SCIENCE•HISTORY•NATURE•FOR THE CURIOUS MIND

SLEEP DEPRIVATION
COULD HELP TO
FIGHT DEPRESSION
p16

ASIA EDITION | VOL 10 ISSUE 2

WILL WE EVER BE
ABLE TO FORECAST
THE WEATHER?
p80

WILDLIFE ON THE
BORDERLINE
p54

UNLOCKING THE
SECRETS OF
PPS 1875/01/2016 (025609)
MCI (P) 002/09/2017 ISSN 2529-7503

9 771793 983016
02
THE BRAIN
How 'minibrains' being grown in labs could reveal the mysteries
SGD 7.50 | THB 240 | NT 200 | RM 18
behind human development and disease p28
TV HIGHLIGHTS
How to Stay Young S2
You may be free from grey hairs and wrinkles, but do your
insides tell a different story? A team of health experts meet
ordinary people to reveal how quickly their organs, skin,
muscles and brain are growing old. Discover the secrets
that could hold the key to living longer, healthier lives.

Premieres 12 February
Mondays at 9.30pm (JKT/BKK)
10.30pm (SIN/HK/MY/TW)

Where the Wild Men Are

with Ben Fogle
Adventurer Ben Fogle meets more people who’ve ditched
a life of debts and daily grind for something different. These
intrepid adventurers have made their homes in some of
Earth’s most remote locations. From the Sahara Dessert to the
Guatemalan jungle, discover the reality of leaving it all behind.

Premieres 19 February
Mondays at 8.40pm (JKT/BKK)
9.40pm (SIN/HK/MY/TW)

Trust Me, I’m a Vet

The team run a brand-new study to find the best
way to help your pet lose weight, reveal how to
create a calm environment for stressed-out cats,
and investigate the nutritional pros and cons of wet
and dry pet foods.

Premieres 27 February
Tuesdays at 9.40pm (JKT/BKK)
10.40pm (SIN/HK/MY/TW)

www.bbcasia.com
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Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. Please call
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Y Send us your letters to bbcearth@media-group.com.sg WELCOME
THE FLIP SIDE OF ADVANCEMENT
Apart from New Year festivities, one other thing was welcomed with
much excitement in the final week of last year. The new season of Black
Mirror was released, a show that has elicited in its loyal viewers an
BBC Earth Magazine
eerie sense of foreboding towards the rapid rate at which our world is Includes selected articles from other BBC specialist magazines,
becoming dependent on technology. including Focus, BBC History Magazine and BBC Wildlife Magazine.
Such is the power of science fiction though, it has an almost
anticipatory nature to it. It could occasionally even trigger an idea that
www.sciencefocus.com
science eventually uses as a template for future innovation. After all,
the flatscreen TV was at one point just a fancy bit of animation on The
Jetsons. Remember that? www.historyextra.com
The truth is, though, that we still need ample technological advancement
for the good of the world. While the extremes can be scary, it www.discoverwildlife.com
is also true that technology is needed for dealing with real
issues like disease, climate change or even for energy
conservation and sustainability practices. IMPORTANT CHANGE:
One such example is our cover story this month, The licence to publish this magazine was acquired
where Simon Crompton takes us through the research from BBC Worldwide by Immediate Media Company
on the human brain that could help tackle difficult on 1 November 2011. We remain committed to making
diseases such as Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and a magazine of the highest editorial quality, one that
autism (p28). Elsewhere in the issue, we also explore complies with BBC editorial and commercial guidelines
the ways in which technology can help improve and connects with BBC programmes.
methods of weather forecasting (p80). With the
amount of devastation that can be caused to humans, The BBC Earth television channel is available in the following
animals and the environment by natural disasters, this regions: Asia (Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia,
is one place where pioneering research is crucial. Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan)

That’s it from us this month, we hope you enjoy this

issue as much as we enjoyed curating it!
SCIENCE • HISTORY • NATURE
FOR THE CURIOUS MIND
Know more. Anywhere.
Akanksha Nair
akanksha@media-group.com.sg
BBC Earth Magazine provides trusted, independent advice and information that
has been gathered without fear or favour. When receiving assistance or sample
“LIKE” US ON FACEBOOK! www.facebook.com/BBCEarthMagAsia products from suppliers, we ensure our editorial integrity and independence
Y We welcome your letters, while reserving the right to edit them for length and clarity. By sending us your letter you permit us to publish it are not compromised by never offering anything in return, such as positive
in the magazine and/or on our website. We regret that we cannot always reply personally to letters. coverage, and by including a brief credit where appropriate.

Experts in this issue…

DUNCAN HAYLEY KRISTA JONATHAN

GEERE
Duncan Geere is a freelance
science and technology journalist
based in Gothenburg, Sweden. This
month he explores the technology
behind weather forecasts. (p80)
BENNETT
Hayley Bennett is a freelance science
writer based out of Bristol, UK. In this
issue she talks about the lithium
reserve within the Bolivian salt
plains. (p72)
SCHLYER
Krista Schlyer is an award-winning
photographer and writer focused on
conservation, biodiversity and public lands.
She is the author of Continental Divide:
Wildlife, People and the Border Wall. (p54)
ELPHICK
Jonathan Elphick is a natural history
author, editor and consultant. He is
an eminent ornithologist and a
Fellow of the Zoological Society of
London. (p36)

Vol. 10 Issue 2 3
CONTENTS VOL. 10 ISSUE 2

FEATURES

14 Adventurous Escapades In Eastern Australia

Why the Australian continent is the ultimate destination
to experience nature and wildlife like never before

28 Unlocking the Secrets Of The Brain

20 54
From autism to Alzheimer’s, lab-grown mini-brains
could be the key to solving the biggest mysteries about
human development and disease

36 Harpy Heaven
Jonathan Elphick documents his observations of the
rarely spotted harpy eagle in Panama

42 When Grief Gripped A Nation

Dominic Sandbrook investigates the outpouring of
emotion that followed Princess Diana’s death

48 Rewild Your Diet

Prof Tim Spector reports on how he gave his microbes
a treat by living with the Hadza people

54 Wildlife On The Borderline

The barriers along the US-Mexico frontier carve up
habitats and age-old migration routes, impacting on a
host of species

62 The Bloody Road To Partition

Yasmin Khan describes some of the images that
define the creation of the independent states of India
and Pakistan

72 Digging For Electricity

The Bolivian salt plains hide vast reserves of lithium.
With demand for rechargeable batteries set to soar,
could this be the site of a new gold rush?

80 Will We Ever Be Able To Forecast The Weather?
Duncan Geere investigates why even in today’s advanced 6 Snapshot
world we still have trouble predicting the weather
RESOURCE
94 Book Review
This month, we list out our favourite literature from
last year that you must add to your shelf
96 Time Out
Crossword puzzle to stimulate your brain
28
REGULARS
3 Welcome
A note from the editor sharing her thoughts
on the issue and other ramblings
Stunning snaps from across the fields of
history, nature or science
28 Comment & Analysis
Helen Czerski on rainbows in ice
97 My Life Scientific
Helen Pilcher talks to Dr Andrew Digby about
career changes and the charismatic
98 The Last Word
Robert Matthews on why natural disasters don’t worry
us more
UPDATE
14 The Latest Intelligence
Sleep deprivation could help to fight depression;
consciousness restored in man after 15 years in a
vegetative state…
85 Q&A
Do blind people see in their dreams? How are calories in
food calculated? Are the fish in a shoal all the same age?
Why do I weigh less in the morning?

4 Vol. 10 Issue 2
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Snapshot
Naples at Night
Crew aboard the International
Space Station took this
photograph of the city lights of
Naples and the Campania region
of southern Italy. The Naples
region is one of the brightest in
the country; roughly three million
people live in and around this
metropolitan area.
The different colours of lights in the
scene reflect some of the history of
development in the area. The green
lights are mercury vapour bulbs,
an older variety that has been
10 Vol. 10 Issue 2
replaced in newer developments
by orange sodium bulbs (yellow-
orange). To the northeast, the
lightless gaps between the homes
and businesses are agricultural
fields. The bright yellow-orange
complex amidst the fields is the CIS
emporium, the largest commercial
retail facility in Europe. The large
black circular area in the photo is
Mount Vesuvius, the only active
volcano on Europe’s mainland.
PHOTO: NASA
Vol. 10 Issue 2 11
Snapshot

12 Vol. 10 Issue 2
The Bluest
of Ice
Acquired on November 29, 2017
by Operation IceBridge during
a flight to Victoria Land, this
image shows an iceberg floating
in Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound.
The part of the iceberg below
water appears bluest primarily
due to blue light from the water
in the Sound. The undersides of
some icebergs can be eroded
away, exposing older, denser,
and incredibly blue ice. Erosion
can change an iceberg’s shape
and cause it to flip, bringing
the sculpted blue ice above the
water’s surface. The unique step-
like shape of this berg—compared
to the tabular and more stable
berg in the top-right of the image—
suggests that it likely rotated
sometime after calving.
Operation IceBridge—an
airborne mission to map polar
ice—recently made several
flights out of the McMurdo and
Amundsen-Scott South Pole
stations, giving researchers greater
access to the interior of the icy
continent. For the ninth year in a
row, flights over Antarctica have
turned up ample science data, as
well as spectacular images.

PHOTO: NASA

Vol. 10 Issue 2 13
SPECIAL FEATURE
THRILLING
ESCAPADES
IN EASTERN
AUSTRALIA
These three states on the east coast of the Australian continent
can be the perfect source of adrenaline for your next vacation
1. ACTION PACKED:
NEW SOUTH WALES
SOAK UP SYDNEY
No matter how popular it gets, the
stunning Sydney harbour will still
captivate first-time and returning visitors
alike. Take to the stunning water at a
pace of your choosing. You can take
a ferry to soak in the views and use
the slow speed to capture the perfect
shot, or get the wind in your hair by
trying jetboating. You could even test
your endurance by kayaking across
the water. Lounge on any one of
Sydney’s 70 sparkling beaches, or get
active as you dive with sharks at Manly
SEALIFE. Refuel with a yum cha feast
in Chinatown or tuck into a hearty pie at
Harry’s Café de Wheels; this city truly
has it all.
14 Vol. 10 Issue 2
MIGHTY BLUE MOUNTAINS
Just a 90 minute drive to the west of
Sydney, The Three Sisters is an iconic
rock formation which happens to
be a part of the World Heritage Blue
Mountains. Ideal for canyoning and
caving, the mountains have deep fissures
gouged from the sandstone over eons.
Jenolan Caves is a labyrinth of stalactite-
lined limestone chasms carved by
underground rivers. Scenic World takes
you into the Jamison Valley floor, via
railway, cable car and skywalk. Follow
the boardwalk through the trees and
take in the sounds and tranquillity of the
Jurassic rainforest.
OUTBACK DISCOVERIES
For generations the continent has
attracted visitors hoping to get a real
taste of 1950’s outback Australia. Broken
Hill is the perfect solution, a unique
outback experience complete with an
authentic milk bar, famous sodas, and
milkshakes. The local mailman also
takes visitors out on tours, a first hand
opportunity to witness his epic 550 km
mail run. If not on foot, visitors can even
take a camel safari to see indigenous
animals, reptiles, birds and vegetation,
along with a chance to explore the Mundi
Mundi ruins, steep water-filled gullies, dry
creek beds and ranges, all on a working
sheep and cattle station.
SURF’S UP!
No trip to Australia is complete without at
least taking a shot at surfing. First-timers
can head to Australia’s most famous
strip of sand, Bondi Beach, to learn
to surf. Let’s Go Surfing’s friendly and
professional staff can help you catch the

wave of your dreams. Palm Beach, the
most northerly of Sydney’s beaches, is a
huge crescent of sand which is another
great spot for surfing. It also happens to
be the stunning locale from the Home and
Away TV series.
2. BACKPACKING BOUNTY:
QUEENSLAND
TAKE A DIVE ON THE WILD SIDE
Another one for the bucket list, visitors
can head to the Great Barrier Reef for
a lesson in diving. The reef is the only
natural organism that can be viewed
from outer space, and is known as one of
the seven natural wonders of the world.
Between the months of June and August,
join fellow travellers at the only place in
the world that let’s you swim with the
dwarf minke whale.
GET YOUR HEART RACING
Unlike other bridge climbs in the world,
Brisbane’s Story Bridge Adventure
Climb allows you to actually climb up
and abseil down. Thrill seekers can also
head to the only bungy site in Australia
at the AJ Hackett in Cairns. Catch great
views over the rainforest and out to the
Great Barrier Reef, that is if you find
yourself brave enough to keep your
eyes open on the way down.
DIG A DINO AT THE AUSTRALIAN
AGE OF DINOSAURS
The Age of Dinosaurs is not just a
museum – it’s a living heritage that
continues to uncover secrets from
the past. Located in Winton, in north
Queensland, this is the only place in the
southern hemisphere where people can
actually get their hands on dinosaurs
by volunteering to drill the soil off the
bones, or by taking part in a dinosaur
dig each August.
FUN AND GAMES AT GOLD COAST
An international fun-filled destination
that also boasts some of Australia’s
best, most consistent waves, Gold
Coast is certainly a worthy addition
to this list. Apart from lounging at
the beach or surfing the waves, you
can also head inland for treks in the
World-Heritage listed rainforest of
the Gold Coast hinterland. There you
can swim in crystal-clear rock pools,
explore rainforest retreats like Mount
Tamborine, and see Australia’s largest
glow-worm colony.
3. ALL IN ONE: VICTORIA
THE ULTIMATE AUSSIE ADVENTURE
From abundant wineries to craft breweries,
at just a 1.5 – 3.5 hours drive away from
the city, visitors can discover a variety
of natural vistas and abundant activities.
The area abounds in stunning beaches
ranging from the Great Ocean Road and
Mornington Peninsula, as well as iconic
native animals at Phillip Island, the Yarra
Valley and the Grampians regions. The
Grampians region is also renowned for its
national parks and world-class climbing.
CYCLE IN THE CITY
Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the
international governing body for sports
cycling, named Melbourne ‘Bike City’.
Humble Vintage rents out fully restored
vintage bikes and custom-made maps that
show you the coolest attractions, bars and
shops off the beaten track. For shorter
trips, the Melbourne Bike Share Scheme
allows patrons to hire bikes with rates as
low as AUD3.00 a day for trips lasting up
to 30 minutes.
GET UP CLOSE WITH NATURE
Give back to the environment by booking
a ‘voluntourism’ or ‘wwoofing’ (willing
workers on organic farms) holiday.
Programs include Koala Conservation
and Tiger Quoll Conservation at the Great
Ocean Ecolodge, as well as volunteer
packages with penguins at the Phillip
Island Nature Parks. Conservation
Volunteers Australia also provides many
programs for the perfect eco-vacation.
Vol. 10 Issue 2 15
Update THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE

PSYCHOLOGY

SLEEP DEPRIVATION
Although counterintuitive, a
bout of sleeplessness could
help tackle depression

COULD HELP TO
FIGHT DEPRESSION
Large study finds that ‘wake therapy’ is as effective
as antidepressants

According to the Office of National Statistics, anxiety or

depression affects almost one in five adults in the UK.
Currently, counselling therapies and antidepressant
drugs are the most common form of treatment, but it
can take weeks or months until positive effects are
seen. Now, a meta-analysis carried out at the
University of Pennsylvania has found that
medically supervised periods of sleep
deprivation can temporarily reduce
symptoms in as little as 24 hours.

PHOTOS: GETTY

16 Vol. 10 Issue 2

It’s been known for some time that sleep deprivation
has potential antidepressive effects, but exactly how
effective it is and how it works has remained a mystery.
To investigate this further, the team compiled data from
a carefully selected group of 66 studies dating back
some 36 years, selecting these from an initial ‘long list’
of more than 2,000 pieces of research.
They found positive results in around 50 per cent of
patients, regardless of their age, gender, condition (for
example, bipolar disorder or postpartum depression)
or the type of medication they were taking, if any.
Furthermore, partial sleep deprivation – sleeping for
three to four hours followed by forced wakefulness for
around 20 hours – was just as effective as being
deprived of sleep for 36 hours in a single sitting.
“These studies in our analysis show that sleep
PHOTOS: GETTY, THE FRANCIS CRICK INSTITUTE
deprivation is effective for many populations,” said Dr
Elaine Boland, lead author of the paper published in
The Journal Of Clinical Psychiatry. “Regardless of how
the response was quantified, how the sleep deprivation
was delivered, or the type of depression the subject
was experiencing, we found a nearly equivalent
response rate.”
Further study is now needed to determine precisely
how sleep deprivation brings around a reduction in the
symptoms of depression and to identify those who
could potentially benefit the most from the treatment,
researchers say.
Sleep deprivation
therapies could
offer new hope
to sufferers
E X P E R T C O M M E N T
ALICE GREGORY
PROFESSOR OF SLEEP PSYCHOLOGY,
GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
“The links between sleep and depression are well-
established within the field of psychiatry. People who
suffer from depression often suffer from insomnia
or hypersomnia (excessive sleepiness), for example.
Associations are complex, and researchers have
“FURTHER STUDY investigated whether manipulating sleep might have
positive consequences for depression. Cognitive
IS NOW NEEDED Behavioural Therapy aimed at improving insomnia has
led to reduced depression symptoms over time.
TO DETERMINE The meta-analysis described here focuses on
another technique: sleep deprivation. This is a long
PRECISELY established technique that seems somewhat counter-
intuitive, and lies in stark contrast to the therapy
HOW SLEEP mentioned above. In the meta-analysis, it was found
that restricting sleep is a rapid and useful intervention
DEPRIVATION for approximately half of those suffering from
depression. I think that this intervention holds great
BRINGS AROUND promise. However, it’s currently unclear as to how this
might be realised. The problem is that when those
A REDUCTION with depression are permitted to sleep normally again,
the benefits tend to disappear.
IN SYMPTOMS” So while sleep deprivation may not yet be a very
useful intervention, the technique could perhaps
be developed in ways so as to reduce depression
symptoms over longer periods. As the authors note,
the next step is to further understand the mechanisms
by which sleep deprivation improves mood. Could
it help to reset the body clock, perhaps? Could
elucidation of the neurotransmitters involved help us
to develop treatments in the future? We don’t yet know
where this knowledge will take us, but meta-analyses
of this type are important in telling researchers where
we need to go next.”
Vol. 10 Issue 2 17
Update THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
ANTHROPOLOGY
NEANDERTHAL BOY’S SKELETON
REVEALS THEY GREW MUCH LIKE
MODERN HUMANS
Neanderthals’ offspring developed in a very
similar way to our own, new research has
shown – with the differences in rates of
development thought to account for the
physical differences between the two species.
A team led by Antonio Rosas at the Spanish
National Research Council studied a male
Neanderthal child who died aged around
eight years old, and whose remains were
discovered in the El Sidrón cave in Piloña,
Spain in 1994. At the time of his death, he was
111cm tall and weighed 26kg. The Spanish
team found that the child had developed to
almost exactly the same degree you’d expect
to see in an eight-year-old male child today,
with two key differences.
First, his brain cavity had only reached
87.5 per cent of its adult size, compared to a
modern human child where the brain cavity
would already have reached its full size.
It’s thought this slightly slower rate of brain
development enabled Neanderthals to
grow larger.
18 Vol. 10 Issue 2
LEFT: Spain’s El
Sidrón caves contain
Neanderthal fossils
and tools, which are
of great interest
to researchers
“Developing a large brain involves ABOVE: Skeleton of
significant energy expenditure and, the Neanderthal boy
PHOTOS: PALEOANTHROPOLOGY GROUP MNCN-CSIC, SANDRA GOUTTE, ALAMY
consequently, this hinders the growth of
other parts of the body,” said Rosas. “In
Homo sapiens, the development of the brain
during childhood has a high energetic cost
and, as a result, the development of the rest
of the body slows down.”
Second, the thorax area of the skeleton
appears to have more developed more
slowly. The Neanderthal specimen’s thorax
resembled that of a five- or six-year-old
human child, with the cartilaginous joints of
the middle thoracic vertebrae and the
topmost vertebrae yet to fuse.
“The delay of this fusion in the vertebral
column may indicate that Neanderthals had
a decoupling of certain aspects in the
transition from infancy to the juvenile phase.
Although the implications are unknown, this
feature could be related to the characteristic
enlarged shape of the Neanderthal torso, or
slower brain growth,” said Rosas.

