'WORRYING TIMES
The truth about the anxiety epidemic
LOST WORDS The birth and death of
“đã a
a unique language
NUCLEAR POWER PLAY Time to get serious about North Koreas bomb WEEKLY October 8-14, 2016
130 NOT OUT What's the upper limit of longevity?
THE REACTION THAT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD
Crack it and we can burn fossil fuels forever
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Trang 2
CRICOS
PROVIDER
Code
Trang 3WORLD
CHANGERS | ta»
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Trang 5
CONTENTS
News
ư
Kids walk after
DNA therapy
Drug breakthrough
gives hope for treating
neurological diseases
On the cover
28
The reaction
that will change
the world
Crack itand we can burn fossil fuels forever
Cover image John Randall ZEPHYR/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Features 32 Worrying times
The truth about the
anxiety epidemic SELL JOHNSON/EYEEM/CGET TY RUS 32 Worrying times
The anxiety epidemic
36 Lostwords
Language birth and death
18 Nuclear power play
Time to get serious about
North Korea's bomb
10 130notout
The limits of longevity
9 Delightofthe bumblebee
Insects get emotional
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THE REACTION THAT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD
Crt @ and we Cn bara torel bards forever
eS ee) ee) 2 a3.) SS sx~«
Coming next week
Running on empty
Why do we feel tired all the time?
Predicting history
The computer that holds the secrets of the past
14 18 20 21 22 26 28 32 36 40 43 44 52 56 57 Volume 232 No 3094 This issue online
newscientist.com/issue/3094
Leaders
The loss of a language is not always a
disaster Ahard line on crime can backfire
News
UPFRONT
Key species score a conservation victory Rosetta’s final act Nobel prize round-up
THIS WEEK
Hidden ice found inside Hawaiian volcano Bees can be optimistic and happy The limits
of human lifespan China wants a space plane for tourists Men get violent if outnumbered by women Artificial killer
cells mimic simple ecosystem IN BRIEF
Budgies always swerve right Cannibal
galaxy Bendy, bouncy 3D-printed bones
Analysis
North Korea's nukes Is it time to start
worrying about Kim Jong-un's nuclear plans? COMMENT
For an optimum Brexit deal, take your time
What should we do if insects have feelings? INSIGHT
Elon Musk‘s vision alone won't get us to Mars
Technology
Artificial intelligence gets common sense 3D printing on the move Material morphs to its own molecular clock
Aperture
The crimson beauty of industrial waste
Features
The reaction that will change the world (see above left)
Worrying times (see left)
Lost words The birth and death of a unique language
PEOPLE
The Comte de Buffon’s cold Earth model
Culture
E-paradise lost Rethinking the internet Missing picture We cant talk about gene
editing without calling for tough regulations
Furry friends, not What cats are really like
Regulars
LETTERS More perverse biofuel incentives FEEDBACK Using trickery to do good
THE LAST WORD Seal mea!
Trang 6ANETA
IVANOVA,
THE ADULT BRAIN IS
JUST AS AGILE AS A CHILD'S
KEEP EXPLORING
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Mechanicsburg, PA 17055 * k 1x , ~~ »x lye hd a 7 Ầ ở Unspoken assumptions
The loss of a language Is not always an unmitigated disaster
DOES it matter if a language dies out? The orthodox answer is that it does, because every language is a repository of ideas and culture
and embodies a unique way of looking at the world The planet
only has about 7000 languages;
the extinction of even one diminishes the sum total of
human knowledge
But in some cases, extinction
can be seen ina more positive
light Take Al-Sayyid Bedouin
Sign Language (ABSL), restricted to about 1000 users in a small
Israeli village with a high level of congenital deafness The language seems doomed by the spread of
Israeli sign language (see page 36)
The instinctive reaction is regret, and from a linguistic
perspective the loss of ABSLisa genuine shame It is a fascinating
language that has kept linguists
busy since it came to their attention around 15 years ago
But for the deaf villagers, Israeli
sign language is an upgrade: it allows them to speak to tens of thousands of people rather than
a few hundred, and enables them
to work and marry outside the village It is hard to see that as anything other than progress
The same is sometimes true for other endangered languages: they die out because people abandon them in favour of ones that serve
their needs better
Technology also softens the
blow, as endangered languages
can now be captured in detail —
which also means they could eventually be brought back from the dead, much as the language
of the Israelites was in the 19th
century Hebrew is now the first language of 9 million people
Linguists instinctively decry
the loss of language muchas
conservationist biologists once mourned the loss of every single
species But conservation is in
the midst of a paradigm shift,
moving towards acceptance that not all species can be saved, that invasive species are not always
bad and that human-engineered
ecosystems are not necessarily
inferior to natural ones Perhaps our attitudes to language
extinction are due fora similar
heretical change @
Tough on the causes
ONE of the worst spectacles of the US presidential election has been
the resurgence of racially charged
politics Donald Trump is stoking fears of an explosion of violent crime in inner cities —a tactic
widely seen as a racist dog whistle
Unlike lots of Trump's “facts”,
there is a grain of truth in this one There has been a recent rise in
violent crime in some major
cities Solving this, and dispelling
racial tensions, should be high on
the political agenda
Conservatives and liberals will
disagree on the causes, but now
researchers have uncovered a
counter-intuitive factor: areas
with more women than men have
higher levels of violent and sexual crime (see page 12)
In the US, skewed sex ratios are
common in African-American
communities, where high levels of
male mortality and incarceration
mean there are nine or fewer adult
males for every 10 women
Census data reveals the depth
of the problem The vast majority
of white and Hispanic people live
in communities with roughly
equal sex ratios More than 90 per
cent of black people do not
Sex ratios are clearly not the only factor in play But those who advocate tough-on-crime policies
with high levels of incarceration may be unwittingly fuelling the
fire they are trying to put out
8 October 2016 | NewScientist |5
DAVE
SINAIFOR
NEW
Trang 8UPFRONT UP/DASP/IDA ESA/ROSETTA/MPS FOR OSIRIS TEAMMPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/
One of Rosetta’s final shots
Nobels unveiled
PRETZELS and recycling featured
in this year’s Nobels as New
Scientist went to press
The physics prize went to three British scientists, David Thouless
at the University of Washington,
“Topology helped to show how superconductivity can appear in extremely
thin materials”
Duncan Haldane at Princeton
University and Michael Kosterlitz at Brown University They looked at superconductors and other unusual states of matter using topology, the mathematical
description of shapes
Topologically, a bagel is different
froma pretzel because one has one hole while the other has two
Thouless and Kosterlitz used topology to show how
superconductivity can appear in
extremely thin materials
Haldane used the same ideas to
explain the magnetic properties of some materials
The work could lead to
breakthroughs in electronics
6 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
€YRILHLINAR,
Haldane said he “was very
surprised and very gratified” to
receive the award
Many had expected the
discovery of gravitational waves to win, but the LIGO team’s
announcement just missed the
Nobel cut-off date of 31 January
The prize in physiology or
medicine went to Yoshinori
Ohsumiat the Tokyo Institute of Technology for his work on autophagy, the process by which cells recycle and repair
themselves His discoveries are
vital for understanding how cells respond to stress and infection
Rosetta’s final bow
GOODBYE, Rosetta On 30 September,
the European Space Agency probe
landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-
Gerasimenko, in a spectacular finish
toits two years spentin orbit around
the space rock
Rosetta, never designed to land,
was probably badly damaged on
impact, despite comingin ata speed
of just 1 metre per second Its last
signal, transmitted at the moment of
landing, reached Earth at 12:19 BST
We will never hear from it again
The mission team hugged, clapped
and cried as Rosetta’s final moments were confirmed “I can announce full
towards 67P,” said Rosetta mission
manager Patrick Martin “Farewell
Rosetta, you've done the job That
was space science atits best.”
Wildlife wins
ITHAS been a red-letter week for
many of the world’s most iconic and threatened species The only
tinge of disappointment was a
failure to win complete protection for elephants and lions
Overall, the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of
Wild Fauna and Flora, in
Johannesburg, South Africa, voted
en masse to back outright bans on
the wildlife trade These cover the
parts and tissues of a whole host of threatened species, including
Pretty in pink
Rosetta launched in 2004 and
spent 10 years catching up with 67P
Itreached the cometin August 2014
and beamed back images of analien
landscape waiting to be explored
In November that year, Rosetta’s
companion lander, Philae, made a
bumpy touchdown and survived fora
few days on the comet before being
lost - though Rosetta did eventually
find itagain
‘As comet 67P moved away from
the sun, Rosetta’s solar panels delivered less and less power,
meaning the mission would always
have to end now,
“Everybody is very sad On the
other hand, the mission end had to
come, and this is a spectacular way
‘to doit,” said Paolo Ferri, head of
ESA mission operations
African grey parrots, all species of pangolins, and Barbary macaques
“Most of the decisions favour
protection of animals for the
long term, so overall it’s beena
very strong pro-conservation
agenda,” says Kelvin Alie from the
International Fund for Animal
Welfare
Several species of sharks and rays were also newly listed under
the convention, and countries
voted to defeat a controversial proposal by Swaziland to permit
sales of white rhino horn But a
motion to expand protection to all African elephants failed
Baby dragons
IT WAS touch and go fora while But the elusive pink aquatic
salamanders that hatched inside
Slovenia's Postojna Cave about four months ago have survived
the most difficult stage of their
lives, reaching adolescence
“These are the only baby
dragons in the world known
Trang 9
For new stories every day,
They were once only known from specimens washed out of
caves by flooding and legend had
it they were baby dragons—a
nickname that stuck They can live
to be 100 years old and only lay
eggs once or twice a decade So it was remarkable to see
64 eggs laid by a single individual earlier this year They were placed
inan aquarium within the cave In
total, 22 eggs hatched, and all are still alive and developing better than expected, says Weldt Small populations and water pollution in its habitat in the Dinaric Alps
in the Western Balkans means the
species is classed as vulnerable
Rocket escape d
SPACE flight firm Blue Origin
‘was preparing for its most
dramatic trial yet as New Scientist
went to press: a test of an in-flight
escape system, designed to carry future space tourists to safety in
an emergency
The company has already flown its reusable New Shepard
rocket four times, launching
its uncrewed capsule into space and then returning the rocket safely to the West Texas desert
The escape system is designed to separate the capsule from
the rocket For the test flight,
it will jettison the capsule 45 seconds after launch, when
the rocket has climbed nearly
5000 metres
The capsule, with room for six,
will blast its motor for less than
2seconds, enough to carry it away to safety But in doing so, the
motor will knock the rocket back
with a force of more than
300,000 newtons, likely inflicting
severe damage on it
As the capsule parachutes
back to Earth, the rocket will most
probably plummet to the ground
Still filled with unused fuel, its
landing will be decidedly
explosive rather than soft If New Shepard somehow
manages to survive, the company
says it will put it ina museum
NOAA
it newscientist.com/news
Frog beats fungus
FOR decades a deadly fungus has been killing amphibians around the world, driving many to the brink of extinction, or worse
But now one frog’s recovery
shows that, with a little luck and
habitat preservation, some may evolve resistance after all
The Sierra Nevada yellow-
legged frog from the mountains
of California has been declining
for more than 100 years, due to
non-native predatory trout and the deadly chytrid fungus
“By the early 2000s, it had
disappeared from 93 per cent of
60 SECONDS
its historical localities,” says
Roland Knapp at the University of California’s Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory
But its numbers are recovering
by an average of 11 percent per year, according to Knapp’s team,
who analysed 7000 population surveys from the past 20 years in Yosemite National Park (PNAS, doi
org/brch)
There are fewer non-native fish
And, the frogs have developed some resistance to the fungus “This shows there is hope that at
least some species can recover,
given the time and the habitat in
which to doit,” Knapp says
Hurricane Matthew batters Haiti
HAITI has been pummelled by
hurricane Matthew, which brought flooding and violent winds when it
hit on Tuesday One person had been
killed as New Scientist went to press One of the strongest Atlantic
storms for nearly a decade, the
hurricane could dump up to a metre of rain and generate winds of 230
kilometres an hour, raising fears
about flash floods and mudslides in
the western hemisphere's poorest
country
Thousands have been evacuated
from parts of neighbouring
Dominican Republic, and heavy
rain and wind has hit Jamaica,
with flooding blocking roads in the
capital, Kingston
Rural areas in south-west Haiti are
Notjust another storm
forecast to see the heaviest rain and
most punishing winds
“Wherever that centre passes
close to would see the worst winds
and that’s what's projected to happen for the western tip of Haiti," says John
Cangialosi at NOAA'S National
Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida
Rain is also a major concern, he adds
The Category 4 hurricaneis
forecast to move north over eastern Cuba and then the Bahamas, before
striking the US east coast later this
week Florida and parts of North
Carolina have already declared states
of emergency
Matthew briefly reached the top
classification, Category 5, becoming
the strongest hurricane in the region
since Felix in 2007
SpaceX investigation
SpaceX has launched aninquiry
into howits Falcon 9 rocket blew up
during aroutine testa month ago According to the Washington Post,
this means SpaceX has not ruled out
the possibility of sabotage, although
thatremains unlikely Congressman
Mike Coffman has urged government
agencies to take over the case, to protect future NASA crewsslated to
fly with SpaceX to the ISS
The ugly truth
Unattractive friends may make you
look more fanciable, tests with
volunteers suggest They had to rate pictures of different faces for
attractiveness, viewing them singly
at first, then again with images of
less attractive people alongside The
original faces scored more highly the
second time around (Psychological
Science, doi.org/brbn)
Bees on their knees
Bees have appeared onthe US
endangered-species list for the first
time All native to Hawaii, the seven
species of yellow-faced bees are
threatened by non-native animals
and by development The bees
pollinate some of Hawaii's
indigenous plant species, many of
whichare themselves threatened
Poles’ pro-choice strike
Thousands of women in Poland went
onstrike on Monday to protesta
planto ban abortions The proposal, fromananti-abortion grassroots
campaign, is being examined by
aparliamentary commission and
would make all abortions illegal,
even incases of rape or when the
woman'slifeis at risk
Atitan’s footprints
One of the largest ever dinosaur
footprints has been unearthed in
the Gobi desert The well-preserved
fossilis 106 centimetres long and
77 centimetres wide, and is thought
to have been made by atitanosaur -
along-necked herbivore that may
have been 20 metres tall
Trang 10
THIS WEEK
Children walk after
drug breakthrough
Michael Le Page
“TO SEE children who would have
been dead sitting and standing
is something I never thought I
would see.”
