SPACECRAFT CRASH

Soyuz emergency
spells trouble for ISS
TWO EGGS, ONE BABY
Same-sex mice reproduce.
Are we next?
EARLIEST ANIMAL
Unusual fossil reveals
surprising origins
WEEKLY October 20 – 26, 2018

THE
POWER
OF
FASTING Why an empty plate
may hold the secret to
a longer life

No3200 US$6.99 CAN$6.99

LUCY HAWKING 4 2

On her father’s extraordinary legacy

PLUS 400-TONNE FUNGUS/ MOONMOONS/BACKWARDS CHEMISTRY
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CONTENTS
newscientist.com/issue/3200

Management
Executive chairman Bernard Gray
Chief executive Nina Wright
Finance director Jenni Prince
Chief technology officer Chris Corderoy
Marketing director Jo Adams
Human resources Shirley Spencer
Non-executive director Louise Rogers

VITALY KOROVIN/SHUTTERSTOCK
Publishing and commercial

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Commercial director Chris Martin Volume 240 No 3200 This week Time to adapt to a warming world 5
Richard Holliman, Justin Viljoen,
Henry Vowden, Helen Williams

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Post New Scientist, PO Box 3806,
Chesterfield MO 63006-9953
25 Spacecraft crash
Soyuz emergency
spells trouble for ISS
13 Two eggs, one baby
Same-sex mice reproduce.
Are we next?
8 Earliest animal
Unusual fossil reveals
surprising origins
30 The power of fasting
Why an empty plate may hold
the secret to a longer life
42 Lucy Hawking
On her father’s extraordinary
legacy
Plus 400-tonne fungus (13).
Moonmoons (3 and 10).
Backwards chemistry (38)
3 We must ensure that data-driven
medicine puts patients first. The
joy of moonmoons
News
4 THIS WEEK Adapting to a
warmer world. Photography prize
for monkeys. Rabbit virus hits
hares? UK to put folic acid in flour
6 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Smacking linked to teen violence.
Placental stem cells help hips heal.
Electric chewing gum keeps its
flavour. Space rocks could seed life
through the galaxy. Earliest ever
animal fossil. Mysterious cosmic
radio burst near Earth. Hospital
of the future. Moons can have
moons. Mice with two biological
mothers. 400-tonne fungus.
A laser that shouts. Forensics gets
a genetic upgrade
17 IN BRIEF Jiggling pills end
constipation. We remember 5000
faces. Bees fall silent in eclipse.
AI’s weird limbs. Sneaky T. rex
Analysis
22 INSIGHT Why trying to end all
suicide could be a bad idea
24 COMMENT More help needed
for those who lose a pregnancy.
Medical cannabis in limbo
25 ANALYSIS Crisis in space leaves
the ISS inaccessible
30 The fashion for fasting
Why an empty plate may hold
the secret to a longer life
34 Full steam ahead
Cracking the immense promise
of geothermal power
38 The disassembly line
How to make molecules
at the touch of a button
42 Memories of my father
As Stephen Hawking’s final book
is published, his daughter Lucy
reflects on his legacy. Plus an
exclusive extract from the book
and a review
Culture
46 Red sky at night A deeply
realised novel from Kim Stanley
Robinson peeks into our possible
future on the moon. PLUS: This
week’s cultural picks
Regulars
26 APERTURE
The world’s most extraordinary
freshwater environments
52 LETTERS
For mammals, matriarchy
is second nature
55 OLD SCIENTIST
50 years ago
56 FEEDBACK
Goats with a strange thirst
57 THE LAST WORD
Waxing miracle

20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 1

LEADERS

Editorial
Editor Emily Wilson
Managing editor Rowan Hooper
Art editor Craig Mackie

News
News editor Penny Sarchet
Editors Jacob Aron, Timothy Revell
Reporters (UK) Jessica Hamzelou
Michael Le Page, Clare Wilson, Sam Wong
(US) Leah Crane, Chelsea Whyte
(Aus) Alice Klein

Features

BARANOZDEMIR/GETTY
Chief features editor Richard Webb
Editors Catherine de Lange, Gilead Amit,
Julia Brown, Daniel Cossins, Kate Douglas,
Alison George, Joshua Howgego,
Tiffany O’Callaghan
Feature writer Graham Lawton

Culture and Community

Editors Liz Else, Mike Holderness, Simon Ings,
Frank Swain

Subeditors
Chief subeditor Eleanor Parsons
Patients before tech
Tom Campbell, Chris Simms, Jon White
We must ensure that data-driven medicine puts people first
Design
Kathryn Brazier, Joe Hetzel,
Dave Johnston, Ryan Wills ADVANCES in technology have For example, people who to imagine that a face-recognition
Picture desk done wonders for keeping us signed up to DNA ancestry system designed to identify
Chief picture editor Adam Goff alive and healthy – think where services probably never expected hospital visitors could one day
Kirstin Kidd, David Stock
we would be without the likes of their genetic data to be put to be redeployed to search for signs
Production
MRI machines, heart monitors work solving murders. Now, of depression.
Alan Blagrove, Anne Marie Conlon,
Melanie Green or ventilators. So it is heartening thanks to the rapid pace of genetic Although medical data is
Contact us to see that Great Ormond Street technology, police are using it generally subject to strict
newscientist.com/contact Hospital in London is now to do just that (see page 14). safeguards, it is not clear whether
General & media enquiries experimenting with how the Even if most people would data that later becomes medically
enquiries@newscientist.com
latest advances in artificial be happy to assist with such useful can be equally protected.
US
210 Broadway #201 intelligence, robots and face enquiries, the benefits of other After all, you never know what
Cambridge, MA 02139 recognition might aid patient reuses of data are thornier still. might come in handy down the
Tel +1 617 283 3213
care (see page 10). Last week, it was revealed that line. Good healthcare relies
UK
25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES Unlike medical tech of old, Amazon has patented the ability not just on the latest advances,
Tel +44 (0)20 7611 1200 this latest generation heavily of its Alexa voice assistant to but also on trust. In striving for
AUSTRALIA relies on the use of data. And as detect when you are ill, such as innovation, medical practitioners
PO Box 2315, Strawberry Hills, NSW 2012
we are increasingly learning, data by listening out for coughs and must do their best to protect
collected for one reason often sniffles, then offer to buy cough their patients – both now and
ends up being used for another. drops. In the same vein, it is easy for the future. ■

makes light of a serious field

© 2018 New Scientist Ltd, England.
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The joy of moonmoons
LAST week, New Scientist sent
certain corners of the internet
into rapturous delight by
publishing a story about the
potential for moons to have
moons of their own (see page 10).
This included a suggested name
for such objects: moonmoons.
The response on social media
was an immediate outpouring of
glee. Something about the word’s
childlike simplicity makes it a
pleasure to say, and thousands
of readers were quickly firing off
their own reactions. As it happens,
“Moon Moon” is the name of a
five-year-old meme depicting
a wolf looking stupid, which
certainly helped the idea spread.
Some astronomers are
bemoaning the use of
moonmoon, suggesting it
of study. But given that terms
such as super-Earth, twotino and
cubewano are all an accepted
part of the literature, moonmoon
doesn’t seem a huge departure.
Ultimately, it remains to be
seen whether the word sticks
or gives way to more po-faced
alternatives such as submoon
or second-order moon. But to
lose moonmoon, and the joy
it brings, would seem an
astronomical shame. ■

20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 3

THIS WEEK

Golden duo
grab prize
A PORTRAIT of two golden
snub-nosed monkeys has won
the 2018 Wildlife Photographer
of the Year competition.
The pair were snapped by
Dutch photographer Marsel van
Oosten in the temperate forest 
of China’s Qinling mountains, the

© MARSEL VAN OOSTEN /WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR

only place where this endangered
species lives.
“This image is a symbolic
reminder of the beauty of nature
and how impoverished we are
becoming as nature is diminished,”
says Roz Kidman Cox, a member
of the judging panel.
The photography competition
is produced by the Natural History
Museum in London.

400 micrograms of folic acid.

Apple hits back at Plan to add folic
anti-encryption law acid to UK flour
TECH giant Apple has strongly
criticised a proposed Australian
law that would force companies to
provide access to encrypted data.
“Criminals and terrorists… may
start their attacks by accessing just
one person’s smartphone,” said
Apple in a letter to the Australian
government. “In the face of these
threats, this is no time to weaken
encryption.”
The proposed bill’s public hearing
is on 19 October, but Australia is not
the first to attempt a clampdown
on encryption. Law enforcement
agencies and politicians around the
world have long been calling for such
measures, claiming it is essential to
fight crime and terrorism. The UK’s
prime minister, Theresa May, has
repeatedly pressed the need for a
ban on encryption.
Computer scientists say there is
MASKOT/PLAINPICTURE
GOVERNMENT ministers are backing
a plan to fortify flour with folic acid
in the UK, according to The Guardian.
The move is intended to help
reduce birth defects that affect the
brain and spine. A lack of folic acid
can lead to problems with neural tube
development, resulting in conditions
such as spina bifida and anencephaly.
Pregnant women and those trying
to conceive are currently encouraged
to take a daily supplement of
But many don’t take
supplements. “Many pregnancies
are not planned, meaning many
women will not have taken folic
acid around the time of conception
and very early in their pregnancy,”
says Clare Livingstone from the
Royal College of Midwives.
Flour is already fortified with
vitamins and minerals in more
than 80 countries, including the
US, Canada and Australia. When
fortification was introduced in
Canada in the 1990s, a marked
decrease in birth defects was seen.
Concern over
hare deaths
BROWN hares are turning up dead
across the UK, leading to fears that
the highly infectious rabbit disease
myxomatosis has jumped species.
Myxomatosis, caused by the
myxoma virus, was introduced to
rabbits in Australia and Europe in the
1950s to reduce their numbers. The
disease tore through populations,
killing 99 per cent of rabbits in the UK.
Numbers bounced back after rabbits
developed some resistance, but the
disease is still prevalent.
Now the University of East Anglia
and the Suffolk and Norfolk wildlife
trusts are warning that a mutated
form of the virus may be infecting
hares. There have been reports
before of the disease seeming to
affect hares, but now a large number
of dead hares have been found over
a short period of time in the UK – in
one case six in a single field.

no way to create “back doors” for law If the disease were to hit hares as
enforcement without making devices hard as it did rabbits, the effect could
more vulnerable to hackers, such as be devastating. UK hare populations
those who break into systems and are already thought to have declined
demand a ransom to restore them. by 80 per cent over the past century.

4 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018

For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news

Time to adapt to a warming world

Climate change is hitting faster than expected, says Michael Le Page

IT IS not enough to try to limit

further global warming – we must
also do far more to ensure we
survive it. That’s the message
from a coalition of global figures,
including former UN head Ban
Ki-moon and billionaire Bill Gates.
They are part of the Global
Commission on Adaptation
launched this week, which says
that the impact of global warming
is being felt much sooner and
more powerfully than expected.
To keep reducing global poverty
and maintain economic growth,
JONAS BENDIKSEN/MAGNUM

it says societies must do much

more, much faster, to adapt.
“Adaptation action is not only
the right action, it is the smart
thing. We need to make this
case more aggressively. The
costs of adapting are less than have switched to raising ducks conclusion: we have to mitigate Growing flood risks are one impact
the cost of business as usual. instead of chickens. In a flood, and adapt at the same time.” of the rise in global temperature
And the benefits many times chickens drown but ducks swim. The launch of such a big
larger,” says Ban, who, with Gates, Bangladesh has also succeeded adaptation initiative just a week The commissioners also say
in greatly reducing deaths from after a major UN report on what we can combine adaptation with
“We are the first generation cyclones by improving warning it would take to limit warming to efforts to limit climate change.
that has to live with systems and building shelters. In 1.5°C might be seen by some as an For instance, solar panels keep
the consequences of 1970, half a million people died admission of defeat. But scientists homes supplied with electricity
climate change” in one such storm; in 2007, fewer have always made it clear that we if a disaster damages power lines.
than 5000 perished in a cyclone. need to adapt even if warming is While the commission paints
is one of 28 commissioners Adaptation is especially crucial limited to 1.5°C or 2°C by 2100. a rosy picture of the benefits of
heading the new initiative. for the poorest, because they are Based on current policies we are adaptation, in reality there will
Climate adaptation is not hit hardest. Climate change may heading for more than 3°C. be hard choices, such as whether
just about special projects, says plunge around 100 million people to retreat from low-lying coastal
Kristalina Georgieva, CEO of the back into extreme poverty by areas or build flood defences.
World Bank and another of the 2030. “The urgency around
Not defeated This will be true even for wealthy
commissioners. Everyone should adaptation cannot be overstated,” “For quite some time there has cities such as New York.
think about resilience to climate says Patrick Verkooijen, CEO of been a sense that if we opt to “Some places, like lower
change when making decisions: the Global Centre on Adaptation adapt, that means we’re accepting Manhattan, will clearly be
from governments and business initiative. He will help to run the defeat in the fight against climate defended with walls and other
leaders to the general public, for new commission. change,” says Georgieva. “But the structures. But will billions be
instance when buying a home. All those involved in the call truth here is that we already are spent to protect, say, Howard
“A very significant opportunity for adaptation still stress the experiencing the consequences Beach, a low-lying neighbourhood
for adaptation comes from need to cut emissions to limit, of the changing climate. It’s not in Queens? I don’t think so,” says
mainstreaming resilience in the or mitigate, further warming. defeat, it’s reality that we face.” Jeff Goodell, author of The Water
normal investments we make,” “We are the last generation that That means giving equal Will Come. “In most places, retreat
says Georgieva. “It doesn’t have to can mitigate climate change priority to adaptation. Half of is inevitable. And it will be driven
be a more expensive investment, effectively. We are the first the money the World Bank lends by simple economics. The hard
it has to be done with risk in generation that has to live with for climate-related projects – truth is, adaptation to quickly
mind.” For example, she describes its consequences,” says Georgieva. $20.5 billion in the past year – now rising seas is a luxury that few
how some farmers in Bangladesh “That leads to a very obvious goes on adaptation, she says. can afford.” ■

20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 5

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Smacking linked to
teenage violence
Clare Wilson
A GLOBAL survey has found that
teenagers get into more fights in
countries where it is legal to spank
children, prompting campaigners
to renew calls to make corporal
punishment illegal.
Smacking children used to be
commonplace in parenting, but
a growing list of countries have
banned it, including Sweden,
Germany and New Zealand. The
practice will soon become illegal
in Scotland, and there are calls for
the same to happen throughout
the rest of the UK.
Supporters of smacking say that
it can be necessary for discipline,
but campaigners say that it makes
parental child abuse more likely,
and promotes violence more
generally. To see if childhood
smacking might later affect
teenage behaviour, Frank Elgar
of McGill University in Montreal,
Canada, and his colleagues
analysed child survey data from
88 countries.
These countries were each
classed in one of three ways:
no smacking bans, full smacking
P.WEI/GETTY
bans, or partial smacking bans,
where smacking isn’t allowed in
Stem cells from
placentas could
help fix muscles
STEM cells taken from placentas
have healing properties that can
help people recover from having
their hip joint replaced.
Placentas are normally thrown
away after childbirth, but now
Israeli company Pluristem has taken
discarded placentas and developed
a batch of mesenchymal stem cells
from them. These cells have the
6 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
schools, but is legal for parents,
as is currently the case in the UK.
The analysis found that
13-year-olds from places with full
smacking bans were less likely to
get into frequent fights than those
from nations where it is allowed
everywhere. In boys, who fought
the most, the rates for frequent
fighting were 8.5 per cent where
there are full smacking bans and
potential to turn into different kinds
of tissue and release chemicals that
promote healing.
To see how the cells affect muscle
repair, Tobias Winkler of Charité –
Berlin University of Medicine in
Germany and his colleagues tested
two different doses of the cells in
20 people having hip replacements.
During the operation, surgeons have
to cut into muscle tissue around the
joint, which can leave people limping
for several months, particularly if it
isn’t their first hip replacement.
Six months after surgery, people
who got a dose of cells had stronger
12 per cent where there are
none (BMJ Open, DOI: 10.1136/
bmjopen-2018-021616 ).
This suggests “bans not only
keep children safe from adults,
but also from their peers”, says
Alana Ryan of the UK’s National
Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, which has
long campaigned for a ban on
smacking in the home.
But Catey Bunce of the UK Royal
Statistical Society says this makes
the mistake of assuming that a
correlation between two things
Teenagers seem to fight more
where spanking is permitted–
hip muscles than those in the
placebo group, as measured by
an exercise machine (Journal of
Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle,
doi.org/cvsw). All of the people in
the experiment – even those in the
placebo group – were limp-free by
the time they were tested at six
months, probably because everyone
was having their first hip surgery,
says Winkler.
“Six months after the
operation, people who
got stem cell doses had
stronger hip muscles”
means one causes the second.
It could be that the second
causes the first. For instance,
teenagers who get into lots of
fights might grow up to be
tougher disciplinarians.
Or perhaps smacking and
teenage fights are both affected
by a third factor, such as broader
societal attitudes. For centuries,
there has been a slow decline in
violence across many aspects of
society, according to an idea
popularised by Steven Pinker of
Harvard University. Any falls in
smacking and teenage fighting
could be two manifestations of
this trend, without one directly
causing the other.
“As a parent, I would not smack
my children, so it is tempting to
believe if they were exposed to
it they would become more
aggressive,” says Bunce. “But
you need to be wary of jumping
from correlation to causation.”
Another caveat to the latest
findings is that there was just
a small difference in frequent
fighting between countries
with full bans and partial bans.
In boys, the rates were 8.5 per
cent versus 10 per cent, a gap too
small to be found statistically
meaningful by this analysis.
But Elgar says other evidence
shows that smacking makes
children more violent. “Being hit
or spanked or slapped does affect
how kids react in their own social
relationships,” he says. ■
The improvements seen in strength
suggest that the cells would reduce
limping in people having second or
third joint replacements, where the
muscle starts off in worse condition,
says Winkler.
Dennis McGonagle at the University
of Leeds, UK, says animal studies
show that stem cells are often killed
by the recipient’s immune system
when they are injected into the body.
But mesenchymal stem cells seem to
release tiny packages of beneficial
compounds before this happens.
“They are full of growth factors and
other goodies,” he says. Clare Wilson ■
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news