ZOOLOGY
ADORABLE BRAZILIAN FROGS
CAN’T HEAR THEMSELVES SPEAK
Two species of tiny frogs, known as
pumpkin toadlets, which live on the
floor of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, are
unable to hear their own (and each
other’s) cries, it has been discovered.
This makes them the only two
species known to have evolved in
this way. The discovery was made by
a team of scientists from Brazil,
Denmark and the UK, led by Dr
Sandra Goutte from Brazil’s
Universidade Estadual de Campinas.
In order to find a mate, most frog
species signal their presence to
members of the opposite sex by calls,
but making such calls consumes
energy and can attract predators. The
two species of pumpkin toadlet also
make such calls, but laboratory
testing at the University of Southern
Denmark suggested they are unable
to actually hear them, while
anatomical studies at Cambridge
University confirmed that the part of
The pumpkin toadlets’
bright colours warn
predators of
their toxicity
the ear that would normally detect
the high frequencies involved is
vestigial in the two species involved.
In other words, like the human
tailbone, it’s still there but no longer
does anything.
Jakob Christensen-Dalsgaard
from the University of Southern
Denmark said: “We have never seen
this before: these frogs make sounds
that they cannot hear themselves.”
Goutte added: “One would think
that if a signal is not perceived by its
target audience, it would be lost
through evolution.”
It’s thought that the calls have
been retained because the bright
orange toadlets have replace
auditory with visual signalling, and
that the throat-swelling that
produces the call is now the way the
toadlets attract a mate – with the
resulting call now a mere by-product
of this visual signal.
NEUROSCIENCE
CONSCIOUSNESS
RESTORED IN
MAN AFTER
15 YEARS IN A
VEGETATIVE STATE
A vagus nerve
stimulator being used
to treat epilepsy
A 35-year-old man who had been in a
vegetative state for 15 years following a car
accident has shown signs of
consciousness after receiving pioneering
nerve stimulation therapy. The outcome
challenges the belief that disorders of
consciousness that persist for longer than
12 months are irreversible.
The procedure, which was carried out by
a team of neuroscientists based at the
Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc
Jeannerod in Lyon, France, involved
implanting a device into his chest to
stimulate his vagus nerve – a major nerve
that runs down through the body from the
brainstem and is involved in walking and
many other important motor functions. The
same therapy is used to treat seizures.
One month after the implant, the man
went from being in a completely vegetative
state to being able to turn his head, follow
objects with his eyes and listen to his
therapist reading a book.
Recordings of brain activity also revealed
major changes in areas of the brain
involved in movement, sensation, and
awareness. After many years in a
nonresponsive state, he had entered a
state of minimal consciousness.
“Brain plasticity and brain repair are still
possible even when hope seems to have
vanished,” said lead author Dr Angela Sirigu.
The researchers are now planning to
extend the study to further investigate
the technique.
Vol. 10 Issue 2 19
Update THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
NEUROSCIENCE
BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE ALLOWS
MUSIC TO BE COMPOSED BY THOUGHT
Beethoven famously composed several of his
masterpieces while he was essentially deaf
– but surely even he would be impressed with
this piece of research. A team at TU Graz in
Vienna has created a brain-computer interface,
or BCI, that allows musicians to compose
using just the power of their thoughts.
Based on an established BCI that is used to
enable severely disabled people to write, the
system works by flashing up a series of options
– notes, pauses, chords etc – onto a screen
placed in front of the user. When the patients
focus on their desired options, minute changes
occur in their brain waves. These changes are
picked up by a special cap fitted with
electrodes, and relayed back into the software,
20 Vol. 10 Issue 2
A competitor uses
a brain-computer
interface at
2016’s Cybathlon
Championship
PHOTOS: GETTY, RICHARD WALLBACK/SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTE/UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
which then pieces the user’s decisions
together to form a musical score of their
composition. The project could eventually give
physically impaired people an opportunity to
express themselves with music, the team says.
“The results of the BCI compositions can
really be heard. And what is more important:
the test persons enjoyed it. After a short
training session, all of them could start
composing and seeing their melodies on the
score, and then play them. The very positive
results of the study with bodily healthy test
persons are the first step in a possible
expansion of the BCI composition to
patients,” said study leader Prof Gernot
Müller-Putz.
GENETICS

BUTTERFLY WINGS ‘REPAINTED’

USING GENE EDITING
Butterfly wings have been given a new look by instructions, we can infer which part says ‘paint THE DOWNLOAD
researchers who used the gene-editing tool the number 2s red’ or ‘paint the number 1s
CRISPR to alter the colours and patterns of black’. Of course, it’s really a lot more
their distinctive markings. complicated than this, because what is actually
The international team based at the changing are networks of genes that have a BJ 581
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in cascading effect on pattern and colour.”
Panama focused their attention on the WntA The team hopes that the findings will What’s that – BMW’s
gene – a gene known to strongly influence the eventually help them to learn more about how snazzy new hatchback?
staggering diversity of shapes and colours the colourful insects evolved. Miles off. It’s the designation
found in butterfly wing patterns in nature. They “The butterflies and moths, or Lepidoptera, that’s been given to the
discovered that by ‘rewiring’ this gene using the are the third largest group of organisms known grave of a 10th-Century
DNA-snipping tool CRISPR, they were able to on the planet,” said Dr Arnaud Martin. “Once Viking warrior found in Birka
customise the wing markings of seven different we have identified the sets of genes that are in south-east Sweden.
butterfly species. regulated by a gene like WntA, we can look at
“Imagine a paint-by-numbers image of a the sequence of different butterflies in the Cool. So why are we
butterfly,” said researcher Owen McMillan. “The family tree to see when and where these talking about it?
instructions for colouring the wing are written in changes took place during the 60 million years When the grave was first
the genetic code. By deleting some of the of butterfly evolution.” unearthed in the 1870s,
the shields, swords, axes
and remnants of horses
A normal Heliconius sara butterfly is shown on the left; the same species that has had its genes edited using CRISPR is shown on the right
buried alongside the body
led researchers to believe
it belonged to a male
Viking warrior.

But they were wrong?

Yep. A new DNA analysis
has found the skeleton only
has X chromosomes, and no
Y chromosomes. This
means it must have
belonged to a woman.

Wow! Does that mean

this was the grave of a
real-life shield-maiden?
Well, there’s a bit of
disagreement among
researchers. Some say that
there is still no solid proof
the Viking woman was a
warrior. Others say that if
we automatically assume
men buried in such a
manner were warriors, then
why would we make
different assumptions when
the body is female?

Vol. 10 Issue 2 21
Update THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
PETS
“WE NEED BETTER
EXPERIMENTS TO FIND OUT
WHAT DOGS KNOW”
Dogs don’t recognise changes to their own appearance – the ‘mirror test’ of
intelligence. But as dog cognition expert Dr Alexandra Horowitz explains,
there’s a reason they fail
ABOVE: Microbots Why is self-recognition a sign of
could one day be
used to target cancer intelligence?
cells, like in this Self-recognition comes out of the comparative
artist’s impression
cognition field, where people test if non-human
animals can problem solve, imitate or learn, just
as we would ask of children. Some questions are
about meta-cognition – thinking about thinking.
One meta-cognitive skill is ‘theory of mind’ – the
realisation that others have minds different from
your own, and know things you don’t. Humans
gain this skill after about the age of three.
What is the mirror test?
This involves looking at yourself in the mirror and
recognising that something has changed. The
story goes that [psychologist] Gordon Gallup
was shaving, and wondered if his captive
chimpanzees would look in a mirror and see
themselves the way he did. So he put a mirror in
their enclosure. They attacked because there
was a chimp running at them, but they soon
learned and started to examine themselves. He
surreptitiously marked chimpanzees on the
forehead with an odourless red dye and
recorded their behaviour the next time they saw
their reflection. His chimps touched the mark on
22 Vol. 10 Issue 2
their own head, not the mirror, and tried to smell
the dye on their fingers. That was considered
passing the mirror self-recognition test.
Which animals pass the test?
Dolphins have passed using marks on their sides
and a reflective surface in their aquarium, moving
their bodies in unusual ways to see the mark. One
African elephant passed the test and magpies
have passed. But a number haven’t passed, like
rhesus macaque monkeys. Dogs don’t pass the
test. But think about differences in sensory
PHOTOS: GETTY, ALAMY ILLUSTRATIONS: DAN BRIGHT
equipment and what’s important for animals –
whether they live with others, their social
organisation, whether they groom themselves. All
seem relevant to whether one might pass. With
dogs, you have not a visual but an olfactory
[scent-driven] creature.
So how did you test dogs?
I looked at a natural dog behaviour: they urinate,
leaving information in their pee. They also sniff
other dogs’ urine markings, so something is
communicated, presumably about identity.
They’re interested in who else is around. So I
designed an ‘olfactory mirror’. I collected urine
 YOGIS
Practising yoga for just 25 minutes a day can boost brain
function and the ability to control negative actions,
researchers at the University of Waterloo have found. The
effect is thought to be due to the release of endorphins and
increased blood flow in the brain.

THE CHEERFUL
Being in a good mood when you get a flu jab could boost
its protective effect, researchers at the University of
Nottingham have found.

GOOD MONTH

BAD MONTH

from 35 dogs and put small amounts of the

urine into canisters with air holes, then PANDAS
exposed the canisters to the dogs. The dogs The black and white bears recently had their conservation
spent less time sniffing their own urine and status downgraded due to rising numbers, but all is not well
longer sniffing other dogs’. But then I took their in China’s bamboo forests. Satellite images show that their
odour and added anise (the scent of liquorice) habitat is still smaller than it was 30 years ago.
to it. Sure enough, they spent more time
sniffing their own odour with this mark. MEAT LOVERS
Eating lots of processed red meat can raise your chances of
So are dogs smarter than we think? getting Type 2 diabetes by more than 20 per cent, a team in
BELOW: The mirror We have to take seriously what it’s like to be an Singapore has found. They believe it is due to the high levels
self-recognition test was
based on an experiment olfactory creature, and how that revises what of the iron-rich compound heme.
with chimpanzees their cognition might be. It’s possible that dogs
have a thorough
understanding of
themselves. Simply the
fact we haven’t been able
to answer these
questions previously
shouldn’t lead us to
assume that dogs don’t
have the capacity – we
just need better
experiments to find out
what it is that dogs
already know.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 23
Update
W H AT W E
L E A RNED
T HIS MON T H
BABIES CAN LEARN
THE VALUE
OF HARD WORK
A study at MIT showed
that babies as young as 15
months old persevered more
with tasks they were attempting
if they had previously seen an
adult struggling hard to
achieve something.
FISH HAVE
PERSONALITIES
University of Exeter researchers
studying Trinidadian guppies
found that particular guppies
were consistently more cautious,
curious or aggressive than
others across a range
of situations and environments.
MOODS ARE
CONTAGIOUS,
DEPRESSION ISN’T
A US study has found that
teenagers whose friends are in
a good or bad mood are more
likely to feel the same way –
although this doesn’t apply if
their friends are
severely depressed.
GIRAFFES’ LONG
NECKS MAY BE
A COOLING
MECHANISM
Giraffes’ necks are an
evolutionary mystery, but a new
study suggests that distributing
body mass in this way enables
them to present a smaller
surface area to bright sunlight,
and hence keep cool.
24 Vol. 10 Issue 2
THE LATEST INTELLIGENCE
ZOOLOGY
JELLYFISH SLEEP, DESPITE
HAVING NO BRAINS
Science still can’t fully explain why we need
sleep, but many current theories involve
clearing the brain of waste chemicals. A
rethink maybe required, however, because
research at California Institute of Technology
(Caltech) shows that Cassiopea jellyfish,
which have no brain at all, exhibit similar sleep
behaviour to humans and other mammals.
Cassiopea, the upside-down jellyfish, are
known for sitting on the ocean floor and
pulsating. So how can you tell if they’re
snoozing? Scientists use three criteria to define
‘sleep’ across the animal kingdom. Is the
creature less active? Is it less responsive to
external stimuli? And if you deprive it of ‘sleep’,
is it more prone to such a state afterwards?
The Caltech team monitored the jellyfish 24
hours a day and found that they pulsate about
39 times per minute at night, compared to 58
Cassiopea jellyfish
have algae living in
their tissues. When the
jellyfish lie upside-down
on the seabed, the algae
is exposed to sunlight
so it photosynthesises
and provides food
for the jellyfish
times per minute by day. In an experiment
where a shelf in the water was pulled out from
under them, jellyfish in this slower-pulsating
state took longer to reorient themshelves on
the ocean floor than jellyfish that were
‘awake’. Finally, if the jellyfish were ‘prodded’
with jets of water during the night, they tended
to fall into the quiescent state the next day
when they would usually be awake.
This suggests that jellyfish, which are an
ancient group of animals, do indeed sleep,
suggesting sleep may be a behaviour acquired
early on in our evolution and never abandoned.
“Jellyfish are the most evolutionarily ancient
animals known to sleep,” said researcher Ravi
PHOTO: CALTECH
Nath. “This finding opens up may more
questions. Is sleep the property of neurons?
And perhaps a more far-fetched question: do
plants sleep?”
GENETICS
HUMAN EMBRYO DNA SUCCESSFULLY
EDITED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN THE UK
A team at the Francis Crick Institute in
London has used DNA editing technology to
uncover the role of a gene that plays a key
role in the early development of human
embryos. The finding could open the door to
creating new treatments for fertility
problems, developmental disorders, and
even adult diseases such as diabetes that
may originate during the early
stages of life.
The researchers used a
DNA editing technique called
CRISPR to alter the genetic
code of 41 human embryos
donated by couples who had
successfully undergone IVF
treatment. In a regular, ‘molecular scissors’, allowing
healthy pregnancy, the cells researchers to snip out individual
in the egg divide for around
seven days until they form a rearrange them, altering the
ball of around 200 cells called
a blastocyst, which then goes
on to form an embryo. However, the team
found that if they manipulated a specific
gene they were able to stop the eggs from
producing a protein called OCT4, rendering
them incapable of forming into a blastocyst.
“One way to find out what a gene does in
the developing embryo is to see what
happens when it isn’t working. Now we have
demonstrated an efficient
way of doing this, we hope
that other scientists will use it
WHAT IS to find out the roles of other
CRISPR? genes,” said Dr Kathy Niakan.
“If we knew the key genes
CRISPR is a gene-editing that embryos need to
tool that acts like a pair of develop successfully, we IN N U MBERS
could improve IVF treatments
2,370
and understand some causes
‘letters’ of DNA code and of pregnancy failure. It will
take many years to achieve
gene’s function. such an understanding, our
study is just the first step.”
The temperature, in degrees
centigrade, of an asteroid that
smashed into what is now
It’s hoped the embryo Canada 40 million years ago –
research could lead to new the hottest temperature of any
fertility treatments
object ever known to be on the
surface of the Earth.
30
MINUTES
The maximum time period
we should be inactive for.
Moving for at least a few
minutes every half hour
can help prolong your
life, researchers from the
University of Columbia say.
6,000
The percentage of all of
the world’s known plant
species that are currently
growing in botanical
gardens across the globe.
Vol. 10 Issue 2 25
COMMENT & ANALYSIS
HELEN CZERSKI ON … RAINBOWS IN ICE
“HE FISHED OUT AN AXE, HACKED INTO A GLACIAL PIMPLE, AND
OUT CAME ICE FILLED WITH RAINBOWS”
W
e love it when a gift that
we’ve carefully chosen
makes someone happy.
But when the recipient of the
present is a small child we have
to accept that the real source of
joy is often the packaging rather
than its contents. Physicists have
a similar streak, and can often be
left in a corner happily playing with
something that isn’t meant to be
the main attraction. This time, the
culprit was one particular chunk of
ice, on a day that had been filled
with the stuff.
The star of the show was a cave
in the side of a glacier, and we had
spent an afternoon working there,
filming for a BBC documentary. But
right at the end of a long day, when
everyone was tired and ready to go
home, our guide said a child had
once told him there were rainbows
in the ice at one specific spot next
to the cave. He fished out an ice
axe, hacked into an unassuming
glacial pimple, and out came a
chunk of ice filled with rainbows.
Except that wasn’t quite it – there
were sheets of blues, pinks and
greens, glinting inside the clear ice.
And once I had been given this toy
to play with, I didn’t want to leave.
As the colours in the ice were
the same as those seen on
soap bubbles, they were a dead
giveaway of what was going on. Light hitting a thin soap
film can reflect off both the near and far surfaces, and when
those two reflections overlap with each other, some colours
of the rainbow are enhanced and some suppressed. In any
one spot, we just see one colour, the one that comes from
the specific mix of the rainbow that’s on offer from that
place. And only some combinations are possible, which is
why blue, pink and green dominate. But there was no soap
in the ice to cause the effect. Instead, there must have been
incredibly thin, sheet-like cracks, and light was reflecting
26 Vol. 10 Issue 2
off the near and far surfaces of the
cracks. The blue colours told me that
some of these cracks were only a few
hundred nanometres thick, and as
they widened, the colours merged into
yellow, then pink, and then green. The
colours let me see the width directly.
But ice cracks all the time. When
you put an ice cube into a drink, you
quite often hear the popping sound
as cracks form. In this case, it’s
because the outer ice expands slightly
as it warms (before it melts) and the
mismatch in size between
inside and outside forces the structure
to break. So why do we never see
colours in an ice cube? I suspect
that it’s because the cracks in an ice
cube are too wide – they just open
up until the inside and outside of
the ice cube are the same size. My
guess is that the cracks in this glacial
ice followed hidden layers of stress,
possibly left over from the ice flowing
sideways under pressure. Instead of
pulling apart, the two surfaces were
just shunted over each other, leaving
a truly tiny gap in between. The final
sideways shimmy might even have
been caused by the impact of the
guide’s ice axe.
As I held the ice, I could see the
colours fading as the warmth of
the sunlight softened the ice and
the cracks vanished. The guide
commented that this was the most
excited he had seen me all day. I could have spent hours
there, looking at the prettiest fracture patterns I had ever
ILLUSTRATION: KYLE SMART
seen. But everyone else was hungry and waiting for me, so
eventually I had to leave. Still, I carried my excitement home
with me, because the unexpected colours in the ice had
been the best toy of the day. 
Dr Helen Czerski is a physicist and BBC science presenter. Her book,
The Storm In A Teacup, is out now
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SCIENCE

UNLOCKING
THE
SECRETS
OF THE
BRAIN
From autism and schizophrenia to Alzheimer’s, lab-grown
mini-brains could be the key to solving the biggest mysteries
about human development and disease
WORDS BY SIMON CROMPTON

Scan this QR Code for

the audio reader

28 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 ILLUSTRATION: MAGIC TORCH

Vol. 10 Issue 2
29
SCIENCE

tacks of little plastic dishes in a laboratory

S incubator, each one holding a free-floating blob

of human brain might sound like the stuff of
science fiction. But this is no futuristic flight of the
imagination: these strange creations, known as brain
organoids, are already being cultivated in labs all over the
world, and researchers believe they could unlock some of
the deepest secrets of how our brains grow and what
happens when they go wrong.
“I don’t think that any of us set out to try and grow a
brain in a dish,” says Madeline Lancaster, a
neurobiologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular
Biology in Cambridge. “If you’d asked me even just a few
months before I started working on it, I would have said it
was completely nuts – but in my case, it was an
accident!”
Lancaster’s accidental experiments with organoids
started when she was a postdoctoral researcher working
in Vienna with molecular biologist Jürgen Knoblich,
A bright-field
investigating how the brain forms during development in microscopic image of a
the womb. She started by growing brain stem cells in flat cerebral organoid. In real
layers in a dish, but soon realised they lacked many of the life, this ‘mini-brain’ is
1cm across
key characteristics of nerve cells in a real brain. In search
of a better method she tried a new technique for growing
neural ‘rosettes’ – flat, flower-like circles of cells that were
more realistic, albeit still two-dimensional.
“When I put the cells in the culture dish, there was
something wrong with the reagents that I was using,” she BUILDING A BRAIN
says. “Rather than forming these nice flat rosettes, mine Despite their ‘mini-brain’ nickname, these organoids are
were forming these weird, floating balls. I thought they a long way from being full-size human organs. They’re
looked interesting, so I continued growing them.” around half a centimetre in diameter – roughly the shape
Speaking to other researchers in the field, she and size of the eraser on the end of a pencil – and they
discovered that some of them had also seen these lack key structures such as blood vessels, which limits
strange blobs, but had thrown them away because they how big they can grow. Organoids are also remarkably
looked wrong. But while these brain balls looked curious hardy, as long as they’re grown in a scrupulously clean
from the outside, what Lancaster found inside was environment, and can stay alive for more than a year.
PHOTOS: MRC-LMB, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

fascinating. Each was made from bulging layers of cells Lancaster’s mini-brains are enabling her to prise open
connected by cavities, just like the fluid-filled ventricles the ‘black box’ of human brain development. Because
that connect the hemispheres
of the cerebral cortex in a real
brain. Even the layers of cells
mimicked the arrangement in
“Despite their ‘mini-brain’
normal brain tissue, with stem nickname, these organoids are a
cells lining the ventricles and
layers upon layers of more long way from being full-size
specialised cells and neurons
built up towards the outside. human organs”

