mediathroughout – and lost

Graeme Baxter of RobertGordon University in Aberdeen,

UK, says politicians of both sidesweren’t using social media’s full

power In general, he says, campaigns often use it as a broadcast platform But a monologue tends to appeal only

to those who already agree with everything a campaign is saying

It ignores social media’s potential

to draw voters into a richer way conversation – the digital equivalent of door-to-door canvassing

two-Stephenson says Leave does respond to direct messages but not

to all the posts people put on their feed: “That would be impossible!” The reticence may also be down

to the fact that something said in

“Knowledge about the EU

is low It will be a domestic protest vote guided by entrenched views”

Boris Johnson wants to Leave

Young people tend to back Remain

Perhaps the biggest input of social media will be to draw inpeople who haven’t been thinkingabout the referendum – whether that’s via campaign content that people share or via friends’ own grassroots endorsements “There will be an element of accidental exposure,” says Lilleker, which could push people who hadn’t considered voting to vote Friendscan put information in front of

us we may not have sought out ourselves, says Nigel Jackson of Plymouth University, UK, adding that friends are one of the most powerful influences on who we vote for Hal Hodson ■

18 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

EU REFERENDUM COMMENT

Brexit, or not?

The UK and its science will thrive outside the EU, says Chris Leigh

Vote leave and risk big collective gains, warns Mike Galsworthy

THE UK SHOULD LEAVE

CAN the UK thrive outside the

European Union? This is a central

question in the EU referendum

debate, and the fate of British

science is part of it

The UK’s scientific status is

beyond dispute A recent UNESCO

report confirms British researchers

excel globally They generate

around 15 per cent of the world’s

most-cited papers Of the world’s

top 20 universities, the five that

are in EU nations are all British

Voting to exit the EU won’t

throw this into reverse

Recent Royal Society figures

show that EU research funding

supports just 3 per cent of UK R&D

That was UK taxpayer money in

the first place, part of the nation’s

£13 billion annual contribution

On the whole, our scientific and

academic base gains no more than

a marginal benefit from political

membership of the EU

And while international

collaboration is essential for

science to excel, Scientists for

Britain is confident that after a vote

to leave, the UK would continue to

work with EU science networks It

could be an associated member of

EU research programmes, along

with 16 other non-EU nations,

including Norway, Switzerland,

Israel and Tunisia They pay in to

access grants on an equal footing

with member states

Add in British involvement

with European projects that arenot EU entities – such as CERN, the European Molecular BiologyLaboratory and the EuropeanSpace Agency – and it’s clear the

UK would still play a major and productive role in European science from outside the union

What’s more, non-EU scientistscan sit on the governing body of the European Research Council, with both Israel and Switzerland

on it in recent years And the newScientific Advice Mechanism, which helps shape EU policy, alsoallows for non-EU members

Finally, the fact that the US, Canada and Australia recruit a greater percentage of overseas researchers than the UK, France and Germany shows that politicalunion is not essential to the flow

of scientific talent

British science can gain from Brexit The greatest threat to UK innovation comes from ill-thought-out and burdensome EU regulations, such as the 2001 Clinical Trials Directive, which led

to the UK’s global share of clinical trials dropping dramatically in the years that followed

The referendum is not a vote on membership of a science club, as that can continue For people in the UK, it is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to decide who we are and who we want to govern us

Which brings us to another key question: do we want to be a self-governing nation with a global vision, or remain as a reluctant participant in a political union set upon the path to federalism? ■Chris Leigh is part of the Scientists for Britain group

THE UK SHOULD STAY

THE EU is the world’s sciencesuperpower and the UK is inthe driving seat The union of

28 nations produces a third of theworld’s research output – 34 percent more than the US That gaphas widened by 4 per cent over thepast six years Collectively, Europeproduces more researchers thanChina or the US

