New Scientist - 31 May 2014.bak

PUSHING YOUR BUTTONS
How game designers get you hooked – and keep you hooked
WEEKLY May 31 - June 6, 2014
The trouble with acetaminophen
INDEPENDENCE
Can science help a new nation find its way in the world
WIMPS IN CRISIS
Dark matter hunt
comes to a head
ECO RESURRECTION
Lost sea came back
from the dead – twice
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CONTENTS
Volume 222 No 2971
This issue online
newscientist.com/issue/2971
News
8
WIMPs in crisis
Dark matter hunt
comes to a head
On the cover
34
The problem with
acetaminophen
Has the world’s favorite
drug had its day
Features
38
Pushing your
buttons
How game designers
get you hooked – and
keep you hooked
PATRICK GEORGE NASA
38 Pushing your buttons
Games you can’t put down
12 Independence
Can science help a new
nation find its way
8 WIMPS in crisis
Hunt for dark matter
16 Eco resurrection
Lost sea came back from
the dead – twice
30 Your inner tadpole
Power to grow new limbs
Coming next week…
The memory fix
Wiring your mind to heal itself
Ahead of the radiation curve
The unexpected benefits of nuclear bomb tests
News
6 UPFRONT
Europe swings to the right. Syrian refugees
go home for cancer therapy. RIP UK fracking
16 THIS WEEK
Lost sea came back from the dead – twice.
Origins of gut flora in newborns. Hacked
brain cells soothe seizures
18 IN BRIEF
Dancing bees assess ecosystems. Longer
life for mice that feel less pain. Planet eaters
Four futures for Scotland
12 Oil investment paradise Offshore riches
High-tech hub Rev up the start-ups
Green beacon All-renewable by 2020
Sickest state in Europe If the dream fails
Technology
21 App to stop sexual harassment. Saving lives
in prison. Ethical app. Radar spots pirates.
Curvy gadgets. Health-tracking dog collar
Aperture
26 Twitter user spots galactic coyote
Opinion
28 A no vote for science Michael Brooks on
how UKIP’s win might prove science’s loss
29 One minute with… Robert Schwartz Older
astronauts are go, says Mars One shortlister
30 We can regrow Michael Levin plans to plug
into bioelectric fields to grow new limbs
32 LETTERS Quantum quirks. Robot minds
Features
34 The problem with acetaminophen
(see above left)
38 Pushing your buttons (see left)
42 The secret language The tribe that
doesn’t want to be heard
CultureLab
46 Join it up From climate change to economic
busts, our problems need holistic thinking
47 On hoverflies Knowledge’s gentle pleasures
48 The world, for free How technology creep
is starting to undermine market certainties
Regulars
5 LEADER Don’t let new boundaries
cut off British science
56 FEEDBACK Mammoth politics
57 THE LAST WORD Lemon, and on, and on
50 JOBS & CAREERS
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 3

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Science sans frontières
Don’t let new boundaries cut off UK science
WHEN Louis Pasteur remarked
that science knows no country, he
clearly wasn’t thinking of research
funding. In principle, scientists
don’t pay much attention to the
nationality of their collaborators:
they simply seek out people who
can help advance their studies.
In practice, the choice of research
partners is constrained by
migration policies, funding
regimes and political will. Today,
the potential choices are greater
than ever – which is why it is
frustrating that the constraints
may now be tightened.
Ungainly though it is, the
European Union is on balance
good for science, and particularly
for science in the UK. That is now
threatened by the surge in
support for Eurosceptic parties in
last week’s elections (see page 6).
If the UK Independence Party
(UKIP) gets its way, and the UK
steps away from the European
Union, the country’s researchers
may find themselves cut off from
their former collaborators (see
page 28). There is no sign that
UKIP is bothered about this: it has
failed to respond to New Scientist’s
repeated requests for comment.
That is not the only question
mark over the future of UK
science. In September, the Scots
will vote on whether they want
their country to secede from the
UK. As we report on pages 12-15,
science and technology would
play important parts in shaping
an independent Scotland’s future,
just as they have shaped its
history: think of Alexander
Graham Bell, James Clerk
Maxwell, James Watt and Lord
Kelvin, among others.