30 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 One of Madeline
Lancaster’s cerebral
organoids, seen here in
cross-section

they reflect the cell types and

organisation of a growing
human brain, organoids are
opening a window into time of life
that has previously been inaccessible
to science.
“People have done MRI scanning
on children and even babies to
look at how the brain wiring
changes, but when it comes to
those early events – how
neurons are made, how
many, which types and
where – we can’t answer
them, no matter how good
our MRI machine is. But I
think what’s happening in
these dishes reflects what’s
happening in an actual embryo.
Cambridge
We know this because the end
neurobiologist Madeline
Lancaster was the first product looks a lot like a real brain,
person to start growing so we have a tractable system to start
‘mini-brains’
asking some of these fundamental
questions about brain development.”
Lancaster is also using her mini-brains to
answer an even deeper question: what makes
a human brain human? We share more than 95
per cent of our DNA with our closest primate
relatives, such as chimpanzees, but our brains
are much bigger and undoubtedly different. By
comparing brain organoids grown from chimp
stem cells with those from humans, she and
her team are watching how these differences
emerge from the earliest stages of
development. There’s even the possibility of
The process of using new genetic engineering techniques to
building a switch human and chimp genes around in
‘mini-brain’ starts with
a genetically modified mini-brains – something that would be
human skin cell impossible to do in living animals – to pin
down the precise molecular pathways that
make the human brain so special.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 31
SCIENCE
The brain-like appearance of these organoids raises
ethical as well as scientific questions. Can they think, and
are they conscious? According to Lancaster, the answer
is almost certainly no. “I think of them as being a bit like
brain tumours,” she says. “Tumours contain many more
neurons than our mini-brains in a dish, but no one is
concerned that their brain tumour is thinking or has
consciousness, and nobody is sad that it has been taken
out and thrown away. That’s what we have here. It’s not
an organised network, and it cannot make a functional
thinking circuit – it’s a ball of brain tissue, and just
because you have neurons doesn’t mean it can think.”
Today, she and her team are growing mini-brains from
human embryonic stem cell lines – the multi-purpose cells
originally found in very early human embryos, but now
cultivated in the lab. She’s also using so-called induced
pluripotent stem (IPS) cells: adult cells that have been
pushed back to an embryonic state with a cocktail of
molecules first discovered by Nobel Prize-winning
Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka. Depending on the
exact conditions used, Lancaster can nudge her
organoids to develop all kinds of cells, from the fluffy
choroid plexus (which would connect with blood vessels
in a real brain) to pigmented light-sensing cells that are
usually found in the retina at the back of the eye.
“There’s just so many cell types to look for,” she says,
“But depending on the method we use, every time we
look for something that we know should be there, we
find it.”
WIRING UP
Mini-brains don’t just allow researchers to study normal
developmental processes. Sergiu Pasca, Assistant
Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at
Stanford University in California, is using them to
understand what goes wrong in autism, schizophrenia,
epilepsy and other neuropsychiatric disorders.
“Most of the psychiatric drugs we have today have
been discovered by chance – we know very little about
the origins of these disorders and the question is why?,”
he asks. “Unlike cancer biologists, who can take out a
tumour, put it in a dish and find ways to treat it, we
cannot do that with the brains of our patients with
mental disorders!”
“Pasca and his team have managed to
grow mini-brains for more than two
years – a staggering 800 days is their
current record”
32 Vol. 10 Issue 2
Pasca and his team have managed to grow mini-brains
for more than two years – a staggering 800 days is their
current record – and shown that they can generate most
of the same cell types and structures found in real
human brains. They’re using the technique to
investigate the roots of severe autism and epilepsy
syndromes, by generating organoids with IPS cells
derived from skin samples of affected children and
then carefully comparing them with cultures grown
from healthy cells.
“We can use electrodes to measure how the cells
are talking to each other, and microscopy to see
how the cells move and make connections with
each other,” he explains. “Many of the genes
associated with these disorders are involved in
the connections between nerve cells, so we can
see how the gene changes in these patients are
impairing the communication within the brain in
a non-invasive way.”
He’s now taking these ideas even further,
sticking together organoids that mimic different
regions of the brain and studying their
interactions – a technique he describes as ‘brain
Lego’. The team is using these hybrids to spy on
the brain as it wires itself up, focusing on what
happens to so-called inhibitory neurons that
normally help to calm down brain activity but are
faulty in people with epilepsy and autism.
“Inhibitory neurons are not born in the cortex
on the surface of the brain: they are born in a very
deep region of the forebrain and have to migrate
millimetres over many months after birth,” Pasca
says. “It’s really fascinating to watch in our cultures
– they kind of pull themselves up and jump along.”
But when Pasca and his colleagues looked at
organoids grown using cells from patients with a
form of autism that is associated with epilepsy, they
saw a very different picture. The inhibitory cells were
moving in a very peculiar way, jumping more often but
less efficiently and eventually getting left behind.
Impressively, the researchers were then able to identify
a drug that could rescue these lagging cells, correcting
the wiring defect and pointing towards a potential future
treatment for children suffering from the same condition.
Sergiu Pasca
PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK
holding ‘mini-brains’
used to study the
development
of conditions such
as autism
Vol. 10 Issue 2 33
SCIENCE

Selina Wray
at work in her
laboratory
at University
College London

INTO OLD AGE

Meanwhile at University
College London, neurologist Selina
Wray is using brain organoids to
look at neurodegenerative conditions
that start at the other end of life,
One of the
cerebral organoids
including Alzheimer’s disease and
used by Sergius Pasca fronto-temporal dementia.
in his research into “Normally we have to work with post-
neuropsychiatric
disorders
mortem brain tissue from patients, but you’re
only ever looking at the end stages,” she says.
“It’s almost like coming to the scene of a crime after
the criminal is gone, and you’re trying to piece
together a sequence of events by looking at the
damage that’s been left. I want to build models in
the lab which will let us look at the very beginning of
the disease – because if we understand the first
An X
things to go wrong, that’s when treatment should be
chromosome: the red
areas at the end of the more effective.”
‘arms’ are telomeres, In a similar way to Pasca and Lancaster, she’s
which play a role in
ageing
taking samples of skin from patients with dementia,

ALL THE
ORGANOIDS
It’s not just brains: researchers are
creating three-dimensional organoids
from many different types of tissue,
not only to study healthy devel-
opment but also to discover what
happens when things go wrong and
to develop future therapies. Here are
some of the types they’ve managed
to grow so far…
GUT
Scientists have made
organoid versions of many parts
of the gastro-intestinal tract, from
taste buds to the intestines and
stomach. Intestinal organoids can be
manipulated to produce insulin,
suggesting possible future
treatments for diabetes.
LUNG
Although they’re a long way
from a ‘lung in the lab’, lung
organoids grown using reprogrammed
stem cells from patients with diseases
such as chronic asthma and cystic
fibrosis could be useful models for
finding new treatments.

34 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 turning them into IPS cells and then growing
organoids. Wray can spot differences
compared with organoids from unaffected
people after just a few months, finding increased
levels of the forms of certain molecules that are
associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
However, there’s a problem with this approach:
mini-brains mimic the very earliest stages of life,
while dementia is a problem that takes decades to
develop. To solve this, researchers are working on
CHARLIE ARBER & CHRIS LOVEJOY/UCL

clever hacks to speed up the ageing process. One

idea is to add in genetic changes that mimic “Mini-brains mimic the very
progeria – a rare disorder that causes dramatic
premature ageing. Another approach is to meddle
earliest stages of life, while
with the structures protecting the ends of DNA
inside cells, known as telomeres, which act as a
dementia is a problem that
kind of countdown clock as we age.
As well as studying the underlying processes that
takes decades to develop”
drive dementia, Wray thinks that mini-brains have a
lot of potential for helping to identify the right
treatment for individual patients.
“I feel excited by the idea of personalised Sergiu Pasca is similarly enthusiastic about
PHOTOS: UCLA, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY,

medicine – that you could take somebody’s cells
and grow organoids in the lab, screen a panel of
drugs against them and say, ‘Okay, we think this
person will respond to drugs ABC, but this person
will respond better to drugs XYZ,’” she says. “That’s
happening in cancer biology, this idea of being able
to stratify patients on a molecular basis, and while I
think we are a long way off, I love the idea of
growing someone’s neurons so we can work out
what therapies we should be giving them.”
the potential of mini-brains to change lives.
“Our organoids are grown from cells taken
from real patients,” he says. “These kids have
severe neurodevelopmental disorders that
really impair their lives, and to think that a few
months later you can derive brain tissue from
those patients in a dish and start asking
questions about how the disease may arise –
that’s what makes this exciting.” 

BREAST THYMUS HEART

Mammary organoids grow
the same branching structures
that are seen in human milk ducts.
Because many breast cancers start
from such ducts, these organoids
are providing vital insights into
tumour growth.
The thymus gland is the
place where infection-fighting
immune T-cells mature. Thymus
organoids can produce functional
human T-cells, which could potentially
be used to restore the immune
system in transplant patients.
Cardiac organoids are
revealing hidden regenerative
pathways that could be reactivated to
treat heart disease. Researchers also
created organoids with functional,
beating chambers, as a model for
studying heart failure.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 35
NATURE

Seeing a harpy eagle nest is a Holy Grail

for birdwatchers. Jonathan Elphick
strikes gold in Panama, a hotspot for
the world’s most powerful raptor

HARPY
H E AV E N
36 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 It may recall the mythical
JOÃO MARCOS ROSA

Roc, but the harpy

eagle is no figment of
our imagination. The
giant raptor has evolved
massive feet and bear-
like claws to snatch
monkeys and sloths from
the treetops

Vol. 10 Issue 2 37
NATURE
arlos turns and grins. “I think we’re finally going
C to see the adult eagle this morning,” he says.
“Are you excited?” As our four-wheel-drive
bumps down a rainforest track towards the Pan-
American Highway, there is a resounding chorus of “You
bet!” The day before we had made the long journey to a
recently discovered harpy eagle nest. Though we were
thrilled by the single huge fluffy white chick as it peeked
over the edge of its eyrie, it was disappointing not to
spot a mighty adult as well.
Since the chick is already about six weeks old, its
parents will now be bringing back food – mostly monkeys
and sloths – rather infrequently. There is still a good
chance of a sighting, however. Any encounter with a
harpy eagle – a species that regularly features near the
top of ‘birds-to-see-before-you-die’ lists – is a red-letter
day. We’re keen to try our luck again.
Harpy eagles breed only once every two or three years,
one of the longest reproductive periods of any raptor.
While pairs may nest again in the same tree, there is no
guarantee: they might move elsewhere for subsequent
nesting attempts. So whenever an easily observable
active nest is found, word spreads like wildfire among
38 Vol. 10 Issue 2
ABOVE: Visiting rangers and guides and then further afield, and lodges
an active nest is
your only realistic
chance of spotting
harpy eagles,
start filling up with eager birders from all over the world.
Celebrated as Panama’s national bird, the harpy eagle
which despite occurs in greater numbers here than anywhere else in
their size can melt Central America. Measured by confirmed active nests, the
into the forest
with ease country’s harpy population is third-largest in the species’
entire range, from southern Mexico south to north-east
Argentina. Only Venezuela and Brazil have more harpies.
But Panama hosts the highest density, with 800 or more
breeding pairs by some estimates. Most are in the Darién,
the easternmost province.
The harpy eagle is classified by the IUCN as Near
Threatened, though this label is somewhat misleading
because in many regions it is rare and declining. The
Global Raptor Information Network prefers to class
the species as Critically Endangered in Mexico and
Central America, and as Vulnerable in South America.
Deforestation is an important factor, but the main threat
is persecution. Eagles are killed for trophies, because
they are wrongly seen as a threat to chickens, pigs
and other livestock, and by some native Americans for
their magnificent crest and wing feathers, used to make
arrowheads and head-dresses.
 CANOPY
TOWER:
FROM RUIN
TO ECOLODGE
Slim and dapper in his jaunty red hat,
Raul Arias de Para may be 70 but still
has a child’s delight in wildlife. In 1999,
this ex-banker and politician-turned-
conservationist, whose grandfather was
a founder of the Republic of Panama, had
a brilliant idea. He decided to convert an
abandoned US military radar facility near the
Panama Canal into a bird- and mammal-
watching lodge, which he named Canopy
Tower. Its now-famous upper deck has a
360° vista across the surrounding rainforest,
providing stunning eye-level views of
otherwise hard-to-see canopy birds, from
toucans to tanagers, while monkeys and
sloths entrance viewers from the floor below.
Find out more at www.canopytower.com

THE HARPY EAGLE IS A

Why Panama has a relatively healthy population of
harpies is unclear, but it may be due to abundance of
prey. In South America there are more raptor species
and mammalian predators – including humans –
competing for food. Also, the Emberá and Wounaan
tribes native to the Darién tend to practise low-level
subsistence hunting (which does not include the taking
of sloths) and small-scale shifting cultivation, neither of
which appears to pose any threats to the eagles.
On the second day of our quest, I join guide Carlos
Bethancourt and wildlife photographer David Tipling
for a bleary-eyed pre-dawn breakfast. Our base is the
newly opened Canopy Camp, some 50km from the
great expanse of remote rainforest covering much of
the Darién, where our target nest lies.
SPECIES THAT FEATURES
NEAR THE TOP OF ‘BIRDS-TO-
SEE-BEFORE-YOU-DIE’ LISTS.
We drive along an increasingly potholed road for an
hour, before reaching the small town of Yaviza. At this
point the Pan-American Highway, which connects Alaska
and the southern tip of South America, peters out for a
substantial distance. Here we enter the famous Darién
Gap – a near-pristine world of rainforest and swamp
extending for 160km, well into northern Colombia.
It is still dark as the Panamanian border police
check us out. Then we board a dugout canoe with
an outboard motor and begin speeding along the
Chucunaque River. As dawn breaks, and mantled
ABOVE: A tiny, howler monkeys proclaim their presence from the
recently hatched
fluffy chick is treetops with amazingly loud roars, we at last arrive at
dwarfed by the the settler village of El Real. We climb into a pick-up
powerful feet
of its parent. truck for the short drive to the headquarters of Darién
Amazingly, it will National Park, where we are joined by two park rangers.
be adult-sized in
five to six months Finally, hearts in mouths, we walk a trail through the
rainforest to the harpy eyrie.
A DREAM COME TRUE
Gazing up at the nest far above, we do not have
long to wait. A grey-plumaged adult suddenly appears,
every bit as spectacular as I had hoped. It lands near
the nest, its enormous rounded wings spread wide. A
lifetime dream for many birders has, for our small party,
come true.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 39
NATURE

Though not quite the largest bird of prey – that title belongs to the
condors – the harpy eagle is arguably the most powerful. It measures
around 0.9–1m from meat-cleaver beak to tail. The wings, which
span up to 2m, are relatively short for the eagle’s size, but combine
with a long tail to give this mighty bird – like a giant sparrowhawk
– great manoeuvrability in flight. The tail acts like a rudder as it
steers through the dense forest. As with sparrowhawks, females are
considerably larger than their mates – at a maximum of 9kg, they
weigh up to twice as much.
Harpies hunt mainly by making short flights from one tree to
another, pausing at each look-out to locate unwary sloths and
monkeys, their chief prey. The dark interior of the forest renders
hearing more important than vision. These eagles have a large
circular facial disc like that of owls and harriers, which directs
sound into the ears and enhances hearing in a similar way to
cupping your ears with your hands.
Such hefty prey requires some heavy lifting. Harpies’ immensely
thick legs and feet are powerful enough to rip sloths and monkeys
from branches. The talons are the largest of any raptor, the sabre-
like hind claw being up to 7cm long. A big female harpy can fly
off clutching a male howler monkey or adult brown-throated sloth
weighing almost as much as she does. Even so, many hunting
attempts will end in failure.
Harpies also prey on other arboreal mammals, suchas kinkajous,
opossums and olingos, as well as iguanas and large birds such as
A fully grown youngster,
macaws. Very occasionally they may take the odd ground-dwelling by now sporting the
animal, such as a young peccary, armadillo or snake. species’ famous crest. It
will be four years before
it acquires its first adult
RICHNESS OF ANIMAL LIFE plumage

Seeing this stunning predator may have been the high spot of my
trip – literally, as the nest was over 30m above the forest floor – but
there was so much else to marvel at. Panama is phenomenally rich in
wildlife for a compact country slightly smaller than Scotland. It hosts
1,000 species of bird (about 100 more than have been recorded in
the whole of Europe) and over 10,000 plant species, including some
1,200 orchids and 1,500 trees. New species are being discovered
every year.
The harpy eagle seems an appropriate symbol of all this diversity
– its domain, the rainforest canopy, is the richest part of the richest
land habitat on Earth. Researchers estimate that 60–90 per cent
of rainforest life is found mainly or exclusively in this sunlit layer,
which typically soars 30–45m above ground level. In the Darién, the
rainforest canopy is the home of the aforementioned monkeys, sloths
and kinkajous, not to mention toucans, parrots, trogons, tanagers
and a myriad other colourful birds, as well as many species of frog,
lizard, bat and countless invertebrates, especially ants.
By contrast, shade cast by the dense umbrella of the canopy
makes the forest interior a dark environment, with as little as five per
cent of sunlight filtering down to the lower layers – the understorey
and shrub layer. The forest floor receives even less light: typically just
two per cent. This is why so little vegetation grows there. Shallow
soils mean that trees are often toppled by storms. A big tree crashing
down creates an open area that allows light to break in, bringing
new opportunities for trees, shrubs and vines to create a jungle of
vegetation in a short time.
One particular rainforest feature with which the harpy eagle
is closely associated is the presence of extra-tall trees reaching
40–60m that tower above the canopy. Known as emergent trees,
these form what is sometimes called the ‘overstorey’. A common
example in the Darién is the cuipo, which has a massive pale grey

40 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 During migration
periods flocks of
raptors funnelpast the
capital, Panama City

HOW TO SEE PANAMA’S

Harpies like to nest in
the prominent fork of a
huge emergent tree, with
enormous boughs offering
sweeping vistas of the
surrounding forest.
HARPY EAGLES
WHEN TO GO
Harpy eagles can be seen year-round.
Tourist high season, when it is mainly
dry, is December–April; most rain falls
in May–October.
Visit in October–December to
experience one of the world’s great
avian spectacles. Three million North
American hawks, kites and vultures
migrate south across the isthmus
of Panama, and many millions of
songbirds, waders and other migratory
birds also pass through.
ACCOMMODATION
Canopy Tower and its sister locations
Canopy Camp and Canopy Lodge can
be visited on all-inclusive seven-night
birding packages, which offer a chance
of spotting harpy eagles as well as
many other rainforest species. Details at
www.canopytower.com.