The EU is the glue that hasnetworked European countriesinto a powerful hub withglobal reach A common budget,common policies and freedom ofmovement harness an economy

of scale to lower barriers,unleash academic freedom

and return huge added value

EU researchers form a talentpool from which universitiesand small businesses can hire without visa hurdles Its science programmes are growing rapidly, facilitating multinational research between 170 countries

On policy, EU members collaborate to design science programmes, common academic standards and the innovation standards of the single market All of these magnify British science Whether it’s UK technical standards becoming EU standards then global standards thanks to the single market’s size, or the fact that international collaborations have 50 per cent more impact

“Ill-thought-out and

burdensome EU regulation

is a major threat to UK

innovation”

Niall Firth

REFERENDUMS are “a splendidweapon for demagogues anddictators”, argued Margaret Thatcher

in a debate over Britain’s place in the

EU in 1975

Was that anything more than asnappy sound bite? Do referendumsappeal to the darker side of democracy?

Referendums are the embodiment ofdirect democracy, which means everycitizen gets a vote on an issue Thatseems entirely fair, but one argumentagainst them is that they oversimplifycomplex arguments They usuallyframe things in the binary, which israrely how people see an issue

Some places have thrived underdirect democracy for years Swisscitizens have the right to call areferendum to make changes to thecountry’s constitution if enoughpeople sign a petition That soundsreasonable too, but it has revealedanother flaw of referendums – that decisions made by a majority are often made at the expense of the minority

For example, in 2009, Switzerland banned the building of Islamic minarets after 57 per cent voted for it

So, if we do want the publicinvolved in big decisions, what’s thebest way of going about it? One of thewackier ideas is liquid democracy, inwhich every voter has a mandate theycan exercise as they see fit Themandate is transferable, so voters canpass theirs to someone they trust

The whole process happens onlineand at any point you can retrieve avote you’ve allocated to someone elseand use it yourself

It puts power directly in the people’shands, while making sure it’s not just acase of who shouts the loudest But ittoo has flaws: individuals can garner a

huge number of mandates and wield

a disproportionate amount of power

A more fundamental problem of such set-ups is political legitimacy

Any level of complexity, like the transfer of mandates, makes it harder

to trace how a decision was made

Demagoguery it might be, but when the UK public votes on the country’s

future in the EU, the choice is clear,even if the knock-on effects are not

A referendum makes voters feel as if they are directly influencing a situation

Trouble is, most people don’t feel well equipped with facts, leaving a vacuum that is filled with endless spin and fearmongering, as we have seen

so far in this campaign Online tools such as FullFact.org can help, which fact-check arguments made by both sides Online questionnaires can also

be useful, letting you choose the issues you feel strongly about and then suggesting how you should vote But people still have to search for these tools A more satisfying option would be to bake public involvement into the democratic process

Enter “deliberative democracy” This involves a group of citizens discussing issues and making suggestions to the electorate One example is the Citizens’ Initiative Review Commission in Oregon, where a panel of randomly selected people discusses issues before voting day After this, a

“Citizens’ Statement” is included with each ballot paper, summarising the key points as decided by the voters’ peers It’s a bit late to get the electorate better informed for this referendum, but it won’t be long before another one looms Doing it deliberatively next time, in a way that engages people with an issue, and with politics itself, is an opportunity the establishment should grasp ■

Therearebetterways todecidethebigissues

INSIGHT Alternative democracy

–Who’s unsure about the facts? –

“Baking public involvement into the democratic process would better than referendums”

For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

than domestic research, it’s all

about increased value through

team play

The overwhelming majority

of UK researchers and engineers –

93 per cent in a recent survey –

regard the EU as a “major benefit”