Francesco Muntoni, at
University College London, is talking about videos of children given an experimental drug for treating spinal muscular atrophy This genetic disorder involves
the deterioration of nerves
connecting the brain and spinal cord to the body’s muscles
Children with the severest form can’t sit upright and seldom
survive past the age of 2 Yet a few parents have posted videos online
showing children given the drug, called nusinersen, who appear to
be sitting and even walking with
assistance
The trial of nusinersen was stopped in August when it became clear it was effective,
making it unethical not to give the real drug to those on the placebo
The full results haven't yet been
published, but what has been
revealed so far of this “antisense”
therapy suggests we have
overcome the biggest obstacle -
how to deliver such therapies — at least in disorders that affect the
nervous system The breakthrough could open the floodgates for
similar treatments for neurological conditions such as Huntington’s,
motor neurone disease and
possibly even Alzheimer’s
Antisense drugs are essentially
pieces of DNA that bind to specific RNAs - the recipe that cells use
to make proteins By binding
to RNAs, they can block the
production of proteins, or
alter their form
These drugs have the potential
to prevent or cure many diseases
But there’s been a huge snag: if
naked DNA is injected into people, ZEPHYR/SPL 8 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
it doesn’t last long, let alone get
into cells So biologists have spent decades trying to create synthetic
forms that can survive in the
body They have strengthened the
DNA backbone, for example, to
help it bind more strongly to RNA
They have also made tweaks that help it enter nerve cells
Nusinersen is one such
modified antisense drug Reports of its success have created great
excitement among parents of
children with spinal muscular
atrophy, but we need to be
cautious about individual reports, says neuroscientist James Sleigh at the University of Oxford
Even if the final results show
nusinersen doesn’t work as well
as hoped, there is still cause
for optimism Animal studies,
and postmortems of children
who died despite being given
nusinersen, show widespread
distribution of the antisense
molecule in the brain and spinal
cord, says Muntoni, who has
helped develop and test therapies
suchas nusinersen
These findings, and others,
show it is possible to get antisense
molecules into nerve cells,
meaning improved versions
should soon become available “Tthink it will happen
surprisingly quickly,” says Edward
Wild at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in
“It became clear that
the drug was effective, meaning it was unethical tokeepg
London, who is part of a team testing an antisense drug for
Huntington’s disease
This inherited condition remains untreatable despite decades of attempts to develop
therapies With the delivery
problem seemingly cracked, Wild thinks that will soon change The Huntington’s antisense drug that
ing the placebo”
Next on thelist: Huntington's
Wild’s team is trialling has passed initial safety tests with flying
colours
Such therapies could be used to
treat a range of disorders, possibly including Alzheimer’s There is no single mutation that causes Alzheimer’s, says Wild, but we know of several gene variations
that increase the risk of the
disease In theory, blocking the production of proteins encoded
by these genes could delay or
prevent people becoming ill The downside of antisense treatments is that repeat doses are required at least every few
months, and often for life The
drugs have to be injected directly
into the cerebrospinal fluid,
which flows around the brain and spine This procedure, calleda
lumbar puncture, can cause side
effects including headaches and back pain
But Muntoni and colleagues may have found a way to modify the antisense molecules so they
can cross the blood-brain barrier,
meaning they can be injected into
the bloodstream Animal studies
published last month suggest this approach works well, Sleigh says, but it has not yet been tested in people
The advent of therapies for
genetic conditions considered untreatable could change the way
we approach them If treatments
become available for childhood disorders such as spinal muscular atrophy, it will mean children
should be tested for the condition
at birth so they can begin therapy as soon as possible
It could also change the way adults approach genetic sequencing of their own genes At present, most people who have their genome sequenced opt not to find out if they have inherited
diseases such as Huntington’s,
preferring not to know their fate But if it becomes treatable and
perhaps even preventable, they may wish to start therapies early
“As soon as we have something that works, people will want to get
Trang 11In this section
@ The limits of human lifespan, page 10
@ Is it time to worry about North Korea's nuclear plans?, page 18
@ Artificial intelligence gets common sense, page 22
FIELD NOTES Mauna kea, Hawai
The volcano that hides ice like Mars
Alice Klein
THEY are both breathtaking,
in quite different ways: the
thin air 4200 metres up, and the majestically rugged, alien
landscape at my feet
Tam onthe summit of Mauna
Kea, the highest point in Hawaii
The red-brown basalt and barren surface of the dormant volcano conjure up images of Mars
It was in the Pu’u Wekiu crater,
in 1969, that the geophysicist
Alfred Woodcock dug beneath the rocky exterior and discovered a hidden ice world But when Norbert Schorghofer, an
astronomer at the University of
Hawaii at Manoa, stumbled across
Woodcock’s papers decades later, he was baffled How could ice persist in an area where the average temperature is 4°C?
To try to solve this puzzle,
Schorghofer has enlisted the help
of geophysicist and permafrost expert Matthias Leopold at the University of Western Australia in Perth The goal of the expedition Ihave come on is to find out
whether the subterranean
ice patch still exists
Schorghofer buried some
temperature sensors here in 2013,
and when we get to the third of these, a metre deep in the centre
of Woodcock’s old surveying area,
he lets out a whoop of excitement The temperature here is freezing
To investigate further, Leopold spaces out 20 steel electrodes, each the size of a tent peg, across the survey area These generate an
electric field that can find frozen
ground up to 50 metres deep by measuring resistivity Unlike
drilling, it preserves the landscape that local people hold sacred
The readings show that the ice
is still there, but its horizontal
“Sadly, time is running out for a precious window on how and why buried ice forms on the Red Planet”
extent has shrunk from 600 to 200 square metres, andits depth
halved to just 5 metres Global warming may have played a part
in this, but it’s hard to tell without
long-term data
The team will now combine
Bees seem to
have an upbeat
outlook on life
DON'T worry, bee happy Bumblebees may experience something like
happiness after getting a treat, making them take a more positive
view of things
Clint Perry at Queen Mary
University of London and his team trained 24 bumblebees to associate two locations in the lab, each of a particular colour, with sugar water or
plain water They then measured the
time it took them to explore a new site
located midway between the two, and with an intermediate colour chosen to make the bees unsure whether it contained a sweet reward or not
Half of the bumblebees received a sugar treat before the test, and these entered the ambiquous middle station more quickly than those that didn't It wasn't simply that these were more active because of the energy boost: the effects seem to be down to the neurochemical dopamine, which plays a role in the reward system in humans
When the bees’ dopamine receptors
geological and meteorological data tocome up with atheory of
why the buried ice persists The
most plausible explanation is
that it forms at night, when
temperatures drop below zero and icy air can swirl down the
steep crater and seep into the
porous, rocky ground Any ice formed would normally melt in
the daytime heat, but this patch sits in a dark crater
Mauna Kea is one of the best
models on Earth for studying ice within the tropics of Mars, says Schorghofer Most of the Red
Planet's ice is at the poles, but photos have identified signs of
EDUCATION
IMAGES/UIG/GETTY
Sunny disposition
Alien terrain, but not off-world
buried ice towards the equator
Just like with Pu’u Wekiu, these
spots lie in shadow inside the steep craters that punctuate the
planet’s surface
Not much is known about ice
away from Mars’s poles, so Mauna
Kea’s ice is a precious window on how and why it forms But sadly,
its time is running out With
climate change, Schorghofer believes the Mauna Kea ice will disappear over the next 50 years
As we drive back down, the only visible hint of where we have been
is the volcanic ash on our faces But hopefully, this won't be my
last trip to Mars &
were blocked, the effect was gone The treat also helped bees return to feeding more quickly after a simulated
predator attack (Science, doi.org/
brbc) This suggests that bumblebees carry out behaviours that go along with feelings, says Perry
It’s exciting to see a clear
demonstration of something like emotions in bumblebees, says Eirik Sevik at Volda University College in Norway - although he isn’t surprised “They have brains that function in pretty much the same ways as ours,” he says “The hard partis demonstrating it.” Emily Benson @
8 October 2016 | NewScientist | 9
GRANT
Trang 12
THIS WEEK
Is our maximum
lifespan 115?
Clare Wilson
OUR life expectancy has been
climbing for decades — but how much further can we push it?
The maximum lifespan for most people may be around 115, because of the innate limits of the
human body, according to new
research The few who have gone beyond this age are rare outliers,
says Jan Vijg of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York
By analysing demographic records, Vijg’s team has found
that maximum lifespan has not been rising in step with the average lifespan The record for the oldest living person climbed
to around 115 in the 1990s, after
which it has broadly plateaued
Although Jeanne Calment,
a French supercentenarian who has the longest confirmed human
lifespan on record, reached 122 before she died in 1997, her record
has gone unbroken for nearly two decades It shows we are
not seeing increasing numbers
breaking the 115 barrier, says Vijg
Spring chickens
“415 is like a borderline - you can’t cross that unless you're an
exceptional individual.”
The team analysed more than
acentury’s worth of records from the four countries with the largest
documented number of people
aged 110 or over—the UK, US, France and Japan
They found that the rise in
average lifespan is mostly caused by people dying later at ages
below about 110 For people older
than that, improvements in
survival fall off sharply (Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/nature19793)
But James Vaupel of the Max
Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, says many predictions about
limits to lifespan have been
proven wrong, as records have
been repeatedly broken “It is
disheartening how many times
the same mistake can be made,”
he says
At the start of the 20th century, average lifespan in the West was
inthe mid-4os, and has risen
to about 80 today Much of the initial rise came from fewer
child deaths Around the 1970s
onward, further increases in life
expectancy have been driven by older people dying later
This is mainly thanks to better healthcare, such as widespread
use of medicines to lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels
Tom Kirkwood of Newcastle
University, UK, disagrees with the
idea of alimit to human lifespan:
“The idea does not really fit what
we already know about the
biology of the ageing process There is no set programme for
ageing —the process is driven by the build-up of faults and damage in the cells and organs of the body,
which is malleable.”