Hi-tech chewing Panspermia is the idea that

asteroids seed life through space
gum will never microbes to take shelter from the
lose its flavour punishing space environment in
the interior of the rock.
CHEWING gum that zaps your tongue “It’s a very dangerous ride, but
with electricity keeps the flavour you can think of the microbes as
going forever. tiny astronauts sitting in a natural
The pain-free device is called spacecraft,” says Loeb. “I would
“unlimited electric gum”. It uses the actually be thrilled to be a microbe
piezoelectric effect – a phenomenon sitting in a rock that makes it
where some materials produce across the Milky Way.”
electric charge when squeezed. When Once one of these life-laden
the “gum” is chewed, it produces a rocks is captured into orbit
STOCKTREK IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

small current, which tricks the tongue around a new star, it can smash
into experiencing different tastes. into a planet, dropping off its
It currently produces a salty or passengers. The same process on
bitter taste. But the hope is to extend a smaller scale could also spread
that, since other research has shown life to other planets in the system.
that, by varying the pattern and Many Mars rocks have been
strength of electric charge, it is blown off the planet by impacts,
possible to induce all five of the basic ending up on Earth. This has led
tastes our mouths pick up: bitter, some people to speculate that
salty, sour, sweet and umami.
At an event in Japan earlier this Alien life could ride space life on our planet could have
come from Mars. It is even
year, 80 people tried the gum. Almost possible, if unlikely, that life on
everyone reported experiencing salty rocks to travel the stars Earth began with interstellar
or bitter tastes. Some said chewing it microbes, says Loeb.
was a bit like chewing niboshi, which LIFE finds a way – perhaps even stuck on such interstellar However, Ed Turner at
are small dried infant sardines used in across the stars. It may really be projectiles would be to survive. Princeton University says the
snacks and seasonings in Japan. possible for organisms to travel “It’s like billiards,” says team may have overestimated
The gum consists of a piezoelectric all over the galaxy by hitching Ginsburg. “You hit the cue the likelihood that these captured
element and electrodes, wrapped a ride on a fast-moving rock in ball and it hits the other balls, objects carry life. And many of
in a thin plastic film. It is a couple of a phenomenon called galactic and beside just transferring these objects would not be
centimetres wide, like a standard panspermia. In this way, just a momentum it also spreads life, chipped from larger, habitable
stick of gum. Unlike real chewing gum, few inhabited worlds could spread and then life spreads across the planetary bodies, so if they have
the electric version will continue to life throughout the Milky Way. whole table, which is the galaxy.” life, it must have evolved there
stimulate the taste buds for as long In October 2017, astronomers on its own.
as it is chewed – and it won’t break spotted the first interstellar “I would actually be thrilled “Only a tiny fraction of the
down into a sticky glob. object we have ever seen come to be a microbe sitting objects that would be captured
Naoshi Ooba at Meiji University in through our solar system, called in a rock that makes it would plausibly carry life,” he
Japan and his colleagues created the ‘Oumuamua. That was the first across the Milky Way” says. “If that somehow were not
device, and demonstrated it at the concrete proof that rocks can be the case and a lot of them carried
ACM Symposium on User Interface tossed out of orbit from distant The team has found that up to life, then life is very common
Software and Technology in Berlin, stellar systems and make it intact 100 million life-bearing objects and you probably don’t need
Germany, this week. to our solar system. with a radius of 200 kilometres – panspermia anyway.”
This is the latest in a line of Of course, it is not enough for about half the size of Saturn’s Our space-faring descendants
taste-related gadgets devised by a space rock to travel between moon Enceladus – could have may even be able to test this idea.
researchers. These include a digital the stars. In order to transfer life, been captured in stellar systems If life in different places around
lollipop that people can lick to get it must also be captured by a around the Milky Way. the galaxy is varied and diverse,
different tastes, and a virtual star’s gravity and eventually Even about 1000 Earth-sized that would be an indication that
lemonade that uses electrodes to trick smash into a planet. objects could have been collared it arose independently on each
someone into thinking that water is Now, Idan Ginsburg, Manasvi in this way, they say (arxiv.org/ world. However, if there are
actually the fruit-flavoured drink. Lingam and Avi Loeb at Harvard abs/1810.04307v1). groups of stellar systems with
Ooba and his team plan to add other University have calculated just Smaller objects are much similar life on their planets, this
flavours to the electric gum, and want how often these banished rocks more likely to make the journey could mean that microbes really
to eventually create a product that might be captured by a new stellar between stars, but the smaller are travelling between the stars,
people can buy. Timothy Revell ■ system, and how likely any life they get, the harder it is for says Loeb. Clare Wilson ■

20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 7

NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Earliest signs of
animal life found
Chelsea Whyte
SPONGES were probably one of
the earliest animal groups to
evolve, but it has proved hard
to work out exactly when in
geological time they appeared.
Now, an analysis of ancient
rocks and oils has turned up traces
of steroids made by early sponges
that indicate they may have been
populating the ancient sea floor
at least 120 million years earlier
than we thought.
“If animals first appeared in
a predominantly bacterial or
microbial world, they would
need to harness microbes and live
symbiotically with them,” says
Gordon Love at the University of
California, Riverside. That may
be why sponges produce a vast
array of sterols: steroids with
antibacterial properties that
could let them harbour microbes
without harm.
The earliest sponges belong
to a class called demosponges,
which produce sterols that
can be preserved in rocks as
characteristic sterane molecules.
Love and his team went hunting
for these “molecular fossils” in
rock and oil samples from Oman,
Cosmic radio
signal spotted
close to Earth
A STRANGE flash of radio waves
detected from space has been traced
to a galaxy that lies relatively nearby.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are blasts
of radio waves that last for only a few
milliseconds yet can contain as much
energy as our sun puts out in decades.
More than 50 have been spotted since
they were first discovered in 2007, but
we still don’t know what causes them.
8 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
Siberia and India that date to
between 635 and 660 million
years ago.
They found plenty of a sterane
called 26-methylstigmastane
that, as far as we know, is only
produced by demosponges.
In previous work, Love
had found another possible
sponge biomarker, called
24-isopropylcholestane (24-ipc),
in the same rocks. But some
modern algae make a similar
compound, so the ancient 24-ipc
might not have come from
sponges. Love says the evidence
for sponges in the rocks is now
clearer (Nature Ecology &
Evolution, doi.org/cvsx).
But the finding hints at a big
puzzle. Sponges have “skeletons”
made of silicon fibres called
spicules that give structure to
their holey bodies. We don’t see
fossil evidence of spicules until
about 540 million years ago, at
the dawn of the Cambrian period.
“If the biomarkers here are a
genuine sign of sponges, then
we’ve got a huge problem with the
fossil record,” says Joe Botting at
the National Museum Wales, UK.
It could be that older spicules
are out there and we just haven’t
Most detected bursts have been
from billions of light years away,
making them hard to study. But Ryan
Shannon at Swinburne University
of Technology in Australia and his
colleagues recently found one that
occurred unusually close to Earth.
Dubbed FRB 171020, it was spotted
by the Australian Square Kilometre
Array Pathfinder telescope. Elizabeth
Mahony at Australia’s national science
institute, CSIRO, and her colleagues,
including Shannon, have now
determined that it probably came
from ESO 601-G036, a galaxy that is
120 million light years from Earth
JOHNANDERSONPHOTO/GETTY
There is a big puzzle over
when sponges evolved
discovered them yet. But Botting
says there are many people
hunting for them – and they
have yet to find any.
So perhaps some other
organism was making these
compounds 660 million years
ago, having evolved the same
ability independently of sponges.
Although we know that, today,
sponges produce more sterols
than all other complex life forms
combined, and we haven’t found
(arxiv.org/abs/1810.04354v1).
The galaxy is of a comparable size
and has a similar star formation rate
and oxygen abundance to the only
other galaxy in which an FRB has been
pinpointed, which lies 2.4 billion light
years away from us in the constellation
Auriga. However, ESO 601-G036
doesn’t emit the same continuous
stream of low-level radio emissions
as the Auriga galaxy, contradicting
“The team’s telescopes are
trained on the galaxy to
try to pinpoint the source
of the fast radio bursts”
other living organisms that make
the specific molecules that Love’s
team found, there is a chance they
are – or once were – out there.
Love says there is another
possibility: the very first sponges
may have lacked silicon spicules
that would have been preserved
as microfossils. If so, this would
explain why there are molecular
signs that sponges were present
660 million years ago even
though there is no microfossil
evidence. In other words, we
could be looking for fossils that
don’t exist. ■
previous suggestions that such
emissions are required for FRBs.
Mahony and her team are now
focusing their telescopes on ESO
601-G036 to confirm that it does
produce FRBs. If they spot another,
they may be able to pinpoint which
part of the galaxy it comes from.
“Then we might actually be able to
solve the mystery of what causes
these fast radio bursts,” she says.
Some people believe they are alien
messages, but Mahony says they
are more likely to be the products of
astrophysical events, like the creation
of neutron stars. Alice Klein ■
 WHAT IF TIME STARTED
FLOWING BACKWARDS?

WHAT
IF THE
RUSSIANS
GOT TO
THE MOON
FIRST?

WHAT IF DINOSAURS
STILL RULED THE EARTH?
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 NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
STANTON MEDIA
Futuristic hospital
unit is launched
Douglas Heaven
IN THE five steps from the door
to the reception desk, my photo
has been taken, my face saved in
the system and an ID number
assigned. For the rest of my time
at this new high-tech unit in Great
Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH)
in London, I am followed by an AI.
Video screens that will be
visible only to staff show my
head in a red box, annotated with
a score showing how confident
the computer is that I am who it
thinks I am.
Tracking systems like this are
just one of the technologies being “Projects under way include
tested at GOSH’s DRIVE (Digital,
Research, Informatics and Virtual
Environments) unit, which
opened last week. The unit is
a collaboration between the
UK’s National Health Service,
University College London and
several tech companies, including
Microsoft, Samsung and UK
chip-maker Arm.
Although the unit is part of
GOSH, it doesn’t provide clinical
care. Instead, it is a place where interested in the smaller tasks.
10 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
engineers can interact with
patients, doctors and nurses –
sometimes role playing actual
scenarios – to find out what new
tech can and can’t do before it
is rolled out in clinical settings
across the NHS.
“It’s a digital sandpit,” says
Noel Hurley at Arm. “It lets
us experiment and play and
build and break things in a safe
environment.”
Arm’s chips power most of
the world’s smartphones, but it
is also involved in healthcare,
providing the hardware for many
a blue whale that is visible
only to those with an
augmented reality app”
medical devices. The company
now wants to embed AI in those
devices so they can make quick,
automated decisions.
Medical AI has made great
strides in diagnosing certain
conditions, such as cancer and
eye disease. But Arm is more
Robots, such as Sota, can assist
with health checks
By streamlining the simple
actions that are performed in
hospitals thousands of times a
day, such as registering patients
and tracking people’s movements,
it hopes to free up more staff time
for patient care.
Since GOSH is a children’s
hospital, there will be a focus on
how tech can improve the care of
younger people. Several projects
are under way, including a blue
whale in the main entrance
and rabbits hopping about the
wards – visible only to those with
an augmented reality app.
One project already up and
running is Project Fizzyo, which
helps children with cystic fibrosis
put up with their physiotherapy
by making the physio device
they have to squeeze into a game
controller. The better you get at
doing physio, the better you are
at the game, says Neil Sebire,
managing director at DRIVE.
Hospital staff are also asking
young patients what they would
like in a hospital. “Most of them
want robots,” says Sebire. Two
robots are now being developed
that can tell stories inspired by
nearby objects. “Children are not
limited by what they think tech
can do,” he says. ■
Moons of a
moon are called
moonmoons
STARS are orbited by planets, which
are orbited by moons, but what
comes next? More moons, according
to a new analysis.
A moon of a moon has no formal
name, perhaps because we have
never spotted one, but both submoon
and moonmoon have been suggested.
Such an object would have to be close
enough to its host moon to remain
gravitationally bound to the moon
instead of the larger planet, but not
so close that the moon would rip it
apart or pull it out of orbit.
Juna Kollmeier at the Carnegie
Observatories in California and
Sean Raymond at the University of
Bordeaux, France, have calculated
that four moons in our solar system
could theoretically have submoons:
Earth’s moon, Jupiter’s moon Callisto
and Saturn’s moons Titan and Iapetus
(arxiv.org/abs/1810.03304).
These moons are all relatively large
and far from their planets, so there is a
small area in orbit around each where
the planet’s gravity might not steal
a moonmoon away. But even if these
moons could host a moonmoon, it
would be difficult to get one in the
right place, says Raymond.
“Something has to kick a rock into
orbit at the right speed that it would
go into orbit around a moon, and not
the planet or the star,” he says. And
if that moon moved around over the
course of its evolution, as our moon
has, it is unlikely the submoon would
stick around.
There has also been speculation
about whether a moonmoon could
orbit a distant moon that may be
the first ever spotted outside our
solar system, around a planet called
Kepler-1625b. That exomoon, if it
exists, is probably a gas giant, orbiting
an even larger gas giant.
“This system where you’ve got a
giant planet and a Neptune-sized
moon that’s kind of far away from the
planet is sort of the best-case scenario
for a moonmoon,” says Raymond.
Leah Crane ■
 NEW
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 Humanity will need the
equivalent of 2 Earths to People lying down
support itself by 2030. solve anagrams in
10% less time
than people
standing up.

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

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

We spend 50% of our

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NEWS & TECHNOLOGY
Mice pups born to
same-sex parents
Michael Le Page
WE ARE a small step closer to the
day when two women or two men
could have biological children of
their own, thanks to improved
methods for creating mice with
same-sex parents. But the work
also shows that there is a huge
amount still to do before this
could be attempted in humans.
“It is [right] to emphasise the
risks, and the importance of
safety, before any human
experiment is involved,” says
Wei Li at the Chinese Academy
of Sciences in Beijing, who led
the latest research. “But we think
our work does take it closer.”
The biggest obstacle to creating
babies from same-sex parents is
a genetic phenomenon called
imprinting. This means certain
genes in the sperm genome are
switched off by adding epigenetic
markers to the DNA. These are
molecules that affect gene activity
but don’t change the underlying
DNA sequence. Imprinting also
occurs in eggs, but with different
genes turned off.
Normal imprinting in sperm
LEYUN WANG
and eggs is crucial for embryo
development in mammals.
Massive fungus
is older than
Christianity
A HUGE fungus that is one of the
largest living things on the planet
turns out to be both bigger and older
than thought. It may have been
spreading through the soil of Michigan
since the end of the last ice age and
weighs at least 400,000 kilograms.
James B. Anderson at the University
of Toronto in Canada and his
colleagues found the honey fungus
Even if you somehow combined
the genomes of two females –
or two males – in an egg and
kick-started development, the
imprinting would not be normal
and the resulting embryo will die.
But in 2004, a group in Japan
managed to create Kaguya the
mouse, the first ever mammal
Armillaria gallica in the late 1980s,
while studying other fungi that
were killing red pines on a Michigan
plantation. It spanned at least 0.37
square kilometres. At the time, they
estimated it was at least 1500 years
old and weighed at least 100,000 kg.
Back then, the fungus was a
contender for the largest living
organism, but bigger fungi have
since been found.
Anderson and his colleagues have
now revisited the fungus, which had
been left to its own devices since
the early 1990s. They collected
245 samples, far more than before,
with two mothers. They achieved
this by deleting a piece of DNA in
one of the female genomes to try
to mimic normal imprinting. But
500 attempts produced just two
mice that survived to adulthood.
Li and his team have greatly
raised the success rate by deleting
three bits of DNA to better mimic
the normal imprinting required
for embryo development.
They made a total of 200 attempts
at creating a mouse with two
One of the newborn mice
created by researchers in China
allowing them to get a better sense of
its shape below ground. The fungus
weighs at least 400,000 kg, four
times larger than the initial estimate.
The fungus grew from a single
individual, so its greater size implies
it is also older than thought. “We’re
now saying 2500 years based on our
estimates of growth rate, and that’s
a lower bound,” says Anderson.
It could be much older. The upper
“We’re now saying it’s 2500
years old based on our
estimates of growth rate,
and that’s a lower bound”
mothers, succeeding 27 times.
What’s more, Li’s team also
created 12 mice with two fathers
from 500 attempts, by deleting
seven pieces of DNA to try to
mimic imprinting. However,
none survived to adulthood
(Cell Stem Cell, doi.org/cvrw).
Li’s work reveals more about
which imprinted genes are crucial
for normal development in mice.
However, it is not clear if the
results apply to other mammals
such as humans. The team will
test this by trying to create
monkeys with two mothers.
Before we could even think
of trying to create human babies
with same-sex parents, we would
need a way of mimicking imprints
without resorting to genetic
modification, not least because
permanently deleting genes
would have harmful effects in
later generations.
But that might just be possible.
Several groups are modifying
CRISPR gene-editing tools to allow
them to add or remove epigenetic
markers without changing the
underlying DNA sequence.
Even if that sort of approach
works, huge safety questions
remain. “Faulty imprints do give
rise to human diseases,” says
Azim Surani at the University of
Cambridge, who discovered the
imprinting phenomenon in 1984.
Any manipulation of imprints
could therefore have serious
consequences, he says. ■
limit is the end of the last ice age,
about 11,000 years ago, because
that’s when Michigan’s forests began
to grow. “It may go all the way back to
post-glaciation, when the forest was
re-establishing on that site,” says
Anderson (bioRxiv, doi.org/cvq6).
The team was also able to estimate
how many genetic mutations the
fungus has accumulated over its life,
a rate Anderson says is “almost
impossibly low”. It’s not clear how
the fungus manages this: it may be
unusually good at repairing DNA
damage, or have a purposely slow rate
of cell division. Michael Marshall ■
20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 13
NEWS & TECHNOLOGY