to UK research It’s less about

the money, which “only” funds

17 per cent of science contracts

in universities and about 5 per

cent of the total UK research

landscape It’s more that

cross-border policies and funding

cannot be replaced at national

levels The EU is the glue between

European institutions catalysing

our multinational capacity

Brexiteers regularly argue that

the UK could buy back into the EU

science programme from outside,

citing examples of small non-EU

countries Their presumptions

show little understanding of

the balance of interests for the

remaining EU members Yes, the

UK would get some access, most

probably partial access like

Switzerland has However, full

associated status is most likely

to be dependent upon retaining a

freedom of movement agreement

and also some net financial

contribution Even then, there’s

no guarantee and the UK would

have given up its policy voice

Some might muse that issues

of science are trivial relative to

the issues of “democracy” or

“sovereignty” proclaimed with

zeal from some quarters To

quote the English novelist John

Galsworthy: “Idealism increases

in direct proportion to one’s

distance from the problem.” Those

that work in science policy see the

EU’s democratic processes working

well for science and the UK’s

leading voice in decision-making

EU science works That’s why

every UK minister for universities

and science for the last 25 years

has warned against leaving, and

there isn’t one UK university vice

chancellor that supports Brexit ■

Mike Galsworthy (@mikegalsworthy) is

programme director of Scientists for EU

(@scientists4EU)

They are listening

Computers can now speed through thousands of phone conversations

to pick out suspect behaviour, finds Hal Hodson

SAY it out loud and the machines

will know Search engines are

moving beyond the web and

into the messy real world And

they’re finding some odd things

Every call into or out of US

prisons is recorded It can be

important to know what’s being

said, because some inmates

use phones to conduct illegal

business on the outside But

the recordings generate huge

quantities of audio that are

prohibitively expensive to

monitor with human ears

To help, one jail in the Midwest

recently used a machine-learning

system developed by London firm

Intelligent Voice to listen in on the

thousands of hours of recordings

generated every month

The software saw the phrase

“three-way” cropping up again

and again in the calls – it was one

of the most common non-trivial

words or phrases used At first,

prison officials were surprised by

the overwhelming popularity of

what they thought was a sexual

reference

Then they worked out it was

code Prisoners are allowed to

call only a few previously agreed

numbers So if an inmate wanted

to speak to someone on a number

not on the list, they would call

their friends or parents and ask

for a “three-way” with the person

they really wanted to talk to – code

for dialling a third party into the

call No one running the phone

surveillance at the prison spotted

the code until the software started

churning through the recordings

This story illustrates the speedand scale of analysis thatmachine-learning algorithms arebringing to the world IntelligentVoice originally developed thesoftware for use by UK banks,which must record their calls tocomply with industry regulations

As with prisons, this generates

a vast amount of audio datathat is hard to search through

The company’s CEO Nigel Cannings says the breakthrough

came when he decided to seewhat would happen if he pointed

a machine-learning system at thewaveform of the voice data – itspattern of spikes and troughs –rather than the audio recordingdirectly It worked brilliantly

Training his system on thisvisual representation let himharness powerful existingtechniques designed forimage classification “I builtthis dialect classificationsystem based on pictures of

the human voice,” he says.The trick let his system createits own models for recognising speech patterns and accents that were as good as the best hand-coded ones around, models built

by dialect and computer scienceexperts “In our first run we were getting something like 88 per cent accuracy,” says Intelligent Voice developer Neil Glackin

The software then taught itself

to transcribe speech by using recordings of US congressional hearings, matching up the audio with the transcripts

Cheap as chips

The power of machines thatcan listen and watch is notthat they can do better thanhuman ears or eyes In fact,they perform much worse –especially when confrontedwith data from the real world Their power, like all applications

of computation, lies in speed,scale and the relative cheapness

of processing

“The cost would work out at

4 pence per hour of audio,” says Cannings Human transcription costs can be 1000 times that An automated transcription service

is something Intelligent Voice is considering, but for now they are focusing on search

Most large tech companies are developing neural networks for understanding speech, opening

up data sets that were previously difficult, or impossible, to search Voice-activated virtual assistants like Google Now, Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Echo and Microsoft’s Cortana must also make sense

of the quirks of human speech.And Facebook recently announced that it has repurposed its image-recognition software

to draw maps based on satellite photos of Earth These maps are of lower quality than those produced by humans but, again, the advantage is speed Facebook’s system can map the entire land surface of the planet – every road and house – in just a few hours ■