Richard Faragher of the
University of Brighton, UK, thinks
innate limits on lifespan are
“plausible” - yet the findings don’t necessarily mean we can’t extend
our lifespan further in future “Jam positive that the human
maximum lifespan could be raised beyond 122 using technologies
that exist now,” he says
China's giant
spaceplane fits
in 20 tourists
EVEN China can't resist the lure of ‘space tourism A state-backed firm is
developing a gigantic craft that may
one day fly 20 passengers to the edge
of space
The China Academy of Launch
Vehicle Technology in Beijing has
designed a spaceplane that can be
scaled up to carry a large number
of people, academy rocket scientist Lui Haiquang told the International
Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara,
Mexico, last week
10 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
There is stiff competition Big
names include Virgin Galactic, whose
SpaceShipTwo spaceplane will offer
six passengers trips to near-space, and XCOR, whose proposed Lynx
vehicle will fly a single passenger next
toa pilot But academy team leader
Han Pengxin and his colleagues
believe there will be enough
consumer demand to builda
higher capacity spacecraft
Han team has designed two
versions of a spaceplane that takes off
vertically under its own rocket power
The first has a mass of 10 tonnes and
a wingspan of 6 metres This one, he says, should be able to fly five people
to an altitude of 100 kilometres -
where space officially begins - at
speeds up to Mach 6, giving 2 minutes
of weightlessness
Buta scaled-up, 100-tonne version,
with a 12-metre wingspan, could fly
20 people to 130 kilometres at Mach
8, with 4 minutes of weightlessness
The larger spacecraft is fast enough to
help deliver small satellites into orbit,
with the help of a small rocket stage
add-on that would sit on top of the
vehicle They also intend to make it
reusable, so each plane should be
good for upto 50 flights
He imagines flights will take off
“A100-tonne version,
with a12-metre wingspan, could fly 20 people to 130
kilometres at Mach 8”
from a commercial spaceport, with payload launches in 2020 The plane
will carry people when itis considered
safe enough Han predicts that a ride
will cost between $200,000 and
$250,000
Some remain sceptical, however
“The fact that they think they can test
fly in the next2 years is remarkable,”
says Roger Launius at the Smithsonian
Institution’s National Air and Space
Museum in Washington DC, who was
concerned by the lack of technical
details So the onus is on the academy
to prove this is more than a paper
spaceplane, he says “Itis always
easier to draw illustrations and talk
Possibilities than to build and fly
Trang 13BOSTON, MA INSTANT EXPERT: W7 RELATIVITY - ˆ AND BEYOND SATURDAY 29 OCTOBER 2016
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Trang 14
THIS WEEK
Men get violent if
women are aplenty
MORE meninevitably means
more testosterone-fuelled
violence, right? Wrong, according toan analysis exploring how
ratios of men to women affect
crime rates across the US
Inareas where men outnumber
women, there were lower rates
of murders and assaults as well
as fewer sex-related crimes,
including rapes, sex offences and prostitution Conversely,
higher rates of these crimes occurred in areas where there
were more women than men
Ryan Schacht at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and his
colleagues analysed sex-ratio data from 3082 US counties, provided by the US Census Bureau in 2010 They compared this with crime data for the same year, issued by the US Federal Bureau of
Investigation They only included
information about women and
men of reproductive age For all five types of offence
analysed, rising proportions of ANDREW
TESTA
Artificial cells mimic life and obliterate prey
CELL-LIKE structures have been designed to kill another population
of artificial protocells, mimicking a
crucial step in the evolution of life:
creatures eating one another
The hope is that they could one day
be custom made to deliver drugs And
they might just help us understand
how complex cellular communities first evolved
We think protocells were the
microscopic precursors to living cells
Building artificial protocells from substances such as fatty acids and
proteins allows us to study how life
might have originated Stephen Mann
12 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
men ina county correlated
with fewer crimes -—even when
accounting for other potential contributing factors such as
poverty The results suggest that current policies aimed at defusing
at the University of Bristol, UK, and his team made a community of these cells
to find out if they would display the
classic ecological setup of predatory
behaviour
They designed a death match
between two protocell populations
The predator cells were positively
charged droplets containing a
protein-degrading enzyme Their prey
were negatively charged capsules of
protein encircling a bit of DNA
The cells were attracted by their
opposing charges, and the enzyme
from the predator cells “drilled”
through the protein membrane of
their victims, obliterating them in
under an hour and sucking up DNA
in the process (Nature Chemistry, DOI: 10.1038/nchem.2617)
These protocells display habits,
such as moving and eating one
violence and crime by reducing
the amount of men in male-
dominated areas may backfire
(Human Nature, doi.org/brbb) When women are in short supply, men perceive them as
being amore valuable resource,
says Schacht Consequently, men must be more dutiful to win and retain a female partner Inan
abundance of women, men are
spoilt for choice and adopt promiscuous behaviour that
another, that you might expect to see
from living, interacting beings But
because they aren't actually alive -
they can’t replicate on their own and
they don't evolve - their behaviour
highlights how easily we might
be deceived in our search for
extraterrestrial life, says Steven
Benner at the Foundation for Applied
Molecular Evolution in Alachua, Florida “If you were to see that ina
“If you were to see this type of behaviour ina sample from Mars, people would
mistake it for a life form”
sample from Mars, people would be
writing PhD dissertations about this being a life form,” he says
Eventually, Mann’s team hopes to
build a community of even more types More women, more fights
brings them into conflict
with other men, and makes
them more likely to commit sex-related offences
“Work in animals also shows quite similar findings to ours, that when females are abundant
and males rare, males are more
violently competitive, more promiscuous and less likely to invest in offspring,” says Schacht
“Schacht’s findings are in line
with ‘mating-market theory’,”
says David Buss of the University of Texas at Austin The results
tally with his own work, which
shows that when women
outnumber men, there are
more short-term relationships,
divorce rates increase and men
become more reluctant to
commit to one partner
The upshot, says Schacht, is that men alter their behaviour to suit conditions of supply and demand “In some situations they
will be much better behaved, and
in others they will be much more
prone to nasty behaviour,” he says
The work also has implications
for crime prevention, he says:
“We are overly focused on male excess when we should reorient
to places with more women.”
Andy Coghlan @
of artificial cells, all interacting and
exchanging information This could
beused in medicine and materials
science, Mann says “Ultimately,
our vision is to think about protocell
ecosystems,” he says
Although the protocells aren'talive,
their predatory interactions suggest
that competition is possible between
non-living things, says Neal Devaraj at the University of California, San Diego
That brings the field one step closer
to perhaps someday demonstrating
protocell evolution and even artificial
life, he says
Inthe meantime, Devaraj says it
would be interesting to see if the
predator protocells could recognise
a biological signature Such killer
protocells could then be used to battle
particular disease-causing bacteria
Emily Benson mi
Trang 15
WHERE THE
WILD THINGS ARE
Discover strange and stunning animals, epic landscapes,
extreme explorers alongside the best wildlife photography
Buy your copy from all good magazine retailers or digitally Find out more at newscientist.com/TheCollection
Trang 16IMAGE
SOURCE/PLAINPICTURE
IN BRIEF
Boobs devour themselves
doesn't typically happen when breastfeeding ceases
Instead, it seems that epithelial cells eat their dead
when breastfeeding is over
WHEN a woman stops breastfeeding, her breasts go from
milk-producing factories to regular appendages Now a
switch has been found that controls this transformation,
and it could have implications for treating breast cancer
During pregnancy, epithelial cells in the breasts
proliferate and form structures that make milk Once
breastfeeding stops, these structures self-destruct But how does the body remove all that debris? Usually,
immune cells would do that job, gobbling up the dead
cells Yet with that amount of material, you'd expect
neighbours Nasreen Akhtar at the University of Sheffield,
UK, wondered if a protein called Rac! is involved She
found that mice lacking the gene for Racl weren't able
‘to feed pups beyond their first litter Without Racl, dead
cells and milk flooded the breast when lactation had
finished, triggering inflammation and impairing tissue
regeneration (Developmental Cell, doi.org/bq8q)
Although prolonged breastfeeding reduces overall
cancer risk, women have an increased risk of developing
breast cancer for 5 to 10 years following pregnancy One
theory is that inflammation after breastfeeding may fuel
cancer growth Given Racl suppresses this inflammation, significant pain and inflammation - something that
Giant lurkers may explain lonely planets
LONELY planets can blame big bullies Giant planets may evict
most of their smaller brethren
from orbits, partly explaining why the Kepler space telescope saw so many single-planet systems
Up to 80 per cent of the planetary systems Kepler has discovered appear as single
planets passing in front of their stars The rest feature as many as seven planets -—a distinction
14 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
dubbed the Kepler dichotomy
What’s more, multi-planet
systems tend to have circular
orbits all in the same plane, and
singletons’ orbits tend to be elliptical and tilted
Now, a pair of computer
simulations suggest that hidden giants may lurk in these single systems They show that
gravitational interactions
involving giants in outer orbits
it may be a new target for cancer therapies
can eject smaller planets from the system, nudge them into their
stars, or send them crashing into
each other The giants pull the few
remaining inner planets into more
elliptical and inclined orbits—the
same kind seenin many of the
single systems Kepler has spotted
(arxiv.org/abs/1609.08110)
But bullying giants can only account for about 18 per cent of
Kepler’s singles (arxiv.org/
abs/1609.08058), so something
else must be at work as well
Stars’ spin turns weather weird
LIKE a movie on fast-forward,
planets orbiting rapidly spinning
stars might whip through their seasons in double time
Earth’s tilt gives our planet its
seasons But hot, massive “early-
type” stars can spin almost 100 times faster than the sun, creating
amidriff bulge The gas around the star’s equator is then further
from its centre, so it cools more
than other parts of the star’s
surface, while the poles remain
hot and dense
John Ahlers at the University of
Idaho in Moscow wondered how
this might change the seasons on an orbiting planet If its orbit is
angled, it would be directly over
the star’s chilled equator twice in
each orbit, and would have two
summers and two winters a year
Ahlers found that difference
could mean the planet’s surface would oscillate rapidly between a
boiling hellscape anda frozen
tundra (arxiv.org/abs/1609.07106)
Bee fossil reveals
early human abode
AFOSSILISED bees’ nest might
tell us a lot about a key early
human The skull of an apelike
Australopithecus discovered in
South Africa in 1924-knownas
the Taung Child -overturned our view of human origins It suggested humans evolved in
Africa, not Eurasia
Now Philip Hopley at Birkbeck,
University of London and his colleagues are studying a bees’
nest found at the same site The
bees would have nested on open
ground, so the rocks around were
probably formed in an arid
habitat full of flowering plants —
and aren't cave rocks as previously thought This means there may be
more fossils beyond the small site
previously believed to have been
Trang 17
For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
3D-printed bone
offers flexible fix
ABOUNCY, bendy, 3D-printed bone
could revolutionise implants for facial deformities and
reconstruction
Currentimplants are often brittle
and so break easily and can’t be
remodelled during surgery Now, an ink has been developed that can be
used to 3D print bone implants in
any size, shape and form - from leg bones to entire skulls And because
the implants are flexible, they can
be cut into the perfect shape in the
operating theatre
The ink is made from
hydroxyapatite, a mineral found naturally in bone, and PLGA, a
polymer that binds the mineral
particles together and gives the
implants their elasticity
“We were very surprised to find
when we squeezed an implant, it bounced back to its original shape,” says Ramille Shah at Northwestern University in Chicago
Once in place, the implants are
rapidly infiltrated by blood vessels
and gradually turn into natural bone
(Science Translational Medicine, doi.org/bq8r) This offers a cheap
and versatile way to repair an injury
Shah’s team calls the implant
material “hyperelastic bone” and
says it could be used for many
treatments, from dealing with
fractures and spine repairs to
implants to rebuild faces after injury
or chemotherapy
Milky Way's baby brother copies its star-shredding habit
THE Milky Way's brightest
satellite galaxy stands accused of the same crime as itself: tearing
apart a celestial object that
wandered too close
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the brightest of more than
50 galaxies that orbit our own
Big spiral galaxies like the Milky
Way are known to tear up and
devour their neighbours,
including some of the Large Magellanic Cloud’s brethren But the satellite galaxies
themselves have never been
observed doing the same
Sound blasting to
scare off whales
WARNING signals to deter
minke whales from wind farm
construction sites are being
tested in Iceland The deterrents involve a series of amplified
electronic pulses projected into the water, and were originally developed to stop seals from stealing farmed fish
A 40-day trial run by the Carbon,
Trust is looking at whether they
might also help ward off whales during noisy pile-driving activity
inthe North Sea The deterrent
pulses, while annoying to whales,
aren’t harmful
“Noise pollution threatens
whales because it interrupts their normal behaviour and can drive them away from important
breeding and feeding areas,” says
Danny Groves from the charity Whale and Dolphin Conservation
“Excessive noise levels
underwater can also cause injury
and, in some cases, death.”
Minkes are thought to be abundant in many of the areas
earmarked for wind farm
development, which can be
noisy for days on end
The hope is that the pulses
could make whales avoid the area during construction The results are expected early next year
Now Nicolas Martin of the
University of Strasbourg in France and his colleagues have spotted what looks like a globular cluster—
a tightly packed group of stars — in distress The cluster is on the outskirts of the Large Magellanic
Cloud, about 42,000 light years from its centre
The team found the star cluster
in Marchas part ofa search called the Survey of the Magellanic
Stellar History (SMASH), so they named the cluster SMASH 1 And
it does indeed seem headed fora
smash-up It is elongated, and its
long axis points right at the
Large Magellanic Cloud, suggesting that the galaxy’s
gravity is yanking it apart
Still, if the star cluster has been
orbiting the galaxy fora long
time, it is strange that the
destruction is occurring only now
The cluster may have originally
circled the nearby Small
Magellanic Cloud, whose weaker
gravity didn’t have the same
effect Only recently did the Large Magellanic Cloud snatch the
cluster and begin shredding it
(arxiv.org/abs/1609.05918)
Here's how budgies avoid collisions
HOW do birds avoid crashing into
each other when approaching
head-on? They have an inbuilt
preference for veering right
Mandyam Srinivasan atthe
University of Queensland, Australia,
and his colleagues uncovered the
simple trick when filming pairs of
budgerigars flying towards each
other in anarrow tunnel
During more than 100 tests, the
birds moved to each other's left side
in 84 per cent of cases, andnever
crashed They also tended to fly past each other at different heights,
which prevented mid-air collisions on
the rare occasions that one swerved
left (PLoS One, doi.org/bq8h)
Group hierarchy may dictate
which bird opts to fly above the other
“It looks like the dominant birds
prefer to go lower,” Srinivasan says
“Maybe it’s more energy efficient and easier to go lower than higher,
so the non-dominant bird is forced to gainaltitude.”