Laser weapon Most of a sample’s genetic data is

ignored in the search for a match
shouts, then MyHeritage. “Currently, they have
burns people this dilemma: should we run a
CODIS set on our DNA or use the
THE US Marines are developing a more sophisticated techniques?”
laser weapon that can transmit voice Now Noah Rosenberg at
messages at long range – or be turned Stanford University in California
up to deafen or cause painful burns. and his colleagues have developed
The Scalable Compact Ultra-short a computational model that
Pulse Laser System (SCUPLS) will be a makes it easier to link people
non-lethal weapon for crowd control, in CODIS to those in genealogy
according to US Navy documents. databases.
The weapon builds on previous The model relies on the fact
prototypes developed by the that some of the single-letter
Pentagon. An igniter laser fires an variations recorded by ancestry
intense pulse lasting just a few databases are gathered from
JASON BUTCHER/GETTY

million-billionths of a second. This roughly the same part of the

creates a ball of plasma, which can be genome from which the longer
created in mid-air or on the surface stretches of DNA recorded in
of a target. A detonator laser then CODIS come from. This gives
explodes the plasma ball, resulting potential overlaps.
in a flash and a bang. Rosenberg and his team tested
the model with data from 872
Crime scene DNA
At the lowest power setting, a
rapid series of flash-bangs will be people. They found that they
modulated to carry robotic speech, could identify about 35 per cent of
conveying instructions over distances
of up to 100 metres.
At higher levels, it will produce
gets more revealing sibling pairs by comparing CODIS-
like DNA from one member of the
pair with ancestry database-like
flash-bangs as loud as the inside of DNA from the other member of
a jet engine and dazzlingly bright. Chelsea Whyte The US national DNA database the pair (Cell, doi.org/gfb8w6).
When aimed at a person, SCUPLS used by police and the FBI – called “This could expand the
will painfully vaporise the outer POLICING power may be about to CODIS – doesn’t store whole DNA number of cold cases that are
layer of skin. The weapon is likely get much stronger, thanks to an sequence data. Instead, it focuses solvable,” says Natalie Ram at
to be mounted on a small vehicle. advance in genetic analysis. A new on up to 20 specific stretches of the University of Baltimore,
Previous weapons have been technique can link the limited repetitive DNA code that are Maryland. She says it also raises
limited by the strength of available DNA information held in forensic relatively easy to sequence. These questions about how private our
lasers. “They cannot, to-date, provide databases to the rich DNA libraries regions vary between individuals, genetic information is.
the full laser performance necessary held by family tree-building so can help identify people. The CODIS system was designed
to deliver all three of the desired websites – which raises questions Consumer genetic databases to be minimally informative, so
non-lethal effects,” the Pentagon about genetic privacy. store different data: single-letter that it can’t reveal information
told New Scientist. The SCUPLS Earlier this year, police variations in DNA across beyond identity, says Rosenberg.
project will work to increase both identified someone they But the DNA data in genealogy
the power per pulse and the number suspected was the Golden State “This could expand the websites can reveal physical or
of pulses per second. Killer – a serial killer active in number of cold cases that medical characteristics, so the
SCUPLS could be more adaptable California decades ago – with are solvable, but it also ability to link between the
than existing crowd-control weapons. the help of an ancestry database raises privacy questions” systems might make it possible
For example, an individual can be used by people looking to trace to find out more about a suspect
ordered to stop or put down a weapon. their family history. hundreds of thousands of sites from their DNA.
If they fail to comply, SCUPLS could Since the arrest in April, in the genome. Because they However, at least for the
apply increasingly unpleasant effects genealogy databases – which carry more information, these moment, the number of
until the individual complies. allow consumers to upload their commercial databases can more matches between CODIS and
But it is not clear how safety will DNA sequences – have been used accurately pin down a person’s consumer sites is limited. This
be ensured. “Dosage will be decisive to crack several other cold cases. relationship to others. is because CODIS is dominated
for avoiding permanent injury,” says Police are turning to consumer “When police have DNA by DNA samples from minority
Jürgen Altmann at Dortmund genetics databases because evidence, usually it’s very minute groups, while genealogy sites are
University of Technology in Germany. the forensic ones hold only quantities,” says Yaniv Erlich of mostly used by white people of
David Hambling ■ limited genetic information. genetic ancestry company European descent. ■

14 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018

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 IN BRIEF
BJARKI REYR/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Pills jiggle to get

your bowels going
CAPSULES that vibrate in the
gut can ease constipation.
The usual advice for those
with the condition – to eat
more fibre, exercise and take
laxatives – doesn’t always work.
To address this, Israeli firm
Vibrant has developed capsules
the size of fish oil supplements
that vibrate in the large intestine
to stimulate contractions that
move digestive products along.
Satish Rao at Augusta
University in Georgia and his
colleagues tested the capsules in
two clinical trials involving 245
people with chronic constipation.
Participants took capsules for
eight weeks. Half had versions set
to vibrate in the large intestine.
The others had non-vibrating
placebos. The vibrating capsule
group had twice as many bowel
movements per week. Rao
presented the results at the annual
Our memories are packed On average, participants listed 40 people in the first
5 minutes of the exercise and 21 in the final 5 minutes. meeting of the American College
with thousands of mugshots From these rates,the team calculated that a typical of Gastroenterology last week.
participant would have listed 549 people if they were
YOU can probably recognise a lot more faces than you given unlimited time.
might think, typically about 5000. Then they tested recognition of famous faces by
Algae could ferry
“It seems to be overkill,” says Rob Jenkins at the showing images of 3441 public figures from the likes of
University of York in the UK. That is because humans film, business, politics and sport. Each participant saw a drugs in your body
lived in groups of around 150 people for most of our different picture of each figure on separate days. If they
evolutionary history, so the usual idea is that it makes said they recognised the celebrity in both pictures, that SOME algae can swim surprisingly
sense for us to recall about this number of faces. person was considered part of their “facial vocabulary”. fast, a talent that may make them
To test this idea, Jenkins and his team asked Participants recognised about 30 per cent of these an ideal drug delivery system.
25 people to spend an hour writing down the people faces. Based on this, Jenkins and his team estimated that Metin Sitti at the Max Planck
they knew personally for whom they could form a clear most people can recall about 5000 faces (Proceedings of Institute for Intelligent Systems
mental image of their face. the Royal Society B, doi.org/cvqb). in Germany and his colleagues
figured out how to attach tiny
magnets to a freshwater alga.
Diet of pregnant mice affects grandpups male offspring created a third. Then they applied a magnetic
Both were found to have a field to control the direction it
IF A female mouse has a fatty diet Daria Peleg-Raibstein at the 7 per cent greater body weight and swam in (Advanced Materials,
just before, during and just after Swiss Federal Institute of a greater preference for alcohol doi.org/gd93zt).
pregnancy, her pups, grandpups Technology in Zurich and her than normal mice. They also had The aim is to load algae with
and great-grandpups have a raised colleagues wondered about the less dopamine, the brain’s signal drugs and steer them to diseased
risk of obesity and addiction. impact on the second and third for pleasure, and more dopamine tissue. At present, a drug must
Animal studies have shown generations. They fed female mice receptors. Both brain changes may be applied to a wider area or the
that such a high-fat diet can lead a high-fat diet for three weeks have increased the amount of entire body, which can cause
to offspring with a less sensitive before they mated, and six weeks food and alcohol the mice needed unpleasant side effects.
reward system: they need more after. The male offspring were bred to feel satisfied (Translational The team is working on ways to
food to feel full and are more with female mice who had been Psychiatry, doi.org/cvqw). It is too ensure immune cells don’t attack
susceptible to becoming obese or fed a normal diet to produce a early to say if this has implications the algae before they reach their
addicted to drugs. second generation, and those for people, says Peleg-Raibstein. destination.

20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 17

 IN BRIEF
Eclipse didn’t get
the bees buzzing
BEES suddenly went quiet during
the solar eclipse that swept across
North America in August last year.
A set of 16 monitoring stations
recorded them falling silent as
the moon totally covered the sun.
Candace Galen at the University
of Missouri and her colleagues set
up microphones in stands of flowers
along the path of the eclipse, from
Oregon to Missouri, to listen to bees.
They found that as the moon
started to move in front of the sun,
the bees continued buzzing. But
in the period around totality, the
sound, created by the bees’ wings
as they fly, suddenly dropped off.
“We had expected to see a
reduction in activity, but we
thought that it would be gradual
following the loss of light,” says
Galen. “We didn’t expect everything
to go along as usual until totality.”
The team recorded sound for
3 minutes – covering the period
of totality that lasted 40 to 160
seconds depending on the
location – and found that only one
bee buzzed during those 3 minutes
(Annals of the Entomological
Society of America, doi.org/cvp9).
It isn’t clear whether the other
bees flew back to their hives, as
they do at night, or whether they
sheltered in flowers, as they do in
inclement weather. “All we can say
is what they weren’t doing – they
weren’t flying,” says Galen.
NASA/GETTY
18 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
AI invents weird limbs to conquer virtual landscape
WHAT are the best two legs for
acing an obstacle course? For an
AI: one that pulls you forward
by flexing at the knee joint, and
one massive leg pulled behind
for stability like a kangaroo tail.
David Ha at Google created a
virtual robot with a wide head.
It had two legs that it could
design itself. He tasked it with
crossing a randomly generated
virtual landscape within a set
time. The artificial intelligence
learned to do this with an
algorithm that rewarded it with
points for supporting its head,
Why T. rex wasn’t
such a big noise
IT IS easy to think Tyrannosaurus
rex was so large that the ground
shook as it approached. But it
seems the dinosaur made less
of a rumble than expected.
Heavy animals produce
earthquake-like seismic waves
with every footfall. We know that
other animals can detect these.
Large dinosaurs must have
produced seismic waves too.
Ernesto Blanco at the University
of the Republic, Uruguay, and his
colleagues decided to investigate.
They analysed 64 fossil footprints
left by large dinosaurs, including
herbivores, omnivores and
carnivorous theropods – a group
that includes T. rex. The theropods
had a more elongated foot.
When they simulated the
seismic wave pattern generated
when the various dinosaur feet
hit the ground, they found the
waves from theropod feet were
weakest in the walking direction.
In other words, theropods had
a foot shape that would have
allowed them to sneak up on
their prey, seismically speaking.
Blanco suggests that elongated
feet may have evolved because
they gave theropods a hunting
advantage (Journal of Theoretical
Biology, doi.org/cvq3).
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
reaching the exit and not falling
over. This encouraged it to find
the best leg designs.
When the terrain was fairly flat,
the AI crossed most quickly with
a jaunty, skipping gait performed
on the “knees” of long, skinny
legs. This beat walking on the
“feet” of shorter, thicker legs.
When facing a landscape with
pits and obstacles to climb, the
AI developed one long, skinny
leg that it used to sense obstacles,
and a larger hind leg dragged in
its wake to stabilise itself.
As is usual when you give
Scat lets rabbit know it’s on the menu
IF YOU are a rabbit, it is vital to know
when predators are around. It is
even more useful to know if they are
eating your kind, and it seems rabbits
can do this by detecting the whiff
of a digested bunny in droppings.
The European rabbit is a very
popular meal for predators – more
than 30 species eat it, says José
Guerrero-Casado at the University
of Cordoba in Spain.
This rabbit has an impressive
ability to smell predators. But
Guerrero-Casado and his colleagues
wondered if it could also tell if a
predator had already eaten rabbit
artificial intelligence free rein,
high jinxs ensued. When given
no constraints and asked to
cross an obstacle-laden course,
the AI built an extremely tall
bipedal creature that simply
fell down to reach the exit.
When rewarded for building
smaller legs, the AI took that
to an extreme, tottering on tiny
legs across a fairly flat surface.
An algorithm like this could
come up with designs we had
never thought of and that
outperform ours, wrote Ha
(arxiv.org/abs/1810.03779).
NATURE PHOTOGRAPHERS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
from the scent of its droppings.
The researchers ran an experiment
in the Spanish countryside. One area
was sprayed daily with an extract of
scat of ferrets on a beef-based diet.
Another was sprayed with the scat
odour from ferrets on a rabbit-based
diet. The third was sprayed with
water as a control.
Guerrero-Casado’s team counted
rabbit droppings on the plots to
gauge how often the animals were
visiting to feed. They found fewer
droppings in the area sprayed
with rabbit-based scat odour
(Acta Ethologica, doi.org/gd9948).
 Where did we come from?
How did it all begin?

And where does belly-button fluff come from?

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

Introduction by Professor Stephen Hawking

Advertising feature | Meet the Low Carbon Pioneers
Towards a low
carbon future
The world needs more energy but delivered with fewer carbon
emissions. Embracing that dual challenge is the way BP thinks
about every aspect of its business, says Kathrina Mannion
“The world is facing a huge challenge,”
says Kathrina Mannion. The global population
is rising and expected to reach 9 billion by
2040. The standard of living is rising for
many people, who want access to transport,
to nutritious and plentiful food supplies,
to development and so on. To achieve all
this, they need energy.
“But how are we collectively going to meet
this massive demand while also reducing
emissions?” she asks. The issue is that
greenhouse gases are emitted through use
of fossil fuels in activities such as transport,
power, heating and agriculture. But these
gases play a role in global warming.
Mannion’s question may sound unusual
given that she works for BP, one of the world’s
biggest oil and gas companies. But that’s the
point. BP believes it has a key role to play.
And Mannion is heading a unit inside the
company that is helping drive action across
the business.
“No one company or sector alone can
deliver a low carbon future. Everyone, from
consumers to corporations to governments,
needs to take responsibility. At BP we’re
asking what we can do to help to play a role
in addressing this challenge,” she says.
“As part of that we launched the Advancing
Low Carbon programme,” for which she is
the programme director.
Earlier this year, BP announced a number
of new low carbon targets. “We’re trying to
reduce emissions in our own operations, to
improve our products to help our customers
reduce their emissions, and also to create
new low carbon businesses. The Advancing
Low Carbon programme is looking to
encourage more action in all of these areas,”
says Mannion, who has a degree in ecology.
For example, BP is one of the top wind
energy producers in the US, generating
2259 MW of renewable power. That’s
enough to power every home in Philadelphia.
But it’s not just renewable energy sources
she is focusing on. “We know that the world
will be using fuels and lubricants for many Kathrina Mannion,
decades to come. So we are looking at ways BP’s Advancing Low
to make those the most efficient or low Carbon programme
carbon fuels and lubricants we can,” she says. director
One example is Biojet, a lower carbon jet
fuel made partly from recycled cooking oil that
BP sells in Sweden and Norway. This reduces
greenhouse gas emissions by more than
60 per cent compared to standard jet fuel.
This low carbon thinking can be seen in
BP’s lubrication business too. Its Castrol
business has developed an innovative new
way to change and recycle used engine oil, Right: Biojet is
set to hit the market after 2020 (see “All a lower carbon
Change”, opposite) and a range of carbon aviation fuel
neutral lubricants.
Applying this kind of innovative thinking Below: BP is one
to its shipping fleet means that BP tankers of the top wind
operate more energy efficiently too. energy producers
BP has also invested in external in the US
companies that have potential to reduce
carbon emissions . A good example is Solidia
Technologies, which has developed a form
of cement that captures and stores carbon
dioxide as it dries.
The ability to quantify the impact of these
efforts is a crucial part of the Advancing Low
Carbon programme. Mannion is adamant that
these figures must be supported by evidence
and clear and provable data. So the figures
and the approach are all checked by
independent observer Deloitte to ensure that
it is thorough. “We’ve brought in an external
“BP is
partner who looks at these activities to check focusing
our figures and make sure they are robust and on carbon
verifiable,” she says.
The Advancing Low Carbon programme is emissions
beginning to change BP from the inside by in every
energising low carbon thinking. “We need to
think right across the company how we can
aspect of its
encourage and drive low carbon action,” business”
says Mannion. “To deliver significantly lower
emissions, every kind of energy needs to be
cleaner and better.” Q
More at: newscientist.com/BP
 All change
Nexcel is a reusable and easily replaceable
cell, like a cartridge, that contains all the oil
for an engine along with the oil filter. It’s being
developed to be engineered into cars of the
future. So an oil change will be as simple as
lifting out the cell and replacing it with
another, which takes about 90 seconds.
Because the used oil is contained, all of it
can be recycled.That has significant benefits.
The world produces about 6 billion litres of
used engine oil every year but only about a
quarter is recycled. In fact, about 2 billion litres
is not recovered by licensed waste companies
and so ends up in local waste streams,
where it can be hugely damaging.
Nexcel will allow engine oil to be efficiently
recycled and reused. It also does away with
the need for oil to be stored and sold in single
use plastic containers.
The system can also improve engine
efficiency. One factor that determines this
is the temperature of the engine oil.The oil
becomes less viscous, reducing friction
within the engine, as it heats up.That’s one
reason why hot engines are more efficient.
In contrast, an engine running on cold oil uses
up more fuel and is therefore more wasteful.
When a conventional engine starts from
cold, it has to heat all the oil in the sump –
usually around 5 litres. “That’s a large volume
of oil to be heated before you reach the
optimum temperature,” says Rachel Fort,
a chemist who is a senior formulation
technologist at Nexcel.
But the Nexcel system feeds oil into the
engine in small, precisely controlled amounts
that quickly heat up. So the engine can
operate more efficiently from the start.
In-house testing indicates that this, along
with other lubricant technologies enabled
Above centre: by Nexcel, could translate to a reduction in
Rachel Fort, Nexcel carbon dioxide emissions of 2 grams for every
kilometre driven. “That may not sound like
Above: The Aston much, but every gram is important, “says
Martin Vulcan uses Fort. “Over the lifetime of a vehicle, that
the Nexcel system equates to about a third of the vehicle mass.”
INSIGHT SUICIDE PREVENTION

Inside the plan

to end suicide
Politicians say they want to aim for zero suicide, but that target
might be counterproductive, says Clare Wilson

“ZERO suicide” is the phrase of half of UK suicides. By the end of try to swim to the side.” Hawton
the moment in mental health. the 1960s, the total suicide rate says many other suicide survivors
Thanks to a programme in Detroit had dropped by a third. report similar changes of heart.
that managed to push rates of More recently, deaths seem Efforts are still ongoing to make
suicide to zero within a few years, to have been avoided by a change it physically harder for people to
the approach has spread to in UK law to restrict pack sizes of take their own lives, particularly
health bodies all over the world. the painkiller paracetamol, also in psychiatric hospitals, for
Last week, the UK government known as acetaminophen. From instance by removing objects
appointed England’s first minister 1998, the tablets could only be that could enable hanging.
for suicide prevention, on the sold in small quantities. Ten years A more radical approach is to try
back of a “zero suicide ambition” later, deaths from paracetamol to proactively identify those likely
for patients in the care of the poisonings had halved. to attempt it, an approach called
National Health Service suicide screening.
announced in January. “The philosophy of the zero This was at the heart of the
Reducing the number of suicides suicide movement is a programme that helped start the
is clearly a desirable goal. Yet some refusal to accept that any zero suicide idea. It was pioneered
doctors view the zero suicide such deaths are inevitable” in 2001 by a Detroit-based
movement with alarm, fearing healthcare provider called the
LAURENCE DUTTON/GETTY
that such a challenging goal may Effects like these show that Henry Ford Health System.
actually be counterproductive. suicidal thoughts can sometimes Anyone who came into contact
Some of the earliest successes be transient, says Keith Hawton with its mental health services
in suicide prevention simply at the University of Oxford. was screened for suicide risk, and
involved changes that made it “If you can keep people safe safety measures were taken if
more difficult for people to take until those thoughts diminish, they were deemed necessary.
their own lives. Proponents point you can save lives.” These included asking the person depression screen was offered to
to the unintended benefit seen Hawton recalls a former patient if they had had any thoughts of those seeing doctors for reasons
in the UK in the 1960s when the who had somehow survived a suicide and how they would do it, unrelated to mental health – such
gas supply to people’s homes jump from a high bridge. “When then putting obstacles in place. as those visiting primary care or
gradually became less poisonous. he hit the water, he damaged his Often, this meant getting rid of hospital emergency rooms – so
At the time, deliberate gas body very badly, breaking many any guns from the house – about they could be funnelled into
inhalation accounted for about bones. Yet his first thought was to two-thirds of gun deaths in the US suicide screening if necessary.
are suicides. “Many people think
if you get rid of this gun they’ll
Detroit healthcare provider Henry Ford Health System’s suicide screening,
just go find another gun,” says Ed
Downward trend
introduced in 2001, seemed to help stop deaths entirely, for a year
Coffey, who helped introduce the Within a few years, the suicide
120
Suicides per 100,000 patients

scheme. “For some reason, getting rate among those accessing

100 rid of the one they have fantasised mental health services had fallen,
about seems sufficient.” and in 2009 the number hit zero.
SOURCE: JAMA PSYCHIATRY/ED COFFEY