But today’s Scottish science is
rarely done by lone geniuses.
“ Ungainly though it is, the
European Union is good for
science, and particularly
for science in the UK”
Rather, it is conducted at worldleading
research institutes, such
as the Roslin Institute, the UK
Astronomy Technology Centre
and the Higgs Centre for
Theoretical Physics, where
researchers from around the
globe can come together to
collaborate. Again, it is unclear
how cross-border access to
funding and facilities will be
arranged if Scotland goes it alone.
This is worth thinking about,
particularly because UK leaders
have recently been vocal in their
support of a resurgence in science
and technology in pursuit of a
Don’t kill the painkiller
WHOEVER first described the UK
and US as two nations divided
by a common language probably
wasn’t thinking about a molecule
called N-acetyl-p-aminophenol.
But there is possibly no better
example of the cultural divide.
Brits call it paracetamol;
Americans call it acetaminophen.
And attitudes towards the
painkiller are equally divergent.
People in the UK are aware that
a paracetamol overdose can kill.
That goes back to 1998, when
the government restricted the
number of tablets that could be
bought in one purchase and ran an
information campaign explaining
the change. The measures prevent
an estimated 1000 deaths a year.
US awareness is much lower.
When investigative journalism
group Propublica revealed last
year that 1500 Americans die
more balanced economy.
Last month, chancellor George
Osborne outlined a plan to
encourage the development of
research clusters – including one
stretching across southern
Scotland – and pledged to invest
£7 billion in science infrastructure
over the next parliamentary term.
This avowed enthusiasm for
science, from so close to the top of
government, is encouraging, even
if the details remain to be
thrashed out and opinions differ
on how big an economic benefit
such a strategy might yield. But if
UK science is to succeed, Osborne,
his colleagues and his successors
must address its international
dimensions too. So far, science
has gone unmentioned in both
the Scottish and European
debates. That needs to change.
Once, nations guarded the
prowess and achievements of their
researchers jealously. But forgoing
narrow definitions of national
interest in favour of collaboration
has proved hugely productive.
It would be a setback if scientists
found themselves facing those
barriers again, when their ideas so
clearly benefit from being taken up
by anyone, anywhere in the world.
As Pasteur also said, knowledge
belongs to humanity. ■
from accidental overdoses
annually, it was big news.
The drug is now facing further
problems over safety and
effectiveness (see page 34), leading
some to call for it to be withdrawn
from over-the-counter sale.
That would be an overreaction.
As the British experience shows,
people can understand and act on
nuanced messages. Paracetamol
doesn’t need to be banned: people
simply need to be made aware of
its limitations and dangers so that
they can make the right call. ■
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 5

UPFRONT
Right-wing Euro win
IT WAS called a “black day for
the UK, for example, only a third of
Europe”, as far-right parties gained the electorate votes in the European
an unprecedented share of the vote elections. “If you get very low
in last week’s European elections. turnouts, it’s much easier for smaller
Right-wing swings are sometimes parties to make an impact,” says
attributed to harsh economic times, Ed Fieldhouse of the University of
but data from 12 European countries Manchester, UK, who directs the
showed that right-wing parties in half British Election Study.
of them were doing worse after the He says that many voters who
2008 economic crisis. This makes the backed the UK Independence Party
suggestion that economic recovery (see page 28) may well return to
may counter the lurch seem less likely. supporting their usual party when the
“There’s definitely a role played by UK holds its national election next
the economy in this, but it’s not the year. However, his latest study
full picture by a long way,” says
showed that 60 per cent of those who
Marley Morris of political research said they intended to vote UKIP in last
consultancy Counterpoint in London. week’s election said they would also
Higher voter turnouts in national vote UKIP in the general election.
compared with European elections Before the corresponding European
could help make the political
elections in 2009, only 25 per cent
landscape less extreme. Typically in said they would do the same.
–French nationalists celebrate–
CHESNOT/GETTY IMAGES
Futile fracking
THE UK’s new oil rush may have
ended before it even began. There
are several billion barrels of shale
oil under south-east England,
according to a recent report, but it
may not be worth drilling for it.