These crash-avoidance strategies
have evolved over 150 million years in birds and may inspire anti-collision
systems in drones, “especially now
that drones are being built in large numbers”, says Srinivasan
Trang 18
THE SECRET SCIENCE IN YOUR HOME
Fabric care: the
secret revolution
Fabric care used to be just about stain removal Now clever chemistry can also keep clothes looking newer for longer
YOU'RE probably familiar with the life cycle of stains, lift them off fabric and lock them in the
a T-shirt At first, you wear it with pride, perhaps _ water ready to be rinsed away
washing it reluctantly to preserve its newness But other types of stains are more stubborn, But as the luster fades, you demote ittohouse _ for example, some foods and body fluids
wear before eventually consigning its faded So this detergent also includes enzymes, glory to the back of the wardrobe biomolecules that can attack the offending
Washing plays a key role in this life cycle grime They include proteases that break down Improper washing may cause colors to fade, proteins, lipases that fragment fats and oils, as
fabrics to stretch and seams to break It'seasy _ well as amylases that carve up carbohydrates
to feel that your cherished outfits Water is crucial for hydration but it can also deserve better Why does hinder the cleaning process Hard
washing new clothes provoke water, full of metal ions, can
such anxiety? neutralise surfactants, so
The answer is that it detergents usually contain needn't The technology to water softeners, known as keep clothes looking new builders and chelating agents,
for longer is already in the ` which take metal ions out
detergents and fabric & of circulation Finally, special conditioners developed by ~~ ™ polymers keep dirt suspended scientists at P&G, one of the — during the wash cycle, helping to
world’s leading consumer goods prevent redeposition and the graying
companies of clothes this can cause More than 800 scientists and engineers from
40 countries, based at three state-of-the-art Cool chemistry
innovation centers in Brussels, Newcastle and P&G's detergents also contain “optical Cincinnati, are developing and testing a new enhancers” that are deposited on fabrics generation of fabric care products that are making them look whiter and brighter changing the way people think about their Dr Neil Lant, a research fellow at P&G’s
clothes and how they care for them Newcastle Innovation Centre in the UK and
At the heart of this is the smart chemistry his colleagues, are on a mission to challenge in P&G's detergents, like that in Tide Pods® what's possible by designing detergents that
(above) These contain surfactants, long stringy deliver powerful stain removal and keep that molecules that bind to water at one end and T-shirt looking good too “Detergents need Lane ees # tot” 9741,
oily substances at the other Aided by agitation _ to clean and keep clothes looking newer for l4 x h during a wash, these help to break up fatty longer,” he says The team search for ways
“Th ti to make key ingredients work better in colder e new generation and quicker washes For example, they have
of detergents is created an amylase which works at 15 °C This
ã involved P&G partnering with Danish biotech
improving the world, company Novozymes to redesign an existing
Trang 19Ẹ
FABRIC PROTECTION
The fabric conditioner Downy makes clothes softer and smell fresher But it
has another crucial role, says Dr Renae
Fossum, principal scientist at P&G’s
Cincinnati Fabric and Home Care
Innovation Center in Ohio It protects
garments against aging
Downy is relatively simple
chemically It has a water-loving
head atop a long, fatty tail When dispersed in water, these molecules
form spherical vesicles with the heads
on the outside and the fatty tails inside
“When the vesicles touch a fiber,
they break and spread out to form
a lubricating layer,” says Fossum
This has multiple benefits “It
reduces the friction between fibers
so they can return to their original
positions more easily,” says Fossum This process helps garments
keep their shape It also stops fibers,
especially cottons, from splitting and
creating fuzz And it maintains the
color vibrancy That’s because much
of the color fade from washing isn’t
the result of dye loss but increased scattering of light reflected from
damaged and disordered fibers This
causes the fabric to look duller and
lose its sheen
Downy combats this by keeping fibers smoother and aligned, so that
light reflects uniformly from them This
keeps the colors bright and vivid and helps clothes look newer for longer
ADVERTISING FEATURE
The job of P&G’s researchers is complicated by trends in the fashion industry to use more synthetic fabrics Since 1990, polyester has
been replacing cotton as the most common
clothing fiber because of its low cost and durability More recently, the trend for figure- hugging and sporty-looking casual clothes -
“athleisure” wear - has introduced more
elastane, or Lycra®, into clothing
“The big problem with these synthetics
is that they are magnets for grime and bad
odors,” says Lant Anything oily sticks strongly
to synthetic fibers, including the 20 grams of
greasy sebum that an adult’s skin produces every day
Elastane fibers are also relatively sensitive and prone to damage, potentially leading to
loss of stretchiness Tide Pods® contain
chelants and crystal growth inhibitors to
help prevent this loss and avoid the sag
It's a wrap
All this smart chemistry has to be carefully
packaged The latest of P&G's detergents is the
Tide Pods®, which deliver just 28 milliliters of
detergent per wash, half the standard dose They took 8 years to create, yielded 50 patents
and were tested on 8 tons of laundry The Tide Pods® are made of polyvinyl!
alcohol film, which is soluble in water The film must be strong enough to survive shipping, stable enough to survive months in storage
and yet quick to dissolve in a washing machine
“That meant we needed a detergent with alow
water content,” says Annick Vandeputte, senior
scientist at P&G’s Brussels Innovation Center
“Less than 10 per cent of what's in there is water.” The Tide Pods® keep ingredients
apart in three chambers until the moment they combine in the wash
They are a hit with consumers who want clothes to look newer for longer and are easier
for the less experienced, such as students, and
for seniors and the visually impaired who may
have trouble measuring powders and liquids
There are other advantages too An
important goal for P&G is sustainability - super compact Tide Pods® use less detergent for
each wash and colder, quicker washes are
better for your clothes and use less energy too
For Lant, Vandeputte and their colleagues, that’s important: their new generation of
detergents is improving the world one
wash at a time And keeping your T-shirts
looking newer for longer
Trang 20
ANALYSIS NORTH KOREA
Ready for launch?
How much should we worry about Kim Jong-un’s nuclear plans and what can we do to stop them, asks Debora MacKenzie
IT HAS been a record year for
North Korea’s nuclear ambitions
The secretive nation tested its
fifth nuclear device last month,
the second test this year and the largest so far Remote monitoring
put the underground explosion at
10 to 15 kilotons, about the size of
the Hiroshima bomb Days later, it conducted its biggest-ever test ofa
long-range rocket booster
“The threat has now reached
adimension altogether different from what has transpired until
now,” Japanese prime minister
Shinzo Abe told the UN after the
nuclear test “We must thwart
North Korea’s plans.”
But how? The North has several
times agreed to limit its nuclear
plans in return for aid or security
guarantees, but these deals have
always fallen apart Now the fear is it won't give up its nukes- unless
it collapses, which could be worse
Before Kim Jong-un became
leader in 2011, the nation’s nuclear
threat seemed constrained “It
had limited fissile materials and nuclear tests,” says Siegfried
Hecker at Stanford University in
California, and no way to launch Kim accelerated development
(see timeline, below) and the
country now claims it can fit nuclear warheads on missiles
North Korea's nuclear path
“Tt is very likely that North
Korea has a nuclear weapon that
could hit South Korea or Japan,”
says Joe Cirincione of the
Ploughshares Foundation, a US
think tank It may soon even be able to hit the continental US,
making North Korea a top priority
for the incoming US president How can we tell the North’s true capabilities, given its secrecy?
“Itis very likely that
North Korea has a nuclear weapon that could hit
South Korea or Japan”
While seismographs record the explosive power of a bomb, there is no way to confirm its physical
size, but we do have clues
First, we can look to history
The nation is at a significant point inits nuclear development, says Jeffrey Lewis at the Middlebury
Institute of International Studies
in Monterey, California The US,
UK, China, Russia and France had all shrunk their warheads by their fifth tests North Korea should have made similar progress
The nuclear material used
can also hint at its size Outside
observers think the last two tests
were fission bombs boosted by hydrogen isotopes These release
neutrons ina thermonuclear reaction that produces more explosive force per kilogram of
fissile material, usually enriched
uranium or plutonium Satellite
images confirm that a plant
visited in earlier inspections,
which could be used to make the
required isotopes, is now finished The North’s early tests released radioisotopes that could be
detected remotely These showed
they were plutonium devices
Hecker, who has visited North
Korea’s main nuclear facility in Yongbyon, says it probably has enough plutonium for six to eight bombs and produces another
bomb’s worth per year
North Korea also has uranium Based on satellite images anda 2010 visit to its enrichment plant,
Hecker calculates that it has
400 kilograms of highly enriched
uranium (HEU), 16 bombs’ worth,
and can add six bombs per year
Smaller warheads
The recent underground tests
vented no material, so we don’t
know what the devices were made
of But descriptions of a warhead released by the country in March suggest it is using nested shells of plutonium, HEU and hydrogen
The nation’s nuclear programme has developed over the past three decades, but has recently accelerated to make 2016 a record year
JEON HEON-KYUN/ EPA/CAMERA PRESS -
isotopes, says Lewis “Britain used just such a design in its fifth
nuclear test,” he says
This design allows for smaller
warheads, and hence more of
them David Albright at the
Institute for Science and International Security in
Washington DC calculates that
Kim now has 12 to 20 nuclear
weapons at his disposal By 2020,
North Korea could have 50 to 100,
he says, and could field acrude
thermonuclear weapon witha
yield approaching 100 kilotons
Who could it target? This year saw tests of conventional missiles
launched from land and
submarine that reached Japanese
Nuclearfacility| Agreed Framework Leaves Nuclear UN Security Council imposes limited UN Security Council built at Yongbyon signed with US| Non-Proliferation Treaty sanctions, Taks resumewith US and others, expands sanctions
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Failed Failed Failed 2 Failed 10-15 kt Success
© Known missile tests (incomplete)
@ Nuclear tests (kilotons)
© Satellite launch
18 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
US relations break down Ejects|
inspectors and resumes plutonium production|
Talks cancelled when US president George W Bush
Trang 21s=—===——— ———=—— = -——-— — -— -—— —— —— -=—-——— -——
For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
waters -—and could fly further These short-range missiles could
carry warheads that weigh
between 700 kilograms anda ton
To hit the US, it needs a lighter
warhead, a way to slow it down
in flight and heat shields for re- entry Photos released by North
Korea in March showed tests of a
heat shield and in April it showed
off a stationary test of the KN-08,
acopy of a Soviet intercontinental
ballistic missile (ICBM) This
could launch a 500 kg warhead
as far as Washington DC, says John Schilling of Aerospace
Corporation in California Flight tests might be only a year away
But North Korea is unlikely to
nuke the US, given the chances ofa
devastating response Lewis says it only wants ICBMs to deter the US
from striking first, as the mobile
KN-08 would survive to retaliate
The North is more likely to aim shorter-range weapons at the
ports and airports needed to bring in US troops to defend South
Korea, he says: “The goal for the
leadership is survival, and if
troops move in they have nothing
to lose.” South Korea has missile
defence, but it is only partial
Stop the bomb
How do we stop all this? “There
must be talks,” says Joel Wit at
Columbia University in New York
“They may not work, but what we
have now is guaranteed to fail.”
Talks almost worked before
“There have been several efforts
that have successfully delayed
North Korea’s nuclear progress,”
says Albright “But they
MISSILE TO THE MOON
North Korea's declaration in August
that it intends to putits flag on the
moon was greeted with derision
Experts say their rocket could get
there, buta lander is beyond their
current technology
Still, the nation looks determined,
attempting satellite launches despite
accusations that they are a front for
missile development
Are they? Every nation witha space programme once used
launchers that doubled as missiles,
and China still does, says John
Schilling of Aerospace Corporation
in California He thinks North Korea's
space programme taught it about the multi-stage rockets it needs for
long-range nuclear weapons
ultimately failed.”
In 1994, North Korea and the US
signed the Agreed Framework The North pledged to give up its
spent fuel, accept inspectors and
stop plutonium production in
return for nuclear power plants that make less plutonium The US promised no nuclear strikes and to phase out sanctions
“It’s the best deal we could have
gotten, and we lost it,” says Lewis, as George W Bush took a tougher
enforcement of sanctions is
crucial — and it is unlikely to hurt
North Korea enough to force concessions, for fear the regime might collapse
“Beijing doesn’t like a nuclear
North Korea on its border,” says
Lewis “But it certainly doesn’t
want a collapsed nuclear state.”