THE HARPY EAGLE SEEMS AN
APPROPRIATE SYMBOL OF
DIVERSITY. ITS DOMAIN IS THE
RICHEST PART OF THE RICHEST
LAND HABITAT ON EARTH
trunk that bulges at the base. This is one of the trees
most favoured by eagles for their nest.
Pairs of harpy eagles mate for life and share the
task of building the impressive stick structure, often
wedged in a large fork, adding green leaves and seed
pods to the shallow cup. Although no courtship rituals
are known, the male and female have been observed
to call softly to one another and rub their powerful bills
together while nest-building, presumably helping to
reinforce the pair bond.
Female harpies lay two eggs, but are not
known to rear more than one chick, failing to
incubate the second egg (should
both eggs hatch, the younger
chick will likely fail to compete
with its sibling).The incubation
period is about eight weeks. The
youngster, which has white down,
generally fledges at between six and seven
months of age, but even after that length of
time may still beg for food from its parents. It
will be protected by them for a further three
or four months.
A rare photo of an The immature eagle goes through a sequence of
adult harpy eagle
carrying opportunistic
armadillo prey. Sloths
plumages and will remain within 100m or so of the
nest for at least 15 months – and in the same general
and monkeys are
usually on the menu area for up to 30 months. Observations of captive
birds indicate that females may not breed until they
are five years old, and males at some stage before
they are nine. Should an eagle evade disease and
injury, and persecution by humans, it stands a chance
of surviving 25 or even 35 years.
Indigenous Emberá communities in the Darién are
using their valuable knowledge of the forest to help
locate harpy nests, giving a boost to lodges like the
three in the Canopy ‘family’, and to tourism in
Panama in general. The Emberá in turn make
money from taking visitors in dugout canoes
and selling handicrafts. By these means they
can afford to reject any financial incentives
offered by loggers, and thus maintain their
respect for the forest and its wildlife.
Watching the eagle nest with Carlos and
David, I can’t help wondering what fate has in
store for its spectacular young inhabitant. Species
like harpy eagles, that reproduce so slowly, can be
extremely vulnerable to changes in their environment.
But I take heart from the fact that ecotourism is giving
the forest in this corner of Panama a much more
secure future.
Jonathan Elphick, an ornithologist and natural-history author, has
visited Panama several times. His books include The World of
Birds, published by the Natural History Museum

Vol. 10 Issue 2 41
HISTORY

A CARPET OF FLOWERS
Mourners left more than a
million bouquets outside
Kensington Palace in the wake
of Princess Diana’s death
in a car crash on 31 August
1997. The scale of public grief
“escalated to a point when
few people could remember
a precedent”, says
Dominic Sandbrook

42 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 WHEN GRIEF
GRIPPED
A NATION
What does the extraordinary outpouring of
emotion that followed Princess Diana’s death
tell us about the state of Britain 20 years ago?
Dominic Sandbrook investigates
BRIDGEMAN

Vol. 10 Issue 2 43
HISTORY
here are moments in history when
T you can feel a nation changing
course, and the summer of 1997 felt
like one of them. On the first day of May, the
British electorate had unceremoniously
slammed the door on 18 years of
Conservative government, handing Tony
Blair’s Labour party the biggest landslide in
postwar history. When, in the small hours of
the morning, Blair addressed Labour’s
election-night party at the Royal Festival
Hall, he began with the words: “A new dawn
has broken, has it not?”
At lunchtime the following day, as his car
pulled into Downing Street for the first time,
London was bathed in brilliant sunshine.
Britain, Blair had once said, must be a
“young country” again. And as the new
prime minister shook hands with the lines of
Labour activists waving their Union Jacks,
there was a palpable sense that something
had changed.
Three months later, on Sunday 31 August,
Blair was in his constituency home in the
north-east of England when he heard the
terrible news that Diana, Princess of Wales
had been killed in a car crash in Paris. Almost
immediately his thoughts turned to what he
would say, scribbling some thoughts on the
back of an envelope. Among them was a
phrase suggested by his press chief, Alastair
Campbell, that came to capture the public’s
In pictures: Britain mourns
the ‘people’s princess’ in 1997
LEFT: Princess Diana during a visit to an Angolan minefield, 15 January
RIGHT: A visibly shaken Tony Blair reacts to the news of Diana’s death, 31 August
44 Vol. 10 Issue 2
relationship with the dead woman. “She was,”
he told the cameras that morning, “the
people’s princess.”
Later, Blair himself admitted that it
sounded like “something from another age.
And corny. And over the top.” But it caught
the public imagination for a reason. For in
the next few days, the popular reaction to
Diana’s death escalated to a point when few
people could remember a precedent.
Outside her London home, Kensington
Palace, well-wishers left more than a million
bouquets. At the family home, Althorp, so
many people tried to bring flowers that the
police begged them to stay away because
the traffic chaos was endangering public
safety. When Diana’s funeral was held at
Westminster Abbey on 6 September, an
estimated three million people poured into
the streets of London, while a further 2.5
billion people watched the worldwide
television coverage.
A GLOBAL SPECTACLE
I was in the Balkans that summer,
backpacking after graduating from
university. Diana’s death made the front
page of every Bulgarian newspaper for days.
On the day of her funeral, my friends and I
were in a little Black Sea fishing village. At
the appointed hour, a man came out into the
square carrying a battered old television, and
In 1997, Britain was
just emerging from
a period in which
crying in public was
regarded as a sign
of weakness
the locals gathered around to watch the
pictures. The spectacle of the villagers
solemnly listening to Charles Spencer’s
eulogy, delivered in a language almost none
of them understood, was one of the most
extraordinary things I have ever seen.
Twenty years on, Diana’s death remains
an obvious landmark in our recent history.
Yet the passions that surrounded it – the fury
at the popular press, which was thought to
have hounded her to her grave; the outcry at
the royal family, who were criticised for their
reluctance to mourn more publicly; even the
enthusiasm for Tony Blair, who saw his
public satisfaction rating rise to a record high
REUTERS/GETTY
– have now faded to the point when many
feel almost embarrassed to recall them.
In the aftermath of the wedding of Prince
William, the diamond jubilee and the birth of
FROM L TO R: Charles Spencer and Princes William, Harry
and Charles at Diana’s funeral
 a new heir, the monarchy has never been
more popular. Despite having left office 10
years ago, Tony Blair is arguably one of the
least popular public figures in the country.
And even Diana herself has disappeared
from our national conversation to an extent
that would have seemed unimaginable in
those heady days after her death. By 2016
there were even reports that her grave at
Althorp was overgrown and neglected, a
metaphor for the way the most
photographed woman in the world has faded
from our national story.
What does it all mean? And what will
future historians make of the moment when,
as the legend has it, a nation wept as never
before, and when the monarchy itself
seemed in peril?
PUBLIC FRENZY
The first obvious point is that Diana’s death
was not unprecedented. Royal occasions
have always provoked public fervour and
commanded vast crowds, while one of the
few certainties of history is that the death of
an attractive young woman, especially one
with small children, will always produce
more public tears than the demise of an
older one, or a man. The frenzy following
Diana’s death was indeed different from the
GETTY
more solemn reactions to the deaths of
George VI in 1952 or Victoria in 1901. But
Elton John sings ‘Candle in the Wind’ in Westminster Abbey
there is actually a good precedent for the
events of 1997: the death of Princess
Charlotte of Wales in 1817.
As the eldest child of the future George IV,
Charlotte would have become queen if she
had lived. Like Princess Diana, she was the
child of an unhappy marriage with a
complicated love life of her own. Her father
tried to arrange a match with the Prince of
Orange, but despite signing a marriage
contract, she eventually broke off the
engagement. At one point, when her father
tried to confine her to her house, she fled,
managing to escape by the simple process
of running into the street and hailing a cab.
Not surprisingly, all this made her a national
celebrity: whenever she took a coach to the
seaside, she was invariably mobbed
by huge crowds.
Alas, after a successful marriage to
the future Leopold I of Belgium,
Charlotte died at the age of 21 while
delivering a stillborn son. In the
aftermath, the country was
plunged into mourning.
Even the poorest people in
the land were reported to be
wearing makeshift black
armbands, while the capital’s
shops, the docks, the law courts
and the Royal Exchange closed
for two weeks. The story goes
Spectators weep at the funeral procession, Whitehall, 6 September. Two out of three Britons professed to being upset,
or very upset, by Diana’s death
that demand for colourful ribbons and other
bright clothes collapsed so completely that
manufacturers begged the government to
reduce the mourning period, which they
resolutely refused to do. As the Whig
politician Henry Brougham remarked:
“It really was as though every household
throughout Great Britain had lost a
favourite child.”
One lesson of Charlotte’s death is that
there is nothing the British people enjoy so
much as a chance to indulge their taste for
public sentimentalism. But there was an
obvious difference between 1817 and 1997.
In the age of the Regency, nobody talked of
the stiff upper lip. In the late 1990s, thanks
not least to Paul Gascoigne (pictured below
left), who had wept so spectacularly at the
end of the 1990 World Cup, Britain was only
just emerging from a long period in which
public tears were generally regarded as
weak and unmanly.
In this context, the outpouring of national
sentiment at Diana’s death had a clear
political connotation. The outgoing
Conservative administration had not
only been dominated almost entirely
by men, it had been led by a prime
minister immensely unlikely to burst into
tears in public, the determinedly
understated and ostentatiously
unemotional John Major.
Vol. 10 Issue 2 45
HISTORY

Princess Charlotte
of Wales, died 1817
Like Diana, Charlotte captured the public imagination
like no other member of the royal family. When the
daughter of the future George IV died in childbirth at the
age of 21, The Times thought it a national “calamity” –
although the radical poet Shelley claimed that the
execution of three men in Derby, who had been
convicted of plotting against the government, was a
much greater calamity.
When her funeral was held in
Windsor, thousands turned out to
watch, and “the road and streets
through which it passed were
Victoria’s funeral procession snakes
lined with spectators”. through London, February 1901
Afterwards, Charlotte’s doctor,
who blamed himself for her
demise, committed suicide. Queen Victoria, died 1901
Princess Charlotte’s Since Victoria was 81 when she died, her death hardly came as a shock. But,
death in childbirth
was deemed a
as she had been on the throne since 1837, millions of people had never
national “calamity” known another monarch, and her funeral was a genuinely international event,
with one of the largest gatherings of European royals in history.
Victoria had left detailed instructions, asking for her coffin to be draped in
white, and requesting a military procession, with the coffin on a gun
carriage. Again the funeral was held in Windsor, with thousands lining the
streets. But every city in the British empire observed a period of mourning,
from Canada to India.

Horatio Nelson, died 1805

Perhaps the most spectacular and
emotional funeral in British history
was that of Lord Nelson, killed
during the victory at Trafalgar in
1805. Nelson was not only an
all-conquering admiral who had
saved his country from invasion,
he was a national celebrity.
When his body lay in state in
Greenwich, the crowds were so
great that thousands were turned
away. The funeral ceremonies took
five days, including a procession
along the Thames and a simple
but moving ceremony at St Paul’s,
which ended with the sailors from
HMS Victory ripping up their ship’s A contemporary
illustration shows
battle-torn flag. the funeral carriage
carrying Nelson’s
body outside
St Paul’s Cathedral

46 Vol. 10 Issue 2
With its invocations
of the people
against a remote
elite, 1997 can look
like a harbinger of
things to come
But if Major was a man who always seemed
uncomfortable talking about his feelings in
front of the cameras, Blair was different. And
his visibly emotional reaction – the tremor in
his voice, the sentimentalism of his words –
struck a chord with a nation rediscovering the
intoxication of collective tears.
There was another element to the death
and funeral of Princess Diana: the
extraordinary prominence of a man who,
only a few years earlier, would have been an
utterly implausible guest at such a solemn
royal occasion. This was Elton John, whose
rendition of ‘Candle in the Wind’, which he
memorably performed at Westminster
Abbey, soon became the most popular
single of all time.
Released on Saturday 13 September
1997, ‘Candle in the Wind’, rocketed to
number 1 within minutes of the shops
opening. By lunchtime that day, most stores
had already sold out; the next day, Mercury
Records sent a thousand employees to the
printing presses to prepare another million
copies for Monday. By this point the record
had already sold more than 600,000 copies,
going platinum in just 24 hours. By the end
of the year, sales had reached almost 5
million, which meant that one in five
households owned a copy.
ROCK ROYALTY
In a wider context, the remarkable thing was
not the song’s astounding popularity so
much as the fact that Elton John had
performed it at all. He was hardly an obvious
candidate to sing at such a solemn royal
occasion. The former NME journalist Barbara
Ellen thought “a pop song at a royal funeral
seemed about as appropriate as receiving
holy communion in a nightclub toilet”.
Meanwhile the Spectator’s Simon Hoggart
wrote that “there was something deeply
moving about the sight of a plump, red-
nosed gay in a ginger wig performing at a
royal occasion of any kind”.
One reader of the Guardian was less deeply
moved. “Who suggested that Elton John sing
The gun carriage carrying Diana’s coffin approaches Westminster Abbey. An estimated 2.5 billion people watched her funeral
on television
at the funeral?” complained Raul Jaylan of
London N11. “I’m sorry, but this man made
Freddie Mercury’s tribute concert look cheap.
Hopefully he will at least take that stupid rug
off his head.” But as the record sales suggest,
most people were rather more charitable.
Indeed, at one level the success of ‘Candle in
the Wind’, like the spectacle of Diana’s funeral
itself, was a powerful reminder that no
successful monarchy can ignore the appeal of
popular culture.
Fifteen years later, after the concert that
marked the 2012 diamond jubilee, the
conser-vative columnist Peter Hitchens
lamented that the Queen had “pledged
allegiance to the vile new culture of talentless
celebrity”. Yet monarchies have always
harnessed the energies of their most
successful, fashionable and popular cultural
figures, from Hans Holbein’s portraits of
Henry VIII and Handel’s coronation anthems
for George II to the Queen’s cameo
alongside James Bond at the 2012
Olympics. In that sense, there was nothing
inappropriate about Elton John’s presence
at Diana’s funeral.
The greatest temptation is to see the
reaction to Diana’s death as a reminder, in
an increasingly individualistic age, of the
appeal and power of collective national
sentiment. Twenty years on, when our
politics is much more visibly informed by
questions of patriotism, national identity and
collective belonging – Scottish or British?
British or European? – the first week of
September 1997 looks like a harbinger of
things to come. After all, squabbles about
flags and invocations of the ‘people’ against
a remote elite are only too common today.
Yet perhaps Diana’s death also serves
as a lesson that, whatever grand pattern we
impose on the past, it can never be anything
other than a partial and misleading sketch.
Yes, millions turned out for her funeral. But a
poll afterwards found that, while two out of
three people said they had been upset or
very upset by her death, the rest had been
relatively unmoved. Three out of ten had
either laid flowers or wanted to; yet seven
out of ten had no intention of doing so.
During the funeral, as the historian
Thomas Dixon remarks, the television
cameras unwaveringly zoomed in on faces
streaked with tears or contorted with
emotion. What they did not capture, though,
were the faces that remained unmoved, or
the millions of people who were simply doing
something else.
No doubt there were many people like that
in 1817, too: those who simply got on with
their lives, even as their neighbours pulled on
the black crepe. Historians rarely mention
them, of course. But they were there, all
the same. 
Dominic Sandbrook is a historian and television
presenter. His books include Seasons in the Sun:
The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (Penguin, 2013)
Vol. 10 Issue 2 47
SCIENCE

Hadza hunt for food using traditional

bows and arrows. Here, they’ve killed
several vervet monkeys

48 Vol. 10 Issue 2
Fancy some porcupine, baobab and honey (with bee larvae) for
dinner? Don’t grimace: this hunter-gatherer menu might hold
the secret to a healthier you. Prof Tim Spector reports on how
he gave his microbes a treat by living with the Hadza people

REWILD
YOUR DIET
C
limbing to the top of a huge rock
after a gruelling nine-hour drive in
a 4x4 over bumpy tracks, we knew
we had arrived. It had been an epic journey
just to start this unorthodox camping trip.
Here in Tanzania, a stone’s throw from the
famous Olduvai Gorge site of the earliest
human remains, with the stunning plains of
the Serengeti in the distance, we marvelled
at the amazing sunset over Lake Eyasi.
Scan this QR Code for I had not come here just to look at the
the audio reader scenery, though, breathtaking as it was.
Strangely, I had signed up for a scientific
experiment with my gut microbiome. This
vast community of trillions of bacteria and
fungi inhabit every nook and cranny of your
gastrointestinal tract, and have a major
influence on your metabolism, body weight,
propensity to illness, immune system,
appetite and mood. These microbes mostly
live in your lower intestine (the colon) and
outnumber all the other cells in your body
put together. Conceptually, we should
view them as a newly discovered organ,
weighing slightly more than our brains
and nearly as vital. There are some organs
we can live without, including our spleen,
gall bladder, tonsils and appendix, but
we wouldn’t survive long without our gut
microbes. Intriguingly, no two microbiomes
are the same – we are all unique. And
more than ever, we’re finding out just how
important these microbes are.
According to research, the richer and
more diverse the community of microbes is
in your gut, the lower your risk of disease
and allergies. This has been shown in
animal tests and also in human studies
comparing the microbes of people with
and without particular diseases. Examples
from recent work at King’s College London
include studies of diabetes, obesity, allergy
and inflammatory diseases like colitis and
PHOTO: GETTY

arthritis. Examples from recent work at

King’s College London include studies of
diabetes, obesity, allergy and inflammatory
diseases like colitis and arthritis.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 49
SCIENCE
Meanwhile, there is mounting evidence that
babies born via caesarean section miss out
on some of the microbes they would obtain
through a vaginal birth, which may make
them more vulnerable to obesity, allergies
and asthma.
We know that a good diet is key to
maintaining diversity. While the definition of
a good diet in the West is still controversial
(such as the fat versus sugar debate),
everyone agrees that large amounts of
fruits and vegetables are key. As part of
an experiment for my book The Diet Myth,
I bravely volunteered my student son Tom
to eat all his meals at McDonald’s for 10
days so we could observe his microbes. He
lost nearly 40 per cent of his gut diversity
in that time and has only partly recovered
– as he keeps reminding me. What we then
wanted to find out is whether someone with
a healthy, stable microbiome could see the
conditions inside their gut improve in just
a few days. The chance to test this in an
unusual way came when my colleague Jeff
50 Vol. 10 Issue 2
Artificially coloured microscopic
image of the human intestine,
showing its array of beneficial
microbes (yep, all those little
shapes are microbes)
Leach invited me on a field trip to Tanzania,
where he has been living and working
among the Hadza, one of the last remaining
huntergatherer groups in all of Africa. I had
first met Jeff about three years ago. Jeff is a
larger-than life Texan and I was fascinated
by his work and how he had tried to change
his own microbes – even resorting (against
all medical advice) to transplanting some
poo from a healthy Hadza hunter into his
own bottom using a turkey baster. I lacked
Jeff’s daredevil genes so didn’t fancy
repeating that experiment, but I was keen to
do something just as exciting and hopefully
less messy.
My own microbiome is pretty healthy
nowadays – indeed, I came top among the
first 100 samples we tested as part of our
gut analysis project MapMyGut, although I
have since been beaten by several others.
It turns out the Hadza have a diversity
that is one of the richest on the planet and
about 40 per cent higher than the average
American and about 30 per cent higher
than the average Brit. Jeff and his team
had previously worked out that the average
Hadza person eats around 600 species of
plants and animals in a year and has huge
seasonal variation. They have virtually none
of the common Western diseases such as
obesity, allergies, heart disease and cancer.
In contrast, most Westerners have fewer
than 50 species in their diet and are facing
an epidemic of illness and obesity. From
looking at our UK data, we can see a clear
link between the amount and varieties of
plants we eat and gut diversity.
“The Hadza have
virtually none of
the Western diseases
such as obesity,
allergy, heart disease
and cancer”
HUNTING WITH THE HADZA
The plan was for me to spend an intensive
three days living like a hunter-gatherer
during my stay at Jeff’s research camp.
I was not allowed to wash or use alcohol
swabs and I was expected to hunt and
forage with the Hadza as much as possible,
exposing myself to dirt, blood, and baboon
and baby poo. The Hadza seek out and
live with the same animals and plants that
humans have hunted and gathered for
millions of years. The interaction between
the microbes in the Hadza’s home and our
own human cells is an evolutionary dance
that has been played out here for millennia,
shaping our immune system and making us
who we are today.
After an interesting but restless first
night’s sleep, trying not to step on
scorpions when going for a pee, I found
a large pile of baobab pods had been
collected for my breakfast. Baobab pods
have a hard coconut-like shell that cracks
easily to reveal a chalky flesh around
large, fat-rich seeds. The baobab is the
staple of the Hadza diet: it’s packed with
vitamins, contains fat in the seeds, and has
large amounts of fibre. The Hadza mixed
the chalky bits with water and whisked it
vigorously for two to three minutes with a
stick until it was a thick, milky porridge that
was filtered – somewhat – into a mug. It
was surprisingly pleasant and refreshing,
and the vitamin C provided an unexpected
citrus tang. My next snacks were the wild
berries on many of the trees surrounding
the camp – the commonest were small,
slightly sweet kongorobi berries. These
have 20 times the fibre and polyphenols of
 cultivated berries, which are bred for looks
and sweetness. This was powerful fuel for
my microbiome.
After hanging out with the women and
children doing some foraging, I had a
late lunch of a few high-fibre tubers dug
up with a sharp stick and tossed on the
fire. These took a little effort to eat – mine
was a bit too ‘al dente’ like tough, earthy
celery. Babies were being breastfed and
passed around for everyone to cuddle
and play with. I never saw or heard any
crying and they all looked healthy. They
are weaned on baobab from six months
and have 20 times the fibre intakes of
Western kids. Some had large pot bellies
– but rather than suggesting malnutrition,
it showed their high fibre intakes and the
resulting gas from the fermentation. I
quickly learnt they were in no discomfort
and were also amused by their noisy farts.
After my baobab juice I soon joined in!
A few hours later we were asked to join
a hunting party to track down porcupine,
which is a rare delicacy. Even Jeff hadn’t
tasted this creature in his four years of
field work.
Two nocturnal porcupines had been
tracked to their tunnel system in a termite
mound. After several hours of digging and
tunnelling by the slimmest of the Hadza,
who occasionally shouted to his mates
on the surface to dig more holes, the
animals were spotted. Two porcupines
were eventually cornered, speared and
thrown to the surface. A fire was lit. The
spines, skin and valuable organs were
expertly dissected and the heart, lung and
liver cooked and eaten straight away. The
rest of the fatty carcass was taken back to
camp for communal eating. It tasted much
like suckling pig. We had a similar menu
the next two days, with the main dishes
including hyrax – a strange, furry, guinea
pig-like animal and some birds I didn’t
recognise caught by the older children.
I expected more berries for dessert –
but we were in for a treat. With the help
of some birds called honeyguides, a bee
nest that was ripe for harvesting had been
spotted 10m up a baobab tree. One of
the Hadza used small wooden stakes to
nimbly climb the tree and then confused
PHOTOS: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, JEFF LEACH

the bees with smoke so they wouldn’t

attack (much!). When the ‘honey hunter’
descended, grinning, covered with a
dozen bee stings, he brought a bucket full
of the best golden orange honey I could
ever imagine – full of fatty honeycomb,
pollen and protein from the larvae. The
combination of fat and sugars made our
dessert the most energy-dense food
found in nature and may have competed
with fire in terms of its evolutionary
importance a million or so years ago.
A Hadza man with a variety of foods
including baobab (large greyish pod) Microbes from the bee gut are now found
and kongorobi berries (orange), both living happily inside the Hadza colons.
of which are packed with fibre