80
Other elements included The programme’s architects
60 improving access to doctors, and began publicising the results
making sure people had a “safety and it has since been emulated
40 plan”: personalised guidance on by health bodies in more than
Preliminary
data what to do if they had suicidal 100 countries. Methods vary, but
20
impulses, including phone the driving philosophy is a refusal
0 numbers of friends and family to accept that any suicide is
99

00

01

02

03

04

05

06

07

08

09

10

11

12

inevitable. Proponents include

20

to call for help. And a broader

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20
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22 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
bereaved parents who are
determined their child’s death
will not be in vain.
So why the scepticism? One
problem is that there is little
evidence to show that some
elements of the scheme work.
There is particular concern over
suicide screening, because no
questionnaire can reliably
identify who is going to take their
own life, says Hawton. Studies
show that there is a higher rate of
suicide among those classed as
high risk, but about half of people
who take their own lives would
have been classed as low risk.
“Assessments are extremely
inaccurate,” says Hawton.
How did they work in Detroit?
Perhaps they didn’t. The suicide
rate among Henry Ford Health
Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans:
116123 (samaritans.org). Visit bit.ly/
SuicideHelplines for hotlines and
websites for other countries
System’s mental health patients
these days is certainly lower than
before 2001, suggesting services
have improved. But according to
the provider’s published data, the
suicide rate was falling before the
programme started (see graph,
left), and the current rate is
nothing out of the ordinary.
Suicide is a rare event – with
an annual rate of about one in
10,000 people – and so the
provider only has a handful of
cases a year among its mental
health patients. The figure has
jumped up and down since 2001,
but only in 2009 was it actually
zero. “With such small numbers,
a year without any suicides could
occur by chance,” says Hawton.
Another caveat is that the
headline zero figure was for
people using mental health
services. In the UK, about seven
in 10 people who take their own
lives haven’t had any such contact
in the past year. It is a tall order to “Eliminating suicide completely
expect doctors to save the lives
of people they haven’t met.
“One of the big challenges
is reaching out to people who
are not in contact with health
services,” says David Gunnell of
the University of Bristol, UK.
Yet these days, the term zero
suicide is usually taken to apply
not just to those under a doctor’s
care, but to everyone. Politicians
have called for their localities to
become “zero suicide cities”.
For instance, last year London
Assembly members did so, citing
Detroit’s example. Sweden has
adopted a “vision zero” for the
entire country.
Amid a gathering wave of
concern for mental health,
the zero approach has taken on
a life of its own, with a variety of
interpretations. For the Mersey
Care NHS Foundation Trust, one
of the first mental health trusts
to adopt it in the UK, it includes
making sure all patients get
a safety plan, as in Detroit, as
well as improving staff training.
Another key aspect is an
incident report after every
suicide, to work out how it could
have been avoided. Mersey Care
medical director David Fearnley
says the goal of zero was crucial
for changing the mindset that
some suicides are inevitable.
In Sweden, though, critics
complain that the goal hasn’t
led to any specific measures or
significant new funding. So it feels hard target to an aspiration, one
like an empty slogan – one that
comes with potential downsides,
says Herman Holm of Skåne
University Hospital in Malmö.
Holm worries it could lead to
more compulsory psychiatric
treatment. The decision to keep
someone in hospital against their
will is always a delicate balance
between their liberty and their
risk of self-harm. “A zero suicide
target risks scaring psychiatrists
into depriving too many people
of their freedom,” says Holm.
But the chief grievance is that
zero suicide sets a target that is
not realistically going to be met.
is not going to happen,” says
Hawton. “Throughout history,
suicides have occurred.”
It is unclear what hearing
claims that “all suicides are
preventable” does to bereaved
“I believe it should not be
a target but a reminder
that there are ways we
can reduce suicide risk”
families. For some, “the idea that
suicide should not happen makes
them feel worse”, says Hawton.
“It adds to their burden.”
Then there is the effect on
doctors and nurses, says Simon
Wessely, past president of the UK’s
Royal College of Psychiatrists.
“Impossible targets rebound on
staff morale. You’re increasing
the blame culture when it’s not
achievable.”
But Fearnley says that’s not
how it works within Mersey Care.
Although the trust mandates
incident reports after each
suicide, he says they have a
blame-free culture. “It has given
people permission to start
asking questions about deaths,
and being far more curious to ask
what else we could have done.”
The sceptics stress they
applaud new suicide prevention
initiatives, but they don’t think
the goal should be framed this
way. Some say it would be more
useful to change it from being a
meant to inspire people rather
than be taken literally. “I believe
it should not be a target but a
reminder that there are ways
we can reduce suicide risk,” says
Wessely. “If that happens, I’m all
in favour.” ■
20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 23
COMMENT
Support needed
Baby Loss Awareness Week is a start, but more must be done to help
those who, like me, have lost a pregnancy, says Petra Boynton
ANYONE who has experienced
a miscarriage, stillbirth or
other pregnancy loss will
understand the pain, distress
and uncertainty that can follow.
Because these experiences are
common, you might hope that
the way we help people during
and after the event would be
uniformly good.
Unfortunately, this is not the
case. Back in 2016, The Lancet
noted that half of the world’s
2.6 million annual stillbirths are
preventable. And there are huge
inequalities globally, with 98 per
cent of stillbirths happening in
low-income countries.
The quality of training for
healthcare workers is also patchy,
with staff often struggling to
stay up to date with the latest
evidence, or to provide effective
care in overstretched services.
Where training is provided, it
tends to focus primarily on
Smoke signals
UK’s halting step towards cannabis legalisation
leaves patients in limbo, says Henry Fisher
ANY government looking to
regulate medical cannabis has
to chart a careful course. If you
implement a system that is too
permissive, it is simply a facade
for non-medical use. And one
that is too restrictive will fail
to provide for patients.
In a policy shift that will legalise
the sale of medical cannabis
24 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
products on prescription as of
November, the UK government
has chosen to steer far closer to
the second option.
Cannabis not produced for
medical use in humans remains
a class B, schedule 1 prohibited
substance. Cannabis-based
medical products, however, will
become schedule 2 medicines,
with one major exception:
when they are smoked. In a bid
to prevent confusion for police,
smoking cannabis will remain
illegal, regardless of its origin.
Those prescribed cannabis won’t
be permitted to medicate
themselves with the aid of a flame.
And getting the medication
won’t be easy. Only specialists can
prescribe the cannabis, following
a referral from a doctor. For these
regulations to lead to even modest
levels of patient access, a huge
“Many patients will be
unable to access cannabis
legally due to over
restrictive regulations”
physical issues – preventing
accidents and dealing with
pregnancy or birth problems –
rather than emotional needs.
Providing compassionate care
also requires us doing better
at identifying and recording
loss – stillbirth rates are thought
to be underestimated by a third.
The World Health Organization
uses an international cut-off point
of fetal loss after 28 weeks for
recording stillbirth. Researchers
and practitioners are asking for
stillbirths to be recognised and
recorded from 22 weeks, allowing
for more investigations into its
potential causes. Parents simply
want better opportunities to
recognise their losses and
remember their babies.
All this means that healthcare
workers can’t offer the care they
would like to people who have
lost a pregnancy. In the UK, the
National Bereavement Care
programme of education
among healthcare professionals
will be required.
As groundbreaking as this
change is for UK drugs policy,
the new amendment seeks only
to regulate the medical use of
a product that has both an
established medical need and a
substantial non-medical demand.
This is not a recipe for success.
Many patients who are
unable to access cannabis legally
due to the overly restrictive
regulations will seek it out either
through the illegal market or by
cultivating it themselves.
Lessons should be learned from
other legalisation efforts, notably
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Pathway is seeking to change
things and “ensure that all
bereaved parents are offered equal,
high quality, individualised,
safe and sensitive care in any
experience of pregnancy or
baby loss”. This is a welcome
development in my view, because
the poor care I received after one
of my miscarriages turned an
upsetting event into a far bigger
trauma that in turn affected my
future pregnancies, losses and
mental health.
Speaking about the loss of a
pregnancy shouldn’t be a taboo,
but it remains one. Many charities
are pushing for greater awareness
NASA
and to break the silence over
pregnancy loss, with events such
Soyuz crash leaves
as Baby Loss Awareness Week,
which ended on Monday. All
of this is admirable, but these
the ISS in a grim spot
conversations can’t just be led
by those directly affected by loss.
They need to be heeded and
joined by those offering care
and undertaking research.
Without joined-up studies,
care and training, and referrals
to sources of support, pregnancy
loss will continue to be a difficult
path that many of us should not
have to walk alone. ■
Petra Boynton is a social psychologist
working in healthcare and author of
Coping With Pregnancy Loss (Routledge)
in Germany and Canada. Now
on its third attempt to regulate
medical cannabis, Germany is
struggling with tight restrictions,
low supply and issues of poor
doctor education. Canada,
meanwhile, implemented a fully
legal cannabis market for adult
use this week, having come to the
conclusion that the only way to
maintain an effective medical
market is to also regulate non-
medical sales.
The UK would do well to take a
leaf out of the Canadians’ book. ■
Henry Fisher is the chief scientific
officer of Hanway Associates, a global
cannabis consultancy in London
ANALYSIS Human space flight
Leah Crane
THE near future of human space
flight is looking dangerously uncertain.of reckoning for human space flight.
On 11 October, a Russian Soyuz craft
carrying two astronauts to the
International Space Station (ISS) had anonly way for the three astronauts on
issue with one of its boosters, causing board to return to Earth.
a crash landing about 400 kilometres
from the launch site in Kazakhstan.
Fortunately, the astronauts are
alive and well, but the failed flight
may complicate things on the ISS.
US astronaut Nick Hague and
Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin,
are in good condition, but after a
bumpy ride – including g-forces of six
or seven times the gravity on Earth’s
surface – it could easily have gone
another way. The average person
might pass out under forces of 5 g.
This malfunction is particularly
troubling because the Soyuz rocket
and capsule are the only spacecraft
currently capable of carrying humans
to the ISS. All crewed Soyuz launches
are suspended until NASA and the
Russian space agency Roscosmos
figure out what happened and how
to prevent it in the future. That means will not be a problem, because there
no one can now reach the station.
This accident, coming on the
heels of an air leak in the last crewed
Soyuz to visit the ISS, may mark a point
That damaged Soyuz, which is
currently docked with the ISS, is the
The hole has since been repaired,
and is in part of the spacecraft that
isn’t important for re-entry to Earth’s
atmosphere. Even so, the docked
Soyuz will reach the end of its official
safe lifetime in space in early January.
“For the want of a proverbial
nail, exploration of the
universe could be set back
by decades”
Past then, Roscosmos will have to
send up an empty Soyuz to get the
crew back to Earth.
That puts the three astronauts in
a tough place: they can come home,
abandoning the station, or they can
extend their missions until the Soyuz
or another craft is ready to send new
astronauts to replace them. Supplies
are several other uncrewed spacecraft
that can bring food and fuel.
There is a possibility that the Soyuz
craft will be grounded for a long time.
NASA is notoriously careful when it
comes to astronaut lives, and the
agency may not wait for Soyuz to
get to three strikes.
But what then? NASA retired the
space shuttle in 2011 with plans
to quickly replace it with capsules
made by SpaceX and Boeing. Delays
and budget cuts mean these new
spacecraft now won’t be ready until
mid-2019 at the earliest. Stringent
NASA attitudes about risk and testing
make it unlikely these flights will be
accelerated, even in an emergency.
China is now the only country with
a working craft capable of taking
humans to space, but it has only ever
launched six missions and is currently
excluded from the International Space
Station programme. Theoretically, its
Shenzhou craft, which is based on the
Soyuz design, could dock with the ISS,
but such a mission would require an
extraordinary act of geopolitical
negotiation and technical ability.
If the astronauts do come home
without being replaced by a new
crew, the ISS will be empty for the
first time since 2000. If it remains
empty, the lack of upkeep could
doom the already ageing station,
taking down one of the world’s most
valuable and important assets in
space. For the want of a proverbial nail,
humanity’s exploration of the universe
could be set back by decades. ■
20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 25
APERTURE

26 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018

Fresh perspectives
THE cenotes of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula are
undeniably magical places. These large sinkholes,
formed by the dissolution and collapse of
limestone bedrock, expose groundwater
beneath. In this arid land with almost no rivers
or surface lakes, they became a vital source of
drinking water. The discovery of precious
artefacts and human skeletons in some cenotes
confirm the sacred esteem they were held in by
the Mayan civilisation, who believed they were
gateways to the underworld.
This image, and those on the following two
pages, are from the Freshwater Project, a global
odyssey by Swiss photographer Michel Roggo
covering 40 locations across the world between
2010 and 2017. The project serves to illustrate
the phrase ”still waters often run deep”. It also
shows the diversity of environments found in
fresh water, which often matches that of more
familiar terrestrial ecosystems.
The diver in this picture is Camilo Garcia,
investigating the Dos Ojos, or “two eye” cenote,
named for its two openings at ground level. It is
one of the cenotes along the Yucatán’s Caribbean
coast, where fresh water meets seawater in
extensive networks of underwater passages.
A connection between the Dos Ojos and the
neighbouring, larger Sac Actun system,
discovered only in January 2018, makes this the
longest underwater cave system known, with a
total length of over 300 kilometres. Richard Webb

Photographer
Michel Roggo / NaturePL
roggo.ch

20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 27

APERTURE
Top: Michel Roggo learned his craft
among the rivers, lakes and glaciers of
the Swiss Alps. In the spring of 2013,
a prevailing southerly wind brought
sand from the Sahara to these high-
lying waters. “All the mountains and
the glacier were yellow and orange
from it,” says Roggo. In September that
year, those hues were still visible in
meltwater sediments from the Gorner
glacier on the Monte Rosa massif.
28 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
Bottom: Hidden among water hyacinth
plants, a yacare caiman waits for
passing prey in the Pantanal wetlands.
Sprawling over a vast area from the
Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul
into Bolivia and Paraguay, the
Pantanal is one of the most biodiverse
ecosystems on Earth. Its caiman
population is estimated to number
10 million – the largest crocodilian
community on Earth.
Top: Thanks to a natural filtration
system, Rotomairewhenua, or Blue
Lake, in New Zealand’s Southern Alps
has the planet’s clearest waters. They
are sacred to the Ngati Apa ki te Ra To,
who use them to cleanse the bones of
the dead. “You cannot fish or swim in
this water, or drink or touch it,” says
Roggo. He had to obtain special
permission to photograph it using
a remote-controlled pole camera.
Bottom: Beauty doesn’t need clarity,
as shown by the reddish, acidic water
of Etang de la Gruère in the Jura
mountain range of western
Switzerland. Laced with tannins from
surrounding pine trees, such waters
rich in dissolved organic matter are
known as blackwaters. The Rio Negro,
a tributary of the Amazon, is perhaps
the most famous example, and they
are common in the southern US, too.
Top: The forests of the Gunung Mulu
National Park in Malaysian Borneo
house a rich diversity of animal and
plant life. But if Roggo was expecting
a similar picture when he dipped his
head beneath the surface of the
Sungai Melinau Paku river, he was
disappointed. “I saw not a single
aquatic plant in all the creeks, ponds
and rivers,” he says – just washed-off
debris from the surrounding trees.
Bottom: The “underwater garden”
of Ewens Ponds in South Australia is
formed of three flooded limestone
sinkholes around 10 metres deep,
connected by shallower watercourses.
The water’s extraordinary clarity lets
the plants and the algal blooms seen
here thrive up to 6 metres down. As in
many places, the fresh water here is
under threat as agricultural run-off
changes its natural chemistry.
wScientist | 29
20 October 2018 | NewScientist
 COVER STORY

THE FASHION
FOR FASTING
Fasting diets seem here to stay and the evidence that they are
good for you is stacking up. Caroline Williams tries one for herself
VINCENT BESNAULT/GETTY