So what can be done? It might
help if Pyongyang felt less
threatened, an approach that line Sanctions remained, thenew “There must be talks power plants were delayed, and in
2002 the US accused North Korea
of secretly enriching uranium
The year after, North Korea left the agreement, and the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty
Since then talks have repeatedly restarted only to be scuppered by the North’s reactions to perceived aggression, including satellite launches condemned by the UN
as banned missile tests (see “Missile to the moon’, below)
Now the US will talk only if North Korea agrees to freeze its programme The North refuses
That leaves just trade sanctions
to put pressure on the nation
Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton want to tighten these But nearly all North Korea’s foreign
business goes via China, whose
But now, he says, space and
missile development have parted
ways North Korea’s Unha-3 launcher
has upper stages with small engines
perfect for putting a satellite in orbit,
but too weak for an intercontinental
ballistic missile (ICBM)
COVERT OPS
Yet the North’s space ambitions can
also further its military ones To make
anuclear ICBM, the country needs a
heat shield to protect the warhead on
re-entry They could test one
covertly, suggests Schilling, by flying
itona “satellite” which falls to Earth
We could soon see North Korea
just tested a larger booster engine
that may launch later this year
They may not work, but what we have now
guaranteed to fail
helped South Africa give up its
nukes in 1989 Last month, North
Korea’s foreign minister Ri Yong Ho said they had “no other choice
but to go nuclear”, given annual
US and South Korean military exercises “aimed at the
occupation of Pyongyang” It’s not just paranoia South
Korea uses a mock-up of Kim Jong- un’s palace for target practice,
and the US has flown a nuclear- capable bomber near its border
Confronting North Korea in this way is more likely to make
aconflict go nuclear, says Van
Jackson at the Asia Pacific Centre
for Security Studies in Honolulu
Instead, the US and others should
de-emphasise nukes in their deterrence, giving North Korea’s leadership greater security
That will be impossible if South
Korea or Japan get their own
nuclear weapons Domestic pressure to do that is growing, and Trump backs a nuclear Japan Philip Jun of the Ploughshares Foundation fears that a military miscalculation—say a North Korean missile test wildly off course—could make the heavily
armed peninsula explode
Despite their spotted history,
talks seem the only option “No
country has ever been coerced
into giving up nuclear weapons,
but many have been convinced
to,” says Cirincione None of them,
however, were rogue states that already had nukes &
Trang 22
COMMENT
Going out on a limb
When It comes to a Brexit deal, the science of strategic thinking suggests delay Is the UK's strongest hand, says Petros Sekeris
PRIME Minister Theresa May has said she will trigger Article 50 of the European Constitution by
next April to begin the UK’s exit
from the European Union This will set a two-year clock ticking for talks to finalise withdrawal
Has she made the right decision? While we can try to
answer that in many ways, game theory is science’s best bet This
mathematical construction of behaviour tries to predict how opposing sides in strategic
settings will act to maximise the chance of achieving their goals
It relies on three key inputs:
who's playing, their goals and
when decisions can be made As far as the who goes, this is not just about the UK interacting with a single European block Instead, politicians from all 28 EU nations are motivated by domestic concerns UK elections are due in May 2020 Across the
_ ¬wW w ban’ 2 ' tỳ i> = | We £ x72, xwắ “2D, TTT GALA me NSN Nà |
English Channel, 27 governments will influence talks to varying degrees, but France and Germany are the dominant powers
The UK has conflicting goals: restricting movement of people while keeping trade open The Brexit campaign’s immigration
focus means May’s mission is to
get a face-saving agreement on this while keeping trade tariff- free The votes of Bremainers may be vital for her re-election hopes in 2020, many working in sectors at risk if trade barriers go up
For the EU, free trade without
freedom of movement has been a
red line, and it also wants to deter
more nations from quitting by
ensuring an economic cost to
Brexit Plug these factors into the equation and it looks like an insoluble stand-off
What about the when factor? Game theorists have long known delaying tactics can be potent in
Sting in the tail
If insects have feelings, do we need more humane fly spray, wonders Peter Singer
YOU might want to think twice next time you reach for the fly spray A willingness to draw parallels between mammals and insects is raising significant ethical questions about how we ought totreat them
In May, researchers in Sydney, Australia, suggested that the main part of the insect nervous system
20 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
works ina similar way toa
mammal’s midbrain, and might provide the capacity for the most
basic form of consciousness,
subjective experience
Now a group in London says
that bumblebees appear to show
“positive emotion-like states”
(see page 9) Their study cites other papers from the past five
years that indicate a growing acceptance that invertebrates
may show basic forms of emotion This is not so surprising, given
evidence of intelligence in
cephalopods such as the octopus
But to grant insects emotions
opens a whole new can of worms The authors say that emotional states in bees are not necessarily
conscious, but could be In ethical terms, consciousness —and hence
the capacity to suffer—is crucial Rules to protect lab animals are “If insects share the
capacity for suffering, they
too should be covered by lab animal regulations”
typically limited to vertebrates because there is little doubt that they can suffer In the UK, the
common octopus won protection
in 1993, and later the EU included
all cephalopods If insects, or at
least some, share a capacity for suffering, that would mean they
too should be covered
This would raise questions
about the ethics of bee research In one experiment, “aversive stimuli”
were used: bees were temporarily
trapped in a device to mimic
being caught by a spider If bees
are capable of feeling fear, then presumably this was distressing —
in which case, was the finding
Trang 23
For more opinion ai
the right circumstances, and everything suggests that this is
the right approach here Invoking
Article 50 immediately would
have put the UK ina weak
position, because Europe needs to be tough in the face of the threat of rising right-wing extremism
So whenis the optimum date
to trigger Article 50? In mid-2019,
EU parliamentary elections will
take place and EU budgets will
be decided by the Commission
While in the EU, the UK has a veto
over the budget, and 10 per cent of the European Parliament’s MEPs
Still being “in” Europe then would
win the UK added leverage There is also the chance that
positions in France and Germany will soften after elections —in
spring and early autumn 2017 — as the need to impress voters who want to see Brexit punished fades
Invoking Article 50 should
ideally be done no earlier than
May 2017 to retain influence in EU
elections and budget-setting and to be close enough to German and French elections to minimise
their influence
Will declaring Article 50 sooner,
as Theresa May pledged, hit hopes of an optimal UK deal? All will be
revealed by spring 2019 #
BLOOMBERG
VIA
GETTY
IMAGES
Petros Sekeris is a game theorist at Montpellier Business School, France
But if bees do have this type of
consciousness, that might not mean that all insects do We may
hope that mosquitoes, flies and
ants don’t, so we can get rid of them without worrying about
inflicting pain
And being capable of suffering would not grant insects a right to
life What it would mean is that we
should reconsider how we stop them biting us or contaminating food, so we minimise any pain we
may cause Bi
Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at
Princeton University Ethics in the Real World, a selection of his essays, is out
now (Princeton University Press)
.com/opinion
SpaceX Mars plan is
clever but unconvincing
Lisa Grossman
ELON MUSK has unveiled a spectacular
plan to send humans to Mars, but! am
not convinced he can really pull it off Last week at the International
Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara,
Mexico, the SpaceX founder laid out
his vision for building the largest
rocket ever, to launch a100-person, spaceship on an 80-day trip to Mars
Once at the Red Planet, the
spaceship will land on its feet using
retro-rockets, and the astronauts will
emerge on to a cold, dusty world
Meanwhile, the spaceship will make its own methane fuel for a return
journey to pick up more settlers Musk
also plans to send supplies to Mars
every two years, starting in 2018
Much of this strikes me as clever
and innovative, but it may not be
enough Musk wants to send the first humans in roughly 2024, although he
was “intentionally a bit fuzzy about
this timeline” That only gives Spacex three chances to launch enough kit
This is where the plan breaks down, Musk seems to think his job stops once people reach Mars, and that keeping
them alive is someone else's problem
His only mention of growing food
on Mars assumed that we had already terraformed the planet He was vague on how the settlers would generate energy He said nothing about Martian dust, which covers solar panels and
could harm astronauts
When asked about health risks in
transit, Musk suggested they would be
minor That runs counter to data from
the Curiosity rover, which found that around trip to Mars would expose
astronauts to seven times the
radiation dose they would get during
six months on the International Space
Station - well over NASA's safety limits
“Spend your life savings on
a one-way cruise, followed
by a lifetime of physical labour? Sign me up”
It may be that none of these issues are showstoppers for SpaceX But equally they seem not to be the first problems on Musk’s list And that's odd,
considering his Mars colony is meant
to be humanity's back-up plan "The thing that Mars really
represents is life insurance, ensuring
that the light of consciousness is not
Musk’s mission improbable
extinguished, backing up the
biosphere," he said, “It’s not about everybody moving to Mars, it’s about becoming multiplanetary.”
Sowho will found this brave new world? The rich Musk hopes to get the cost of a ticket to Mars down to around
$200,000 and described the trip as a
luxury cruise, with restaurants, movies and zero-G games
But life on the Red Planet will be
much less cushy: “Mars will have a
labour shortage for along time so jobs will not be in short supply,” he said
So, you spend your life savings on a one-way Musk cruise, followed by a
lifetime of physical labour ona cold,
airless desert? Sign me up
That's not Musk's vision, of course SpaceX's video of the plan ends with
Mars quickly growing more blue and
lush, as if by magic But if we are going
to assume future magical terraforming
powers, | would rather we apply them
to the one planet we can already live
on, and keep Earth habitable,
And who will pay for all of this?
Musk said the initial mission will cost around $10 billion, and wants backers
fora public-private partnership
Still, even talking about sending
humans to Mars in a semi-realistic way
is thrilling Musk is highly driven and
while vague, his plan is not impossible I doubt he will keep to that
2024 timeline, though Musk himself admits that staying on schedule is
not his forte Even his talk started half an hour late
Trang 24
TECHNOLOGY
[t's just Common sense
To build a truly adaptable artificial intelligence, we first need to let it know how our world works, says Sally Adee
PONG isa gloriously simple video
game: youcontrol one paddle,
aiming to bounce the ball past your opponent’s paddle Artificial intelligence has learned to play it so well that it can easily beat human players But try to get the
same AI to play Breakout, a very similar paddle-based game, and it is utterly stumped It can’t reuse what it has learned about paddles and balls from Pong, and has to
learn to play from scratch This problem dogs modern artificial intelligence Computers
can learn without our guidance,
but the knowledge they acquire is
“A computer is like a child
who learns to drink froma
bottle but cannot imagine how to drink froma cup”
meaningless beyond the problem
they are set They are like a child
who, having learned to drink from
a bottle, cannot even begin to
imagine how to drink froma cup At Imperial College London,
Murray Shanahan and colleagues
are working on a way around this problem using an old,
unfashionable technique called symbolic Al “Basically this meant an engineer labelled everything
for the AI,” says Shanahan His
idea is to combine this with modern machine learning
Symbolic Al never took off,
because manually describing everything quickly proved
overwhelming Modern AT has
overcome that problem by using
neural networks, which learn their
own representations of the world around them “They decide what
is salient,” says Marta Garnelo,
also at Imperial College
Neural networks have delivered
22 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
the big Al advances of recent
times, but the representations they use are incomprehensible to
humans and can’t be transferred
to other neural nets So for each
fresh task, neural networks must
build new ones They learn slowly,
relying on big data to chew on and plenty of processing power
Shanahan’s work aims to tie
symbolic AI to the autonomous
learning of neural networks,
allowing some knowledge to
transfer between tasks The
prize is learning that is quick and requires less data about the world As Andrej Karpathy, a machine learning researcher with the firm Open Al, put it ina recent blog
post: “I don’t have to actually
experience crashing my car into
awalla few hundred times before Islowly start avoiding to do so.”
Symbolic Alalso helps us
understand how machines make
decisions, something we often
can’t do “Neural networks don’t
convert the reality around them into the kinds of symbols that we use,” says Joanna Bryson, an Al researcher at the University of
CONVERSATIONAL SKILLS
You'd be forgiven for thinking
computers have language all figured
out Google can translate between
tens of tongues, and natural language
processing lets us speak to software
agents like Siriand Amazon's Alexa Butas Siri’s many noted missteps
attest, a computer really has no idea
what you're talking about It breaks
your speech down, gloms on to
keywords and makes a good guess
at what you're asking
For a machine to carry on a real conversation, it must understand
Bath, UK By “symbols”, Bryson and other AI researchers mean
any kind of reusable concepts or
labels, such as words or phrases Shanahan and Garnelo’s hybrid architecture retains neural
networks’ ability to interpret the world independently However,
the researchers combine that
with some basic assumptions that reflect the way we understand the
world: things don’t usually wink
out of existence for no reason;
objects tend to have certain
attributes like colour and shape
This allows the hybrid to build
rudimentary common sense “Our little system very quickly learns a
set of rules,” says Shanahan These
let it handle unseen situations that are beyond a purely neural- network-based system
The team tested the hybrid’s
abilities ona simple board game Amix between tic-tac-toe and
Pacman, it features a cursor
moving around a board littered with noughts and crosses Hitting aOorx scores or loses a point
respectively Crucially, the distribution of the symbols is
what you're telling it That's amuch
higher-order problem, says Joanna
Bryson at the University of Bath, UK,
requiring an ability to understand
symbols and meanings
The power to fluidly describe,
understand and interact with the
world would bring us close to
artificial general intelligence,
something broadly acknowledged
tobe a distant prospect Hybrid
systems like the one being developed at Imperial College London may point
toa way forward (see main story)
SH/AIUEO/DE
đifferent every time, and the
hybrid AI had to work out what
actions were associated with
reward “IfI go get that o, that’s
good If! go get that x, it’s bad,”
says Shanahan
When pitted against “Deep Q-Network” (DQN), an algorithm, created by Google's subsidiary DeepMind, the AI did extremely well, beating its score on randomly generated boards that neither
architecture had seen before
(arxiv.org/abs/1609.05518)
Crucially, the hybrid was able
to transfer what it had learned
across games After 1000 training
sessions, DQN managed a positive score on half of its games But it took the hybrid only 200 sessions to arrive at a strategy that earned a positive score on 70 per cent of its games Shanahan puts it down to it being able to port a rudimentary
strategy across different games
Trang 25
For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology
Mobile 3D printer lets you make on the go
too much,” says Shanahan “It is
just a prototype The game is simple, and the hybrid beat an old version of DON.”