Vol. 10 Issue 2 51
SCIENCE

HOW TO BOOST YOUR MICROBIOME

The microbes in your gut can help you to get thinner, be happier
and live longer. Here’s how you can give them a helping hand…

1 9

12

8
2

6 10

11

5 13 14

1. INCREASE YOUR FIBRE INTAKE. Aim for
more than 40g per day, which is about double
the current averages. Fibre intake has been
shown to reduce heart disease and some
cancers, as well as reduce weight gain.
2. EAT AS MANY TYPES OF FRUIT AND
VEG AS POSSIBLE, AND TRY TO EAT
SEASONALLY. The variety may be as
important as the quantities, as the chemicals
and types of fibre will vary, and each support
different microbial species.
3. PICK HIGH-FIBRE VEGETABLES. Good
examples are artichokes, leeks, onions and
garlic, which all contain high levels of inulin
(a prebiotic fibre). Some vegetables like
lettuce have little fibre or nutrient value.
4. CHOOSE FOOD AND DRINKS WITH HIGH
LEVELS OF POLYPHENOLS. Polyphenols
are antioxidants that act as fuel for microbes.
Examples are nuts, seeds, berries, olive oil,
brassicas, coffee and tea – especially
green tea.
5. AVOID SNACKING. Also, try to increase
intervals between meals to give your microbes
a rest. Occasionally skip meals or have an
extended fast – this seems to reduce
weight gain.
6. EAT PLENTY OF FERMENTED FOODS
CONTAINING LIVE MICROBES. Good
choices are unsweetened yoghurt; kefir,
which is a sour milk drink with five times
as many microbes as yoghurt; raw milk
cheeses; sauerkraut; kimchi, a Korean dish
made from garlic, cabbage and chilli; and
soybean-based products such as soy
sauce, tempeh and natto.
7. DRINK A BIT OF ALCOHOL. In small
quantities, alcohol has been shown to
increase your gut diversity, but large
amounts are harmful to your microbes
and your health.
8. STEER CLEAR OF ARTIFICIAL
SWEETENERS LIKE ASPARTAME,
SUCRALOSE AND SACCHARINE. These
disrupt the metabolism of microbes and
reduce gut diversity – in animal studies this
has led to obesity and diabetes. Ditch the
processed foods too, as these also upset
microbes’ metabolism.
9. SPEND MORE TIME IN THE
COUNTRYSIDE. People living in rural areas
have better microbes than city-dwellers.
While you’re at it, dust off your trowel:
gardening and other outdoor activities are
good for your microbiome.
10. STROKE ANIMALS. Studies have shown
that people living with dogs have more
microbial diversity.
11. AVOID ANTIBIOTICS AND
NONESSENTIAL MEDICINES. Antibiotics
destroy good and bad microbes, and it
can take weeks to recover, so don’t take
them unless you need them. Their use is
also associated with obesity and allergies
in animals. Even common medications like
paracetamol and antacids can interfere
with microbes.
12. DON’T BE HYGIENE OBSESSED.
Fastidious washing and overuse of antibacterial
sprays may not be good for your gut.
13. SPEND TIME CLOSE TO A LEAN
PERSON. Studies in mice have shown that
leanness may be contagious. Microbes from
a lean animal can reverse obesity in a fat one,
but strangely, obesity microbes are harder to
transmit than lean ones.
14. AVOID FOOD AND VITAMIN
SUPPLEMENTS.
Only a tiny proportion of supplements have
been shown to be beneficial. Instead, focus
on eating a diverse range of real food to get all
your nutrients.

52 Vol. 10 Issue 2

HOME TRUTHS
One lasting impression was how little time
the Hadza spent getting food. It appeared
as though it took just a few hours a
day – as simple as going round a large
supermarket. Wherever you walked there
PHOTO: JEFF LEACH
was food – above, on and below ground –
with plenty of time for chatting, practising
archery and socialising around the fire. I
did briefly get a tiny glimpse of the other
more dangerous side of their lives. While
“My gut microbial
diversity and number
of species increased
by 20 per cent”
Honey straight from the comb
is an important energy source
for the Hadza, and many rank
it as their favourite food
the porcupines were being dissected, I had
a call of nature and went off to produce a
stool sample for my experiment. When I
returned 10 minutes later, clutching my test
tubes, the hunting party had disappeared.
When I realised they weren’t playing games
on me, I had a moment of feeling totally
alone and useless with no clue which way
to go. After some aimless wandering and
shouting I returned to the old fire. This
should have been reassuring, were it not
for the leftover entrails that would soon
attract hyenas. I only had my poo-testing
kit as a weapon. Luckily the Hadza
are the best trackers in the world and
on noticing I wasn’t with them – to my
immense relief – they rapidly found me. It
felt like an eternity.
Twenty-four hours we were back in
London with my cherished poo samples,
which we sent to the lab for testing.
The results showed clear differences
between my starting sample and after
three days of my forager diet. The good
news was my gut microbial diversity
and number of species increased by
a stunning 20 per cent, and contained
higher levels of many beneficial bacteria
that we know can fight against obesity
and inflammation. The bad news was,
after a few days of my usual food and
environment, my gut microbes had
virtually returned to where they were
before the trip. There were exceptions,
though, and I have managed to retain
a few African microbes that seem to be
enjoying their new home and diet.
Within five years, I predict testing our
microbes will be routine, as we
personalise our diets to suit our own
microbial species and to help reduce
diseases. Until then, I believe everyone
should make the effort to improve their
gut health and microbe diversity by
rewilding their diet and lifestyle (for tips,
see opposite page). Understanding
the intimate relationship between our
food, our environment and our microbes
should encourage us to be more
adventurous and branch out from our
usual dull cuisine. Every now and then I
would highly recommend reconnecting
with nature and our ancestral past to give
our microbes a treat.
Prof Tim Spector is professor of genetic
epidemiology at King’s College London, and author of
The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat.
He tweets from @timspector
Vol. 10 Issue 2 53
NATURE

WILDLIFE
ON THE
BORDERLINE The barriers along the US–Mexico frontier
carve up habitats and age-old migration routes,
impacting on a host of species
WORDS AND PHOTOS BY KRISTA SCHLYER

Scan this QR Code for

the audio reader

54 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 After travelling the
US–Mexico border wall
for 90m, looking for a
place to cross, these
collared peccaries turned
away. This stretch of wall
in Arizona bisects the San
Pedro River corridor

Vol. 10 Issue 2 55
NATURE

t the southern end of Arizona’s Huachuca mountains,

A the United States meets Mexico on a rocky precipice

where a sweeping vista unfolds. To the east, the
international boundary reaches towards the horizon through an
ocean of pale winter grasses where jackrabbits hide and great
horned owls hunt. To the south, the deep grooves of the upper
San Pedro River watershed stretch across the border, extending
into the foothills of the Huachucas as secret passageways for
bobcats and black bears. To the west, the immense San Rafael
Valley sprawls southwards as a sea of golden grass where
shy pronghorn antelopes roam. And all around, dark mountain
ranges tower like islands in the lazuli desert sky, their deepest
shadows sheltering the footsteps of jaguars.
This landscape radiates a wild calm, but beneath the
surface are two conflicting realities: the borderlands region
encompasses one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in
North America, while rapidly becoming one of the world’s
most militarised and divided places. Over the past decade,
just over 1,000km of border wall have been constructed
along this 3,200km-long frontier. Most construction has been
exempted from environmental laws that would have protected
critical habitat and migration pathways for endangered
species. And in January, the new US president vowed to
expand border wall construction and to intensify militarisation
of this land.
Yet from a steep mountainside overlooking the border,
geopolitical tension drifts away on a fresh westerly wind. This
immense landscape remains the kind of special space where
wildlife can thrive, and humans can find that unique brand of
respite particular to vast open spaces.

STANDING IN THE WAY

Seeking out some of this wild solace, I hike a trail from the
Montezuma Pass in Coronado National Memorial, a protected
area managed by the US National Park Service, through the
mountains to the border, where a monument was placed
in the 1850s when the United States bought this land from
Mexico under the Gadsden Purchase.

USA
CALIFORNIA

San Diego
ARIZONA NEW MEXICO
Tijuana

THE Douglas
Ciudad
El Paso
Existing border fence

CURRENT Nogales Juárez

TEXAS
STATE
OF THE Ojinaga
Del Rio

BORDER Eagle Pass

Where the USA meets Mexico, a

Laredo
3,200km stretch of land bridges MEXICO Nuevo Laredo
the tropical and temperate zones.
This is a landscape of wild surprise, McAllen
Brownsville
shared equitably by the north and
Reynosa
south of the natural world.

56 Vol. 10 Issue 2
ONE OF THE MOST BIODIVERSE
ECOSYSTEMS IN NORTH AMERICA
IS RAPIDLY BECOMING ONE OF THE
WORLD’S MOST DIVIDED PLACES
Such monuments were erected all along the border, from the CLOCKWISE FROM TOP
LEFT: The best hope for
Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. But today this particular the continued survival
one carries a weighty importance – it is situated on one of the of bighorn sheep is
open travel corridors;
few migration pathways remaining to a suite of transnational The border wall has
grassland species. fragmented bobcat
habitat; Kangaroo
The US–Mexico border, a line drawn in the sand by two rat populations are
nations, is fundamentally defined by a natural boundary at the being split by walls
built through the
overlap of the temperate and tropical zones. Here the north California dunes; Elf
and south meet and mingle, sharing an assortment of trees, owls are facing habitat
destruction in the
cacti, wildflowers and grasses that don’t coexist anywhere borderlands; Migration
else. Natural borders like this are unusual places, prone to corridors are being
severed by border
biological extravagance. barriers
Prior to the Gadsden Purchase, this land was claimed by
Mexico, and before that Spain. In the millennia that preceded
Spain’s conquest of North America, it was the domain of native
people; and before that, it belonged to the jaguar.
Strength, adaptability and stealth earned the jaguar its
position as an apex predator in the Sonoran Desert. “Jaguars
evolved here in North America before they moved south
into the tropics. So in a very fundamental sense they belong
here,” says Randy Serraglio, a conservation advocate for the
Center for Biological Diversity. And somewhere out within
this grassland sea, or padding through shadows in the river
corridor, the jaguar still roams. Only now the big cat is fighting
for its existence in an arid world at the boundary of two nations.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 57
NATURE
CENTRAL TO JAGUAR CONSERVATION
ARE TWO BASIC NEEDS: SPACE AND
PATHWAYS FOR TRAVEL
In the early 20th century, jaguars started to disappear,
largely due to hunting and habitat loss. In 1963, the last
known female jaguar in the United States was killed near
the Grand Canyon, and for decades the largest cat in the
western hemisphere was feared to have been driven to
extinction in the US. But then, in the 1990s, a ray of hope
appeared in the form of a photograph captured in south-
east Arizona. Since then, there have been hundreds of
photos and sightings of male jaguars. “We don’t know
where the nearest female is,” Serraglio admits. “We know
there is a breeding population around 200km south of the
border, but we don’t know if there are some closer, even in
the United States. Jaguars are so cryptic.”
IN SEARCH OF A MATE
Researchers know that young male jaguars are coming to
the US to find new territory. They live here for a few years
until a biological urge kicks in, and then head back to
Mexico to find the nearest female. “They have to go back,”
Serraglio says. “They have to find a female.”
Jaguar researchers believe that when the northernmost
female jaguars begin to branch out, if migration
pathways are open to them, they will find their
way to the United States. And when that female
pioneer arrives, Seraglio says, it will be a game-
changer. In the meantime, conservation organisations
have been working to raise awareness and create a plan
58 Vol. 10 Issue 2
CLOCKWISE FROM for restoration. Central to jaguar conservation are two basic
ABOVE: The border
wall now bisects the needs: space and pathways for travel.
grasslands of the “Like most apex predators, jaguars need large areas
Coronado National
Memorial and San of wilderness,” Serraglio explains. “And they travel long
Pedro River corridor; distances to find what they need. Connectivity is critically
A gila monster
on a conservation important for jaguars.” This puts the future of this cat at
property in Mexico; the mercy of the prevailing US policy of building walls and
A male jaguar in
southern Arizona; expanding militarisation of its southern border. “If jaguars
Altamira oriole are ever going to recover in the United States, the breeding
in Lower Rio
Grande Valley population in northern Mexico must be able to expand
north,” Serraglio says. And jaguars are not alone.
The US began intensifying border enforcement in 2005
when Congress approved several measures aimed at
fast-tracking the construction of a wall. In addition to
mandating 1,120km of wall, the federal measures removed
environmental and other bedrock protections for land,
people and wildlife. Since that time, about one-third of the
border has been walled, largely over landscapes set aside
specifically for wildlife and wilderness.
Dismissal of environmental law along much of the
border has jeopardised populations of numerous species,
including the jaguar, ocelot, collared peccary, pronghorn
antelope and black bear. For many species, the wall poses
a direct threat by blocking access to scarce water and
food resources. Barriers have also isolated individuals
from mates on the opposite side of the border, which
worries biologists.
 A 2011 study found that black bears in the Sierra Madre
mountains are genetically linked with bears across the
border in south-east Arizona; any barrier that separates
bears in Mexico from those in the US will threaten this
isolated southern population. “Black bears are much
less abundant in Mexico,” says Juan Carlos Bravo, who
directs the Mexico Program for the Wildlands Network, an
organisation focused on restoring landscape connectivity.
“They depend on open corridors into the United States for
genetic diversity.”

TRAGEDY FOR TOADS

The fallout from this may not become apparent for years,
as genetic poverty takes its toll on the bears. But for
some species, the growing divisions in this landscape
have already hit hard. Immediately after the border wall
was built in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument,
scientists filmed Sonoran Desert toads jumping against its
steel, time after time, until they were taken by predators
or died of dehydration. In 2012, a herd of pronghorn in the
San Rafael Valley began disappearing. An investigation
found that after the border barrier was put up, all of the
breeding males were isolated on its southern side.
All of these impacts were predictable outcomes of
adding large obstacles to the landscape, Bravo notes.
“It goes against modern conservation practice to build
a barrier.”

Vol. 10 Issue 2 59
NATURE
The construction of a border wall has destroyed and
fragmented critical habitat all along the border. In Texas,
where the Rio Grande delineates the frontier, more than
95 per cent of the native habitat has been lost to human
development. The remaining five per cent is located
almost entirely on wildlife refuges along the river corridor.
This scant remaining habitat provides a lifeline for
endangered wild cats, imperilled reptiles and insects, and
globally important bird populations.
VITAL HABITAT
More than 500 species of bird depend on the Lower Rio
Grande Valley. Many make their homes along the river,
while others rely on its relatively lush surroundings to rest
and refuel after gruelling flights over the Gulf of Mexico
or the vast deserts to the west. Every remaining acre of
native habitat here may make the difference between
death and survival for migratory birds such as northern
cardinals, altamira orioles, green jays, kiskadees and
many more.
Bobcats also use the Rio Grande. But in 2009
researchers found that after the border wall fragmented
wildlife refuges in southern Texas, bobcats were killing
bobcats and dying on roads as they fought over shrinking
territory and roamed the Lower Rio Grande Valley
searching for new homes.
60 Vol. 10 Issue 2
ABOVE: A desert For conservationists, the rise of border walls constitutes a
cottontail at the
border wall during tragedy of epic proportions for thousands of wild species.
its construction in And this threat to global biodiversity goes well beyond the
southern Arizona.
The barrier restricts borders of North America, as more nations reinforce their
the passage of the borders worldwide.
species and other
land mammals Here in the Huachucas, looking out over the San Pedro
River and the mountains rising above the Mexican grasslands,
the intention of newly elected president Donald Trump to
expand the US–Mexico border wall casts an ominous pall.
For now, however, the border at the foot of the Huachucas
is defined by a 2.5m-high barbed-wire fence. It poses little
obstacle to the jaguar, which can jump over this barrier or
sneak under if need be.
Recent evidence shows jaguars are doing just that. In late
2016, a camera-trap captured the image of a new jaguar in
Arizona – one whose sex could not be determined. The mere
possibility it may be that long-awaited female caused jaguar
conservation hopes to soar. But to the east of the Huachucas,
an 11m-high wall has already been built right up into the
foothills, a wall that stretches for dozens of miles across the
San Pedro Valley.
I myself have witnessed numerous species trapped by this
wall, including collared peccaries, animals with an important
ecological role as both a prey species and seed distributor. The
imposing edifice also blocks the passage of pronghorn, mule
and white-tailed deer, cottontail rabbits and indeed every other
 A WORLD OF BARRIERS
In 2015, construction began on more border walls worldwide than at any other time in
recorded human history. Barriers between Russia and Ukraine, Burma and Bangladesh,
Mexico and Guatemala, Turkey and Syria have all gone up in the past few years, largely
motivated by fears of terrorism and increasing human migration. A total of 63 walls
were built or under construction by the end of 2015, compared with fewer than 20
when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Here are four examples of how barriers are
affecting wildlife in Europe, Asia and Australasia.

1 Czech Republic/Germany
815km fence
Reason for border: During the Cold War,
the Iron Curtain was heavily guarded
and electrified.
Impact on wildlife: The Iron Curtain fell
over 25 years ago but red deer on the
border between the Czech Republic and
Germany still do not cross the divide,
which is now forest and open land with
no barrier. A study of 300 deer found
the animals on each side of the border
maintained old boundaries and were
terrestrial animal, through one of the most completely separate populations.
Jaguar: UA/USFWS; stag: Frank Sommariva/Imagebroker/FLPA; ass: Eric Dragesco/naturepl.com;
2 Mongolia/China
4,710km fence
Reason for border: The original fence was
built following a border treaty in 1962. In 2008,
the Chinese built a 100km fence to protect
livestock from wolves.
Impact on wildlife: Khulan, or Mongolian wild
asses, were fitted with GPS collars in a 2013
study, which demonstrated that the fence
presented an absolute barrier in the south-east
Gobi Desert. While the barrier restricts wild ass
movement and migration between countries,
the border area has become a grazing refuge
for the animals in harsh winters.

critical passages in the region for wildlife.

Climate change can only worsen the
situation, as it begins to exacerbate
droughts and intensify heat in the desert.
“With such huge uncertainty due to climate
change, we have to preserve the options for
wolves: Franck Fouquet/Biosphoto/FLPA; dingo: Andy Rouse/naturepl.com

these species to adapt,” Serraglio says.