The British Geological Survey
(BGS) estimates there are between
2.2 billion and 8.6 billion barrels
of oil, but little gas, in the rocks of
the Weald basin, south of London.
Energy companies will have to
resort to fracking to get the oil, but
they may not bother because little
of it can be extracted, says Andrew
“If only 1 per cent of the
shale oil is extractable,
that doesn’t seem like
a very big prize”
Aplin of Durham University, UK.
“Looking at data from the US,
the exploitable amount of oil
from fracking is normally around
5 per cent,” Aplin says. That means
only 110 million to 428 million
barrels of oil could be extracted.
Even that might be optimistic.
The 5 per cent figure comes from
areas rich in limestone. In clay
areas, like the Weald, the figure is
lower. What’s more, the oil in the
Weald comes from similar rocks
to North Sea oil, which is heavy
and viscous. If Weald oil is the
same, extraction will be difficult.
So Aplin estimates only 1 per
cent of the Weald reserve –
between 22 million and 86 million
barrels – can be extracted.
“Britain consumes about half a
billion barrels of oil per year, so if
only 1 per cent is extractable that
would be about two months’
consumption,” says Aplin. “It
doesn’t seem like a very big prize.”
Northern England looks more
promising. An earlier study by
the BGS found evidence of large
deposits of shale gas, perhaps
37.7 trillion cubic metres. The
south-west also has deposits. In
theory, these could meet the UK’s
gas needs for 40 years, but US
figures suggest that only 10 per
cent can be extracted.
“So you’re talking about only
a few years of potential UK
consumption,” says Aplin. “That’s
not to be sniffed at, but it doesn’t
change the basic message that we
as a country will be continuing to
import oil and gas in future.”
Neutrinos ahoy
STEP aside, Higgs boson. A US
panel has concluded the best way
for the nation to contribute to
particle physics is to create a worldleading
neutrino programme.
Neutrinos are elusive particles
that rarely interact with other
matter. They come in three
flavours, each thought to have a
different mass, but our ability to
study those masses with current
detectors is limited. Precision
measurements could help answer
big mysteries about the universe,
such as why there is more matter
than antimatter.
Last week, the Particle Physics
Project Prioritization Panel issued
a report mapping the next 10 to
20 years of US particle physics
research. It recommends
pursuing greater international
collaboration to build a neutrino
experiment of exceptional
physical length, centred at the
Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.
The report also recommends
boosting the energy of Fermilab’s
existing neutrino beams.
Space worms on the menu
MAYBE there’s a reason we call them
mealworms. Three volunteers in
China have just spent three months
eating beetle larvae as part of a
project to test life-support systems
for deep-space travel.
Last week, one man and two
women emerged from Moon Palace 1,
an artificial biosphere at the Beijing
University of Aeronautics and
Astronautics. The volunteers grew
and harvested grain, vegetables and
fruit, feeding the inedible leftovers
to mealworms. Along with some
meat, the mock crew ate dozens
of mealworms each day, trying
out different seasonings and
cooking styles.
Kim Binsted at the University of
Hawaii works on HI-SEAS, another
project that simulates long trips to
space. Her team also considered
growing mealworms for food, but ran
into problems: “In the end we decided
against it, because apparently
they’re little escape artists.”
6 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
60 SECONDS
Ebola epidemic
AN OUTBREAK of deadly Ebola
virus in west Africa has so far killed
174 people, and this week more
cases were confirmed in Sierra
Leone. And deep in the nearby
forest many gorillas and chimps
“An experimental Ebola
vaccine for chimpanzees
is safe and induces a strong
immune response”
could also be dying of the virus.
This strain of Ebola has been
spreading since 1995, killing
thousands of gorillas and chimps.
There is now hope: on Monday
researchers announced that an
experimental Ebola vaccine is
safe and induces a strong immune
response in captive chimps (PNAS,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1316902111). The
vaccine, based on a surface protein
from the Ebola virus, had already
been shown to protect monkeys.
But there is a new problem, says
Peter Walsh of the University of
Cambridge, who led the work. We
need to test ways to get the vaccine
into wild chimps, but such tests
may not happen. The US is the
only country that permits
biomedical research on chimps,
but last year, after a campaign by
the Humane Society of the US,
government agencies proposed
ending it. That could stymie
research on the Ebola vaccine.