Still, the implications of
transferable learning are fairly significant “Being able to pick up regularities at different levels isan important component of human-
like intelligence,” says Bryson
This kind of hybrid learning is important for robotics Powerful learning that involves many layers
of neural networks is hard to apply
there because of the volume of data needed, says Coline Devin,
acomputer scientist at the
University of California, Berkeley Devin sees hybrid architectures as having a particular advantage
for driverless cars “They could use
deep learning to process camera images,” she says, while accessing a library of preset rules—like
stopping at red lights and carrying
on when they are green - which
PSs FH FS 00)
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It's good to learn on the job
wouldn’t need to be learned In driverless cars, the symbol- based transparency of sucha hybrid is also crucial “Symbols area really important aspect of how we explain ourselves and
communicate with other people,”
says Bryson Coming legislation in Germany will require algorithms to explain decisions they take in driverless cars By 2018, European Union citizens may have the right to ask any automated system to
account for its decisions
However, the most startling
consequence of a workable hybrid
architecture, Bryson points out, is
that it could enable machines to convert their representations into reusable symbols — analogous
to language or words (see
“Conversational skills”, opposite) “This experiment barely
scratches the surface of what we believe is possible with this
architecture,” Shanahan says & CHRISTOPHER
/ ALAMY
STOCK
PHOTO
YOU know the feeling: you look
around and the one thing you urgently
need seems to have vanished Maybe
it’s akey, or an earring back, ora
specific spanner
Whatever itis, a new project aims
to help With a mobile app anda
pocket-sized 3D printer, this personal
fabrication kit lets you quickly print
what you need on the go
For several years, 3D printing has
been heralded as the next big thing in manufacturing But Thijs Roumen,
a graduate student at the Hasso
Plattner Institute in Potsdam,
Germany, wondered why it has
yet to catch on for individuals
He likens his vision for 3D printing ‘to the rise of personal computing,
where computers evolved from
enormous machines into easy-to-use
handheld devices
“We were curious why 3D printing
never really made that transition,” he says “What would the real world
look like if we made things on the go,
rather than in a controlled office environment?”
First, Roumen and his colleagues
crowdsourced alist of objects people
wanted to be able to make when they were out and about, such as
akarabiner to fix a broken strap or
earplugs if someone were snoring
beside them on the bus Then the
team built prototype mobile printers
that could make these objects
The most successful was a
modified extruder pen, a kind of
handheld printer that spits outa
stream of plastic An app lets you look
up the object you want to make, then
shows the pattern you need to trace
on top of your phone screen to create
it In tests, the team printed a button fora shirt as well as a hex key to fit a
loose bolt ona bike accessory
The project will be presented at
the User Interface Software and
“This approach, where the
human and the machine
both do some stuff,
can get a better result”
Technology Symposium this month
in Tokyo, Japan
“I like this idea of moving entirely
from the mechanised and automatic
3D printer to using a pen,” says Daniel
Ashbrook at Rochester Institute of
Technology in New York The machine
can balance human imprecision, while
our motor skills offset the machine's
slow speed, he says
“This kind of hybrid approach,
where the human is doing some stuff
and the machine is doing some stuff,
can get a better result - especially
when you're not trying to be perfect,
you're just trying to get something
done.” Aviva Rutkin mi
Parts when you really need them
Trang 26TECHNOLOGY
Plastic flower blossoms
Material morphs to its own beat, finds Sandrine Ceurstemont
IT’S blooming marvellous An
artificial flower can blossom when
you want, thanks to petals made out ofa material that contains its own version of a biological clock
“Nobody has ever done this before,” says Sergei Sheiko at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Morphing materials are
interesting because they allow objects to change shape, and thus function They have been mooted as a way to create medical implants that are folded up for insertion into the body then change shape once inside But they typically need a trigger to
start the process, like a change in
light levels, temperature or pH
“In certain situations, like
inside your body or in space,
external triggers are not
‘SHEIKO ET AL, NATURE COMMUNICATIONS 24|NewScientist | 8 October 2016
permissible or are ineffective,”
says Sheiko “You simply want an object to change shape at a
given moment.”
So Sheiko and his colleagues have created a type of putty with an internal clock that allows it to transform over time They made the flower out of individually
“Morphing materials could
be used to create medical implants that change
shape inside the body” programmed petals to
demonstrate the concept,
alongside a box that opened on
one side at a scheduled time
“Tt has great potential fora range of applications, especially in biomedical engineering,” says Michael Kessler at Washington
Let's do the time warpagain
State University in Pullman,
who also develops transformable materials
To create the material, Sheiko’s
team tweaked the molecular
structure of a conventional soft
polymer A small proportion of
links between molecules ina
polymer are permanent, allowing
the material to act like a spring,
snapping back to its original form
when stretched and released,
like a piece of rubber
But most of the bonds are shape-shifting, breaking and rearranging themselves over
time It’s these that the team
targeted: modifying the rate of shape-shifting let them control how the material changes over the
course of several hours (Nature
Communications, doi.org/bq8k)
“Most bonds snap ina split
second, so our goal was to extend their lifetime,” says Sheiko
Although the material can morph without an external trigger, the team found that tweaking pH and temperature gave them additional control to speed up or slow down the transformation
Designing complex shapes proved difficult, so the team broke intricate designs into
building blocks that could each
be programmed to change at different times
Programming the material
to change at a constant rate was
easy But the team struggled to introduce a dormant period orto accelerate change at certain times Their best solution was to give
an object an extra water-soluble
“skin” By tweaking its thickness
based on the desired time delay,
an additional clock could be
added to the system when it
was dropped into water
“We plan to explore this
further,” says Sheiko &
ONE PER CENT
See dog-bot bounce
Fancyarobotpet? Minitaur,the orate tReet) chain-linkfences, cross obstacle- strewnterrain and evenreach uptoopendoors.Made by Philadelphia-based start-up Ghost Robotics, its motors act Ee pee eeu ER ai system soMinitaur is bouncy, althoughitslegsare rigid The
currentversionweighs6kilograms andhasamaximum speedof
2metresasecond,
TheDutchresortofKijkduin makesits position clearasittakes the creators
of Pokemon Gotocourtinan attempt
tokeepPokemonplayersoff P0 4c o5
Electrictongue
Move over somrmeliers An
electronic tongue hasbeen
developed that can determine
'the age,†ype and quality of wine Made by Xavier Ceto and
colleaguesatthe University of
South Australia, the device measures the electrochemical
signalsofcompounds presentin
awine, thenconverts them intoa
unique fingerprintfor each The goalisto use the device to test
the quality of wineson an industrialscale
GHOST
Trang 27NEW : SCIENTIST » ^MEUHANGERS Ms IN ASSOCIATION WITH ae RE:WOR a RHNVENTING ENERGY SUMMIT 25 NOVEMBER 2016, LONDON xa
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Join industry experts at this one-day summit to learn about the rapidly advancing technologies impacting renewable energy, how you can save money, invest wisely and position your business as an industry-leader Programme includes:
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Trang 28APERTURE
Trang 29
ase
Beautiful sludge
SINUOUSred streams of aluminium-processing
'waste and bright green vegetation light up this
aerialview ofanindustrial reservoir onthe lower Mississippi river,about50 kilometres south of
Baton Rouge Atfirst glance, the vivid colours suggest beauty, butthe image is meantto cause alarm, says photographerJ Henry Fair
Producing aluminiumfrom bauxite ore
generates a toxic sludge called “red mud” thatis visible around the edges of the football-field- Sized area pictured here Whenasimilar reservoir containing the substance burstin Hungaryin 2010,four people were killed and there was catastrophic ecological damage
Fair wantsto getusto thinkaboutwhatwe chooseto buy and throw away, as wellasthe environmental impact of something as simple as ailing to recycle an aluminium can
MU 1U (CO TC (0.220 things to people in a way that makes them
question, and hopefully think about, the impact,”
ee
The photograph below is another birds-eye view, this time of afield in Germany The shadowsr cast by surrounding trees have stopped some of 'the rapeseed plantsfrom flowering
'Both images are part of a series taken over 15
yearsfroma small plane and collected in the book
Industrial Scars, published by Papadakis this
Trang 30
ˆCOVERSTORY
Going clean
Crack a simple chemical reaction and we don't
have to kick our addiction to fossil fuels,
seabirds writhing in liquorice gloop: there’s no denying fossil fuels have an
image problem That’s before we even start
to factor in the grave risk continuing to burn
them poses to Earth’s climate But what’s the
alternative? Nuclear is expensive, renewables are unreliable, and we are along way from making batteries that could power our fuel-
hungry lifestyles Realistically, we are going
to be reliant on fossil fuels for a while yet What we need is a way to exploit them
without emitting any planet-warming carbon dioxide Alberto Abanades thinks he has the answer He isn’t a PR man for the fossil fuel industry, and nor does he have anything to do with various schemes to capture and bury carbon emissions after the event He and his research team think they have cracked the problem using chemistry alone By simply changing the way we liberate the energy
trapped inside natural gas molecules, we can
have all the benefits of fossil fuels— and none of the guilt Too good to be true?
It’s easy to see why we love fossil fuels Fora start, they are cheap and abundant
Discoveries of new resources and extraction
techniques such as fracking mean reports of “peak oil” always seem exaggerated They are reliable, too— you can shovel coal or pipe gas into a power station when the sky is cloudy or the wind’s not blowing And they can be
: portable ~ simply fill a car tank with petrol
= and you are good to go
S CARRED landscapes, billowing smoke,
28 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
says Jon Cartwright
We have tried to kick our fossil addiction
before During the oil crisis of the 1970s, all
the talk was of hydrogen The gas ticks a lot of
boxes as a fuel: it is non-toxic and the most
abundant element in the universe It is clean,
burning in air to create water vapour that
falls harmlessly back to Earth as rain It is
energy-dense—you could drive the 600-odd kilometres from London to Edinburgh, or
San Francisco to Los Angeles ona single tank
And it can be burned in power plants, even competing cost-wise with fossil fuels once
carbon taxes are taken into account
“It’s easy to see why we love fossil fuels - they’re cheap, abundant and reliable”
In practice, things aren’t so simple Being light and tiny, hydrogen has an annoying
ability to wiggle through any material
designed to contain it Like petrol, it is
flammable, yet burns witha near-invisible flame Above all, it isn’t abundant where and
how we want it
On Earth, hydrogen isn’t a free agent It is only found bound up in compounds such as water Pure hydrogen can be generated by
splitting water molecules using electrolysis,
but that takes a lot of energy Or youcan
extract hydrogen from coal or natural gas by
heating them with steam, but that generates
copious amounts of carbon dioxide
So it came as little surprise when, in 2009,
then US energy secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel prizewinning physicist, ditched funding for research into hydrogen-powered vehicles Last year, Elon Musk, CEO of electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla, summed up many
sceptical opinions when he labelled hydrogen
an “incredibly dumb” alternative fuel
Perhaps, though, we haven't been thinking
about it in the right way Natural gas is
essentially methane, a molecule of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms Rather than reacting natural gas with steam to liberate the hydrogen, Abanades, who is now at the
Technical University of Madrid, and his
team developed a deceptively simple plan
You “crack” the methane into its constituent
atoms — pure, clean hydrogen, plus inert
atomic carbon, or soot
If it were that simple, it would already have been done Breaking carbon-hydrogen bonds takes a lot of energy They only start to crack spontaneously at temperatures above 550°C
orso; normally, temperatures over 800°C are
needed But there is a bigger problem: the soot This scuppered an early attempt to make methane cracking industrially viable: it coated the nickel-iron-cobalt catalyst used by chemists at the petroleum company Universal
Oil Products to improve the reaction rate at
lower temperatures Their solution was to burn off the carbon- making carbon dioxide
It’s been the same lament with methane
Trang 32BOOZE CRUISE
Itis inherently difficult to
compress flighty hydrogen
gas into a fuel tank The
problem evaporates if you
first convertit into a liquid
alcohol, such as methanol
Aside from being easy to
store, methanol can be used
in regular internal combustion
engines - where itcan even
perform better than petrol
Compared with methane,
methanol contains just an
extra oxygen atom, butitis
gas Itis much easier to
create by combining hydrogen
with carbon dioxide The
combustion of methanol in
anengine releases carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere,
but if you use atmospheric
carbon dioxide in the first
place, the overall process is
carbon-neutral Eric Croiset
at the University of Waterloo in Canada is hoping to work witha company to builda
proto-plant that generates
There are other options In
2014, scientists at the Swiss
Federal Institute of
Technology in Lausanne
reported a straightforward process for converting
hydrogen into formic acid that
can be fed into fuel cells, the
battery-like power systems
that drive hydrogen vehicles
The process is also reversible,
so formic acid could be an
alternative way to squirrel
away hydrogen when regular
trickyto make from natural methanolinthisway
the whole process grinds to a standstill It’s inevitable: the carbon has to go somewhere
Inhis 20 years as an engineer, Abanades has worked on various types of energy generation, including nuclear and solar His old group
leader, Carlo Rubbia, first put him on to
methane cracking in 2008 Rubbia had shared the Nobel prize for physics in 1984 for his part
in finding the particles that govern nuclear
decay, but, in his late seventies, he had long since turned his focus to energy innovation “Professor Rubbia has always said to me, don’t
do what others do,” says Abanades
Bubble bath
Trawling back through the literature, they soon found something someone hadn't done
Back in 1999, Meyer Steinberg, a chemical
engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory
in New York, anda veteran of the Manhattan Project to make a nuclear fission bomb, had
proposed performing methane cracking in
a heat bath made of molten metal The idea,
apparently never acted upon, was that the molten metal would improve heat transfer
and allow the soot to float to the surface,
avoiding clogging
Abanades and Rubbia were then based at the
Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies
in Potsdam, Germany On the other side of
the country, at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, was perhaps the best molten metal laboratory in Europe By 2012 the two
groups were collaborating on a 30-month
fast-track project to see whether they could,
well, crack methane cracking
After two years of trial and error, they had
what they thought was a viable reactor design:
30 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
storage is impractical
avessel about the height and diameter of ahockey stick lined with quartz glass and
stainless steel and filled with molten tin Its
external foil insulation made it look rather
like a domestic hot water tank but it worked:
they bubbled methane in at the bottom
while raising the temperature of the tin
up to1000°C, until hydrogen gas spouted continuously from the top
But the real test was what it looked like
inside After two weeks, Abanades and
colleagues switched off the reactor and
peered in Soot had indeed formed, but it had
all floated neatly to the tin’s surface, where it
could be scraped away like the slag in an ore
refinery “We could even have operated the
reactor for a couple more days,” says Abanades Last year, repeating the experiment at 1200°C,
the team managed to convert nearly 80 per cent of the methane they pumped in into hydrogen (International Journal of Hydrogen
Energy, vol 41, p 8159)
The notion that hydrogen can be
continuously generated from methane,
without directly producing any greenhouse gases, is enough to turn the heads of those in
the field “These are serious people,” says Eric
Croiset, a chemical engineer at the University
of Waterloo in Canada, who performed a
review of the state of methane cracking five years ago “I wouldn’t distrust their results.”