“One of the best ways to do that is to
maintain connectivity.”
The borderlands represents the only viable
future for the jaguar in the US, and for so
many other species entwined in the region’s
web of life. Each creature here has adapted
to survive in a desert, but their greatest test
may yet rise before them. “For thousands of
years jaguars were revered by indigenous
cultures as superhuman,” Serraglio says.
“But they can’t climb that wall.” 
Krista Schlyer has studied the US–Mexico
borderlands for 10 years. She is the author of
Continental Divide: Wildlife, People and the
Border Wall
3 Croatia/Slovenia
670km razor-wire fence
Reason for border: Reduce flow of asylum
seekers from Syria and Iraq.
Impact on wildlife: 349km of the fence cuts
through the Dinaric Mountains that contain
one of the most important wolf populations in
Europe. Out of 10 wolf packs, five have their
home ranges in both countries. While some
wolves have shown an ability to cross, there is
no guarantee they will remain connected with
their core population in the south. There is a
chance the populations will become isolated
and inbreed.
4 Australia
5,531km fence, Queensland
Reason for border: To protect domestic
sheep from dingo predation.
Impact on wildlife: The north-western
side of the fence habituates a larger dingo
population and subsequently kangaroo and
emu numbers have fallen due to predation.
But fewer dingoes on the southern side has
led to an increase in kangaroos there. Where
dingoes have been exterminated altogether,
a rise in numbers of red foxes (an introduced
species) has led to a reduction in small native
mammals, including bandicoots.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 61
HISTORY

THE BLOODY
ROAD TO
PARTITION
2017 marked the 70th
anniversary of the end of the
British Raj. Yasmin Khan
describes eight of the images
that define the creation of
the independent states of
India and Pakistan. Then, in
a timeline on page 70, she
explores some landmark
moments in the turbulent
story of India’s partition

WAITING IN LINE
Men queue for drinking water in a
refugee camp in New Delhi, 1947.
Between 12 and 15 million people
were displaced by partition – by the
end of 1947, more than 3 million of
them were living in camps. Many
were driven there by escalating
ethnic violence

62 Vol. 10 Issue 2
GETTY IMAGES

Vol. 10 Issue 2 63
HISTORY

Mountbatten and Gandhi

take tea
1 April 1947

With partition negotiations locked in on India’s political stasis. How

deadlock, Mahatma Gandhi and
Louis Mountbatten endeavoured to
find a way forward over a cup of tea
in the garden of the Viceroy’s House
in New Delhi.
This image was a brilliant piece
of propaganda, as the British
needed to show to the world that
they were consulting with the most
important Indian nationalist leader.
should Mountbatten accommodate
the different constitutional demands
at the time of independence?
The leaders’ meetings were cordial
but Mountbatten was upset that
Gandhi refused any possibility of
partition as a solution (he described
Gandhi as “Trotskyist” in private
letters of the time). Gandhi continued
to talk of British policies of ‘divide

The last viceroy is It shows the two men enjoying a

drink that was grown on Indian
and rule’.
Although, ultimately, the Congress

sworn in plantations but had, by now,

become quintessentially British.
did reluctantly agree to the partition of
India, Gandhi never endorsed it. On
24 March 1947 The leaders had long discussions independence day in August the same
about Gandhi’s life in South Africa, year, he refused to celebrate, spending
Louis Mountbatten was the final viceroy of India after but the conversation mostly focused the day fasting and in silent prayer.
almost 200 years of British rule. The 1st Earl of
Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, arrived in India on
22 March 1947 and – as this image shows – were
sworn in at a ceremony in the Durbar Hall of the
Viceroy’s House in New Delhi two days later.
A great grandson of Queen Victoria, Mountbatten
enjoyed theatrical ceremonies, but he also had
extensive powers. As head of the British
administration in India, he was responsible for
planning the departure of the British from India and for
finding a solution to the deadlock between the
different Indian political parties.
Mountbatten had been dispatched to India by the
British prime minister, Clement Attlee, with
instructions to secure the fastest possible transfer of
power. Within two months of his arrival, he had
finalised a plan to partition the subcontinent into two
separate states – Muslim-majority Pakistan and
Hindu-majority India – and transferred power a year
faster than anyone had expected.
Edwina also played a decisive role in the drama,
developing an intimate personal relationship with
Jawaharal Nehru, the leader of the Indian National
Congress, the party that was spearheading the move
towards independence. The Mountbattens remained
in the subcontinent after independence (until June
1948), and Louis acted as first governor-general of
independent India.

64 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 A partition of literature
Summer 1947
This famous image, taken by the
American photographer David Douglas
Duncan, seems to show the division of
a library, with stacks of books allocated
to India and Pakistan. As the mountain
of literature grows ever larger, the
young librarian BS Kesavan struggles
with his mammoth task.
The photograph – published in Time
magazine in 1947 – seems to epitomise
the petty yet momentous nature of the
division between the two new
countries. Many squabbles erupted in
government offices about the fair
allocation of goods. Mundane objects
that belonged to the state, including
cutlery, stationery and office furniture,
were divided up between India and
ALAMY
Pakistan respectively on a 4:1 ratio.
Yet this photograph may have been
staged or doctored. As the writer
Anhad Hundal pointed out, the books in
the Imperial Secretariat Library in New
Delhi, where the photograph was taken,
were never actually divided.
Nonetheless, there was a proposal to
divide this library, and many others
were unquestionably split up. Worse
still, a huge number of archives and
precious manuscripts were lost during
the chaos that followed partition.
Indians and Pakistanis continued to
contest lost property and possessions
for many decades after 1947, and some
residential property disputes continue
to the present day.
Mundane objects,
including cutlery and
office furniture, were
divided up between India
and Pakistan on a 4:1 ratio
Vol. 10 Issue 2 65
HISTORY

Jinnah marks the

birth of Pakistan
14 August 1947

Mohammed Ali Jinnah was the leader of the Muslim

League and hero-worshipped by many south Asian
Muslims. It’s fitting therefore that he led the
celebrations for the new state of Pakistan in Karachi,
on 14 August 1947.
Educated in Britain, Jinnah often wore Savile Row
suits, but on this day he sported a white sherwani (a
knee-length coat) and a north Indian hat called a karakul.
Despite the celebrations there was much uncertainty
about the new state, and the role of religion within it.
Jinnah himself was ambivalent about the territory that

Leaders thrash had been granted to Pakistan, describing it as “moth

eaten”. In just over a year he would be dead, leaving

out a plan Pakistan bereft of a leader who could unify many

different competing ethnic groups.
for partition
3 June 1947

This photograph marks the moment when

fewer than a dozen men agreed to divide
the whole of the Indian subcontinent, a
population of 400 million.
On 3 June 1947, Abdul Rab Nishtar,
Sardar Baldev Singh, Acharya Kriplani,
Sardar Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru,
Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Liaquat Ali
Khan – representatives of the Muslim
League, the Sikh parties and Congress
– sat around a small table with the British
viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, and
Lord Ismay, Mountbatten’s chief of staff.
They agreed that the plan to partition
would go ahead.
The Indian leaders look tired and
apprehensive, but Ismay (second left)
smiles, perhaps with relief that an
agreement has finally been reached.
The plan was announced in the House of
Commons in London that evening. At the
same time, Mountbatten and the leaders of
the different parties took to the radio to
explain the decision to an expectant and
nervous south Asian population.
Mountbatten declared: “The whole plan
may not be perfect: but like all plans its
success will depend on the spirit of good
will with which it is carried out.”
GETTY IMAGES

66 Vol. 10 Issue 2
A desperate exodus
19 September 1947
Trains overcrowded with refugees,
packed onto the roof and clinging to
the sides – like the one near New
Delhi, shown above – became the
defining image of partition. At least
12 million people moved between
India and Pakistan. Many travelled by
train, but others walked in long foot
columns, while some crossed the
border by car or plane.
The scale of the migrations was
unplanned, and caught the British
and Asian politicians by surprise.
Confusion followed, as some people
were urged to return or to stay in
their homes. In early September
At least 12 million people
1947, it became clear that the safest moved between India and
way forward was to exchange the
populations across Punjab. This Pakistan. Many travelled
soon became official policy,
organised by the military. by train but countless
others crossed the border
The majority of the refugees were
from Punjab but hundreds of
thousands also moved in both
directions from other parts of India in long foot columns
and Pakistan, including Bengal,
Bombay, North West Frontier
Province, Sind and United Provinces.
Vol. 10 Issue 2 67
HISTORY

This moving image was

taken by the American
photographer Margaret
Bourke-White, showing
a harrowed mother
hugging a relative
beside the grave of
her child

GETTY IMAGES

68 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 The despair of the refugees
October 1947
This iconic image of a young Muslim
boy looking out over a New Delhi refugee
camp with his head in his hands seems to
define the confusion and anxiety of the
partition period.
A quarter of a million refugees passed
through New Delhi in the summer of 1947,
using makeshift cloths and sheets to
separate their temporary homes. Most
would make new homes in Pakistan,
although many perished from disease and
GETTY IMAGES
violence along the way.
The camp in this picture was at Purana
Qila, the old fort of New Delhi. The boy
sits upon the fort’s ramparts while, on the
horizon are the cupolas of the Red Fort,
the seat of Mughal power in India, which
had been a British barracks since 1857.
This image was also taken by Margaret
Bourke-White, who travelled widely in India
in 1947 for Life magazine, and took many
of the defining images of partition.
Yasmin Khan is associate professor in 18th to early 20th-
century British history at the University of Oxford. Her books
include The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
(Yale, 2007)
Vol. 10 Issue 2 69
HISTORY

Key milestones in the partition story…

The end of the Second World War Late 1946

In 1945 India emerged from the Second World
War a transformed nation – both economically
and politically – and its people craved freedom
from British rule. It was a divided nation.
The nationalist Congress Party leaders –
Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru –
claimed to represent all south Asians but they
were struggling to keep their movement
non-violent, and had spent several of the war
years in prison. In 1946 the British decided to
leave India but could not settle the question of a
constitutional settlement.
Violence blights north
and east India
Extreme violence broke out in late 1946 in
north India, particularly in the regions of
Noakhali (Bengal), Bihar and the United
Provinces. This was different to earlier episodes
– not just in scale, but also because women and
children were increasingly being targeted.
Gandhi toured the afflicted regions to try and
bring peace to the troubled areas. He threatened to
fast until death if the violence did not stop.
Meanwhile, local political leaders and agitators from all
communities were involved in spreading rumours and
increasing ethnic tension.

15 August 1947 14 August 1947

Independence Bloodshed mars

day for India
India celebrated Independence Day 24 hours
after Pakistan, in the capital, New Delhi. While
the celebrations went ahead, nearby refugee
camps continued to fill.
Older princely states were also being
absorbed into the new state. The unsettled
status of Kashmir – and whether it belonged to
India or Pakistan – soon led to war.
Jawaharlal Nehru became India’s new prime
minister but it would take another two years
for India to write a constitution and over four
years to hold a general election.
Pakistan’s birth
Pakistan marked its independence one
day before India. The new state was
made up of two wings, East Pakistan
(later to become Bangladesh) and West
Pakistan, separated by more than 1,000
miles of Indian territory.
While people celebrated the creation
of the new nation state, parts of the
country were engulfed in violence. One in
five people in the new state was a
refugee, a fact that threatened Pakistan’s
very survival.

17 August 1947 August–October 1947

Boundary judgment 12 million people

increases tensions
The British judge Cyril Radcliffe was asked to draw the
boundary between the new states of India and Pakistan.
He did so with the help of south Asian members of the
Bengal and Punjab Boundary Commissions.
Using the 1941 census, Radcliffe considered the
majority and minority populations in the districts to be
divided, but was also allowed to consider cultural and
hit the road
In the early days of partition, politicians
initially urged people not to move home.
But this policy soon fell victim to
events on the ground. Many refugees
across the Punjab – caught between
the two new states – were soon calling
for their own homeland. Soon the
GETTY IMAGES

economic factors. The announcement of the boundary states were organising a formal
line was held back until after independence day. ‘exchange of population’ in the Punjab,
Inevitably, many were deeply disappointed by the which would see 6 million people
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
decisions that Radcliffe made. moving in both directions.
with India’s new flag in July 1947
70 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 Gandhi – pictured in his mobile hut in East
Bengal, 1946 – threatened to fast until
death if the violence didn’t stop
20 February 1947
Attlee intervenes
British prime minister Clement Attlee
(pictured below) was determined to see
Britain withdraw from India as soon as
possible. He was concerned by the
deterioration of loyalty to the British in the
Indian armed forces, and worried about
increasing ethnic violence.
On 20 February 1947, despite being
unable to find agreement among Indian
parties, Attlee announced that the British
would leave India no later than the
summer of 1948. He also announced he
would replace the viceroy, Archibald
Wavell, with Louis Mountbatten.
A convoy of Sikhs 17 July 1947
migrate to East
Punjab, c1947
Boundary force
proves toothless
A Punjab Boundary Force was created from
units in the Indian army, with the aim of
restoring law and order. But, such was its
ineffectiveness, it was disbanded after just
32 days. Even at its peak, the force covered
no more than the 12 most ‘disturbed’
districts of Punjab, and consisted of only
25,000 men. This meant that there were
fewer than two men to a square mile.
British troops were still in India but – far
from being used to contain the violence –
were being demobilised following the
Second World War.
30 January 1948
Gandhi’s murder
stuns India
On 30 January, Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist
fiercely opposed to Mahatma Gandhi’s demands for a
secular, pluralist state, and his attempts to make peace
with Pakistan, walked into a prayer meeting at Birla House
in New Delhi and shot the leader in the chest three times.
GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY
Gandhi’s death was a massive shock to the Indian nation
and helped to bring partition violence to a halt.
Nonetheless, the subcontinent would continue to be
afflicted by sporadic bloodletting, and refugees would
continue to cross the borders of Bengal and East Pakistan
for many years. 
March 1947
Refugees flee
Punjab violence
After Attlee’s statement, violence
intensified in Punjab. In early March,
under intense pressure, the Unionist
Party leader in Punjab, Khizr Tiwana,
resigned from his role as prime minister
of the province. With Tiwana gone, a
bloody battle for Lahore erupted.
The violence triggered the first wave
of Punjabi refugees, as the more
prosperous decided to move to safer
parts of the country, and started to
remove their valuables and assets.
3 June 1947
The plan to partition
is unveiled
Mountbatten achieved the agreement to the
partition plan that he so craved during
meetings with south Asian leaders on 2 and 3
June. With this plan allowing people in Bengal
and the Punjab to decide if they wanted to
divide their provinces – and new borders not
yet settled – there was great uncertainty about
what the 3 June plan meant for ordinary
people, and which areas would end up in
India or Pakistan.
The plan also saw the British bringing
forward the date of independence by
an entire year.
Crowds surround
Gandhi’s funeral pyre,
New Delhi, 1948
Vol. 10 Issue 2 71
SCIENCE

The Bolivian salt plains hide vast

reserves of lithium. With demand
for rechargeable batteries set to
soar, could this be the site of a
new gold rush?
WORDS BY HAYLEY BENNETT
TRANSLATION BY ADRIANA CASTRO
PHOTOS BY DANY KROM/REDUX/EYEVINE

DIGGING FOR
ELECTRICITY
igh up in the Andean Mountains in

H Bolivia is a vast expanse of white

desert, the world’s largest salt flat:
Salar de Uyuni. Stretching 160km from west to
east, its cracked surface heals during the rainy
season to form a giant natural mirror. Until
recently, this extraordinary environment had
kept all but migrating flamingos, salt rakers
and the most intrepid of tourists at bay. Just
below the surface, however, is something that
the mining industry is itching to get its hands
on: 10 million tonnes of lithium. This soft,
silvery metal is the stuff of the rechargeable
batteries that power our smartphones
and laptops.
In the so-called ‘lithium triangle’ covering
the borders between Bolivia, Chile and
Argentina, lithium is extracted from brine
beneath the crusts of salt plains. These three
South American countries alone hold 56 per
cent of the world’s lithium stores. Bolivia’s
lithium is thought to have leached from the
surrounding Andes into a prehistoric lake
that dried to form the present-day salt flat. It
contains more lithium than even the most
productive flat, Chile’s Salar de Atacama.
The Bolivian government is shelling out
millions to help unlock the potential of this
huge, untapped resource, but whether it all
pays off may depend on the future of the
electric car industry.

72 Vol. 10 Issue 2
Vol. 10 Issue 2 73
SCIENCE

PREVIOUS PAGE:
Raúl Martinez at an
evaporation pool, where
lithium carbonate is
concentrated from brine.
Miners must protect their
skin and eyes from the
Sun’s UV radiation and
the surface glare

74 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 MAIN IMAGE:
Evaporation pools,
separated by levees,
concentrate the lithium

BELOW RIGHT:
Lithium-rich brine
is pumped from
beneath the crust

MINING THE BRINE

Lithium carbonate is extracted from the salt desert
by piping brine from below the crust into large
evaporation pools. Three litres of Salar de Uyuni
brine contain less than a gram of lithium metal, so it
is concentrated under the glare of the Sun before
being collected for processing. The lithium at Salar
de Uyuni is also bound up with magnesium, which
has to be removed before the lithium can be turned
into electrodes and electrolytes for batteries.
Right now, there is only one working pilot plant at
the salt flat, where, as former director of
communications for the plant, Raúl Martinez,
explains, 99.7 per cent pure, battery-grade lithium is
being produced. “This project demonstrates that the
Bolivians have all the potential to obtain lithium
carbonate of commercial and battery-grade in the
salt flats,” he says. However, the state mining
company Comibol may need to scale up its
operations. It shipped less than 30 tonnes of lithium
carbonate in 2016, making the target of 10,000
tonnes by 2021 seem like a stretch. Bidding for
construction of a second plant, designed by
German company K-UTEC, is underway.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 75
SCIENCE

76 Vol. 10 Issue 2
LEFT: A young boy
amuses himself
by playing football
while his dad makes
bricks for building
salt hotels

UNCERTAIN TIMES
The Bolivian government plans to plough
$925m into the lithium industry by 2019.
President Evo Morales dreams of building a
high-tech future for his country, based on
manufacturing smartphone and electric car
batteries. However, outsiders claim he needs
foreign investment, and so far this hasn’t been
particularly forthcoming. What’s more, there’s
no guarantee of lucrative markets like China
being reliant on lithium in the future. Prof Martin
Bertau, director of the Institute of Technical
Chemistry at TU Bergakademie in Freiberg,
Germany, thinks lithium battery-powered cars
may only be a short-term solution for China,
while another potentially greener technology
based on methanol fuel cells ramps up. “If
direct methanol fuel cell cars emerge [in China],
lithium electrical vehicles may lose their
significance overnight,” he says. “It is this
scenario that truly will not be helpful for Bolivia.”
There also remains uncertainty over the
environmental damage that could be caused by
widespread lithium mining on the salt flat, with
accusations flying back and forth between
mining and environmental organisations.
According to Martinez, all mining activities at
Salar de Uyuni must comply with state
regulations to reduce their environmental
impact. The Bolivian National Evaporite
Resources Authority has switched from
lime-based to sulphate-based technology
because this produces less sludge, although
research on the impacts of sulphate in this
environment is scarce.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 77
SCIENCE

TOP RIGHT: The

Salar de Uyuni salt
flat covers over
10,000 square
kilometres

MIDDLE RIGHT:
Compounds
extracted from the
brine are stored in
large silos

BOTTOM RIGHT:
Battery-grade
lithium carbonate

MAIN IMAGE: This

aerial shot gives
a bird’s-eye view
of a brine-filled
evaporation pool

SUPPLY AND DEMAND

Demand for lithium in batteries has risen
on average by 20 per cent a year since
2000. The most powerful Tesla Model S
electric car (the P100D) carries a 100kWh
rechargeable battery, with each 6kWh of
performance requiring around 5kg of
battery-grade lithium carbonate.
What makes the market situation
unpredictable is that lithium has other
uses – the most important being for
strengthening and coatings in glass and
ceramics. It’s almost impossible to predict
accurately what the future of the lithium
industry will look like, but earlier this year,
Bertau published a paper on lithium
supply and demand in the journal Energy
Storage Materials that gives us a short-
term idea. 140,000 tonnes of lithium
carbonate were produced in 2014. If
electric cars really take off, demand could
reach 300,000 tonnes by 2020, or less
than 200,000 tonnes in a more modest
scenario. Bertau thinks the modest
scenario is more realistic but, either way, it
looks like lithium is going to be in demand
for some time yet. What this will mean for
the Bolivian mining industry, and those
who depend on it, remains to be seen. 

78 Vol. 10 Issue 2
Vol. 10 Issue 2 79
SCIENCE

WILL WE
EVER BE ABLE TO
FORECAST THE WEATHER?
In October 1987, the Great Storm wreaked havoc across the south of the UK, taking everyone
by surprise. Now, 31 years on, why do we still have trouble predicting the weather?
WORDS BY DUNCAN GEERE

n the morning of 16 October 1987, southern England The culprit was the Great Storm of 1987, as it became known.

O woke to a scene of devastation. Eighteen people were

dead, and thousands of homes were without power.
Fifteen million trees had fallen across the country, irreparably
changing the landscape and blocking roads and railways.
In Folkestone, a 110-metre Sealink ferry was discovered
marooned on the beach. A pier on the Isle of Wight was almost
totally demolished.
Forming in the Bay of Biscay north of Spain and sweeping up
across the country, it brought gusts of up to 185km/h (115mph)
and sustained winds of more than 80km/h (50mph) across the
south-east. The passage of the storm’s warm front increased
temperatures by up to 10°C, while barometric pressure fell to
951 millibars. It was the worst storm to have hit southern
England and northern France in almost 300 years.