“This will be a conservation
catastrophe,” says Walsh.
GONG LEI/REX FEATURES
–Deep space dine–
HAIDER ALA/REUTERS
Refugee care costs
FROM one crisis to the next. Many
refugees from middle-eastern
countries like Syria are unable to
get treatment for cancer and other
non-infectious diseases. So says a
report by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) published this week.
In past conflicts, medical care for
refugees has focused on infectious
diseases and nutrition. However,
recent waves of refugees from
middle-income countries often
“Refugees with cancer and
other long-term illnesses
have to forego treatment
or face crippling debts”
have costlier needs. The UNHCR
offers financial help to host
countries, but a shortage of
funding has caused it to tighten
its criteria, capping spending at
$2000 per person per year.
Paul Spiegel of the UNHCR
and his colleagues assessed
applications for Iraqi and Syrian
refugees living in Jordan between
2010 and 2012. They found that
around a quarter were for help
with cancer treatment costs. More
than half of these were declined,
either because the patient faced a
poor prognosis or the costs of
treating them were too high
(Lancet Oncology, doi.org/f2rzzt).
As a result, many refugees
–The choice is debt or disease–
living with long-term illnesses
like cancer are having to forgo
treatment or face crippling debts,
trying to pay for it themselves.
Some are forced to return home.
Given limited funding, Spiegel
says that more emphasis needs to
be placed on cancer prevention.
Health insurance systems have
also proved to be effective in other
refugee settings.
Costly exhaust
CARS are pricey enough, but they
take another toll. Smog from road
transport drains $0.8 trillion yearly
from a group of 34 wealthy nations.
A report from the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and
Development estimates that air
pollution costs OECD countries
$1.7 trillion a year in healthcare
and premature deaths. Road
transport accounts for half of this.
The most harmful emissions
come from diesel engines, so the
OECD wants governments to
remove incentives to buy them.
Air pollution also costs
$1.4 trillion in China and
$0.5 trillion in India. Both have
seen deaths due to smog rising
faster than the global average.
Many nations are trying to
cut smog by making cars more
efficient, but any gains have
been overwhelmed by the rising
number of cars in fast-expanding
cities in China and India.
Canada flexes robo-arm
Astronauts on the International
Space Station can now leave routine
repairs to a robot. Canadian-made
Dextre has replaced two cameras
on fellow bot Canadarm2, a job that
normally entails a human spacewalk.
This time, astronauts chucked the
cameras into an airlock and let
Dextre get to work.
Speedier gene trials
Gene therapy clinical trials in the
US no longer need to be reviewed by
a special federal advisory board, the
National Institutes of Health has
announced. The Recombinant DNA
Advisory Committee will only review
high-risk therapies, with most
proposed trials going through
existing regulatory channels.
Vape alarm
In a letter to the World Health
Organization, 48 scientists have
accused the body of either
“overlooking or purposefully
marginalising” the idea that
e-cigarettes could be a low-risk
alternative to cigarettes. They
say the WHO is treating e-cigarettes
in the same way as traditional
tobacco products.
Toad invasion
Madagascar has been invaded by
toads, which could cause havoc to its
delicate ecosystem, much as cane
toads have in Australia. Biologists
collected six Asian common toads
(Duttaphrynus melanostictus) in the
country in late March and are calling
for them to be eradicated (Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/509563a).
Atomfall
What do you get when you throw
two clouds of frozen atoms off a
tower and grab a stopwatch
A German experiment timing the fall
of rubidium and potassium atoms
in an extreme quantum state has
confirmed Einstein’s prediction that
different types of atoms fall at the
same rate (Physical Review Letters,
doi.org/sxt).
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 7

THIS WEEK
Dark matter hunt
at crisis point
Time to blaze new trails in the search for the
dark stuff Lisa Grossman checks them out
ROADS may soon diverge in the
dark matter wood, and some
physicists want to take the ones
less travelled.
The most promising candidate
for a dark matter particle could be
about to show itself at last, as it is
running out of places to hide. But
should the hunters fail to bag
one of these WIMPs, or weakly
interacting massive particles, the
search for dark matter could be
thrown into crisis.