We haven't reached the promised land yet,
though To heat their reactor, Abanades’s team
resorted to electricity from the wall socket — not necessarily the green option A renewable
source of heat, such asa solar concentrator,
might do the trick, says Stéphane Abanades (no relation) at the French solar innovation lab PROMES, although there’s a risk that when
the sun sets or goes behind a cloud, the molten
tin could solidify, damaging the reactor “Supplying solar energy to sucha reactor
may not be an easy task,” he says
Alberto Abanades hopes that a future
reactor could simply burn a little of the
hydrogen it generates, perhaps 15 per cent of the total yield This approach would generate
similar low levels of carbon dioxide as
hydrogen produced by wind-powered
electrolysis of water, but would be cheaper,
more reliable and more scalable, according to
his team’s preliminary analysis, performed in
collaboration with RWTH Aachen University
in Germany
Clean hydrogen
could transform our
energy and crop
Trang 33
That still leaves the question of the soot Scaling up methane cracking to terawatt-scale production —a reasonable extrapolation for
aglobal hydrogen economy — would create a
mountain of soot several cubic kilometres in volume every year That is far less problematic than the carbon dioxide generated by directly
burning fossil fuels, but still not an amount
you can brush under the carpet
“Other bits of the hydrogen
puzzle seem to be coming together too”
Abánades is confident a cheap and
abundant supply of pure black carbon will find its uses, given the element is already in demand for nanotechnology, steel production
and as a filling for car tyres “A new market could be opened up,” he says But first the
carbon produced has to be of a higher quality The methane cracking team believes its
carbon is about 90 per cent pure, and could be improved either by tinkering with the
reactor’s chemistry or by purifying the carbon
further down the line
Isit full steam ahead for the hydrogen economy? Perhaps, especially as other bits of the puzzle seem to be coming together For example, chemists are tinkering with ways to convert hydrogen into fuels that
are easier to handle, suchas methanol
(see “Booze cruise” left) That might sound
convoluted, but Abanades points out that
oil is just as useless when freshly drilled
from the ground “Do we actually use
crude oil? No, we transform it into gasoline
Hydrogen could be similar,” he says
Spurred on by cheaper hydrogen technology
and the current range limitations of batteries,
Toyota, Hyundai and Honda have all recently put cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells back on sale Last year the European Union launched the Hydrogen Mobility Europe project, aiming to create a network of hydrogen refuelling
stations across Europe The UK government
is providing small subsidies for fleets of hydrogen-powered vehicles Croiset believes electric and hydrogen cars could address different markets, perhaps electric for inner city travel and hydrogen for longer distance
commuting “You will buy the vehicle that
suits your needs,” he says
Others are less keen on the incentives that producing hydrogen-based fuels from natural gas create The technology could commit us to
THE REACTION THAT FEEDS THE WORLD
Should the futuristic hydrogen economy
fail to materialise (see main story),
hydrogen from methane cracking has amarket ready and waiting: ammonium
fertiliser The Haber-Bosch process,
which converts hydrogen and nitrogen
into ammonia, generates most of the
ammonium fertiliser used in agriculture
The reaction has been credited with
fuelling the 20th century's population
boom It is so ubiquitous that it is part of
you: over 80 per cent of the nitrogen that
finds its way into the average person's
tissue is thought to be asa result of the
Haber-Bosch process
Currently over 95 per cent of hydrogen
production comes from traditional
fossil-fuelled processes, mostly blasting natural gas with steam In 2007 alone,
the fertiliser industry generated alittle
short of 500 million tonnes of carbon
dioxide, nearly 1 per cent of total global
emissions Re-supplying the Haber-
Bosch process with methane-cracked
hydrogen could drastically shrink
this carbon footprint With the world
population expected to exceed 10 billion
by the end of this century, that would be
a significant step on its own
more fossil-fuel infrastructure in the future,
distracting from efforts to pursue renewable alternatives, warns climate scientist Ilissa
Ocko from the Environmental Defense Fund,
a New York-based non-profit that campaigns
on global warming What’s more, the pipelines used to transport natural gas are known to
leak a considerable amount of methane, a far
more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide “Unless these leaks are plugged,
it’s possible that the warming from leaked
methane will offset the climate benefits from
methane cracking in the near-term,” she says
Abanades agrees that climate impact should be the deciding factor on which technologies
to pursue But in energy innovation, he says, it
is tempting to view those working on different technologies as enemies, and it is easy to
become tarnished by an association with fossil
fuels In the absence of a renewable silver-
bullet, anything that limits the impact of fossil fuels has to be a good thing, he says “Emissions should be stopped now, and that could be done through methane cracking
If they aren’t, when it comes to controlling
global warming, we will be too late.” &
Jon Cartwright is a freelance journalist based in
Bristol, UK
Trang 34
Are we really in the midst of an anxiety epidemic,
asks Linda Geddes
ost of us are familiar with the dry
M mouth, racing heart and knotted
stomach that are the hallmarks of
feeling anxious Usually this isa fleeting
response to danger and uncertainty In some
people, however, the state of high alert won't switch off Their anxiety becomes so draining it is impossible to leave the house or function in daily life
One woman feels agitated and
lightheaded each morning when she wakes She worries about the accidents that might befall her if she travels to work, but also about what would happen if she had nothing
planned for the day Another avoids work,
friends or even walking her dog in case it
triggers another panic attack One man finds it difficult to pick up the phone for fear he will
mash his words and be misunderstood
These are real cases of people who
have sought help for their anxiety Their experiences aren’t unusual, Anxiety
disorders — including generalised anxiety, panic attacks, social anxiety and phobias —
are the most prevalent mental health problem
inthe US and Europe, and a growing number of reports from other regions suggest they
could be a global concern In the West, they
cost healthcare systems more than $40 billion
each year On average 1 in 6 of us will contend with an anxiety disorder at some stage in
our lives— women more than men
The damage is real Anxiety disorders
have been linked to depression and
increased substance abuse, particularly of
alcohol A recent study found that men who
have anxiety disorders are twice as likely to
die from cancer as men who don't, even when
factors such as drinking and smoking are taken into account
So what is the cause of all this anxiety? Is
there more of it about, and what is the best
way to tackle it?
Trang 35AMARA
UST PREVALE PUBIHI |
HOW MUCH ANXIETY IS NORMAL?
Anxiety is a natural response that evolved over millions of years to make us more
vigilant and prime our bodies to flee danger But feeling anxious because you heard a noise
ona dark street isn’t the same thing as having
an anxiety disorder “The key thing we look for in the clinic is whether anxiety is interfering with a person’s day-to-day life, or causing
them a lot of distress,” says Nick Grey of King’s College London
To clinical psychologists like Grey,
“maladaptive beliefs” are a hallmark of anxiety
disorders and are often used to diagnose the type of anxiety someone has In social anxiety disorder, the most common anxiety disorder, you might believe that blushing will result in people laughing at or shunning you People with this type of disorder experience
persistent and overwhelming fear before,
during and after social events
If you have panic disorder, you might assume that you are having a heart attack if your heart starts to race The physical symptoms of
anxiety —a pounding heart, difficulty
breathing, feeling dizzy or flushed — will then
come on inarush Everyone can experience
such panic attacks from time to time, but in panic disorder the attacks are regular and become a source of anxiety themselves
Other maladaptive beliefs are less specific Generalised anxiety disorder is characterised by chronic worrying about a range of different
events or activities, for at least six months If
you have this condition, the belief driving
your anxiety could, for example, be the feeling it's your job to take care of other people, or
that you have responsibilities that you must meet at all cost To decide who to refer for further treatment, doctors might use a tool called the GAD7 test (see “Test your anxiety levels”, page 35)
ARE WE MORE ANXIOUS THAN WE USED TO BE?
The Greek philosopher Cicero was among the
first to define anxiety as an illness, in the 1st
century BC Our current medical definition
dates to 1980, when the American
Psychological Association estimated that between 2 and 4 percent of people inthe US had an anxiety disorder Today, some studies suggest it’s more like 18 per cent in the US and
14 per cent in Europe
Such figures have led some to conclude we are in the midst of an anxiety epidemic, fuelled by factors such as economic anxiety,
social media and the rise of the 24-hour
society The reality is more complex The
apparent increase is probably due to changes
in diagnostics over the years, which make
long-term comparisons difficult “I think we are becoming more stressed and that has to do with having a lot of demands on our time,”
says Jennifer Wild of the Oxford Centre for
Anxiety Disorder and Trauma in the UK “But if you re looking at the prevalence of anxiety disorders, they haven't gone up.”
There is tentative evidence to support this conclusion For instance, Olivia Remes and her colleagues at the University of Cambridge
found little overall change in the number of people around the world affected by anxiety
disorders between 1990 and 2010 Their meta-
analysis, published earlier this year, found that roughly 1in 10 people experience anxiety at any given time, and about 17 per cent are likely to experience it at some stage in their lives
Remes found that adults under the age of 35 were disproportionately affected by
anxiety Similarly, Borwin Bandelow and Sophie Michaelis at the University Medical Centre in Gottingen, Germany, found evidence that the prevalence of most anxiety disorders peaks in 18 to 34-year-olds before dropping off again Specific phobias were the exception, peaking in 35 to sO-year-olds
Even if the overall prevalence of anxiety
disorders hasn't increased, anecdotal evidence
suggests that the type of anxiety people are experiencing is changing When Nicky
Lidbetter, chief executive of Anxiety UK, joined the charity 20 years ago, the majority of queries they received were from people with panic disorder or agoraphobia, an
extreme fear of open spaces “Nowadays it is
health anxiety [hypochondria] and social
anxiety, she says >
Trang 36WHAT CAUSES THE
SYMPTOMS OF ANXIETY?
Although we are still a long way from fully understanding what is going on in ananxious brain, recent studies offer some insights into why anxiety seems to take over in some
people Central to it allis the amygdala,
a brain region that processes our emotions
and triggers the release of the hormones responsible for the fight-or-flight response
The amygdala is linked to parts of the
prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex that process social information and help us make decisions (see diagram, opposite) During bouts of everyday anxiety, this brain circuit switches on and then off again — but Oliver
Robinson at University College London and his colleagues have shown that in people with
anxiety disorders it seems to get stuck in the on position “We think it might be amplifying
negative information in your surroundings
to make sure you pay attention toit, and triggering a fight-or-flight response so you ]Ì
runaway, says Robinson
Studies suggest that fear memories stored inthe amygdala prime us to respond to
threats we have previously experienced This response is normally kept in check bya
parallel circuit: in healthy people, inputs from the prefrontal cortex can temper our learned
response and even overwrite it with new
memories Occasionally the system fails, however Psychiatrists have found that war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder - a kind of anxiety disorder— have abnormally low levels of activity in their prefrontal cortex, and unusually high levels in their amygdala
Ultimately, an overactive amygdala appears to hype up the familiar symptoms of the fight- or-flight response by stimulating a network of hormonal glands and brain regions called the
“HPA axis’ — causing rapid heart rate and
breathing, a dry mouth, shaking and tense muscles The fight-or-flight response also
has less obvious effects, like slowing digestion and making us more susceptible to pain
Understanding these interactions will help design better treatments For instance,
Robinson's circuit switches on when levels of
the neurotransmitter serotonin are low, which
could explain why a class of antidepressants known as SSRIs can reduce anxiety levels: they increase the availability of serotonin inthe brain “Maybe serotonin is applying the brakes
to this particular circuitry,” says Robinson
34 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
ARE SOME PEOPLE NATURALLY MORE ANXIOUS THAN OTHERS?
Do you calmly navigate life’s bumps or
agonise at every turn? Psychologists have long argued that people have innate dispositions
that explain how we act, one of which is
neuroticism — or proneness to anxiety
A recent study of more than 106,000 people identified nine regions of the genome that seem to correlate with neuroticism Some of these contain genes previously linked to
anxious behaviour, such as CRHR1, which
regulates release of the stress hormone cortisol The same gene has also been
associated with anxiety-related behaviour in mice, and panic disorder in humans
Some people are therefore naturally more
prone to anxiety But even if you are a natural-
born neurotic, this doesn’t mean you will develop an anxiety disorder “Having a high level of dispositional anxiety is a risk factor for developing an anxiety disorder, but youcan be
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highly anxious and completely healthy,” says
Marcus Munafo, a behavioural neuroscientist
at the University of Bristol, UK
Your age (see “Are we more anxious
than we used to be”, page 33) and sex are
factors at play Population studies show that women are about twice as likely to develop an anxiety disorder as men In part, this may
be down to hormones and their influence on
the brain The surges in oestrogen and
progesterone that occur during pregnancy, for instance, have been linked to obsessive compulsive disorder, an anxiety-related
condition Remes points out that there may be other explanations too, such as the fact that women tend to cope with stressful situations differently “They worry a lot more about
what's going to happen, which can increase
their anxiety,’ she says “Men tend to take a
more problem-focused approach.”