80 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 Forecasters had seen it coming. Five days
earlier, the BBC’s farmers’ forecast warned
that the weather would be “becoming very
windy later in the week”. By the middle of the
week, however, the computer models that
meteorologists use to make their predictions
had become more uncertain. Shipping
forecasts continued to warn of dangerous
weather, but the inland forecasts cautioned
of rain rather than winds. On the lunchtime
news, weather presenter Michael Fish issued
a now infamous proclamation that there
would be no hurricane, and by the time most
people went to bed, no warnings of
unusually strong winds had been issued on
TV or radio. As the night continued, however,
the storm grew stronger and stronger.
Meteorologists began to realise what was
happening and issued ever-worsening alerts
to emergency services and the government.
At 10:35pm on 15 October, Force 10 gales
over the channel were forecast. At 1:40am
on 16 October, warnings of Force 11 were
issued. The military was notified that its
assistance may be required to deal with the
storm’s consequences.
So why was this particular storm so
damaging? “One thing people talk about
when they remember the storm was just how
warm it was that night,” says Dr Pete Inness,
PHOTO: GETTY
a meteorologist at the
University of Reading. “The
subtropical air mass sitting in
the middle of the storm provided
a huge amount of heat energy to spin the
storm up.”
“There was also a very small feature
developed within it, which we today call
a sting jet, but was unknown to
meteorologists in 1987,” adds Mel
Harrowsmith, head of civil contingencies
at the Met Office. “A sting jet is,
effectively, a small core of very strong
winds, and they tend to happen towards
the back end of a storm. So you get this
very narrow, very strong core of wind
that touches down on the ground and
can cause a lot of devastation.”
TOP: The Sealink
ferry Hengist
remained beached
for a week after
the 1987 storm,
and it took four
months to repair
VIRTUAL WEATHER
Computer simulations of the atmosphere
work in pretty much the same way today as
they did back in 1987, and it’s a three-step
process. The first step is to collect data from
meteorological stations on the ground,
buoys in the ocean, weather balloons in the
sky and satellites up in orbit. This can tell us
what the state of the atmosphere is at any
given time.
That data is then plugged into the
computer model itself – a set of equations
that reflect how air and water (the chief
components of weather) behave under
different circumstances. Hot air
tends to rise over cold air, for
example, and holds more water
vapour. But as hot air rises it
cools, and the water vapour
condenses out into water
droplets – just like on your
mirror when you take a shower.
That’s how a cloud is made.
Finally, to get a forecast, the
atmosphere is split up into a
series of ‘boxes’. Each box is
given data from real-world
observations and then allowed
to develop according to the
equations defined in step two.
By seeing what happens in
those different boxes over time,
we get a weather forecast.
LEFT: Buoys can
help gather data on
weather conditions at
sea. Here, members of
the US Navy adjust an
NOAA weather buoy
Vol. 10 Issue 2 81
SCIENCE
M I C HA E L FIS H VINDIC ATED
Why the weather forecaster
was right after all
For many, the defining image of the Great Storm of
1987 was weather forecaster Michael Fish standing
before the nation, promising there would be no
hurricane. Someone had phoned the BBC earlier, he
told viewers, with fears that one was on the way.
“Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t,”
he cheerfully said. A few hours later, the south-east
of England was hit by the worst weather it had seen
in almost 300 years.
In subsequent days, as the damage was
assessed, newspapers were filled with vitriol for Fish
and the Met Office’s perceived failure to get the
forecast right. The Met Office admitted that its radio
and TV bulletins had predominantly warned of rainfall
rather than strong winds, and conducted an internal
investigation which resulted in improved weather
data collection in the northern Atlantic and a change
in how severe weather warnings were issued.
Fish, however, stuck to his guns, pointing out
that he’d followed up his reassurance with warnings
that the weather would become very windy, and
claiming that his hurricane comments referred to a
storm that had recently hit Florida. It was a fair
defence: the term ‘hurricane’ refers to tropical
cyclones, not those that originate outside the
tropics, as the Great Storm did. While wind speeds
reached a level on the Beaufort scale labelled
‘hurricane force’, the Great Storm was never a hurri-
cane. Fish was effectively right, but it mattered little:
his name was forever associated with embarrass-
ingly incorrect predictions.
82 Vol. 10 Issue 2
TOP: Around
The reason why forecasts can go wrong is the potential for 15 million trees
mistakes in all three of these stages. In the first stage, we might were uprooted
during the storm,
not collect enough data: it’s impossible to know the exact weather including historic
in every part of the globe – particularly over the ocean – so specimens at
Kew Gardens and
sometimes we have to make an educated guess on what numbers Hyde Park
to put in. Plugging in numbers that are even slightly wrong will
create an error that grows larger over time – just like the proverbial
butterfly flapping its wings and eventually causing a hurricane.
Meteorologists refer to this as ‘chaos’, and it’s the main reason
why forecasts get less accurate over time.
Even if you did have perfect data, you might not get a correct
forecast because the equations aren’t quite right. Meteorologists
are constantly tweaking the physics of their models in response to
the latest research, and the complexity of the atmosphere means
PHOTOS: GETTY X2, BBC, NOAA
that it’s going to be a long time, if ever, before we can perfectly
predict what the weather will do in every circumstance.
Finally, there are those boxes, which meteorologists refer to as
the ‘resolution’ of the model. Think of them like the pixels of your
laptop or smartphone: the more you have, the better the picture
you get, but the more computing power it takes to run them all at
the same time. The same is true for weather models. This may be
why the Great Storm of 1987 was so poorly forecast. “The boxes
 “On the lunchtime news, Michael Fish issued a
now infamous proclamation that there would be
no hurricane, and by the time most people went to
bed, no warnings had been issued”
back then were about 150km by 150km,”
Harrowsmith says. “So if you have a small feature
inside that box, the model cannot see it.” The sting jet
that made the storm particularly damaging was about
50km across, making it impossible for the model to
take it into account.
ON THE UP
Since 1987, meteorologists have made substantial
progress in all three areas of weather modelling,
making forecasts far more reliable. “Our four-day
forecast now is as accurate as our one-day forecast
was 30 years ago,” says Harrowsmith.
Some of that progress is down to increased
supercomputing power. In 1982, the Met Office
computers could handle 200 million calculations per
second. In 1997, that figure was one trillion
calculations per second, and earlier this year, the Met
Office installed a new supercomputer capable of a
stunning 14 quadrillion (that’s 14 with 15 zeros after it)
calculations per second.
But that’s not all. We now have access to more
weather observations, chiefly due to improvements in
satellite and radar technology. The Met Office is in the
middle of upgrading its radar network to be able to see
not only where it’s raining but also the size and shape
of raindrops. This will help forecasters to differentiate
between rain and snow – revealing whether that
oncoming storm is a downpour or a blizzard.
We also have much more data from the Atlantic.
“As a result of the Great Storm, the Met Office realised
they didn’t have enough observations over the
ocean,” says Dr Hannah Christensen at the US
National Center for Atmospheric Research. “So they
set up a lot more observational buoys out to the west
and south, to fill in some of the gaps.” Plus, new
techniques like ensemble forecasting – where several
forecasts are run at the same time with slightly
different starting data – can give us an idea of how
certain a forecast is. If all the models still come up
with the same forecast, meteorologists can be more
sure it’s correct.

A RE W E GE T T I NG MOR E H U R R IC ANES ?

Dr Dann Mitchell,
climate scientist
at the University
of Bristol
In the Atlantic basin, the hurricane season normally
lasts from June to November, peaking in
September. The fact that we’ve seen eight
hurricanes as of 25 September, 2017 is markedly
out of the ordinary – the average per season is six.
However, perhaps more profound is the sheer
number of strong hurricanes: 2017 was the first
time in recorded US history that three Category 4+
hurricanes had made landfall in a single season.
But whatever the remainder of the season brings,
it’s unlikely to be as active as the famous 2005
season. This saw Katrina, one of 15 hurricanes that
year, devastate the US coastline and left much of
New Orleans underwater.
Is there a link with climate change?
We know that a warmer atmosphere can hold more
rain than a cooler atmosphere, so the downpour
over Texas during Hurricane Harvey may have been
worsened by climate change. We also know that
hurricanes get their energy from the heat in oceans,
so warmer oceans are theorised to lead to stronger
hurricanes, although not necessarily to a change in
the number of storms. But it’s too early to say for
sure whether the strong hurricanes we’ve been
seeing recently are a result of climate change. To
know this, we need to see a trend over a longer
period, so time will tell. We’re more sure, however,
that climate change will worsen the impact of any
storm surges caused by a hurricane’s strong winds.
With sea levels rising, storm surges can make it
further inland, potentially leading to more
widespread flooding.
Are we getting better at predicting
hurricanes?
The hurricane path is perhaps the most important
part of a forecast because you need to prepare
when a hurricane’s on its way. This is especially
true if the system is travelling over low-lying
islands, where storm surges can be devastating.
Due to these risks, the US has invested heavily in
predictive research, and now a reasonable forecast
of a hurricane’s path can be made three to five days
ahead of time. A day before the hurricane hits,
we can forecast its centre to within about 64km
(40 miles). It was remarkable how close to the
forecast Hurricane Irma came, and this undoubtedly
saved lives.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 83
SCIENCE
On the subject
of uncertainty, one
of the biggest changes
for forecasters over the
last three decades has been
in the way that a forecast is
communicated. Where once we
were told it was going to rain, for
example, we’re now told there is a 60 per
cent chance of rain. “For a long time the Met
Office was reluctant to put out probabilistic
information, and some of their reluctance came from
the idea that the public wouldn’t know how to use the
information,” says Christensen.
Different weather forecasting services use probabilities in
different ways, but the Met Office explains on its website
“A number of meteorologists are
investigating the potential for artificial
intelligence and machine learning to
improve forecasts”
84 Vol. 10 Issue 2
that its probabilities indicate how likely it is that
precipitation will fall at some point during a specified
period in a specified location. So a 70 per cent chance of
rain in Scotland, for example, means that there’s a
seven-in-ten chance that some rain will fall anywhere north
ABOVE: of the border. “If you have the communication channels to
Forecasting is present those uncertainties, this extra information can help
more accurate
than ever, people to make decisions to protect themselves and their
and the public property,” says Harrowsmith.
can now get
probabilities of
poor weather FUTURE FORECASTING
LEFT: When With continued improvements in computer power and our
Hurricane Irma understanding of atmospheric physics, there’s little doubt
battered the
Caribbean, that our forecasts will also continue to improve. Inness says
meteorologists that some meteorologists are investigating automated
predicted the
path of the storm rocket- or drone-launching buoys that could gather data on
with pretty good developing systems across the Atlantic. “You wouldn’t use
accuracy
them every day,” he says, “but they could come in handy if
you knew there was a weather system in that area and were
particularly uncertain about how it was going to develop. It’s
not fantasy by any means.”
Meanwhile, a number of meteorologists are investigating
the potential for artificial intelligence and machine learning
to improve forecasts, by using past weather data to learn
from inaccurate forecasts and make predictions about
future weather patterns. “At the moment it seems to be in
a very exploratory phase,” says Christensen, “but there are
results coming out which show that AI has the potential to
help us process our enormous amount of observations to
improve our simulations of the atmosphere.”
But the better we get at forecasting, the harder it is to
tease out further improvements – and the more demanding
the audience gets. “These days, we’ll do a 10-day forecast
and we can predict that timescale with reasonable
accuracy,” says Rebekah LaBar, a consultant
meteorologist for MetraWeather in New Zealand. “But
there are always people that ask us: what’s the coming
summer going to be like? How many hot days are we
going to have?”
Ultimately, there’ll probably never be such a thing as a
perfect weather forecast. No matter how good our models
and how powerful our supercomputers, chaos means that
PHOTO: GETTY, ALAMY, LARS COMMUNICATIONS
even tiny mistakes in our observations will grow out of
control over time, causing some degree of uncertainty in
our predictions. But as atmospheric science continues to
progress, a mistake on the scale of the Great Storm is
looking increasingly like a thing of the past. Storm clouds
today rarely take us by surprise. But it’s always worth
packing a raincoat, just in case. 
A radome, seen
here on top
of a weather
radar, protects
the sensitive
antenna from
Duncan Geere is a freelance science and technology journalist based
bad weather in Gothenburg, Sweden
QA &
DR ALASTAIR ALEXANDRA DR PETER PROF ALICE PROF MARK CHARLOTTE
GUNN CHEUNG J BENTLEY GREGORY LORCH CORNEY
Astronomer, Environment/ Computer Psychologist, Chemist, Zoo director,
astrophysicist climate expert scientist, author sleep expert science writer conservationist

DR HELEN DR CHRISTIAN EMMA LUIS DR AARATHI PROF ROBERT

SCALES JARRETT DAVIES VILLAZON PRASAD MATTHEWS
Marine biologist, Neuroscientist, Heath expert, Science/tech Biologist, Physicist,
writer writer science writer writer geneticist science writer

YOUR QUESTI0NS ANSWERED editorial-bbcearth@regentmedia.sg

BY OUR EXPERT PANEL

Do blind
people see in
their dreams?
People who are born blind, or become blind
early in life (before around five or seven years
of age), do not experience visual imagery
when they dream. People who became blind
later typically do retain some visual imagery
when they dream – but less so than in sighted
individuals. A study by Danish researchers
found that the longer someone has been
blind, the less likely they are to dream visually.
And while those who were born blind may
not see in their sleep, they are more likely
than those with sight to experience auditory,
olfactory, gustatory and tactile components to
their dreams. AGr
PHOTO: GETTY

Vol. 10 Issue 2 85
QA
&

What makes mozzarella

Squirrels can cheese so stretchy?
even sniff out
nuts that are
buried under a
layer of snow! Milk contains proteins consisting of coiled-up chains of molecules.
When you make cheese, these proteins are separated out during the
curdling of the milk, to make curds. In the manufacture of
mozzarella, the curds are then put into hot, salty water. This uncoils
the proteins and turns them into long strands, which are then
repeatedly compressed and stretched. This forces the strands to
line up, creating the famous stringy consistency. RM

How do squirrels find

the nuts they buried?
It was once thought that they just used their noses to sniff out
buried nuts and that the majority were never actually located.
But a 1990 study at Princeton University showed that squirrels
actually have a good memory and can build a map of the route
from one hidden nut to the next. They still use smell to find the
caches of other squirrels, but they find a lot more of their own
by memory. LV

Why does a drop of water improve the taste of whisky?

Whisky is predominantly water and ethanol. One end of
the ethanol molecule is hydrophilic (water-loving) and the
other hydrophobic (water-hating). As a result, the ethanol
tends to form a thin layer at the surface of the whisky, with
the hydrophobic ends pointing up into the air. Elsewhere
in the tipple, it clumps together, forming a so-called
micelle, with the hydrophilic ends shielding the other parts
of the molecule from the water. Many of the flavours in
whisky dissolve better in ethanol, and therefore get locked
away in the micelles. When water is added, this disrupts
some of the micelles allowing more of the ethanol to
migrate to the surface of the drink, along with the volatile
flavours. Scientists and whisky connoisseurs agree that to
get maximum flavour enhancement, you need more than
a drop of water – diluting the whisky to about 25 per cent
alcohol is ideal. ML

86 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 IN NUMBERS
Did Homo sapiens
and Neanderthals
56
The percentage of green turtle How are calories
interbreed?

nests lost from Florida’s Archie

Carr National Wildlife Refuge,
in food calculated?
after Hurricane Irma.
Calories are a measure of the energy content of

289
The number of species of
Japanese marine life that
have washed up in the US on
debris from 2011’s tsunami.
food, and as such play a key role in the science of
nutrition. During the late 19th Century, scientists
began the laborious task of measuring the calorie
content of food by burning it in a sealed container
and measuring the heat released. While studying Yes, and more than once! DNA analysis
the results, a rule of thumb emerged: weight for suggests that the earliest encounter between
weight, fat contains nine calories per gram, around the two species was 100,000 years ago, just as
twice that in protein or carbohydrates. This led to the earliest wave of Homo sapiens was
the so-called Atwater system for calculating the migrating out of Africa. They met Neanderthals

1,300
The length, in kilometres,
of the Deep Underground
Neutrino Experiment, which is
currently being built.
calories in food without lab tests: work out the
proportions of fat, protein and carbs it contains,
and multiply by the relevant ‘Atwater factor’ giving
the calories contained in each component. But
while it’s quick and cheap, there’s growing concern
the Atwater system misses subtleties of how the
body uses calories. RM
moving eastwards from Europe to Asia and
swapped genes. Later interbreeding periods
happened 55,000 and 40,000 years ago, and
each time we acquired some Neanderthal
genes. Unless you are of sub-Saharan
descent, your genome contains 1-4 per cent
Neanderthal DNA. LV

THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF ALL THE TREES WERE CUT DOWN?

PHOTOS: GETTY X3, ALAMY X2, SHUTTERSTOCK ILLUSTRATIONS: RAJA LOCKEY

1. THE LOGISTICS 2. ECOSYSTEM COLLAPSE

There are three trillion trees in the world. The timber industry currently cuts
down 15 billion a year, so at current rates it would take at least 200 years to
fell them all – probably much longer because a lot of virgin forest is hard to
reach. If you gave everyone aged 15 to 65 a chainsaw, they would have to
cut down 625 trees each, which might be manageable in a year. But
collecting and processing that timber would take much longer and 99 per
cent of the trees would just lie on the forest floor, rotting and releasing
35 billion tonnes of CO2.
Eighty per cent of land animals and plants live in forests and without the
trees most of them will die. Trees also keep the ground wet and cool, and
help to drive the water cycle. A large tree can push 150 tonnes of water
into the atmosphere each year, which then falls back on the forest as
rain. With no trees, the land will heat up and dry out and the dead wood
will inevitably result in enormous wildfires. This will fill the sky with soot
that blocks out the Sun, causing failed harvests for several years and
leading to worldwide famine.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 87
QA
&
T O P 10

How far
Longest-lived cells offshore can
in the human body wind farms be
On average, the cells in your body are replaced every 7 to 10 years. But those
numbers hide a huge variability in lifespan across the different organs of the body.
located?
Neutrophil cells (a type of white blood cell) might only last two days, while the cells in
the middle of your eye lenses will last your entire life. And it’s even possible that your Sea depth is often the limiting factor
brain cells might have longer maximum lifespans than you do. In 2013, researchers when it comes to constructing offshore
transplanted neurons from old mice into the brains of longer-lived rats and found that wind farms. Conventional turbines rest
the cells were still healthy after living for two whole mouse lifespans! on the seabed and can’t be installed in
water deeper than about 40 metres. In
most regions this means they cannot be
built more than 30km from shore.
Brain cells
200+ years? Floating wind turbines could, however,
be a game changer. The floating turbines
currently being installed at the Hywind
wind farm near Peterhead in north-east
Eye lens cells
Lifetime Scotland can operate in water up to 1km
deep. Such technologies could make it
possible to build wind farms much further
Egg cells out to sea, where winds are typically
50 years stronger. AFC

Heart muscle cells

40 years

Intestinal cells
(excluding lining)
15.9 years

PHOTOS: JAN ARNE WOLD/STATOIL/ATLAS, GETTY X2 ILLUSTRATION: RAJA LOCKEY

Skeletal muscle
cells 15.1 years

Fat cells
8 years

Hematopoietic
stem cells
5 years

Liver cells
10-16 months

Pancreas cells
1 year

88 Vol. 10 Issue 2
The floating wind turbines
being installed at Hywind
were built in Norway and
towed across the sea to
Scottish waters

Why are lips red?

In the 1960s, zoologist Desmond Morris suggested that a woman’s
lips evolved to signal sexual receptiveness, by mimicking increased
blood flow to the genitalia. Research has shown that men do find
the colour red attractive, but a 2012 study at the University of Kent
found that men didn’t prefer a red vulva, specifically, over a pink
one. So lip colour might just be a consequence of the thinner skin
there, which improves sensitivity. LV

Are fish in a shoal all

the same age?

In general, yes. Swirling, spiralling shoals are usually made up of fish of

the same species and same size, and hence age. This is partly to
confuse predators. Being a similar size, shape and colour makes it
difficult for a hunter – a seal, dolphin or bigger fish – to make out and
target a single prey fish. Other benefits of forming shoals include
swimming efficiency and finding food. Roughly half of all fish species
form shoals at some point and one in four species, including sardines,
herring and anchovies, live permanently in shoals and get agitated
when they’re on their own. HS

Vol. 10 Issue 2 89
QA
&
FACT OR FICTION? W H AT C O N N E C T S…

...EXPLODING STREETS
Eating chocolate gives you spots AND ZINC?
1.
Explosions
In 1992 a series of
10 explosions in
the city of
Guadalajara,
Mexico, killed
more than 250
people. The
explosions burst from
directly under the
downtown streets and

2.
left 15,000
people
homeless.
Fumes
It was caused by
UNCERTAIN petrol leaking into
The research evidence is very weak either way. Relatively few studies have looked at the link the sewers,
between chocolate and acne (or milk fat and acne), yet all of them have serious problems with creating
their methodology. Some trials were too short to rule out natural cycles of acne flare-ups, others explosive

PHOTO: GETTY X4, SHUTTERSTOCK, VILAIWAN M FERNANDES/DESPLAN LAB/NYU DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY ILLUSTRATION: RAJA LOCKEY
had too few people, or didn’t have proper controls. One study simply involved a questionnaire fumes. This
happened after
asking people to recall what they had eaten while in college, years ago, and how bad their acne
new water pipes
had been. While there is some evidence that diet can exacerbate acne in people who already were laid
suffer from it, there is no clear data to pin down whether it is caused by fat, sugar, hormones in underground,
milk, or cocoa. If chocolate does cause spots, the effect seems to be very small. LV alongside a petrol
pipeline that crossed the city.