At a meeting in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, last week,
researchers debated the best
paths forward into the wilder
landscape of less-favoured
candidates, from alternate
particles to changes to our
theory of gravity.
“It’s really refreshing,” says
Lisa Randall at Harvard University.
“For years I went to conferences
where people said, ‘We know what
dark matter is and we’re just
cutting out the parameter space’.
I thought that was strange,
because we really don’t know
what dark matter is.”
So far we have only sensed
dark matter’s presence through
its gravitational effects. But
theory says that WIMPs should
also brush shoulders with normal
atoms occasionally, producing
signals we can detect. WIMP
champions are pinning their
hopes on more sensitive
underground detectors that are
running or under construction.
“This is a golden decade for
dark matter because of detector
sensitivity,” says Kathryn Zurek at
the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor.
The trouble is that background
noise can prevent us noticing
the impact of a WIMP. Beyond a
certain sensitivity limit, the signal
would be swamped by neutrinos,
nearly massless particles that are
constantly streaming from the
sun and from particle collisions
in our atmosphere. After just a
few more upgrades, WIMP
hunters will hit this limit and the
desired particles may no longer
be detectable.
Indirect methods for spotting
WIMPs offer the best chance of a
sighting. When WIMPs collide
they should annihilate, shattering
into other particles. This includes
“When there is no evidence,
you have to be careful.
We’re looking for a black
cat in a dark room”
gamma rays, and an excess of
these high-energy photons
spotted in the centre of our
galaxy seems to fit nicely with the
simplest models for WIMPs. But
one criticism is that the rays could
just as easily come from fastspinning
dead stars called pulsars.
So if not WIMPs then what
Some theories modify the classic
particle, changing its properties
and offering new places to look.
Others focus more on runner-up
particles, such as axions or sterile
neutrinos. And still others say
dark matter might not exist at all,
and we just need to modify the
laws of gravity (see right).
“It’s always possible WIMPs are
just around the corner,” says Avi
Loeb at Harvard University. “But
when there is no evidence, you
have to be careful. We’re looking
for a black cat in a dark room.” ■
BACKGROUND: NASA LEFT: LUXDARKMATTER/FLICKR MIDDLE: BOREXINO CALLIBRATION RIGHT: XENON
WELCOME TO WIMP CITY
There are good reasons to build up
a metropolis around WIMPs.
Our best models support the
theory that dark matter is the
scaffold around which normal
matter formed galaxies and
clusters. If so, dark matter must
have existed since the dawn of the
universe.
Early theories hinted that dark
matter particles should annihilate
themselves, so physicists knew the galactic centre, says Dan
they must have certain properties, Hooper at the Fermilab in Batavia,
in order for enough of the particles Illinois. But alternative
to still exist and make up the
explanations have not been ruled
amount of dark matter we detect out, and other detection
today. A particle that interacts via techniques have yet to pan out –
gravity and the weak force but not like waiting for a WIMP to smack
with photons fits the bill – and that into an underground detector such
is a WIMP.
as LUX in South Dakota (pictured
“There’s a simplistic beauty to above) or creating one at a particle
the WIMP model. That’s why it’s so accelerator, for example.
compelling,” says James Bullock at If WIMPs remain elusive even as
the University of California, Irvine. we whittle down the places to look,
Signs of exactly this kind of the hypothetical particles become
particle are showing up as an
less attractive candidates, says
excess of gamma rays coming from Bullock. “Then you start to worry.”
8 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

In this section
■ Four futures for Scotland, page 12
■ Lost sea came back from the dead – twice, page 16
■ Radar spots pirates, page 23
WIMPY SUBURBS
AXION FARMS
With classical WIMPs in a bind,
theorists have started expanding
their descriptions of the particle,
creating a sprawling landscape of
WIMP-like alternatives.
One idea is asymmetric dark
matter, which would invoke a dark
anti-particle. We exist because
something in the early universe
allowed more matter than
antimatter to survive after the big
bang. The mechanism for this
asymmetry is still unclear, but if
something similar happened for
dark matter, it should be made of
lightweight particles of about 5 to
10 gigaelectronvolts – just below
what WIMP detectors can see.