Trang 37TEST YOUR ANXIETY LEVELS
Doctors use the GAD-7 test to help them decide
whether a persons experiencing pathological
levels of anxiety For each of the questions
here, answer “not at all”, “several days”, “more
than half the days” or “nearly every day”, giving yourself a score of 0, 1, 2, or 3respectively
See * below to interpret your total score
Over the last two weeks, how often have you
been bothered by any of the following problems: Feeling nervous, anxious or on edge?
Not being able to stop or control worrying?
Worrying too much about different things? Trouble relaxing?
hard to sit still? Becoming easily annoyed or irritable?
Feeling afraid as if something awful
might happen?
Being so restless tha
Mmumk
nh
The anxious brain
WHAT'S THE BEST WAY TO
TACKLE AN ANXIETY DISORDER?
Ifyou have an anxiety disorder, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is likely to be the
first recommended treatment Considered the
gold standard in treatment, it aims to address
the maladaptive beliefs that drive your
anxiety Once they have been identified,
CBT helps you challenge them “If someone is
worried about blushing, we might put blusher
all over their face and make them have
conversations with people to see that they
generally don’t even notice,” says Wild “For
panic disorder, you might get someone to run
up and down the stairs, to show them that
even if they do an extreme behaviour, they
aren't going to have a heart attack.”
A shortage of therapists has spurred the
development of online delivery of CBT Ina pilot study of 11 people with social anxiety disorder, Wild found that nine of them responded to
online CBT and seven achieved remission,
The amygdalais responsible for initiating the fight-or-flight response Two circuits feed into it,
one that enhances its activity and one that dampenst In people with anxiety disorders the
normal workings of these circuits are disturbed, and the amygdala is hyperactive PREFRONTAL CORTEX
Centre for rational, logical thought Itis involved in laying down new memories and tempering learned fear responses
PREFRONTAL AND
ANTERIOR CINGULATE CORTEX
Amplifies negative information in your
surroundings and makes you pay
attention to it
AMYGDALA
Emotional memories and our learned reactions to them are stored here When active, it triggers the release of hormones responsible for the fight-or-flight response
@eEnhances anxiety Tempers anxiety
Fight-or-flight response (sweaty palms, racing heart etc)
“SCORING THE GAD-7 TEST
Scores of 5 to 9, 10 to 14, and 15 to 21 indicate mild, moderate and severe anxiety, respectively Doctors recommend further evaluation if your score is 10 or greater This test is best suited to
highlighting generalised anxiety disorder but may also help pick up panic disorder, social
anxiety disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder
although it is too early to say if this is better or worse than face-to-face therapy
Therapy isn’t for everyone, however Some people don’t respond well to therapists or analysing their own behaviour In this case,
asecond line of attack is drugs, which can
redress chemical imbalances in the brain Several studies have shown that people with panic disorder and generalised anxiety disorder tend to have lower levels ofa
neurotransmitter called GABA, which is
thought to help the amygdala filter out unthreatening stimuli Blocking GABA
production in rats has been shown to trigger
anxiety-like symptoms
Benzodiazepines, a class of common
anti-anxiety drugs which includes Valium, work on this system but are highly addictive
Doctors may feel more comfortable
prescribing antidepressants, says Lidbetter
These can help with the physiology of anxiety as well as the secondary symptoms, which often include depression However, Lidbetter
believes that this is a field that needs to move
on “We need a new benzodiazepine-type
drug - something which isn’t addictive,”
she says
Exercise can help with day-to-day
anxiety and is a helpful additional strategy for people with anxiety disorders It triggers the release of mood-boosting endorphins, and forces you to concentrate on something other than your own thoughts Then there’s
diet A team led by Phil Burnet at the
University of Oxford has found that taking a fibre-rich supplement to encourage the
growth of beneficial gut bacteria for three weeks caused people to pay more attention to positive words on a computer screen and less
attention to negative ones Upon waking each
morning, the volunteers also had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood “We sawa small but significant effect on the underlying psychological mechanisms that
contribute to anxiety,” says Burnet
Modern life may be packed with events
outside your control, seemingly designed to foster anxiety and self-doubt The important
thing is to recognise the symptoms and do
something about them &
Linda Geddes is a consultant for New Scientist For links to the studies mentioned, see bitly/NSAnxiety
Trang 38
The birth and death
of a language
Ina dusty village in the Negev desert, linguists are racing to decode a remarkable new lanquage before it vanishes forever Shira Rubin reports
36 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
AST the glimmering industrial
p developments and fast food chains of
the northern Negev desert in Israel, I pull off the dusty highway into the quiet village of
Al-Sayyid A family of 22 awaits me outside their
home, greeting me with sage tea The children introduce me to the family pets: a horse, a brood
of chickens anda camel Meanwhile, the head
of the household, Ishak al-Sayyid, recounts
his family’s history, shifting between Arabic, Hebrew anda language I don’t understand
Ishak’s family have lived here for
generations They are members of the
Al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe, founded 200 years ago by an Egyptian peasant who moved here
after a family feud then married several local women Shaykh al-Sayyid’s children married
among themselves after being rejected as outsiders by neighbouring tribes What they
did not know was that two of them carrieda
Trang 39children were born in the 1930s At first it was
just one family, with four deaf siblings among
many hearing ones But soon other families
started having deaf children too Today the
village has the highest known rate of congenital
deafness in the world Around 150 of 4000
residents were born deaf, 50 times the global
average Three of Ishak’s own children are deaf
Deafness also accounts for what really puts
Al-Sayyid on the map Over the past 75 years, the villagers have created an entirely new
and unique language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin
Sign Language (ABSL) The seeds emerged spontaneously among the first deaf residents
and, three generations later, it has flowered
into a complex language capable of expressing anything a spoken one can
Since its discovery by linguists in 2000, ABSL has captivated researchers driven by
two fundamental questions: how did language
emerge, and what can that tell us about the
nature of the human mind?
More than 15 years and hundreds of hours
of video footage later, those researchers have
documented a remarkable language that casts serious doubts on some long-standing
linguistic theories But even as they decipher
ABSL's secrets, it is in danger of dying out
Forbidden experiment
The origins of language have always fascinated
us Around 3000 years ago, the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus was said to have plucked twin infants from their mother and turned them over to be raised in isolation by ashepherd who was forbidden from speaking in their presence The idea was that whatever words the babies produced would reveal the original, primal form of human language
Linguists refer to this as the “forbidden experiment” Obviously they cannot
replicate it, but sign languages like ABSL
offer something very similar
ABSLis classed as a “village sign”, a type of language that often emerges in isolated
communities with large numbers of deaf
people One of the earliest known arose in the 18th century on Martha’s Vineyard, anisland
off Cape Cod, Massachusetts The language
was widely shared by both deaf and hearing people, but rose and fell without being
formally documented
Today at least 24 village sign languages exist across the globe They usually start life as a
“home sign’ —a set of rudimentary gestures
invented by two or three people in the same household But in the hands of acommunity
of deaf people, they can rapidly evolve into
fully fledged languages, with a rich vocabulary
and formal grammar
This is probably how most of the world’s 140 or so major sign languages started life The beauty of ABSL is that it is emerging
right now, in front of linguists’ eyes “We can literally see it unfold,” says Wendy Sandler at
the University of Haifa, Israel, who launched
the ABSL study
ABSL has other features that make it
especially appealing Unlike other village signs studied so far, it apparently emerged
uninfluenced by the other languages used in
the village today - modern Arabic, the local
Bedouin dialect, Hebrew and Israeli Sign
Salah al-Sayyid tells a story using the
signs “man”, “soldier” and “papers”
Language That makes it possibly the purest
sign language ever recorded ~a pristine
expression of the human instinct to converse
In addition, the deafness gene does not
cause any physical or mental disabilities and deafness is not stigmatised in Al-Sayyid, so
deaf people are fully integrated into society
Both deaf and hearing members of the
community are fluent signers During my
visit, | spoke with a group of boys playing
soccer ona dusty courtyard The hearing kids immediately translated into ABSL so that all could participate in the conversation
ABSL thus offers a unique opportunity to test a theory that has dominated linguistics
since the 1950s Put forth by Noam Chomsky, it
claims that language is an innate and uniquely human trait, programmed into our genes
Children are born with a “language instinct”
that compels them to effortlessly acquire whatever language (or languages) they are
immersed in as toddlers
Chomsky also proposed the idea of a
“universal grammar” shared by all languages
He said that a Martian visitor to Earth would find
that, apart from their mutually unintelligible
vocabularies, “Earthlings speak a single
language.” Thus began the search for deep
structures common to human languages across cultures
That is what makes village signs like
ABSL so fascinating If Chomsky is right,
their spontaneous emergence and evolution
ought to reveal the language instinct at
work, as home signers invent a rudimentary language from scratch and their children
and children’s children convert it into a full- blown language
As predicted, ABSL started to evolve a
grammar in its second generation of signers In 2005 Sandler's team reported that one of
the most important organising principles of
any language - the word order in a sentence—
appeared to be settling on a rule called
subject-object-verb (S-O-V; “Iball kick”)
That was a tantalising result For one
thing, Arabic and Hebrew use a different
word order (S-V-O; “I kick ball”), bolstering
the case for ABSL’s linguistic independence (though Israeli Sign Language uses S-O-V very
occasionally, which muddies the water a bit)
More importantly, S-O-V has an important
place in universal grammar The majority of
the world’s spoken languages use that rule and Chomskyan theory sees it as being the purest
expression of innate grammar
But as the ABSL study has progressed, that early result has not played out as expected
Despite passing through four generations, >
Trang 40ABSLS grammar remains simple,inconsistent
and, at best, a work in progress
When he first began studying ABSL in 2000, Mark Aronoff at Stony Brook University in
New York expected it to support Chomskyan
theory But after watching the language evolve
unpredictably, with vocabulary developing quickly but grammar more slowly and
inconsistently, Aronoff has changed his
mind He now thinks that although we do have an innate capacity for language, it is
not uniquely human but rooted in deeper
biological properties shared across species Another challenge to conventional wisdom
is that despite its simple grammar, ABSL
can still convey complex ideas I witnessed villagers fluently describing their dreams
and ambitions, gossiping about weddings or
births and discussing topics such as national
insurance plans and construction projects
How ABSL achieves this without complex
grammar is largely a mystery
Multiple signs
Another intriguing feature of ABSL is its
sprawling vocabulary As is often the case in emerging languages, signers invent new
signs by combining existing ones “Pray” and
“house” combine to mean “mosque” ; “cold”
and “large rectangle” to mean “refrigerator”
But unexpectedly, these compounds do
not appear to be converging onto agreed
conventions Even common nouns can
have multiple signs, some used by just one household For example, there are
three different signs for “cat” — whiskers,
footprints and the licking of paws
This phenomenon alerted the researchers’ toaneglected factor in sign language
development: social interaction Urban
deaf communities, which tend to be more
segregated from hearing society, often
encounter strangers and need to make
themselves understood The deaf people of
Al-Sayyid, by contrast, all know one another,
so are under less pressure to conventionalise
Allinall, research on ABSL is playing
into an emerging consensus in linguistics —
that Chomskyan theory is a busted flush That view is probably best expressed in
an influential 2009 article “The myth of
language universals”, by Nicholas Evans
at the Australian National University and
Stephen Levinson at the Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics In it they wrote: “The
claims of Universal Grammar are either
empirically false, unfalsifiable, or misleading
in that they refer to tendencies rather than
38 | NewScientist | 8 October 2016
strict universals Structural differences
[between languages] should instead be accepted
for what they are, and integrated into a new approach to language and cognition that
places diversity at centre stage.”
They argued that only once researchers
accepted that diversity, not uniformity, is what
makes language remarkable could they begin
to truly understand how humans process language, and to what extent its emergence
is influenced by a combination of biological
and sociocultural forces (Behavioral and Brain
Unspoken word
The village of Al-Sayyid in Israel is a natural
laboratory for studying the origins of language
WEST BANK Mediterranean = Jerusalem @ ISRAEL IDead K4) GAZA STRIP BeerShevae_ ® AlSayyid JORDAN Sciences, vol 32, p 429)
That is essentially what has happened with
ABSL When researchers stopped focusing on grammatical structures, they were able to see
that while the urge to create the language does
appear to be biological, it is also cultural and social, stemming from the villagers’ heritage,
identity and social conditions
But even as ABSL helps to undermine the dominant linguistic theory of the
2oth century, it is itself being threatened
by forces beyond its control
Unsurprisingly given their fragile
origins and small pool of speakers,
village sign languages are at high risk of extinction — usually at the hands of an education system that teaches the official national sign language
That is increasingly happening in Al-Sayyid In 2004, the village was officially recognised by the Israeli government, granting it the right to municipal services Children were bussed
off to deaf schools in other towns where they
were exposed to Israeli Sign Language, the country’s dominant sign language with an
estimated 10,000 speakers Then, in 2007,
the village launched its own deaf education programme Teachers were brought in from
outside the village, and Israeli Sign Language
was the language of instruction
The effects were soon felt Where the village once boasted a robust signing community, made up of both hearing and deaf people who learned ABSL early in life, today the
hearing and deaf communities are
becoming increasingly estranged