–All on record–

“No one at the prison

spotted the code word

until software started

churning through calls”

For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology

THE web is watching you Chunks

of code hide inside every website,tracking your online behaviour

Now, a pair of computerscientists have published theirattempt to spy back They audited

1 million of the most popularwebsites for tracking behaviours –more than anyone has looked atbefore Their investigation givesnew insight not only into whatsites might know about you,but how they’re figuring it out

Studying a million websites ishard To do it, Arvind Narayanan –who heads the Web Transparencyand Accountability Project atPrinceton University – built a toolcalled OpenWPM with graduatestudent Steven Englehardt

OpenWPM can visit and log in towebsites automatically, takingmore than a dozen measurements

of each one It took two weeks tocrawl through the top millionwebsites, as ranked by web trafficfirm Alexa

Narayanan and Englehardtdiscovered that many trackersare sharing the information theygather with at least one other

party, sometimes dozens oftimes The audit also revealed several previously unknown

“fingerprinting” techniques thatsites are using Here, the website asks the browser to perform a taskthat is hidden from the user The site then fingerprints individual machines based on slight differences in their performance

Trackers used to do this by watching how the browser draws

a graphic; now, they checkwhat fonts are installed or how the browser processes audio

A couple of trackers even gatheredthe device’s battery level

Tracking lets websites serve targeted ads, personalise what users see, or even price products differently Audits like this one can make the process behind these behaviours more transparent, says Narayanan

“You often don’t know how

How websites take your fingerprint on the sly

much tracking is going on, who’sdoing the tracking, or what data they’re collecting about you and what that will be used for,” he says “There needs to be external oversight, somebody holding companies’ feet to the fire.”Overall, they discovered more than 81,000 third-party trackers News websites had the most, on average Adult websites and those owned by government agencies and universities tended to have the fewest

Information like this could

be helpful for privacy tools like Ghostery, a popular browser extension that blocks trackers, says Narayanan “A big part of our research is helping [software] like Ghostery,” he says “Tools like this can block only the known stuff, not the unknown stuff.”

David Choffnes of NortheasternUniversity in Boston says it’shard to be surprised by revelations like this when web tracking is so ubiquitous “Is it frustrating and disappointing? Very much,” he says “Such studies are important

to keep consumers aware of privacy risks while browsingthe web, informing regulators,and guiding the design of countermeasures for those who do not want to be tracked.” Aviva Rutkin ■

“The audit found that some websites were asking for data on a visiting device’s battery level”