Other models say that dark
matter may be a mix of classic
WIMPs and WIMP-like cousins that
would interact with each other via a
hypothetical dark force. Selfinteracting
dark matter would be
harder to find in detectors, but it
would build structures.
Some astronomers are already
hunting for signs of this shadow
cosmos in the motions of stars and
colliding galaxies.
In the absence of WIMPs, the runners-up
are axions, which behave more like an
all-encompassing field than single particles.
Theoretically speaking, axions are just as
likely as WIMPs but are much harder to find.
Classical WIMP detectors, such as the
XENON100 project at Gran Sasso National
Laboratory in Italy (pictured below), can also
hunt for axions. The best limits so far have been
set by the ADMX experiment at the University
of Washington in Seattle, but it is only
sensitive to a small range of possible particles.
Last April, Peter Graham at Stanford
University, California, and his colleagues
devised another way to hunt them using the
same technology as MRI scanners. “There is
still a lot of work to be done, but I think they
deserve a similar effort.”
NEUTRINO PARK
Neutrinos seem like natural candidates for
dark matter: they have mass, yet they flit
through normal matter as if it weren’t there.
The three known types of neutrinos don’t
add up to enough mass to explain all the dark
matter we see in the universe. But what if
there is a fourth flavour of the particle
This sterile neutrino could fit the bill. Hints
of it have popped up and vanished again in
several experiments, including the Borexino
detector at Gran Sasso (pictured below).
A whiff of X-rays from the centre of the
galaxy could be yet another sign of them. In
February, two teams saw extra X-rays in data
from two telescopes, and a sterile neutrino
with a mass of 7 kiloelectronvolts could
explain the sighting. If confirmed, the next
test would be to see if there is enough of
these particles to account for dark matter.
MOND OFF-ROADING
It’s still possible that the search for
any sort of particle is misguided.
Instead, modified Newtonian
dynamics, or MOND, suggests
rewriting one of our most cherished
theories: gravity.
The first evidence for dark matter
came from the ability of rotating
galaxies to hold themselves
together, even though they do not
have enough mass in their planets,
stars and gas to act as the only
gravitational glue.
According to MOND, gravity simply
works differently on galactic scales
than on the scale of solar systems,
and we just need to figure out how.
Some observations of mass in dim
galaxies and the motions of dwarf
galaxies agree better with MOND
than with Newtonian physics,
a mystery that convinced Stacy
McGaugh at Case Western Reserve
University in Cleveland, Ohio, that it
could be the way to go. But starting
afresh with gravity continues to
make many physicists
uncomfortable – including some of
MOND’s grudging supporters.
At the Cambridge conference (see
main story), McGaugh made the case
for MOND but then left his
colleagues with an impassioned
plea: “Please detect this stuff! Put
me out of the misery of having to
give this talk over and over again!”
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 9

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FOUR FUTURES FOR SCOTLAND
Take the high road
In 16 weeks’ time, the people of Scotland will decide whether
their country should become independent of the UK. It is not an
easy decision: the political, economic and cultural questions have
been debated for months.
There are other dimensions to consider, too, including science,
technology and the environment. These can shape any country’s
fate just as much as the social factors – perhaps more so, for a
small new nation looking to carve out its place in the world.
New Scientist looks at how an independent Scotland might reinvest
its oil riches, become a high-tech hub, a green beacon – or the
sickest country in Europe
SMALL nations can shape their own destiny, and this
can be both a blessing and a curse. If the Scots opt
for independence, they would do well to heed other
small nations before them.
Research by the innovation-fostering charity
Nesta has looked at small countries that have
prospered in the last few decades. Take tiny Estonia,
with a population one-quarter the size of Scotland’s.
It is the poster child for newly independent states.
Estonia’s government took advantage of freedom
from the USSR in 1991 to turn the country into a
technology superpower in miniature. From the free
public Wi-Fi in Tallinn to compulsory coding lessons
in schools, Estonia bet big on IT. And it paid off:
Estonians built the technology behind Skype and
run a host of cool start-ups.
But for every Estonia there’s an Iceland. Around the
time the Estonians embarked on their technological
adventure, the Icelanders set themselves up as the
buccaneers of international capitalism. It ended
badly, with the country’s banks collapsing and the
country facing years of painful austerity.