30 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018

 A
S I unpack my rations for the next
five days, I start to question what I
have signed up to. For years I have
heard the hype about fasting diets and what
they promise: smaller thighs, a clearer head,
a lower risk of cancer, heart disease and
diabetes and the promise of a generally
longer, healthier life.
But then there is the hunger. Hunger makes
me angry, and tired, and generally not a very
nice person. So I have always given fasting
diets a miss: the 5:2 diet where you fast for two
days a week and eat normally the others; the
16:8 where you eat within an 8 hour window,
and fast for 16; the alternate day fasting.
You name it, it seems someone has tried it.
Then I heard about one of the latest trends,
the fasting mimicking diet. If the marketing
materials are to be believed, it is the holy grail:
all the health benefits of fasting without the
hunger. The company behind it has even
become the first to be granted a patent for
boosting human healthspan before the onset
of disease. So can I really have my cake and
eat it? I decided to give it a go – and try to get
to the truth about fasting.
We have known for decades that restricting
calories can have beneficial effects – if not in
humans, then in animals. Many studies have
found that organisms from single-celled
yeasts to rodents age more slowly and live
longer when their calorie intake falls to 40 per
cent of that consumed by a group of animals
eating normally.
Constant calorie restriction has never
really caught on in people, however, not
least because the results didn’t bear out in
primates. Besides, people find it difficult
to restrict their diet in this way for long
enough to find out if it extends their lives.
Fasting has been part of religious practice
around the world for millennia, but it first
made it into the consumer mainstream
around five years ago, on the back of animal
studies and research in overweight people
suggesting that skipping meals could have
numerous health benefits. There is growing
evidence that periodically going without
food puts our bodies into a kind of emergency
mode, where they conserve energy, make
repairs and prioritise mental clarity to solve
the problem of finding food. “If we accept
that the Palaeolithic was the environment in
which most modern human adaptations were
shaped, including dietary ones, the hunter-
gatherers then were adapted to periods of
feast and famine,” says Stanley Ulijaszek, a
Don’t eat it nutritional anthropologist at the University
all at once of Oxford. “This could well be a more
natural state for us than ‘three meals a day’.”
As well as weight loss, proponents claim
that intermittent fasting could help protect
against cancer, diabetes and disorders like
Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
My own enthusiasm at the promise of a
hunger-free fast diminishes somewhat as
the kit arrives. I would be living off two packet
soups a day, plus a few crackers, olives and the
odd nut bar. It looked a lot like hunger to me.
This particular diet is the brainchild of
Valter Longo, a gerontologist at the University
of Southern California in Los Angeles. The
basic claim is that fasting just once a month –
albeit for five days – can mimic the effects of
fasting seen in animals, even reversing the
effects of ageing. The website of Longo’s spin-
off company, ProLon, says that the fasting
mimicking diet is “clinically proven to induce
the [body’s] protectionist and rejuvenation
mode”, while providing enough calories that
you don’t actually pass out.
Anyone can benefit from this cellular
spring clean, says Longo: “It doesn’t matter
how good your diet is, it doesn’t matter how
much exercise [you do], the body ages and
the cells accumulate damage.”
Thanks to animal studies, we know a fair
amount about what happens in the body when
food is scarce. A lack of nutrients kick-starts a
process called autophagy, in which cells break
down and damaged or dysfunctional parts are
“Our hunter-gatherer
ancestors were adapted to
periods of feast and famine”
recycled and used as fuel. The thinking is that
this system probably evolved to maximise
the chances of surviving famine.
Autophagy happens at a low level in healthy
cells but becomes less efficient as we age.
Sluggish autophagy lets the inside of cells
gunk up and has been linked to many age-
related diseases including cancer, and to the
ageing process itself. Some researchers believe
that the rise in health problems like cancer
and type 2 diabetes has a lot to do with the
fact that many people no longer go hungry.
Although the initial findings came from
research in mice, last year Longo and his
colleagues published a study in around 100
people who either did the fasting mimicking
diet for five days a month over three months,
or continued with their normal diet for three
months. The second group then tried the
fasting diet. When people did the diet, they
dropped body weight and fat, and ended up >
20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 31
with lower blood pressure and lower levels of
a hormone called insulin-like growth factor-1
(IGF-1), which is thought to play a role in
ageing and disease. They also had lower levels
of inflammation markers and cholesterol,
among other benefits.
For my little experiment, before I started
the diet I underwent some blood tests,
measuring levels of IGF-1, cholesterol
and C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of
inflammation. I also had a body composition
scan to measure any effects on my body fat at
the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology
and Metabolism. Fredrik Karpe, who runs the
centre, is sceptical to say the least. “It is very
Not so fast hour,” he says. If you’re not eating during that
Our reporter underwent blood tests to measure time, “you do the math, it’s around 10 hours”.
markers of health and longevity before and after Add exercise into the equation and the
a five day fasting mimicking diet and saw minimal switch can happen even faster, says Mattson.
changes in most of them A vigorous run can burn 100 calories in 10
Before After minutes. Get your sports shoes on a few hours
Fasting blood after your last meal and it won’t take long to
glucose hit ketosis, he says, leaving me wondering
Fasting why I am sticking out a five-day fast instead.
triglycerides
Another claim about fasting that almost
Fasting total tempted me in the past was the cognitive
cholesterol
effect. Fasters regularly boast about clearer
HDL cholesterol thinking and improved focus. Ulijaszek
observed something similar with modern-day
LDL cholesterol hunter-gatherers. While foraging with the

SOURCE: THE DOCTOR’S LABORATORY

important to critically investigate health non-HDL Wopkaimin of Papua New Guinea in the 1980s,
claims for interventions giving great cholesterol he noted that they never started the day with
promises,” he says. breakfast because they preferred to be hungry
CRP* (mg/L)
One crucial question is how long you need while hunting. “They said it made them lighter
to fast to kick-start these processes. After all, on their feet, and more aware of their
IGF-1* (nmol/L)
we know that famines are seriously bad for our surroundings,” says Ulijaszek.
health. Unfortunately, the answer is unclear. 0 5 10 15 20 25 So far, though, no controlled studies have
In a recent review of the health effects of Millimoles per litre (mmol/L) been done to investigate the link between
(unless otherwise stated)
fasting, Benjamin Horne, at Intermountain fasting and cognition in humans, and the
*CRP is a measure of inlammation. IGF-1 is implicated
Heart Institute in Salt Lake City, Utah, in ageing and disease only hints about what might be going on
concluded that no research has yet identified come from mice. Mattson’s group found that
a set line between fasting and starvation, and switching to ketosis gives the brain a boost,
that it probably varies a lot depending on the before the switch to ketosis occurs is stimulating the release of a chemical called
body you have to start with. unknown. Longo says that it takes at least BDNF, which promotes new connections
Another effect of fasting is that the body three days and that shorter fasts, such as between neurons and stimulates neurons
starts to run out of glucose in the blood and the 5:2 diet, don’t last long enough to make to make more mitochondria, which generate
glycogen stores in the liver, which causes a it happen. energy. This could be the ticket to the mental
metabolic switch: the liver starts converting Mark Mattson at Johns Hopkins University clarity reported by fasters.
fats into ketone bodies for the muscles and in Baltimore, Maryland, who studies the His team is conducting a randomised
brain to use as fuel, a process called ketosis. effects of fasting on the brain, disagrees. study in human volunteers to find out
This is why fasting almost always causes “The liver holds maybe 700 calories-worth of whether these brain changes and associated
weight loss of somewhere between 2.5 and glycogen and people’s general daily activity effects are seen in people, with results
8 per cent. But how long you need to fast around the house burns maybe 70 calories an expected in early 2019.
Mental clarity certainly wasn’t something
IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH? I experienced. My brain hit the wall early on
day two and on most days during the fast
The evidence for the benefits very low calorie diet instead. fasting might reduce the I gave up trying to work and went back to
of fasting in healthy people is It is early days but initial results risk of type 2 diabetes, while bed. After day three my legs ached like I had
controversial. But it may turn suggest that fasting can reduce research presented at this the flu, apparently a sign of ketosis.
out to work best when the body the side effects of year’s European Society of
is already struggling. chemotherapy, without reducing Endocrinology meeting warned
Animal studies suggest that its power to shrink tumours. that intermittent fasting might
Shock results
while healthy cells hunker down Longo is now trialling his diet damage the pancreas and It was difficult to believe that something
during starvation, cancer cells in people with multiple sclerosis increase the risk of the disease. that made me feel so awful could possibly
don’t, making them more (MS) to see if it can prompt the Either way, people who already be doing me good, especially since my test
susceptible to chemotherapy. body to clear out the immune have the disease and are taking results from before the fast showed that
The fasting mimicking diet cells responsible for the disease insulin should steer well clear. I was already metabolically healthy. I had
(see main story) was designed in and replace them with healthy “If you do insulin plus fasting low levels of “bad” cholesterol, healthy blood
a bid to see if the same applies versions. Again, animal studies or fast-mimicking diet, you sugar and fat levels and very low amounts
to humans. Doctors weren’t keen look promising, but it remains to could actually kill someone,” of visceral fat – the stuff that sticks to our
for their already thin patients be seen if it works in people too. says Longo. organs and which can be a risk factor for
to fast, so Valter Longo at the The evidence around diabetes If you are unwell, you should cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The body
University of Southern California prevention is more unclear. speak to your doctor before scan showed a fair amount of body fat (30 per
in Los Angeles came up with a Some studies suggest that embarking on a diet. cent), but nearly all concentrated on my hips

32 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018


DDP/CAMERA PRESS
Five days of soup and little else each month
would be hard to swallow for many
and thighs, a pattern that has been linked to
a lower risk of heart disease and diabetes.
After five days of fasting, none of this had
shifted. The body composition scan revealed
that I had lost just over 1 kilogram in weight,
584 grams of which came from a loss of lean
mass and only 168 grams from body fat. This
was a bit of a shock – one selling point of the
fasting mimicking diet is that it is supposed
to target visceral fat while protecting lean
mass. According to Longo, ketosis doesn’t
target the visible wobbly bits, only fat around
the organs. As I started off with little visceral
fat, it instead targeted my lean mass, he says.
“From a global health perspective, I find
it quite a negative outcome,” says Karpe.
“Half of your change was muscle. The fat
regions have not changed much at all.
That’s not what you intended.”
Could it be that the lean mass loss was the
result of autophagy? Mice put on Longo’s
diet in middle age certainly seemed to have
some kind of clear-out: their liver, heart and
kidneys all shrank during the fast and they
had a temporary cull in the numbers of
some kinds of blood cells. All went back to
normal within a few days of normal eating,
heralded by an increase in markers of liver
regeneration and tentative signs of muscle
regeneration. The assumption is that the
decrepit cells that were removed were
replaced by newer, shinier versions.
The evidence for autophagy and
regeneration in human trials, however, is
purely circumstantial. And we don’t know
whether any new cells are healthier than
what was lost. Longo concedes that this is
something his team is still working on.
When it came to blood markers of health
and longevity, my results were similarly
unimpressive (see graph, left). The only
marked difference was to the hormone IGF-1.
In the ProLon trials, volunteers saw a
“When people did the diet
they had lower body
weight, fat and cholesterol”
significant reduction in IGF-1, which Longo
says was still there three months after going
back to a normal diet.
Whether this adds up to increased longevity,
however, is less clear. Epidemiological studies
have linked both low and high IGF-1 levels to
early death, with high IGF-1 levels linked to
increased cancer risk and low IGF-1 to
cardiovascular disease.
Of course, my experiment of one isn’t very
scientific, but it did get me wondering: for
those of us who are healthy to begin with,
does fasting truly offer a benefit beyond the
fact you inevitably cut a few calories and lose
a bit of weight?
Michelle Harvie, the researcher at
Manchester University in the UK who came up
with the 5:2 diet, told me that based on current
research, we just don’t know. “Intermittent
dieting is a proven method for weight loss…
we don’t know benefits or harms for healthy
weight or underweight people,” she says.
A serving of truth
Many of the original studies of fasting diets
involved overweight volunteers. Even in
Longo’s study of 100 healthy volunteers, two-
thirds started with a BMI of over 25, making
the vast majority overweight or obese. So,
while their health markers such as body mass
index, visceral fat and blood pressure were all
significantly reduced after doing the fast three
times over three months, it isn’t clear whether
this can be explained by the simple fact that
they lost weight. Fasting also tends to mean
eating a lot less animal protein and fat, which
have both been linked to cancer, so this might
also be responsible for the effects seen in trials.
When a person is a healthy weight, their
bodily clear-out functions work fine on their
own, says Karpe. “Any normal physiological
system, in a healthy, lean human being, eating
well, exercising, doing what the body likes to
do, all these things work. That’s why healthy
people, who exercise and eat normal things,
live longer than overweight people.”
Susan Jebb, a nutrition scientist at the
University of Oxford, agrees: “I am not
aware of any high-quality evidence relating
to intermittent fasting among people who
are not overweight.”
Time will tell whether humans benefit
from fasting beyond weight loss. So I can’t
help thinking that the wording printed on
the box of ProLon that Longo sent me, which
promises “rejuvenation from within”, is
premature. We aren’t yet sure that the body
clears out damaged cells and replaces them
with something better.
For my money, armed with the knowledge
that most of my body fat is stored away from
my organs and my blood results are entirely
within the healthy range, I think I will stick
with my normal diet and take my chances.
Yes, my body could probably handle less
wine and chocolate, but going hungry in
return for a payoff that may never materialise?
Life’s too short. ■
Caroline Williams is a consultant for New Scientist
20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 33
ARCTIC-IMAGES/GETTY

34 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018

 Full steam
ahead
Recent advances could let us crack the
immense promise of geothermal heat to
power our world. Julia Rosen reports
T
HE Reykjanes peninsula juts out of
the south-western tip of Iceland like
a hitch-hiker’s thumb. Most visitors
glimpse it from a plane, as they swoop
down onto the runway at Keflavík airport,
or through the mist at the Blue Lagoon – a
popular hot spring. It is an otherworldly
landscape of rumpled volcanic rocks and
stout cinder cones. The most common signs
of life: tenacious mosses in varying shades
of green, and the odd wandering sheep.
Here, the tectonic seam that runs along
the bottom of the Atlantic, belching out new
ocean crust between North America and
Europe, runs aground. That’s what makes this
place so attractive to people like Guðmundur
Olaf Friðleifsson, chief geologist at Icelandic
energy company HS Orka. Just a few
kilometres beneath their feet, the staggering
heat of a volcano bubbles away. All they
have to do to harness its power is drill.
Iceland already has plenty of geothermal
energy, but this project is different.
Friðleifsson and his team are tapping into
temperatures and pressures higher than
anything we have used before, and building
on our growing ability to extract more of
Earth’s heat. What they are doing could help
Steam rises from revolutionise geothermal energy and boost
the Reykjanes this overlooked source of renewable power to
peninsula in Iceland a prominent place in the global energy system.
It has the potential to unlock unprecedented
amounts of energy, and make it accessible to
places far from the volcanic fields of Iceland.
It could make the dream of abundant
geothermal power a reality.
So far, geothermal energy hasn’t taken off
like other renewables. More than a century
after humans started using Earth’s hot water
and steam to produce power, geothermal
provides less than 1 per cent of global
electricity. There is no problem with supply:
the depths of our planet still smoulder from
its violent accretion and the slow burn of
radioactive decay. The core is a searing
6000°C, and the heat contained in the upper
3 kilometres of the crust would be enough to
meet the world’s energy demand thousands
of times over.
Geothermal energy also sidesteps the
problems that plague so many other clean
sources of energy. It is always available,
regardless of whether the wind blows or
the sun shines. Alongside nuclear and
hydropower, which have issues of their own,
geothermal offers an attractive source of
clean, reliable baseload electricity. But it has
high start-up costs and has historically been
restricted to Iceland and other hotspots. The
challenge now is to increase the power and
availability of geothermal energy so that it
can truly compete.
The world’s first geothermal power
generator was Italian, built in the verdant >
20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 35
hills of Tuscany in 1904. The seething,
sulphurous hot springs of Larderello attracted
Roman visitors millennia ago, and the Devil’s
valley, as it is sometimes called, supposedly
shaped Dante’s vision of hell. But others saw
something else in the hissing steam: untamed
energy. Today, 800 megawatts of power flow
from the Larderello fields, supplying 10,000
residential and industrial consumers.
Yet humans are still just scratching the
surface. Conventional technologies can only
exploit geothermal energy in spots like
Larderello, where heated water runs through
a natural plumbing system easily accessible
from the surface. But the Geothermal Energy
Association, a US trade group, estimates that
countries have developed just 7 per cent of
the world’s hydrothermal potential.
Digging deeper
Over the past few decades, however,
researchers have been exploring ways to
extract even more heat, including in regions
not blessed with ideal geology. This new
approach, known as enhanced, or engineered,
geothermal systems (EGS), can mean adding
fluid to dry rocks to transport heat to the
surface and generate steam, or fracturing
impermeable formations so that liquid can
flow through the hot rocks, heating up along
the way. “It’s taking what nature gives you
and figuring out how to make it work,” says
Jeff Tester, a geothermal expert at Cornell
University in New York.
EGS could crack open massive stores of
geothermal heat. A 2006 report led by Tester
found that, in the US alone, the technology
could unlock 130,000 times as much energy as
the country uses each year. Realistically, we will
always need other sources of energy, and are
likely to exploit just a fraction of geothermal’s
potential. But, says Lauren Boyd at the US
Department of Energy, EGS has another
important advantage: it will make geothermal
energy available outside existing hydrothermal
systems. “It’s feasible everywhere,” she says.
The basic elements of EGS were first tested
at an experimental site in New Mexico in the
1970s. Since those early days, “we have made
leaps and bounds”, says Boyd. We know more
about what’s going on underground, and have
better drilling technology, some borrowed
from advances in the oil and gas industry.
But even so, engineers still face significant
hurdles, says Boyd, and only a handful of
commercial EGS sites operate today.
For one thing, creating fractures in
controlled and predictable ways remains a
36 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
2.5GW
Europe’s 2016 geothermal
power capacity
vs
6500GW
Its potential power capacity
with enhanced geothermal
systems technology
SOURCES: EUROPEAN GEOTHERMAL ENERGY COUNCIL,
DOI.ORG/F5TNQ3
practical challenge, says Gioia Falcone, an
engineer at the University of Glasgow, UK.
JOHANN S. KARLSSON/GETTY
Sometimes the cracks close up again under
the immense pressure of the overlying rock.
At other times, the rock cracks too much,
and water flows too fast to heat up, she says.
EGS can also have more serious
consequences. In 2006, a commercial
project in Basel, Switzerland, triggered a
magnitude-3.4 earthquake that rattled the
city. No one was hurt, but it made many
residents nervous – they knew a magnitude-6
quake had levelled the city in the Middle Ages.
It isn’t the only case, either. In 2017, an EGS
project in Pohang, South Korea, was the likely
source of a magnitude-5.5 earthquake that
caused $52 million in damage. Both projects
were eventually shuttered.
There is no doubt that EGS, like mining,
fracking for oil and gas, and disposing of waste
water, can cause earthquakes, says Corinne
Layland-Bachmann, an engineer at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory in California
who studied the Basel case. However, Layland-
Bachmann says the risk of a serious quake
from geothermal production is low. She thinks
incidents like those at Basel and Pohang can be
avoided if developers choose EGS sites wisely
and reduce injection rates if tremors begin.
But perhaps the biggest barrier to the
approach has been economic. Since Tester’s
report came out, the price of solar and wind
energy has dropped, and cheap natural gas
has flooded the market, making it hard for
geothermal to expand, says Trenton
Cladouhos at AltaRock Energy, a Seattle-based
geothermal developer. “I’ve been working on
EGS now for 10 years,” he says. “The market
for geothermal just has been flat.”
So AltaRock and others have focused
their efforts on a supercharged version of
geothermal instead. The idea they are
pursuing has its roots in a series of accidents
from the 1980s, when geothermal engineers
unexpectedly encountered super-hot
conditions. The first incident happened at
Larderello, where a well struck 380°C water
just shy of 4 kilometres down. The drillers
were totally unprepared for this heat, as were
the materials they had used to make their well.
They abandoned it when it became clear the
casing wouldn’t hold. Another hole, drilled
nearby a few years later, hit the same reservoir
and blew out in a massive explosion of steam.
In 1988, something similar happened in
Iceland. But Friðleifsson, who had recently
completed his PhD on another Icelandic
volcano, wasn’t surprised by the find. He also
realised that, if researchers could figure out
how to manage these fluids, they could
capitalise on a geothermal bonanza.
That is because, above 374°C and 221 bars of
pressure, water transforms into a supercritical
fluid. As the temperature and pressure rise,
says Friðleifsson, water gets lighter and steam
gets heavier until they become one phase.
And it’s a totally different beast.
Supercritical water at 400°C contains five
times as much energy as water at 200°C in
a typical geothermal well. It also transfers
energy twice as efficiently and has a lower
viscosity, flowing out of the ground more
easily. In 2003, Friðleifsson and Wilfred Elders,
now an emeritus professor at the University