A SHIRT and cap that can diagnose

epilepsy quickly and easily has been

approved for use by European health

services, including the UK’s NHS

Epileptic seizures are the result

of excessive electrical discharges

in the brain More than 50 million

people worldwide have the condition,

including 6 million in Europe, making

it one of the world’s most common

serious neurological conditions

To diagnose epilepsy, someone

must typically have a seizure recorded

by an EEG machine in a hospital But

seizures rarely coincide with hospital

visits “The diagnosis can take several

years and is often imprecise,” says

Françoise Thomas-Vialettes,

president of French epilepsy society

EFAPPE Seizures are so difficult to

record that 30 per cent of people with

epilepsy in Europe are misdiagnosed

To make diagnosis easier, French

start-up BioSerenity developed the

Neuronaute, a smart outfit that

monitors people as they go about

their day The shirt and cap are

embedded with sensors that record

the electrical activity of the wearer’s

brain, heart and muscles If a seizure

occurs, the outfit can send an EEG

recording to doctors via a smartphone

The Neuronaute has recently

completed trials at Pitié-Salpêtrière

Hospital in Paris It could be especially

useful for diagnosing children, says

Thomas-Vialettes Frances Marcellin ■

NHS may soon use

CAN software identify complex

personality traits simply by

analysing your face? Faception, a

start-up in Tel Aviv, Israel, courted

controversy this week when it

claimed its tech does just that And

not just broad categories such as

introvert or extrovert: Faception

claims it can spot paedophiles,

terrorists – and brand promoters

Faception’s algorithm scours

images of a person from a variety

of sources, including uploaded

photos, live-streamed video

and mugshots in a database It

then encodes facial features,

including width and height ratio,

and key points – for example, the

corners of the eyes and mouth

“Using automated feature

extraction is standard for face

recognition and emotion

recognition,” says Raia Hadsell,

a machine vision engineer at

Google DeepMind

The controversial part is what

happens next Faception maps

these features onto a set of

15 proprietary “classifiers” that

it has developed over the past

three years Its categories include

terrorist, paedophile, white-collarcriminal, poker player, bingoplayer and academic To come upwith its custom archetypes, ItzikWilf, Faception’s chief technologyofficer, says the system wastrained on the facial features ofthousands of images of knownexamples The software onlylooks at facial features, he says,and ignores things like hairstyleand jewellery

Wilf says this has led to notablesuccesses When presented withthe photos of the 11 people behindthe 2016 Paris attacks, thealgorithm was able to classify nine

of them as terrorists Similarly,

it spotted 25 out of the 27 pokerplayers in an image database

The Faception site also listsmore prosaic uses for its tech,including marketing, insuranceunderwriting and recruiting

“HR could use it to identify

suitable candidates,” says Wilf

Many machine visionresearchers are crying foul,however, including Emin GünSirer at Cornell University inIthaca, New York “A classifier thattries to flag every single person ofArab descent could identify 9 out

of the 11 Paris attackers at the cost

of falsely flagging 370 million out

of the 450 million Arabs in theworld,” he says “Such a classifier

is completely useless.”

Wilf says that for each of theirclassifiers, the training sets ofimages run in the thousands Butfor behaviours as uncommon

as terrorism or paedophilia, thiswill still lead to a number of falsepositives and Wilf acknowledgesthis “There are always accuracyissues with machine learningalgorithms,” he says For thatreason, the algorithm will alwaysdefer to human judgement

What that means in practice

is unclear, as the human ability

to infer personality from facialtraits is only slightly betterthan chance, says David Perrett

at the University of St Andrews

in the UK

Face recognition technologyhas been the subject of manyethics debates in recent years

Most recently, there was anoutcry over FindFace, a Russianapp which uses data from socialnetwork Vkontakte to enableusers to identify people theysnapped on the street

“We would never licenseour IP to someone who woulduse it for those kinds of purposes,”

says Wilf But Gilad Bechar, a founder of the company, saysone of its clients is an unnamedsecurity contractor outside ofthe US

co-“This is a new idea,” Wilf says

“New ideas are often greetedwith friction.”■

“Faception claims it can spot terrorists, paedophiles – and even brand promoters and bingo players”

in cabins 2 metres above the road, letting cars pass underneath Beijing-based company Transit Explore Bus plans to test a full-size model in July or August

60kThe number of workers to be

replaced by robots at a Foxconn factory in Kunshun, China, according

to local authorities Foxconn supplies electronics to Samsung and Apple

17 per cent of people did so when approached on their own But this rose to 76 per cent when the robot was disguised as a cookie-delivery bot from a made-up outfit called RobotGrub Only one person out

of 108 asked to see an access card

Spot that poker face

New tech claims to tell personalities from faces, says Sally Adee

What’s the future of business?

We at New Scientist decided to take a look at how three of its key

drivers – energy, automation and money – might change over the

next decade To do that, we’ve asked three writers with a deep

understanding of these areas to tell us how they think the future

could unfold, and how it might confound our initial expectations

In this report, author David Wolman looks at the future of money

in a world increasingly divorcing itself from centralised institutions

With technology already disrupting the role of the middleman,

he examines how long banks can expect to eke out an existence

By a subtractive process, Wolman identifies how much of banking

is “socially useless activity” ripe for technological disruption Even

ostensibly specialist products like initial public offerings and

insurance are being brought to the masses He also sees a threat

over the horizon to the US dollar’s globally privileged status

To download your free copy, register online

MONEY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author of our third GameChangers report in the series is David Wolman,

who wrote the book The End of Money Wolman is a contributing editor at Wired,

and has written for a range of international publications including The New York

Times, The Wall Street Journal and New Scientist

IN THIS EXCLUSIVE NEW REPORT FIND OUT:

] Why trust in traditional finance institutions has broken down, leading to surprising shifts in the currency markets

] Why control of credit is shifting from banks to individuals with the advent of disruptive technology and new P2P business models

] Where is the smart money heading? Find out about the rise of the blockchain and understand what’s driving it

INTRODUCING THE THIRD IN A NEW SERIES

OF WHITE PAPERS FROM NEW SCIENTIST

24 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016APERTURE

Duck and dive

THIS is how eider ducks get their lunch The

common eider (Somateria mollissima) flocks

to the Norwegian coast in winter to surf the waves and feed in the protected bays and fjords Pål Hermansen has been photographing the birds along Norway’s central Trøndelag coast for three years, but he is mostly working blind

To get pictures like this one, he lowers a controlled camera on a pole into the water and fires off shots as the birds dive in This image of

remote-a mremote-ale eider is his fremote-avourite shot.

The birds like to snack on mussels, which they swallow whole The shells are crushed in their gizzard and excreted in small pieces Crabs are trickier: the eider has to tear off the claws and legs before gulping down the body.

The scientific name for the bird comes from

the Ancient Greek somatos, for body, erion, for wool and the Latin mollissimus, meaning

“very soft” The down feathers of the female were once used to fill “eiderdown” pillows and quilts, but these days it is more common to use either synthetic materials or down from domestic geese

Alice Klein

Photographer

Pål Hermansen

www.naturepl.com

26 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

1 THE END OF

THE SOLAR SYSTEM

THIS IS

All things must pass

But how, why and when

will all the stuff we take

for granted cease to be?

And what comes after?

From the personal to the

cosmic and the avoidable

to the inevitable, in this

special feature we look

at 13 endings that will

transform the world as

OUR star is not destined to explode as

a supernova, hurling its planets into

space It’s just not massive enough But

when it finally burns through its supply

of hydrogen some 6 billion years from

now, the great sphere of hot plasma

at the centre of our solar system will grow so

spectacularly bloated and bright that it will

transform our cosmic neighbourhood forever

Like most stars, the sun is a main sequence

star: in its core, nuclear fusion generates

energy by converting hydrogen to helium

Once all the hydrogen there has been

consumed, a layer of hydrogen around the

core will ignite, and the extra heat produced

will overcome the gravity that was keeping

the sun from ballooning

The result is a red giant: a swollen sun,

thousands of times more luminous than it

is now, whose outer layers will engulf the

innermost planets At full splendour, its

radius will extend a little further than Earth’s

current orbit

And yet our little blue marble may yet escape As the sun swells, it will lose up to

a third of its mass to a great outward wind

of charged particles With that will go some

of its gravitational pull, allowing the comets, asteroids and planets held in its sway to migrate to wider orbits

For the innermost planets, it’s a race against time “Mercury, Venus and Earth effectively will each try to outrun the sun as it becomes larger,” says Dimitri Veras of the University

of Warwick in Coventry, UK Mercury and then Venus will almost certainly lose, each being engulfed in the sun’s inflated atmosphere and torn apart by tidal forces

The fate of Earth is less certain As the planet drifts away, it will be hauled back in by tides from the sun’s outer layers “The case is too close to call,” Veras says Still, any life clinging

on would be in trouble: the very tides tugging Earth inwards will cook its interior, giving rise to volcanic eruptions worldwide (see “The end of life on Earth”, page 30)