Can we remove greenhouse gases

from the atmosphere?
3.
Pipes
The water pipes were
made of galvanised
Removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the Taking things one step further, this iron to protect against
corrosion but petrol
atmosphere is tricky. Some new plant matter can be burned inside specially
isn’t corrosive so the
technologies use chemical filters to extract adapted power stations that produce fuel pipeline, owned by
CO2 from the air, but come with a hefty energy while capturing the CO2 emitted and the Pemex company, was made
price tag. A more promising method relies burying it underground. This technology is, from ordinary steel.
on plants’ natural ability to absorb ambient however, still undergoing development.

4.
CO2 as they grow, transforming it into AFC
biomass. Planting trees or crops therefore
results in a net removal of CO2 from the air.
Zinc
The zinc coating on the
galvanised pipes
caused an
electrolytic
reaction that
turned the
damp soil into a
battery. The
steel pipe acted
as the anode and
was eroded away,
causing the petrol to leak.

90 Vol. 10 Issue 2
W H AT I S T H I S ?

Visual system of a fruit fly

This microscope image shows the
developing visual system in a fruit fly.
At the top is the retina, while the large
round-shaped structure beneath is
the brain’s optic lobe. Neurons (nerve
cells) are coloured yellow, while their
axons (long projections on neurons
that conduct electrical impulses) are
coloured blue.

Vol. 10 Issue 2 91
QA
&
W H O R E A L LY I N V E N T E D ?
SUNSPOTS
GALILEO JOHANNES
GALILEI FABRICIUS
Caused by magnetic storms breaking
through the Sun’s surface, these relatively
cool patches appear as black spots that
seem to move across the Sun’s disc. They
are sometimes so large they can be seen
with the naked eye through thin cloud or at
sunset. As such, their existence has
probably been known about since
prehistoric times, and Chinese astronomers
kept records of them over 2,000 years ago. 
However, the true nature of sunspots only
became clear with the advent of modern
astronomy in the early 17th Century. Belief
in the Ancient Greek model of a perfect
Universe was still widespread, making the
very existence of ‘blemishes’ on the Sun
deeply controversial. In 1611, the Jesuit
scholar Christoph Scheiner insisted they
were moons in orbit around the otherwise
pristine Sun. Galileo was unconvinced, and
argued for clouds in the solar atmosphere.
The first person to show the sunspots
were features on the Sun itself was a
German astronomer named Johannes
Fabricius. Using a pinhole camera, he
observed clusters of sunspots for months,
showing that they vanished over the Sun’s
western edge, then appeared again two
weeks later on the other side. This
confirmed they were part of the Sun’s
rotating surface – and made Fabricius the
first solar scientist. RM
92 Vol. 10 Issue 2
W H AT ’ S I N…
…IBUPROFEN TABLETS?
Medical tablets are made from much more that just the active compound.
Other ingredients are required to give the tablet volume, colour and to make sure
the manufacturing process runs smoothly.
IBUPROFEN
The active ingredient
only makes up 200mg of a
standard tablet.
LACTOSE
This is used in many tablets,
including aspirin and
paracetamol, to bulk them out.
SILICON DIOXIDE
This is added during the
manufacturing process to help
the various powders that make
the tablet flow nicely together.
Do all galaxies rotate in the
same direction?
If all galaxies formed from the same cloud
of spinning material, we might expect
their spin directions to be the same. This
is similar to the planets of the Solar
System, which all spin in the same
direction as the proto-planetary cloud
from which they formed (except for Venus
and Uranus which were probably made to
spin in the opposite direction by large
impacts). But, although galaxies do not
form from the same cloud of material,
they are not randomly distributed in
space; they form along ‘filaments’ with
‘voids’ in between. This means that proto-
galaxies actually are gravitationally linked
 
SODIUM LAURYL SULPHATE
A detergent that crops up in many
household products, including
shampoo and toothpaste. In tablets
it is used as a lubricant to stop
the various ingredients sticking to
manufacturing equipment.
TITANIUM DIOXIDE
This turns up in a lot of
products, from tablets to
sunscreen to paint. It is used
as a white pigment.
in small areas of the Universe and this is
probably a result of the distribution of
dark matter throughout the Cosmos.
The matter in these filaments tends to
move in a corkscrew motion towards the
PHOTOS: GETTY X5 ILLUSTRATION: RAJA LOCKEY
area of highest density. The result of this
is that there can be a preferential direction
of spin for galaxies forming in the same
filament, although it also depends on the
galaxy’s mass. Hence, if we look out into
the Universe, there can be areas that
appear to have a preferential direction for
galaxy rotation, but averaged over the
whole Universe, their spin direction is
actually random. AGu
Why does spicy food make
my nose run?

Why do I weigh less in

Spicy compounds are produced by plants to deter animals
from eating them. They have evolved to be as irritating as
possible to the mucous membranes of mammals. In fact,
the capsaicin in chilli doesn’t actually cause tissue damage,
but it triggers the nerve receptors that normally detect heat,
and your nose is fooled into producing extra mucus to
protect your sinuses. LV
the morning?
Because you are alive! The chemical reactions that sustain you all require
energy, and even though you aren’t eating in your sleep, these metabolic
processes are still converting glucose molecules into carbon dioxide
(CO2) and water. The air you breathe out contains 4 per cent CO2 and is
saturated with water vapour. In a typical eight-hour sleep you will exhale
2,100 litres of air, containing 27g of water and 84 litres of CO2. The carbon
in the CO2 weighs 42g. While 69g in a night doesn’t sound like much, you
also lose weight from your sweat, the saliva you dribble onto the pillow,
and from the skin flakes you shed into the sheets. This is why you need to
change the bedding every now and again. LV

QUESTION OF THE MONTH

Will rising sea levels mean

mountains have to be
recalibrated?
It’s not that simple. Although average height of the sea is rising,
this does not affect Mean Sea Level (MSL). MSL is a reference
level that refers to historical measurements. In the UK, MSL is
defined by data that was collected from tide gauges in Newlyn in
Cornwall between 1915 and 1921. But mountain elevation isn’t
measured relative to sea level anyway. Now, map makers use a
geoid, which is a mathematical representation of the Earth, to
define the reference height. The geoid is the hypothetical shape
that all the oceans of the world would take if they were only
affected by gravity and the Earth’s rotation. In other words, it
excludes the effects of weather and tide. The geoid is determined
by measuring the gravity fluctuations over the Earth’s surface,
due to the varying thickness of the crust and densities of magma
below. The reference geoid does get adjusted from time to time,
and in 2016, Calf Top in the Yorkshire Dales was promoted from a
hill to a mountain because changes to the geoid meant it was
now 2cm taller than previously recorded. But this was because
of more accurate modelling, not changing sea levels. LV

Vol. 10 Issue 2 93
RESOURCE A FEAST FOR THE MIND
01 CURL UP
WITH A BOOK
Here are 13 of our favourite long reads from last year
THE ANIMALS AMONG US
BY JOHN BRADSHAW
Why do we keep pets? Bradshaw argues that it goes
beyond cuteness and companionship, and all the way
back to an ancient connection in our shared past.
Weaving together psychology and evolutionary
science, the book will give pet owners a newfound
appreciation for their furry friends.
BEYOND INFINITY
BY EUGENIA CHENG
It takes a talented writer to bring the concept of
infinity to life, but Cheng’s infectious enthusiasm
makes maths a delight. Discover why some infinities
are bigger than others, and why there’s always room
at an infinite hotel, even if it’s full.
TESTOSTERONE REX
BY CORDELIA FINE
The winner of this year’s Royal Society books prize,
Fine cuts through gender stereotypes with panache,
dispelling the myth that testosterone creates a
deep-rooted division between the sexes and
discussing what this means for the society we live in.
INFERIOR
BY ANGELA SAINI
The second book on our list to tackle gender
stereotypes, Saini discusses how centuries of science
have painted a distorted picture of sex differences,
the impact this has had on women in society, and how
we’re finally beginning to redress the balance.
94 Vol. 10 Issue 2
OTHER MINDS
BY PETER GODFREY-SMITH
The octopus is essentially an alien species right here
on Earth – a sentient being whose intelligence has
evolved entirely independently from our own.
Godfrey-Smith peers into the minds of these
cephalopods, revealing what they can tell us about
the nature of consciousness itself.
GASTROPHYSICS
BY CHARLES SPENCE
In this breezy introduction to the new science of
gastrophysics, Spence explains why our mealtimes
are a truly multisensory experience. It turns out that
everything from the background music to the colour
and shape of our plates affects the taste of our food.
ASK AN ASTRONAUT
BY TIM PEAKE
Who better to describe life in space than someone
who’s walked the (space)walk? Tim pens answers to
the public’s burning questions, revealing what space
smells like, how he enjoyed a cosmic cuppa, and what
it felt like to return to Earth.
CAESAR’S LAST BREATH
BY SAM KEAN
Every breath we take tells a story as old as the Earth.
Kean’s eye-opening guide to the science and history
of our atmosphere takes in everything from
radioactive pigs and spontaneous combustion to
Julius Caesar’s final moments and some unforget-
table performance art at the Moulin Rouge.
02 GET
GRAPHICAL
Last year has seen a wealth of beautiful, science-themed graphic novels
and illustrated books. Here are some of our favourites…
OUT OF NOTHING
BY ANIEL LOCKE &
DAVID BLANDY
Combining science fact
with dreamlike imagery,
Locke and Blandy’s
eye-popping graphic
novel celebrates the
ingenuity of the human
mind. We travel across
centuries from Gutenberg’s printing press to Tim
Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, via Picasso,
Einstein, Rosalind Franklin and more.
ANATOMY
BY HÉLÈNE DRUVERT &
JEAN-CLAUDE DRUVERT
A cutaway book of the
human body, Anatomy
elicited gasps of delight in
the office. Its flaps and
delicate lasercuts allow
kids to explore the organs,
systems and senses that
keep us alive, while the accompanying text
provides a nice introduction to human biology.
WOMEN IN SCIENCE
BY RACHEL IGNOTOFSKY
Discover (or rediscover)
the work of 50 trailblazing
female scientists in
Ignotofsky’s gorgeously
illustrated book. Familiar
names like Marie Curie
and Ada Lovelace sit
alongside lesser-known
pioneers such as Maria Sibylla Merian, one of the
first and more important entomologists.
MYSTERIES OF THE
QUANTUM UNIVERSE
BY THIBAULT DAMOUR &
MATHIEU BURNIAT
Billed as ‘Tintin meets
Brian Cox’, this book
performs the tricky task
of making quantum
physics accessible. Join
Bob and his dog Rick on
a journey through the world of the very small,
talking atoms with Einstein and eating crêpes
with Max Planck.
GRAPHIC SCIENCE
BY DARRYL CUNNINGHAM
With his crisp comic art,
Cunningham tells the
stories of seven scientists
who history has rather
overlooked. Mary Anning,
Alfred Wegener, Fred
Hoyle, Jocelyn Bell
Burnell… they’re names
you may have heard of, but Graphic Science under-
lines the importance of their work.
THE LOST WORDS
BY ROBERT MACFARLANE &
JACKIE MORRIS
Worried by the way in
which natural words
(acorn, dandelion,
kingfisher, etc) are
disappearing from
children’s vocabulary,
Robert Macfarlane has
teamed up with illustrator Jackie Morris to produce
this exquisite ‘spell book’, combining acrostic
poems with hand-painted artwork.
Vol. 10 Issue 2 95
TIME OUT

CROSSWORD PUZZLE
GIVE YOUR BRAIN A WORKOUT

DOWN
1 Frenchman set off an ember in lining (8)
2 Fool king, in charge of an acid (6)
3 Trendy, if tiny, displaying limitlessness (8)
4 Slow down engineers by throwing dart (6)
5 Total type of zero (8)
6 Work together to get position indicator (10)
7 Many CID characters are energetic (7)
8 Blade twirled round shows ability
to shine (6)
11 Concoction is eaten in Greek winds (7)
16 The Spanish have designation for part
of tooth (6)
19 Reported occasion for flavouring (5)
20 Overweight fellow at a junction (3)
22 Alright for a Greek character to have
an animal (5)
23 Endlessly debate sports equipment (10)
25 Hear ripple put out by printer, say (10)
26 Some bread for a swan (3)
27 Fungus growing on chocolate (7)
30 Boil pelt with relative (8)
31 Criticise scare about a gland (8)
32 Resistance to infection is often diplomatic (8)
33 Weep, having gone off temperature reducer (7)
35 Acceptable to spin guns around one nail (6)
36 Relaxed as van is brought back by guide (6)
37 I would work first on moon – that’s addictive (6)

ACROSS
9
10
Disorderly exit – scene is a way of life (9)
Environmental transfer has nothing in tandem (8)
26
28
Revolutionary claim involving compound (8)
Free to wander around coral ridge (4)
ANSWERS
Solution to crossword in the
12 Dullard of calibre (4) 29 Ready-made pressure to judge sailor (6) previous issue
13 Sign about a domineering woman (6) 31 Chap is confused by one Indian game (7)
14 About spy being a catalyst (7) 34 Exploding pulsar for a mineral (9)
15 Displace a strange, Ancient Greek doctor (9) 36 Dan’s sort upset by medium desert wind (9)
17 Ugli variety in old America found in marshes (9) 38 Bear has opening in ear (7)
18 Tear us away to unknown river mouth (7) 39 Mother’s character? (6)
20 Enemy volunteers to get left in 40 Appearance is spiteful, by the sound of it (4)
defensive position (6) 41 Sack everyone with bearing in defence (8)
21 About to find honour in stupor (4) 42 Scientist is at an organisation with Thomas (9)
24 Caught by Peter ordering virtual companion (8)

96 Vol. 10 Issue 2
 MY LIFE SCIENTIFIC

DR ANDREW DIGBY
“This month sees a milestone
as we finish sequencing the
genetic codes of all living
”
How did a former astronomer come to care for
the world’s weirdest parrot? This month, Helen
Pilcher talks to Dr Andrew Digby about career
changes and the charismatic kākāpō
Have you always been interested in science?
Always. My mum was a laboratory chemist at a brewer’s
in Norwich. She encouraged me and my brothers to take
an interest in science when we were kids. I loved going to
local nature reserves and watching the sky at night. I also
recorded the weather every day for seven years: rainfall,
temperature, wind speed, that sort of thing. If we went on
holiday, I’d get the neighbours to do it so there weren’t What’s that like?
any gaps in my data. It’s like the premier league of conservation. Without our help, the
species would undoubtedly go extinct. We manage the birds on
How did your scientific career begin? predator-free islands and do everything we can to help them breed.
My PhD in astronomy led to a post-doc with NASA. We built This month sees a milestone as we finish sequencing the full genetic
an instrument that looks for planets in distant solar systems codes of all living and a handful of dead ones too. It’s the
and deployed it on a US Air Force spy telescope, on a first time this has ever been done for all members of a species.
mountain in Hawaii. During the day, they’d use the telescope
to snoop on satellites. It was all very secret. Then at night, Why is it so important to sequence the genomes of all
when I went to use it, I had to be escorted everywhere of the ?
because I’m not a US citizen. It was a bit crazy, but we did It gives us a whole level of information that we’ve never had before.
find some candidate planets. We can use this information to shed light on the birds’ family tree
and problems such as infertility and disease. It’s going to be an
How did you come to work in conservation? amazing resource, available to anyone that wants to use it. But the
I live and work in New Zealand now. When I first arrived, is only half of my job.
I got a job doing weather forecast modelling, but also did
some voluntary work counting kiwi on the side. That led to What’s the other half?
a second PhD, studying the bioacoustics of kiwi calls, but I I look after another endangered New Zealand bird called the .
never dreamed I’d end up working with . It looks like a bit like a non-endangered bird called the pukeko, and
is often mistaken for it. Its main problem, however, is that it lacks
What is a ? |the ’s charisma. It’s in desperate need of some positive PR.
are these weird, green, nocturnal, ground-dwelling Can you give it a mention, please?
parrots that are unlike any other bird. They are found only
in New Zealand and have nearly 30 million years of unique Consider it done. 
evolutionary history. They’re also incredibly charismatic,
but they’ve been decimated by invasive species so there
are only around 150 alive. I’m now the scientific advisor for Dr Andrew Digby is a scientist for the Kakapo and takahe recovery programmes
the national Recovery Program. at the New Zealand Department of Conservation

Vol. 10 Issue 2 97
 THE LAST WORD
WHY DON’T NATURAL
DISASTERS WORRY US MORE?
HUMANITY OUGHT TO WISE UP ON
THE LONG-TERM RISKS
hat would you think if a nuclear-tipped missile
W zoomed through space and nearly hit a
satellite or two? That’s pretty close to what
actually happened on 12 October last year – except
that the ‘missile’ was under no one’s control.
Travelling at over 25,000 km/h, the house-
sized chunk of rock known as asteroid 2012 TC4
packed the punch of a few dozen atomic bombs
as it flew overhead, at a similar altitude to many
communications satellites. Yet after a bit of media
coverage, the event soon went the way of all such
‘cosmic close shave’ stories, and disappeared off
the news radar entirely.
Even when one of these objects actually does
make it through the atmosphere – as one did over
Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, injuring over
1,000 people – we all soon forget about it.
But are we being too complacent? Many
scientists argue that we are, and they
claim to have evidence to prove it.
The trouble is, that evidence isn’t very
compelling. Exhibit A is that the chances of
dying in an asteroid impact that trashes the
planet are around one in 75,000 – that’s
double the risk of being killed by lightning.
But wait, that can’t be right, surely? After
all, the last time the Earth got totalled
was around 65 million years ago, when
the dinosaurs were wiped out.
The explanation lies in the fact that
this risk depends on more than just
how frequent the event is. While massive
asteroid impacts are far rarer than lightning
strikes, the likely death toll is millions of
times higher – leading to that surprisingly
high final risk figure.
Multiplying the frequency of the event
by its consequences has long been deemed
the only scientific way to make decisions
ILLUSTRATION: DANIEL BRIGHT
about risk – and the theory behind this
is pretty solid. But as a way of getting
people –and politicians – to take
risks of natural disasters seriously,
it doesn’t really work.
That’s because the formula is
only really helpful for deciding
how best to protect the whole of
98 Vol. 10 Issue 2
humanity for the rest of eternity. But Joe Public –
“IT TAKES
and especially Sir Joseph Politician – tend to have
rather more short-term concerns, such as living
AROUND 20 long enough to see their kids grow up, or getting
re-elected. For them, that is perfectly rational,
YEARS FOR too. So telling them they’re wrong to ignore risks
PEOPLE TO PARK on timescales so vast they’ll probably never
experience them isn’t going to win them over.
THEIR CONCERNS Cosmic catastrophes, which typically have
ABOUT A REPEAT timescales of centuries and more, run straight into
this timescale problem – which is probably why
OF A PREVIOUS few people outside academia worry about them.
DISASTER” But natural disasters on much shorter timescales
can still engender indifference. From California’s
San Andreas fault to the slopes of Mount Vesuvius,
it’s clear that millions of people are quite capable
of pondering the risks of living on the sites of far
more frequent natural catastrophes and deciding
they’ll probably be okay.
So what kind of timescale do people take
seriously when assessing such risks? Judging
by the response of those living in hurricane zones,
it takes less than a generation – around 20 years
or so – for people to park their concerns about
a repeat of a previous disaster. That’s far
shorter than the average ‘return period’ of
most forms of natural disaster, such as
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or
Category 5 hurricanes.
In one sense, all of this bears
witness to the astonishing resilience
of the human spirit. But it also
highlights a critical limit to human
rationality –and a major challenge to
those seeking to protect humanity
from long-term disaster. Unless they
can find some way of circumventing
the timescale problem, their pleas
for action are likely to be greeted
by the classic response of each new
generation to the dire warnings of their
elders: “Yeah, whatever…”. 
Robert Matthews is visiting professor of
science at Aston University, Birmingham
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ON EARTH
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