of California, Riverside, who together lead the
geothermal project at Reykjanes, calculated
that a well producing supercritical fluid could
generate ten times more energy than a
conventional one.
Cladouhos says that could make the
economics of geothermal work out for
companies like his. It costs more to drill to
supercritical depths, but the increased energy
production should more than compensate,
he says. “EGS is really difficult to do, so you
might as well do it in an area where you know
the economics are going to be helpful.”
No one has been able to demonstrate the
increased payout of supercritical geothermal
so far, but in Iceland they are getting close. In
2009, Friðleifsson and Elders’s team reached
supercritical conditions when it accidentally
drilled into a magma chamber at the Krafla
volcano. For two years, that well produced
a jet of superheated steam, but then a valve
failed and it had to be sealed.
The Icelandic group then began the
project at Reykjanes, where they drilled a
well 4.6 kilometres down to access fluids as
hot as 600°C. For the past year, engineers
have been pouring cold water down the well,
which cracks the rocks and is sometimes used
in EGS to increase a reservoir’s permeability.
Now, the team is just waiting for the well
to heat up again before they start testing it.
Meanwhile, a new supercritical well has
been completed at Larderello. “The first time,
Iceland’s Reykjanes power
plant hopes to harness
Earth’s deep heat
we met supercritical conditions by chance,”
says Sandra Scalari, at Enel Green Power,
which runs the Larderello site. But this time,
she says, “it was intentional”. There are also
supercritical projects planned in Japan,
Mexico and New Zealand, and AltaRock is
looking for funding to deepen an existing well
at Newberry volcano in Oregon. The rest of the
world is catching up, says Friðleifsson. “The
only difference between us and them is that
Iceland is in the lead.”
Like at Reykjanes, these projects will
probably use EGS, and share the same risks
and challenges – plus others associated with
working in extreme conditions. “The drill bits
basically just start to deform and melt,” says
Cladouhos. After that, engineers must figure
out how to line the wells. Standard casing
materials aren’t designed for such high
temperatures, or for the corrosive fluids that
bubble up from the depths. These eat away at
valves and cement coatings, which expand
and contract in the changing temperatures,
risking blowouts. Finally, the standard
electronics used to measure conditions in the
well just get fried. “The equipment is usually
made for the oil and gas industry,” says Enel’s
Massimo Luchini, and it was never designed to
handle such intense heat.
There are geological uncertainties too, says
Thomas Reinsch, an engineer at the Delft
University of Technology in the Netherlands.
The tools usually used to probe Earth’s
depths – like tracking how seismic waves move
through the crust – have not been calibrated
for rocks at extreme temperatures and
pressures, because it is hard to recreate such
conditions in the lab. That means the results
can be hard to interpret. “We don’t know what
kind of geology is down there,” says Reinsch.
“We are drilling basically into the dark.”
All in all, developing supercritical
geothermal is a monumental challenge.
5MW
Typical power output of
a geothermal well
vs
50MW
Predicted output of
a “supercritical” well
SOURCE: DOI.ORG/FMPP3D
But Friðleifsson is optimistic the teams will
ultimately prevail. “You can send a rocket to
the moon,” he says. “Compared to that, it’s a
piece of cake to drill into the ground.”
For now, scientists and energy companies
are mostly pursuing EGS and supercritical
geothermal in places where it is relatively easy
to reach the temperatures they need – like
Iceland, Italy and the American West. But
eventually, many hope these techniques will
allow geothermal energy to spread.
For the right price, EGS could make
geothermal energy available across much of
the world. Even in places with cooler crust,
it could be used to extract heat for buildings,
says Tester. And supercritical geothermal
could unleash enormous energy reserves in
volcanic areas around the world, says Luchini.
“There is a big potential.”
Ample supercritical resources in one place
could even be enough to power surrounding
countries, says Falcone. There has been talk,
for instance, of Iceland supplying power to
1.6 million homes in the UK. “Electricity is
transportable,” she says.
But could high-powered supercritical
projects ever be feasible in all areas? Reaching
such conditions in places with cooler, thick
crust, like the US Midwest or eastern Europe,
would require boring through more than
15 kilometres of crust, 3 kilometres deeper
than any drill has previously gone. “I wouldn’t
say that we’re going to see supercritical
geothermal developed in Kansas in the
near future unless you have some magical
way of really reducing the cost of really deep
drilling,” says Elders.
But Cladouhos never says never. Engineers
are exploring novel drilling methods, using
energy waves, high-pressure fluid jets or
lasers instead of metal drill bits. He is holding
out hope that a breakthrough will make
supercritical geothermal ubiquitous. “Maybe
the 20-year plan would be supercritical EGS
anywhere,” he says.
Even if Cladouhos’s dream doesn’t come
to pass, the potential benefits of supercritical
wells could still help geothermal become a
major global player, says Falcone.
That future may not be so far off.
Friðleifsson’s team plans to get the Reykjanes
well flowing in early 2019, eventually linking
it to a nearby power plant to make the first
commercial supercritical site in the world.
Even if someone beats them to it, says
Friðleifsson, a geothermal revolution is
coming. “It is not a question of if, but when. ■
Julia Rosen is a journalist in Portland, Oregon
20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 37
 The disassembly line
Making new molecules requires artful reverse engineering. Now we can
do it at the touch of a button, says James Mitchell Crow

C
HEMISTS have a unique power to
manipulate matter. Imagine any
arrangement of atoms you like and a
chemist will have a good shot at stitching
them together. Over the decades, their
round-bottomed flasks have helped bring
all sorts of new compounds into being, from
dazzling pigments to miracle pills and wonder
materials. But they don’t come easy, not least
because chemists must do it all backwards.
The tried-and-tested method for planning
how to create a sophisticated molecule starts
where you would like to end up. You draw out
the web of connected atoms you want to make,
then pick it apart, working backwards to plot
out a series of reactions that, if performed in
the reverse order, will get you to your goal.
It is a simple, old and indispensable idea
that won its inventor a Nobel prize. Plenty of
the last century’s finest drugs have chemical
structures so fiendishly complicated that
they could never have been made without
a logical reverse engineering.
Yet with thousands of possible ways to make
compounds of even middling complexity,
it is tough for humans to spot the best routes.
That is why a few chemists think the quickest
path to molecules more wondrous than ever
lies in taking themselves out of the equation.
Most of the biological world is built of
organic, or carbon-containing, molecules.
From hormones to vitamins to poisons,
organic chemists have long tried to both
divine their structures and find ways to
make them in the laboratory.
In the middle of the 20th century, chemists
generally tried to synthesise new compounds
by starting from structures that looked similar
to the target. That yielded handy compounds

38 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018

 right enough, from synthetic versions of
penicillin to the progesterone hormone
used in the first birth control pill. But there
was a large and exotic landscape of potentially
useful compounds that no one had the
faintest idea how to produce in the lab.
In the 1960s, the Harvard University
chemist Elias Corey decided to make the
planning of syntheses more logical.
He realised a good way to do that would
be to work backwards, which led to the
name retrosynthesis.
Take a blank piece of paper and draw the
target molecule at the top. Examining the
bonds holding it together, the chemist will
pick one and break it. Choosing the right bond
is where the years of training come in. The
bond you break on paper has to be one you
think you could make in the laboratory, in
what would be the final step of the synthesis.
First bond disconnected, you go again.
Step by step, you walk your molecule
backwards, stripping away complexity
BRUNO MANGYOKU
until you reach a structure so simple you can
buy it (see diagram, page 40). A particularly
fiendish structure might take 30 steps to
deconstruct to this point.
“You don’t work back to a specific precursor,
just to simpler and simpler structures,”
says Michael Sherburn, a synthetic organic
chemist at the Australian National University
in Canberra. “If you do it without bias, then
you end up at starting materials you perhaps
wouldn’t have considered.” It is like planning
“Chess and chemistry are
very similar. They’re both
about plotting moves”
the ascent of a never-before-scaled mountain.
Starting from the peak, reverse-plotting the
route eventually reveals the base camp from
which an ascent has the best chance of success.
The moment of truth comes when you
crack open a bottle of your starting chemical.
Not every route planned on paper works first
time, because this is virgin chemical territory.
Still, retrosynthesis has become routine for
planning the most difficult chemical targets
(see “Totally synthetic”, page 41).
Few chemists go back and read Corey’s
original papers on the subject, but if you do
there’s a surprise, says Matthew Todd,
chair of drug discovery at University College
London. “I thought Corey was codifying a very
human activity, but right from the get-go his
explicit aim in developing retrosynthesis was
to tell a computer how to do it,” says Todd.
Corey and his team even developed such
a program, called LHASA for Logic and
Heuristics Applied to Synthetic Analysis.
But it wasn’t a genuinely useful tool,
being hamstrung by the limited speed
and memory of 1970s computers.
Computers have come a long way since
then. For Todd, a key moment came in 1997
when chess world champion Garry Kasparov
lost to IBM supercomputer Deep Blue.
“We often talk about chess and organic
synthesis as being similar,” says Todd.
Both involve strategically plotting moves.
“The fact one area had fallen to a computer
made me think about the other.”
When Todd eventually decided to write a
paper on the subject in 2005, he was startled
at how little had been done since Corey’s
work on LHASA. He ended up speaking with
Deep Blue’s developers, who told him that
formidable computing power wasn’t >
20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 39
enough. Chess has so many possible
permutations that even a potent computer
can’t crunch through them all. The essential
ingredient of Deep Blue’s success was the
software that encoded the heuristics of chess,
the rules of thumb that allowed it to quickly
discard bad moves.
At the time, no one was interested in
encoding equivalent rules for chemical
synthesis. That’s partly because those rules
are extremely complex. In chess, there are
tens of potential moves from any position.
In chemistry, the number of possible
transformations for a single step of a

synthesis can range from about 80 to
several thousand. Even using the conservative
estimate of 100 choices per step, a 15-stage
synthesis becomes a tree of possibilities with
100 million billion branches. As one industry
insider put it to Todd, it was cheaper to pay
consultancy fees and get top academics to
do the retrosynthesis manually.
But what if we could get machines to teach
themselves the rules? That is the promise of the
burgeoning field of machine learning. Let’s say
we want an algorithm to find films that certain
types of people will enjoy. Simply give the
algorithm a long list of films and information
about them, together with a list of the people
who liked them. The machine can then learn to
recommend films with certain characteristics
to people who like those qualities.
These algorithms are not smart as such,
they only learn to reproduce relationships
discovered in the training data. The effects
can be tremendous, however. An algorithm
created by artificial intelligence firm
DeepMind taught itself to play the strategy
board game Go better than any human.
The most promising attempt at machine
learning retrosynthesis comes from Mark
Waller at Shanghai University in China and
Marwin Segler at the University of Münster in
Germany. They developed a neural network, a
computing system inspired by the brain, that
taught itself the rules of organic chemistry by
sifting through a major database of reactions.
The program then predicted routes to
moderately complex structures that typically
required six synthetic steps to make. Although
the syntheses were not tested in the lab, Waller
and Segler asked chemists to distinguish the
computer syntheses from human efforts in a
double-blind test. They couldn’t.
The trend for artificial retrosynthesis is
catching on with big players, including the
publishing giant Wiley. It has a commercial
database called SciFinder that chemists use to
find recipes for individual reactions. Recently,
the firm added a computer-aided tool called
BOLDIZSÁR NÁDI/GETTY
Computers learned the rules of chess.
Now they have done the same for
synthetic chemistry
ChemPlanner to this package that suggests
whole synthetic routes.
Yet there is no published evidence as to
how impressive ChemPlanner’s abilities are.
And for their part, Waller and Segler say their
system is not ready to tackle the most prized
and challenging targets, such as “natural
products”, the often medicinally useful and
intricately structured molecules isolated from
natural sources such as plants or microbes.
One man who hopes he can do better is
Bartosz Grzybowski at the Ulsan National
Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)
in South Korea. He began his career studying
the physics of chemical systems, not cooking
up molecules. But, intrigued by the

Retrosynthesis in action
When chemists identify a promising drug, they must then work out how to make it. They use an approach called
retrosynthesis, which deconstructs the target into simpler, starting materials. Here’s how it could work for paracetamol

Paracetamol Phenol (a cheap

HN CH3 starting material)
N

HO HO HO HO
O
Take an imaginary slice through The remaining molecule of interest NO2 groups are easy to The final step gets us
a carbon-nitrogen bond in a now contains an NH2 group, which is add to carbon rings, so to what would be the
molecule of paracetamol, hard to add to a carbon ring like this, the bond to that part starting material of the
yielding two simpler molecules so it is converted into an NO2 group can be broken forward synthesis

40 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018

Totally synthetic
Chemists whip up all manner of useful molecules, many of which are efective drugs.
Through the years, we’ve scaled more and more diicult synthetic peaks

1964 1977 1989 1994 2017

LONGIFOLENE
Chemist Elias Corey at Harvard
University came up with
retrosynthesis, a method of
logically planning how to
stitch together chemicals.
One of the first molecules he
tried it on was longifolene, a
component of pine resin, and
one of the aromatic molecules
found in lapsang souchong
tea, which is smoked over
pine fires. These days it is
not considered difficult,
but at the time no one had
synthesised it before.
L-DOPA
Starting in the 1950s,
thalidomide was prescribed
as a cure for morning sickness.
It was a mixture of two mirror-
image forms, like right and left
hands. Doctors didn’t know at
the time, but one of these
forms caused birth defects.
That led chemists to find ways
of making the mirror-image
forms separately. William
Knowles was the first to find a
way of mass producing just
one of these forms. It was the
amino acid derivative L-dopa,
used to treat Parkinson’s
disease. Since then, such
methods have become crucial
in drug manufacturing.
PALYTOXIN
Made by corals, palytoxin
is the second most toxic
non-protein we know of.
Just 3 micrograms is thought
to be enough to kill a human.
Its production was desired
because its huge size and
complexity made it the
Mount Everest of chemical
synthesis. Whereas
thalidomide came in two
stereoisomers, palytoxin has
1021, only one of which is the
correct structure. It was built
in eight parts by a team led
by Yoshito Kishi at Harvard
University before they were
all connected together.
TAXOL
This chemotherapy drug was
first synthesised by two
research teams, led by
Kyriacos Nicolaou and Robert
Holton, within a month of
each other. Before that, the
drug, also called paclitaxel,
was harvested from the sap
of rare Pacific yew trees,
making it scarce and costly.
There are stories from the
1990s of the relatives of
people with cancer going into
forests looking for the trees.
Synthesis helped lessen
pressure on the species.
RESINIFERATOXIN
Resiniferatoxin is another
poisonous molecule. At low
doses, it binds a protein found
in nerves and dials down
chronic pain. Synthesising it
was daunting, because it
contains several rings of
atoms fused together. These
rings are hard to build and
chemically sensitive, so they
can easily split apart.
It was prepared in 44
steps in 1997, but renewed
interest in the drug prompted
Masayuki Inoue of the
University of Tokyo to devise
a shorter way. There is still a
way to go before the drug can
be affordably manufactured.

challenge of artificial retrosynthesis,
he began exploring the mathematics
that would allow a computer to efficiently
navigate one of those vast trees with
millions of branches. People were mildly
bemused when, from 2005, his hardcore
maths papers started turning up in
chemistry journals, Grzybowski recalls.
But it was an essential first step.
From there, Grzybowski encountered the
same problem that Todd had identified: he
needed a way to help his program quickly
“Coming up with a molecule
discount bad moves. He investigated feeding
it a database of reactions, but “the quality of
chemistry you get out is pretty pathetic”,
he says. So he and his team took a path others
had written off and spent years teaching the
program 50,000 rules describing why bonds
change as they do.
Pulling the rules together took a long time,
but by 2012, he had shown that his fledgling
program, Chematica, worked in principle.
But coming up with a recipe for a molecule
is one thing. “Unless you cook something,
it doesn’t exist,” says Grzybowski.
He began negotiating to sell the software
to chemical supplies firm MilliporeSigma in
2017. The company wanted to test the program
on molecules its chemists could produce
only in low yield or not at all. The team went
on to check eight Chematica retrosyntheses,
including one of a natural product. They
all worked and the sale went through,
with the program being renamed Synthia.
It is a landmark result. But despite the
potential, not everyone is as enthusiastic
as Grzybowski.
recipe is one thing. Unless
you cook it, it doesn’t exist”
In fact, the artificial retrosynthesis concept
has proved polarising. “Some believe
synthesis is mainly about artistry, and that
human imagination and intellect, creativity
and knowledge, can never be beaten by a
computer,” says Sherburn. But then, they
said that about chess. Chemistry may be
more complicated for algorithms to master,
but that day could come. In the nearer
future, Sherburn says, he can imagine
using programs as he would a colleague,
to get new ideas or ask for advice.
Perhaps it won’t just be chemists asking
for advice. A few years ago, Grzybowski warned
that his program could make it easier for
terrorists to make toxic chemicals. But in
reality it won’t help much. All the program does
is plan a synthesis. It still takes a highly trained
chemist with specialist equipment to realise it.
Fears of chemists losing their jobs to AIs are
probably also overblown. It is more likely that
synthesis will become like playing advanced
chess where grand masters face off armed
with laptops, says Todd. The computer checks
for blunders, which are just as important to
avoid in synthesis as in chess. “You want to
make sure you’re not missing something,”
he says. Synthia proved particularly adept
at spotting reactions in which three or more
simple molecules zip together in one go.
Even if some see Grzybowski’s work as
removing the artistry from chemistry, he can
at least take comfort that his work in a sense
completes retrosynthesis and brings it back
to Corey’s grand vision to drive chemistry
forward – by doing it backwards with a
computer. ■
James Mitchell Crow is a science writer based in
Melbourne, Australia