All the planets beyond Earth should survive, but their atmospheres will be transformed

or boiled off Our supercharged sun will even cause havoc in the asteroid belt, says Veras When sunlight strikes asteroids they spin faster and faster, and many will centrifuge themselves into smithereens The Oort cloud,

a vast population of icy objects loosely bound

at the farthest margins of the solar system, will quietly drift away into interstellar space There is a silver lining: the puffy old sun will

be so luminous that the chilly outer regions

of the solar system, including the Kuiper belt where Pluto resides, may become hospitable

to life But the opportunity will be fleeting After 800 million years as an inflated red giant, the sun will shrink to roughly 11 times its current size, then briefly swell again Finally, its atmosphere will blow away to leave a glowing core: a white dwarf The stellar embers will cool and eventually crystallise, leaving the Kuiper belt once again out in the cold

Joshua Sokol

28 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

YOU have your own mind,

right? You have your

own thoughts and you

experience the world in

your own unique way In

short, you’re an individual

Maybe future generations won’t

enjoy the same privilege

If you believe some futurists,

technology will make telepaths

of us all We will live every day

in a vast network of brains

that communicate directly

via sensors and implants

This “noosphere” could enable

true global consciousness – but

it might also obliterate the

individual, transforming our

existential landscape forever

Researchers at the University

of Washington in Seattle have

already demonstrated a human

brain-to-brain interface Rajesh

Rao wore a sensor-studded cap

to measure his brain’s electrical

activity, while Andrea Stocco

sported a device that stimulates

brain regions using targeted

magnetic fields By imagining

moving his hand, Rao was able

to send a signal to Stocco’s brain,

causing him to move his finger

Miguel Nicolelis at Duke

University in Durham, North

Carolina, and his colleagues

have gone further with rats

and monkeys Last year, they

connected the brains of three

monkeys, showing that the

primates could synchronise brain

activity to control a virtual arm

But the leap from monkey

brains coordinating an action

to a global shared consciousness

is massive “You cannot transfer

minds, emotions, memories,”

says Nicolelis We don’t know

how to measure and encode such

higher-order brain functions

Anders Sandberg at the Future

of Humanity Institute at theUniversity of Oxford, UK, says that even if we could establish connections with the required fidelity, we will have a translationproblem “My mind doesn’t worklike your mind,” he says Creatingsoftware that can translate different mental representations

of various concepts might be as challenging as creating human-level artificial intelligence

There may be a workaround

The brain’s plasticity allows it toincorporate and interpret new sensory information Sandbergthinks that with the right technology we might train our neocortices, the regions

of our brains responsible for consciousness, to adapt to more complex signals coming from other brains, rather than from simple sensors

What might life in the hive mind be like? Acting as part of a group can be joyous and fulfilling,

and the larger the group, thegreater the benefit So joining

a global noosphere could be a profound and ecstatic experience

We might all share the joy of holding a newborn baby, multiplied by the 350,000 born around the world every day, say,

or marvel at how quickly billions

of coordinated hands can fix the environment

But there is a dark side “If technology makes it easy for the

good ideas to spread, it can also make it easy for the stupid ideas,” says Sandberg False accusations, for instance, could rage through our shared consciousness like wildfire, supercharging the worst that mob rule has to offer Advanced neural filters that automatically block the most dangerous thoughts might prevent the worst-case scenarios, says Sandberg The same goes for securing our minds against brain-hackers seeking to influence or even directly control our thoughts and desires But such filters would have to assess the content of neural signals to understand human thought, a staggeringly complex task to say the least

If all such hurdles are overcome, the hive mind might operate at different scales, says Sandberg Our local individual experience would still be ours,

as long as the security measures hold up, but we might choose to switch viewpoints, as in a video game And we might modulatesignals coming from higherlevels – family, city, regional andglobal – so that we experience them as our own preferences or even gut feelings

However, as in the early days

of the internet, you will probably have to get used to buffering Nerve impulses move more slowly than the signals between computers Multiply the inevitable lag by billions of brains, and the hive mind might feel positively indecisive Even in the deepest future, the speed of light will impose limits on what a hive mind can do, says Sandberg “A universe-scale hive mind might take billions of years to think a single thought.” MacGregor Campbell

2 THE END OF

THE INDIVIDUAL

“Global shared consciousness could be a profound, joyful experience”