20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 41

EXCLUSIVE
Memories of
my father
As Stephen Hawking’s final book is published, his
daughter Lucy Hawking relects on its meaning for her
T
HIS is a bittersweet moment. The
publication of my father’s last book,
Brief Answers to the Big Questions, is
a triumph in many ways. It is a summation
of his career, both in science and in public
advocacy on a range of issues that he cared
about deeply. It is the fruit of decades of
thought and scientific enquiry, as well as
hard work, his mastery of technical
communication and his experience on
the public stage.
From examination of the nature of life
itself to exploration of the most mysterious
regions of space, the book is a hymn to rational
scientific enquiry. Famously, my father said
of his 1988 bestseller A Brief History of Time
that he wanted to see it on airport shelves.
He certainly achieved that ambition. I hope
this book will fulfil it too.
But this is also a time of great sadness for
me. The beginning of this book’s journey
marks a full stop. This is the “last” book.
While my father’s legacy will, I hope, live on
in a myriad of different ways, I have to accept
finally that he himself has gone.
For the past six months, that hasn’t seemed
real to me. So much of what we have talked
about, thought about, organised, celebrated
and mourned since his death has had my
father as the central figure. It has been as
though he were still there, still the gravitational
force holding us all in orbit. Only now do I
have the sense that he is departing, leaving
us for the final time.
I went to his house the week before last and
found it deeply moving. I cried over a table
cloth that I bought for him in New Delhi, while I
was on tour in South Asia with one of the
five children’s books we wrote together. Odd
though it seems, technically I am my father’s
most prolific co-author. Together, we created
a series of adventure novels for kids that read
like escapist fantasy, except that the science
in all of them was accurate and up to date.
42 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
As my father liked to say, “Where Harry
Potter has magic, we have science”. I vividly
remember reading him an extract I had just
written for George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt,
which featured a character with a startling
similarity to his own mother. He laughed
so much he nearly fell off his chair. Those
were good times.
I admired my father all my life, but
never so much as in the final months of his
life, when he fought like a true soldier but
let go at the end with grace. Born on the
anniversary of Galileo’s death, my father
died on Einstein’s birthday. This final
flourish somehow seemed so typical of
him, an awesome poetry that left us in
bewildered wonderment through our tears.
It feels like no coincidence that his final
scientific paper, detailed in this book,
concerns symmetry. In the chapter “What is
inside a black hole?”, my father discusses work
he did with Malcolm Perry, Sasha Haco and
Andy Strominger on “supertranslations”,
infinite collections of symmetries found in
areas of space-time far from black holes. These
might help resolve the black hole information
paradox, the puzzle of what happens to the
information entering a black hole, which has
generated arguments among scientists for
more than 40 years (see “Do black holes eat
information?”, page 45).
Like many other problems on the cutting
edge of physics that my father worked on, this
remains unresolved. As his lifelong best friend
Kip Thorne says in his introduction to the
book, “Newton gave us answers. Hawking gave
us questions. And Hawking’s questions keep
on giving, generating breakthroughs decades
later.” If Brief Answers is the end, then it is a
comfort that the big questions live on. ■
Lucy Hawking is a novelist and educator based Lucy Hawking and her
in London. See overleaf for a review of Brief father in 2015. He died
Answers to the Big Questions, and an extract on 14 March this year
 JAMES VEYSEY/CAMERAPRESS

20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 43

An ordinary
genius
Stephen Hawking’s last book reveals
the mind and the man, says Philip Ball
Brief Answers to the Big Questions by
Stephen Hawking, Hodder & Stoughton
MOST people as
famous as Stephen
Hawking face
forensically
intimate scrutiny.
But in its way,
Hawking’s
personality was
as insulated as the Queen’s,
impermeably fortified by the
role allotted to him.
There’s a hint in Brief Answers
that he knew this: “I fit the
stereotype of a disabled genius,”
he writes.
But his easiness with this idea
made me uneasy. While it was
delightful to see how in everyday
life he demolished the laziness
that links physical with mental
disability, he did so only by
personifying the other extreme.
The unworldly intelligence, the
wry sense of humour, his
tremendous resilience against
adversity – such a mind in such a
body! And then of course, there
was that computerised voice
(another part of his armour).
It perhaps suited Hawking that
the media were content with the
cliché – he gave little impression
of caring for the touchy-feely.
In the foreword to Brief Answers,
Eddie Redmayne, who played
Hawking in the 2014 biopic The
Theory of Everything, reminds us
44 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
that the physicist would have
preferred the film to have had
“more physics and fewer feelings”.
I approached this book with
some trepidation. You know he
won’t go wrong with cosmology,
relativity or quantum mechanics,
but when Hawking stepped
outside that comfort zone the
results were often touch and go.
The scientific essays included
in this book supply Hawking’s
Greatest Hits: his work with
mathematician Roger Penrose
on gravitational singularities and
their relation to the big bang; his
realisation that black holes will
emit energy (Hawking radiation);
his speculations about the origin
of the universe in a chance
quantum fluctuation; the debate
(still unresolved) about whether
black holes destroy information.
Hawking, as fellow cosmologist
and long-time friend Kip Thorne
outlines in his introduction,
helped to integrate some of
the central concepts of physics:
general relativity, quantum
mechanics, thermodynamics
and information theory. It is a
phenomenal body of work.
Sometimes there is a plainness
to his prose that is touching even
when it sounds like a self-help
manual: “Be brave, be curious,
be determined, overcome the
odds. It can be done.” His plea
for inspirational teaching, his
concerns about climate change
and environmental degradation,
his contempt for Trump and
the regressive aspects of Brexit,
and (albeit not in this book) his
championing of the UK’s National
Health Service, made you glad to
have Hawking on your side.
A common danger with such
collections is repetition. But the
recurring and familiar passages
are themselves quite revealing,
for they show Hawking curating
his image: the boy always taking
things apart but not always
managing to put them together
again, the man who told us to
“look up at the stars and not down
at your feet”.
There’s no doubt that Hawking
cared passionately about the
future of humankind and the
potential of science to improve
it. His advocacy resembles the
old-fashioned boosterism of
H. G. Wells in later life, tempered
by an awareness of the dire
potential of technologies in
IAN BERRY/MAGNUM PHOTOS
Hawking was first to suggest that
black holes might emit energy
the wrong hands.
One of the most striking
features of this book, however,
is the lack of extracurricular
context, from, say, art, music,
literature, philosophy. In some
pieces, this exposes gaps – for
example, when Hawking begins
an essay called “Is there a God?”
with “people will always cling
to religion, because it gives
comfort, and they do not trust
or understand science”. God, he
tells us (as no theologian ever did),
is all about explaining the origin
of the universe.
And on what grounds does he
claim that most people define
God as “a human-like being, with
whom one can have a personal
relationship”? Even if true, most
people’s notions of a molecule
also bear scant resemblance to
what well-informed folk say on
the matter, but Hawking would
not have been happy with that.
There’s a sloppiness to the
history too, even in science: for
instance, he perpetuates the myth
that Max Planck postulated the
quantum to avoid the “ultraviolet
catastrophe” of black-body
radiation. Planck never
mentioned it in his proposal.
There’s worse. “People might
well have argued that it was a
waste of money to send Columbus
on a wild goose chase. Yet the
discovery of the New World made
a profound difference to the Old.
Just think, we wouldn’t have had
the Big Mac or KFC,” he writes, the
joke perhaps hiding a reluctance
to probe more deeply. The remark
appears in a defence of space
exploration, but he shows no
“He cared passionately
about the future of
humankind and science’s
potential to improve it”
more inclination to examine the
real reasons for the space race
than to reflect on the realities of
Columbus’s mission.
But this is all, in a sense, unfair.
Hawking was a great scientist
who had a remarkable life, and
in another universe, without
motor neurone disease (well,
he did like the “many worlds”
interpretation of quantum
mechanics), we would have no
reason to confer authority on his
thoughts about all and sundry.
We would not deny his right to
ordinariness, and would see his
occasional arrogance for no more
or less than it was.
There is every reason to believe
Hawking enjoyed his fame, and
that’s a cheering thought. That we
seek to put him on a pedestal is
our problem, not his. We should
celebrate his extraordinary
achievements, both personal and
scientific – but to paraphrase
Brecht’s Galileo, unhappy is the
land that needs a guru. ■
Philip Ball is a science writer. His latest
book is Beyond Weird (Bodley Head)
RICHARD KAIL/SPL/GETTY
Do black holes eat
information?
In Brief Answers to the Big
Questions, Stephen Hawking
attempts a new answer to this
decades-old problem, the black
hole information paradox
uppose there was no gravity and space-time
S
was completely flat. This would be like a
completely featureless desert. Such a place
has two types of symmetry. The first is called
translation symmetry. If you moved from one point
in the desert to another, you would not notice any
change. The second symmetry is rotation symmetry.
If you stood somewhere in the desert and started
to turn around, you would again not notice any
difference in what you saw. These symmetries are
also found in “flat” space-time, the space-time one
finds in the absence of any matter.
If one put something into this desert, these
symmetries would be broken. Suppose there was
a mountain, an oasis and some cacti in the desert,
it would look different in different places and in
different directions. The same is true of space-time.
If one puts objects into a space-time, the
translational and rotational symmetries get broken.
And introducing objects into a space-time is what
produces gravity.
A black hole is a region of space-time where
gravity is strong, space-time is violently distorted
and so one expects its symmetries to be broken.
However, as one moves away from the black hole,
the curvature of space-time gets less and less.
Very far away from the black hole, space-time looks
very much like flat space-time.
Back in the 1960s, Hermann Bondi, A. W. Kenneth
Metzner, M. G. J. van der Burg and Rainer Sachs made
the truly remarkable discovery that space-time far
away from any matter has an infinite collection of
symmetries known as supertranslations. Each of
these symmetries is associated with a conserved
quantity, known as the supertranslation charges.
A conserved quantity is a quantity that does
not change as a system evolves. These are
generalisations of more familiar conserved
quantities. For example, if space-time does not
change in time, then energy is conserved. If
space-time looks the same at different points
in space, then momentum is conserved.
What was remarkable about the discovery
of supertranslations is that there are an infinite
number of conserved quantities far from a black
hole. It is these conservation laws that have given
an extraordinary and unexpected insight into
process in gravitational physics.
In 2016, together with my collaborators Malcolm
Perry and Andy Strominger, I was working on using
these new results with their associated conserved
quantities to find a possible resolution to the
information paradox. We know that the three
discernible properties of black holes are their mass,
their charge and their angular momentum. These
are the classical charges that have been understood
for a long time. However, black holes also carry a
supertranslation charge. So perhaps black holes
have a lot more to them than we first thought. They
are not bald or with only three hairs, but actually
have a very large amount of supertranslation hair.
This supertranslation hair might encode some of
the information about what is inside the black hole.
It is likely that these supertranslation charges do
not contain all of the information, but the rest might
be accounted for by some additional conserved
quantities, superrotation charges, associated
with some additional related symmetries called
superrotations, which are as yet, not well
understood. If this is right, and all the information
about a black hole can be understood in terms of its
“hairs”, then perhaps there is no loss of information.
These ideas have just received confirmation with
our most recent calculations. Strominger, Perry and
myself, together with a graduate student, Sasha
Haco, have discovered that these superrotation
charges can account for the entire entropy of any
black hole. Quantum mechanics continues to hold,
and information is stored on the horizon, the surface
of the black hole.
The black holes are still characterised only by their
overall mass, electric charge and spin outside the
event horizon but the event horizon itself contains
the information needed to tell us about what has
fallen into the black hole in a way that goes beyond
these three characteristics the black hole has. People
are still working on these issues and therefore the
information paradox remains unresolved. But I am
optimistic that we are moving towards a solution.
Watch this space.
20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 45
 CULTURE
Red sky at night
A detailed vision of lunar living sends Rowan Hooper into orbit
the Chinese. The book opens with
Red Moon
an American quantum engineer,
by Kim Stanley Robinson, Orbit
Fred Fredericks, chatting with
THE moon is so hot a famous Chinese travel writer,
right now. No, not Ta Shu, en route to the moon.
literally. It’s the Fredericks is delivering an
50th anniversary ultra-secure quantum telephone
of the moon to the Chinese Lunar Authority
landings next chief, but the latter drops dead
year, and with it soon after the two meet.
there is a flurry Framed for the murder,
of excitement around our only Fredericks, along with Chan Qi,
natural satellite that almost makes the pregnant daughter of a top
up for 50-odd years of neglect. Chinese politician, goes on the
In September, SpaceX run, shuttling between the moon
announced that it plans to send and China to elude capture.
a paying customer on a flight Robinson is famous for the
around the moon as early as 2023. scientific detail and plausibility
China is launching the Chang’e 4 of his novels. His award-winning
robot to the far side of the moon Mars trilogy describes the
in December, and next year settlement of the Red Planet from
Chang’e 5 will collect rocks and the first footsteps on the surface
return them to Earth. to the terraforming of the planet
So Kim Stanley Robinson’s new centuries later. Whether he is
novel is timely, to say the least. imagining the richness of
Set mostly on the moon in 2047, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon
Red Moon describes burgeoning culture in southern France
lunar settlements, mostly built by 30,000 years ago, as he did in
Shaman (2013), or the expansion
The future’s bright, and Chinese, of human society across the solar
in Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel system, as he did in 2312
MATJAZ SLANIC/GETTY
46 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
DON’T MISS
Read
Spanning science and politics,
discoveries and global epidemics,
Nine Pints: A journey through the
money, medicine, and mysteries
of blood (Metropolitan) by Rose
George should get any science
fan’s heart pumping.
(published 2012), Robinson
Listen
has an impressive range.
In Red Moon, he turns his On 23 October at 11.30am BST, the
attention to all things lunar, but BBC World Service’s In The Studio
this is as much a primer on China follows Cuban artist and activist
as a 21st-century superpower as it Tania Bruguera as she installs a
is a description of lunar living. vast heat-sensitive artwork in the
Ta Shu (who is obviously a Tate Modern gallery in London.
stand-in for Robinson’s own
musings) contemplates the Subscribe
reasons that China has achieved Podcast Here We Are from
lunar domination: “Money Starburns Audio features comedian
needs to be spent to become Shane Mauss’s journey of discovery.
wealth,” he says. In the Evolution of Alcohol episode,
Ta Shu notes that the global Mauss has an IPA-fuelled chat with
economy has been around far microbiologist Kevin McCabe about
longer than most people realise, the genetic origin-story of yeast.
and that China has been building
up wealth for centuries. Most Visit
of the Roman silver coins ever All I Know Is What’s On The
minted ended up in China, we Internet, an exhibition opening
are told. The Yongle emperor in 26 October at The Photographers’
the 15th century ordered the Gallery, London, sees artists
construction of what is now exploring our algorithmically
Beijing even though the imperial driven culture.
capital was well established in
Nanjing, and he did it, we are told, Watch
because his coffers were John Carpenter’s paranoid sci-fi
overflowing with cash. classic They Live (pictured below)
The Great Wall was a similarly is re-released in UK theatres on
gigantic infrastructure project, 26 October in a 4K restoration.
partly launched to use up You’ll never look at adverts in the
surplus wealth, as was the Beijing- same way again. Or sunglasses.
Hangzhou Grand Canal, the oldest Or people, come to that.
and longest artificial river in the
world. Beijing, the Grand Canal,
the Great Wall – and now the
moon. Robinson builds such
a plausible case for Chinese
domination on the moon that in
parts his novel reads like a history.
COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Red Moon’s depiction of its
characters’ inner lives feels
slightly underpowered, but
Robinson has once again created
a deeply realised world that feels
more like a peep into our future
than a work of fiction. I only hope
we are as established on the moon
by 2047 as he describes. ■

Professor of Chemistry
he Department of Chemistry of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is accepting
applications for multiple positions at the tenured and tenure-track level, beginning
August 2019. We seek outstanding candidates with research interests in all areas of
chemistry.
Ph.D. in Chemistry or related ield is required prior to the start of the appointment.
Area of specialization within chemistry is open. Candidates for the Assistant
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research in his/her ield of specialization. Tenured candidates must have
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he University of Wisconsin-Madison is an equal opportunity airmative action employer. Women and
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guaranteed conidentiality. A criminal background check will be required prior to employment.
Department of Neuroscience
New Haven, CT 06520-8001
http://medicine.yale.edu/neuroscience/index.aspx
NEUROSCIENCE FACULTY POSITIONS
The Department of Neuroscience at Yale University seeks to hire faculty in
any area of neuroscience, with a preference for candidates who use neuronal
or systems level analysis to investigate circuits, behavior or cognition in
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Emphasis will be placed on recruiting at the level of Assistant Professor, but
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Candidates must hold a Ph.D., M.D., or equivalent degree. Please send a
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The Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School ofers
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Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics.
The Master of Biomedical Informatics program is designed for students who aim
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• For students who hold a Bachelor’s degree in Bioinformatics, Bioengineering,
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• For students who hold a Doctoral degree in a biomedical or related ield who
recognize the relevance of informatics and data science to their research.
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The Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics (BIG) PhD program is designed
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TENURE-TRACK ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Position Description: Candidates are invited to apply for a tenure-track assistant
professorship in physical chemistry, broadly defined, including experimental and
theoretical research in areas such as but not limited to atomic and molecular physics,
biophysical chemistry, condensed matter, quantum science and ultrafast spectroscopy.
The appointment is expected to begin on July 1, 2019. The tenure-track professor will
be responsible for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. We are seeking
candidates who have an outstanding research record and a strong commitment to
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Basic Qualifications: Doctorate or terminal degree in chemistry or related discipline
required by the time the appointment begins.
Additional Qualifications: Demonstrated experience in teaching is desired.
Special Instructions: Please submit the following materials through the ARIeS portal
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than October 15, 2018.
1. Cover letter
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4. Outline of future research plans
5. Names and contact information of 3-5 references. Three letters of
recommendation are required, and the application is complete only when all
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6. Selected publications
Contact Information:
Susan M. Kinsella, Search Administrator, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology,
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Phone: 617-496-4088. kinsella@chemistry.harvard.edu
Harvard is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration
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 newscientistjobs.com

Position Title: Research Associate Professor

Req # 03919
Department of Chemistry at The University of Chicago invites
applications for the position of Research Associate Professor.
The successful candidate will be responsible for maintaining a
research program and advise graduate students in Theoretical
or Computational Chemistry. The candidate is expected to
collaborate with experimental and/or theoretical faculty within the
department. Ideally, candidates should have demonstrated ability
to raise support for their research and lead collaborative projects.
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teaching experience in Chemistry. The successful candidate will
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Applicants must apply online at the University of Chicago’s
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upload a curriculum vitae and cover letter.
Review of applications will begin November 15, 2018 and will
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20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 51

LETTERS
letters@newscientist.com @newscientist newscientist

EDITOR’S PICK Weighing the evidence gut in adipose tissue, or even

For mammals, matriarchy is second nature
From Thelma Rowell,
Ingleton, North Yorkshire, UK
Chelsea Whyte reports that in only
seven species of mammal do females
exhibit leadership (29 September, p 8).
Leadership is a difficult concept to
apply to animals, and indeed different
definitions seem to be applied in each
of the seven species cited. I cannot
offhand think of any species of large
long-lived social mammal in which
females don’t exert leadership in at
least one of the definitions used here.
From my own observation, I can say
that sheep and goats follow senior
females’ decisions in foraging, as do
African guenon monkeys, such as blue
monkey females, which also defend
territories. Males have other priorities,
often spending time living in all-male
bands with their own rules. Could the
authors name seven mammal species
in which males provide leadership?
The editor writes:
■ The authors found leadership in
76 species, seven of which had
systematic female leadership. Of
course, females of the remaining
species may take the lead at specific
times and in specific situations.
on healthy fatness
From Jon Arch, Welwyn Garden
City, Hertfordshire, UK
Claire Wilson explains that as
many as a third of people who are
overweight have good scores for
blood glucose, cholesterol and
blood pressure (29 September,
p 20). But why is this?
Many factors apart from body
fat affect these scores. Another,
underappreciated factor is that
not all fat is equal.
The main component of stored
fat, triglyceride, is not a problem
(other than for weight-bearing
joints) so long as it is tucked safely
away in lipid droplets in small,
subcutaneous fat cells. It is not
the direct link between obesity
and metabolic disease.
The problem comes when
triglycerides are stored in large fat
cells called adipocytes around the
worse in non-adipose tissues,
notably skeletal muscle and liver.
Here triglyceride produces
metabolites that cause resistance
to insulin, a feature of type 2
diabetes and other features of
“metabolic syndrome”, such as
high blood pressure and low-HDL
(good) cholesterol.
This helps explain why the
glitazone drugs, which shift fat
from large visceral to small
subcutaneous fat cells, can
increase total body fat but
improve insulin sensitivity.
Those rare individuals who
are unable to make adipose tissue
and direct their fat to muscle
and liver are insulin resistant
and often have symptoms of
metabolic syndrome.
Exercise is more beneficial than
you might expect from its effect on
body fat content, because it burns
off troublesome metabolites.

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52 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018

 “I feel safer with the pilot having the same
outcome as me!”
@wotsapnin isn’t quite ready for the driverless aircraft of the
future (6 October, p 42).

None of this means that losing
fat has no benefit in an overweight
individual. If other factors remain
unchanged, it does.
Things we believe about
economics and the world
From Nick Pattinson,
Stockport, Greater Manchester, UK
Economics is “not an exact
science, after all”, says Pascal
Boyer (22 September, p 40).
Economics is not a science at all.
Where’s the largely agreed body
of prior knowledge? Where are
the experiments capable of
falsifying?
Where – crucially – are the
advances made by disproving
previous theories? How come
the same prescription produces
different outcomes?
Unfortunately, the current
discipline is the best we have, but
please, let’s not forget its woeful
inadequacy, and let’s also not
undermine science by applying
the term where it doesn’t belong.
From John King,
Humberston, Lincolnshire, UK
Pascal Boyer makes assertions
that he is entitled to make in the
field of psychology, but he makes
claims in the field of economics
that he is certainly not.
If you had asked a psychologist
to write an article in which he
discussed astronomy, and in that
article he asserted that no planet
has a retrograde motion, you
would have been committing
the same error.
The first of his “seven flawed
ideas” – the notion that wealth
is a fixed-size pie – certainly holds
in sub-Saharan Africa.
His assertion that prices cannot
be controlled by government
regulation is wrong in the field of
healthcare. All advanced countries
have government controls on
spending in healthcare, from
Japan’s free market with price
controls, to the UK with its
relatively socialised medicine.
The only country that doesn’t
attempt to control prices in
healthcare is the US, where health
costs are vastly higher than in
any other advanced country and
outcomes are relatively poor.
I am sure Boyer is correct in
his psychological analysis, but
he should be careful about his
economic assertions.
Keeping time on the
national grid
From David Clarke,
Seaford, East Sussex, UK
I am not sure why Steve Swift
is having trouble with his
electricity tariff timings ( Letters,
29 September). He says his meter
takes its timing from the mains
frequency; I understood that most
Economy 7 meters switch tariffs
as a result of a signal broadcast on
BBC Radio 4 longwave.
I remember working with the
UK National Grid in its London
control centre in the 1980s. An
important control it had was
to compare, during the day, the
time shown on a mains electric
clock – “electric time” – with the
time shown on an independent
master clock, “clock time”.
A task of the control engineer
was to adjust system frequency so
that sometime around midnight,
the clocks agreed. I assume that an
equivalent system operates today.
Sword-makers were
ahead of their time
From Malcolm Hunter,
Leicester, UK
I read your article about biological
materials inspiring attempts to >

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20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 53

LETTERS
produce metals incorporating
layers, or gradients in their
composition or structure, in
order to combine hardness and
toughness (29 September, p 40).
Surely there is a long history
of layering steel or iron to make
weapons such as swords – with
a hard, high-carbon edge, but a
tougher, less brittle, lower-carbon
core. Similarly, “case hardening”
weapons and armour, using
techniques to infuse steel surfaces
with extra carbon, or with
nitrogen to create surface nitride
layers, also has a long history.
Are milk alternatives
really the white stuff?
From Adam Croucher,
London, UK
Thank you for Chelsea Whyte’s
article on milk alternatives
(22 September, p 22). It is high
time that the question about the
ecological and health impact of
“alt-milks” is addressed in more
detail – please write more!
The perceived benefits and
harms of these “milks” have
been left to marketing and the
fashions of conscience. As a
54 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
consumer and fan of soy and
oat milks (the latter comfortingly
similar in flavour to Coffee-
Mate), I still wonder often at the
sense of consuming milk of any
kind at all.
Alt-milks typically have
complex and highly robust
packaging that is neither
compostable nor recyclable, and
far bulkier than that used for milk,
especially as alt-milks seem to
come only in 1 litre packs.
Is it time for alt-milk producers
to shorten their supply chains,
package more renewably, and tell
us more about what happens to all
the bits of nut, bean, grain that
don’t end up in their products?
Put Martian tourists
on the no-fly list
From Edward Shields,
Neebing, Ontario, Canada
As a biologist and a space
science enthusiast, I strongly
object to Robert Zubrin’s push for
immediate human exploration
of Mars (8 September, p 22).
As humanity is witnessing on
almost a daily basis, robotics and
machine intelligence are opening
letters@newscientist.com
vast swathes of knowledge and
new fields of space enquiry.
The huge amount of money
spent on human space
exploration has produced
little cutting-edge science.
One can only wonder what great
science has been lost, or greatly
delayed, due to funds channelled
there instead of robotics and
machine intelligence.
Those who count and
those who are counted
From Andrew Shand,
Irvine, Ayrshire, UK
You say that you surveyed a
“representative sample of 2026
UK adults” to report on the public
understanding of science and
technology (22 September, p 6).
But then you say “all interviews
were conducted online”. So, did
you just guess the views of those
who are not?
The editor writes:
■ Our survey was designed by
Sapio, a market research company
in London that employs accepted
industry methodologies to obtain
a nationally representative sample.
@newscientist newscientist
According to figures from the
Office of National Statistics, 90
per cent of UK adults are “recent
internet users” so any error
margins associated with offline
people not being online will be
negligible.
Pouring cold water on
green energy efforts
From Chris Hildred,
Whitby, Ontario, Canada
Enid Smith reports that her
self-sufficiency is thwarted
because she can’t find a washing
machine that doesn’t use a cold
water fill, which is heated with
expensive electricity (Letters,
8 September). She should try
using cold water washing
detergent — we’ve been using it
for years!
The alien life hiding in
plain sight
From Quentin Macilray,
Limassol, Cyprus
Cixin Liu postulates that
highly civilised aliens would
be as incomprehensible to us as
we are to ants (8 September, p 42).
Could this be the solution to
Fermi’s paradox, “Where is
everyone?” Answer: they’re
already here.
For the record
■ The data artist with whom Hannah
Redler-Hawes co-curated the
[JOYCAT]LMAO exhibition is Julie
Freeman (29 September, p 44).
■ Estimates of the number killed by
Allied bombing raids on Germany in
1939-45 are in the hundreds of
thousands (6 October, p 16).
Letters should be sent to:
Letters to the Editor, New Scientist,
25 Bedford Street, London, WC2E 9ES
Email: letters@newscientist.com
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number, and a reference (issue, page number, title) to
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OLD SCIENTIST
Growing excitement as moon mission nears? Not a bit of it

NASA

WHEN the 24 October 1968 edition of New Scientist

was published, the space race was in full swing. The US
had just completed a successful Apollo 7 mission, sending
three astronauts into orbit for 11 days. We reported no
details of the mission, however, concentrating instead
on the 19th Congress of the International Astronautical
Federation in New York. The success of the Apollo mission
meant that the US was still aiming to have a man on
the moon by the end of 1969, but the conference was
apparently dominated by “the increasingly dim outlook
for future space efforts”.
Budgets were being slashed as US taxpayers grew
weary of funding adventures in space. It seemed that
the once ambitious Apollo programme to explore large
areas of the moon would be drastically cut back. And we
learned that the Soviet Union was encountering problems
with its programme, all but admitting that the Americans
would beat them to the moon. Delegates were “gloomy”,
we said, and the conference itself was “permeated by a
general air of depression”.
Marginally more optimism came in reports of satellite
developments. We predicted there might be as many as
130 satellites in orbit by 1980, and elsewhere that “there
will be about $5 billion worth of spacecraft in orbit” by
the same date. This latter figure would in turn justify the
development of an “orbital scrap collector that could later
be adapted for returning human cargo to Earth”.
In the meantime, a satellite repair vehicle currently The Perfect Gift
under development would ensure that any damaged for Anyone Interested in Space!
satellites could be fixed by remote control from Earth,
although we added a note of caution for the superpowers. Launch them into the worldwide space community with the
“It is easy to imagine the manipulators being used for British Interplanetary Society. Membership includes our
PRQWKO\PDJD]LQH¶6SDFHÁLJKW·DQGDFFHVVWRWDONVE\
sabotaging the other fellow’s spy satellite or diffusing his
astronauts, space scientists and thought leaders. Join in
orbital bomb,” we warned. with one of our technical projects and help design the future
Today we look back on the 1960s as being a golden era
of space exploration!
for space exploration. It would appear that hindsight can
be unduly generous. Mick O’Hare ■ From £20/year (Under 22) and £70/year (Standard)

www.bis-space.com
To delve more into the New Scientist archives, go to Telephone +44 (0)20 7735 3160
newscientist.com/article-type/old-scientist/

20 October 2018 | NewScientist | 55

 FEEDBACK
AUTHORITIES in the US are giving
free helicopter rides to hundreds
of feral mountain goats, after the
animals developed an insatiable
thirst for human urine.
Olympic National Park in
Washington state is home to about
650 of the goats, which have started
to view hikers as wandering salt licks.
When not approaching park visitors to
lick their perspiration, the goats dig up
soil that ramblers have, er, seasoned,
damaging the trails in the process.
With few natural predators in the  be suffering from sour grapes?
park, and no approved contraceptive
medications, there is little to control
the goat population. Now rangers
plan to trap as many of the animals
as possible, transporting them by
helicopter to nearby forests that
offer a more suitable, presumably
salt-rich, habitat.
THIEVES in Germany have made
off with an entire vineyard’s
worth of grapes, estimated to be
worth €8000. Police believe the
PAUL MCDEVITT
criminals ran a professional
harvesting machine over the
entire vineyard, according to the
A man complaining of a headache discovered
he had a 48mm nail embedded in his skull. The
cement plant supervisor from Chongyang, China,
told doctors he had no idea how it got there
56 | NewScientist | 20 October 2018
newspaper Die Rheinpfalz.
It’s not the first large-scale
grape heist in the Rhineland-
Palatinate region, famous for its
Riesling, but the 1600-kilogram
haul exceeds the 600 to 800 kilos
of grapes stolen last year. Local
vintners suspect that rivals are
responsible, because of the
specialised equipment required.
“The motive is jealousy,” one
winemaker told Die Welt
newspaper. Might the culprits
PSYCHOLOGISTS have dropped a
truth bomb on dog owners: your
pooch isn’t that smart. A team (cat
people, reckons Feedback) reviewed
more than 300 papers on animal
intelligence to compare dogs with
other carnivores, social hunters and
domestic animals, including cats,
dolphins and pigeons.
In many cases, they concluded
that experimenters had set out
to prove how clever dogs are, and
seen what they wanted to see.
And for each ability that was
claimed to be exceptional, they
For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback
found at least one other animal that
equalled dog performance.
“Taking all three groups into
account, dog cognition does not look
exceptional,” said Britta Osthaus of
Canterbury Christ Church University
in the UK. But surely this makes them
Jack Russells of all trades, if master of
none? Smart though dolphins may be,
Feedback has yet to see one fetch the
newspaper.
MANY will call it 2018’s most
adorable trend: 3D-printed
prosthetics for injured animals.
In Canada, a dachshund with
cancer got a new titanium
skull after a brain tumour the
size of an orange grew through
her original one.
And south of the border,
Mr Stubbs the alligator had his
tail bitten off by other alligators
at an illegal facility before he was
rescued. The good medics of the
Phoenix Herpetological Society
in Arizona fitted him with a
3D-printed tail made from a
material known as “dragon skin”.
Meanwhile, students at Armorel
High School in Arkansas created
a 3D-printed foot for Peg the duck,
whose foot had been chewed off
by a peckish turtle.
Feedback could not substantiate
reports that a pig in the UK was
given a finely crafted wooden leg
after pulling the farmer’s infant
son from a pond, saving him
from drowning. After such
heroics, the Devon farmer
reportedly said, “we couldn’t
possibly eat him all at once”.
PREVIOUSLY, Feedback reported on
a Japanese rail company giving staff a
harrowing lesson in safety by forcing
them to sit in a trench by the track
as a train sped past (8 September).
Peter Jacobsen writes that in
Cariacica, Brazil, “a bus company
sought to sensitise its drivers to the
experience of cyclists by having their
drivers ride stationary bikes in the
road while buses passed them”.
London bus drivers, Feedback
thinks, will be only too familiar
with the experience of being
stuck stationary in the road.
A FARMER in Michigan has
discovered that a rock he was
using as a doorstop is a meteorite
worth up to $100,000. When he
bought another farm in 1988,
the previous owner told him his
father had seen the stone come
down from the sky in the 1930s.
After keeping it for 30 years,
he brought the 10-kilogram rock
to Mona Sirbescu, a geologist at
Central Michigan University.
She determined that it was
88 per cent iron and 12 per cent
nickel – an unusually high nickel
content. “What I was holding is
a piece of the early solar system
that literally fell into our hands,”
Sirbescu said.
The farmer, we presume,
is investigating how many
doorstops $100,000 could buy.
A SPATE of nuisance phone calls
emanating from the Ke Kai Ola seal
hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, were
the work of an unlikely culprit.
Hospital director Claire Simeone
was one of many who received silent
calls from the centre, which she
eventually traced to a gecko perched
on a touchscreen telephone. Every
time it moved, this four-footed
telemarketer dialled numbers
stored in the recent calls log.
“I had to send out a note to all
of our staff and volunteers, who
may have received telemarketing
calls,” Simeone wrote on Twitter.
“I immediately hired [the] gecko.”
You can send stories to Feedback by
email at feedback@newscientist.com.
Please include your home address.
This week’s and past Feedbacks can
be seen on our website.
THE LAST WORD
Last words past and present at newscientist.com/lastword

Waxing miracle petroleum wax won’t break about 75 per cent potassium the ignition point. Combustion is
down in cooking and might nitrate, which amounts to about almost instantaneous, a column
Recipes often call for zest of unwaxed affect some recipes, creating 2.25 grams per sparkler. If it all of flame and smoke shoots up
lemons. Why are so many lemons froths and making smooth items decomposes to potassium nitrite, over a metre high and I suspect
waxed, what kind of wax is used and look unattractive. But if you are it would yield about 1.9 grams of it forms a mushroom cloud,
what is the best way to remove the not fussy, any ill effects should this chemical. although it was too dark to tell.
wax without harming the zest? be minor. This would be scattered all Standing downwind with
Jon Richfield over the place, but let’s say 1 gram a glass of wine and a cupcake, as
Q Citrus fruits have a robust Somerset West, South Africa goes onto the surface of the cake. the mushroom cloud settles out,
natural waxy covering that If the cake is then cut into 12 slices, would surely mean that the wine
protects them from drying that is 0.08 grams of potassium and the cupcake would exceed a
out and from some kinds of rot. Bright spark? nitrite per slice, which is just over number of Australian and
That kind of wax, in the amount 1 milligram per kilogram of body European food safety standards.
found on fruit, presents no Some restaurants celebrate weight for a 70 kilogram person. Andrew Carruthers
problems to the home cook. customers’ special occasions by So you could have three slices Beaconsfield, Quebec, Canada
The recipes that call for planting burning sparklers onto food, of sparkler-enhanced cake per
unwaxed lemons want to avoid showering it with sparks. Sparklers day and stay within the European Q The main nitrogen-containing
the artificial wax used to coat typically contain an oxidising agent Food Safety Authority ingestion chemical produced when using
some fruit. This is added for such as potassium nitrate, which limit of 3.7 milligrams per day potassium nitrate in pyrotechnics
various reasons. For a start, yields nitrite as a combustion product. per kilogram of body weight. is nitrogen gas, not potassium
industrial fruit production often The European Food Safety Authority However, it’s not likely that this nitrite. I suspect the amount of
depends on seasonal storage specifies a safety limit for nitrite amount of potassium nitrite nitrite produced is very small,
and international distribution ingestion of 3.7 milligrams per day per is produced. if there is any at all.
of produce, which means it is at kilogram of body weight. How much It is also worth noting that Eric Kvaalen
risk of deterioration, rotting and nitrite would someone ingest by potassium nitrite is a food Les Essarts-le-Roi, France
damage. Sometimes, fruit needs eating a slice of sparkler-enhanced additive, often labelled as E249.
washing and other handling so birthday cake? Peter Borrows
vigorous that it damages the Amersham, Buckinghamshire, UK This week’s question
natural wax coating, spoiling Q Sparklers used on cakes will
the fruit’s appearance or conform to a British European Q I think we are all safe from SLEEPOVER
permitting drying or rot. It might Standard, BS EN 15947 category F1, normal sparklers fired off one at My husband is a lark and I am
also be that the fruit just isn’t which means they will contain a time on a cake, even if we don’t an owl when it comes to our
naturally glossy enough, so the less than 7.5 grams of explosive. cut off the black bits in the icing. attitudes to bedtime. This leads
handlers apply an extra coat to However, there are not to discussions about the ideal
attract customers. “You could have three slices only sparklers, there are also time to go to bed. He is convinced
Sometimes the new coating is of sparkler-enhanced cake mega-sparklers. These are very that the best sleep happens
vegetable wax from other sources, a day and stay within the dangerous – and illegal in some before midnight, while I believe
and is much like the original wax, safety limit for nitrite” countries. I have only seen that no matter when you fall
so it need not trouble the cook. them at Australian New Year asleep, you are advised to get 8
But commonly it is a petroleum In fact, sparklers used on cakes are celebrations, on a beach. As hours and whether it starts before
wax much like that used in likely to be somewhat smaller they say: Don’t try this at home. midnight or after has no relevance
candles, and applied in a thicker than this, containing, say, 3 grams They consist of perhaps to the quality of your sleep.
coat than the fruit naturally of explosive. The black powder 150 normal sparklers bundled Who is right?
produces, to make it look extra (sometimes called gunpowder) together with wire. One central Rita Szilagyi
glossy. Though harmless, used as the explosive is typically sparkler is left sticking up, used as Szeged, Hungary

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