So an independent Scotland must choose its
path carefully. There are a number of directions it
could decide on: oil-investment paradise, renewableenergy
Mecca, high-tech playground.
None of these three scenarios is a sure-fire hit.
High-tech industries could always go the way of
“Silicon Glen”, a region in central Scotland where
electronics manufacturers once flocked. In its heyday
in the mid-1990s, it was claimed that Silicon Glen
produced 35 per cent of PCs in western Europe. But
this success vanished almost overnight when the
dotcom bubble burst and companies headed east in
search of lower costs.
Such scenarios are plausible futures for Scotland,
and there is also a fourth future; one that is more
troubling. Without a plan or a sense of where to
take the nation, it is possible that an independent
Scotland may drift into business-as-usual. Or
perhaps from an economic point of view, it would
be more accurate to call this business-and-financialservices-as-usual
– the time-honoured British model
of an economy run by bankers, built on debt and
managed to the timetable of the quarterly
financial results.
As the experience of Iceland and the Republic of
Ireland shows, this is a perilous path, especially for
a small country. It’s partly about risk: as we have
seen, the financial services sector can act as an
engine for the economy, but it has a nasty habit
of blowing up on the motorway.
There is also something deeper at stake: if
Scotland makes the wrong decisions about its own
economic future, it risks ending up as a backwater
to the rest of the UK, with England – and London
in particular – sucking away its brightest and best.
Independence offers a chance for Scotland to
shape its destiny, but whatever future it aims for,
it must avoid clinging to the old British habit of
muddling through. ■
Stian Westlake is executive director of research
at Nesta in London. Nesta’s report, When Small is
Beautiful: Successful innovation in smaller countries,
will be published on 30 June
MARK PINDER/REPORTDIGITAL.CO.UK
Oil and gas is at
heart of Scots’
future wealth
Rob Edwards, Grangemouth
AS DUSK falls, Grangemouth starts to
glow. Cloaked in clouds of steam and lit
by flares like giant candles, Scotland’s
biggest oil refinery has a strange
beauty. Situated roughly halfway
between Edinburgh and Glasgow on
the Firth of Forth, the 700-hectare
petrochemical complex is a vital hub
of UK oil production. Should Scotland
vote for independence, it will be one
of the new government’s key assets.
According to the industry, there are
between 15 and 24 billion barrels of
recoverable oil and gas left under the
North Sea. About 42bn barrels have
been extracted since production
began there in 1967. Because prices
have risen, 24bn barrels could be
12 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

For more on this, visit newscientist.com/special/scotland
–Waving the flag for independence–
worth £1.5 trillion – more than the
value of all the oil and gas extracted
so far. “That gives us one of the best
financial safety nets of any country in
the world,” the Scottish government
says. If the UK’s Trident nuclear
submarine base moves from the river
Clyde after independence – as Scottish
nationalists say it must – then
prospecting off the west coast could
begin too. It is currently banned in
case it interferes with naval
operations there.
There will be a few other tricky
issues to resolve, like where the lines
are drawn to demarcate which fields
belong to an independent Scotland
and which to the UK, and how the
£35-£50bn cost of decommissioning
old oil rigs would be divided up.
Ultimately the plan is to emulate
Norway, and invest at least some of
the created wealth for the future.
Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond,
has promised to put aside about £1bn
a year, with the aim of generating a
£30bn oil fund over a generation.
Norway’s equivalent, the
Norwegian Pension Fund Global, has
amassed over £500bn from oil and gas
revenues since it was set up in 1990. It
is the world’s largest sovereign wealth
fund and owns 1.3 per cent of all the
world’s listed companies.
According to Bjørn Vidar Lerøen,
an adviser to Norway’s industry body,
“Alex Salmond promises to
put aside about £1 billion
of oil money a year, to
create a £30 billion fund”
Norwegian Oil and Gas Association,
there was political consensus on
the fund from the start. “The oil
belongs to the people and revenues
from oil production shall be used to
build a better society,” he says. The
Norwegian fund has a wide-ranging
ethical policy that forbids investments
in more than 60 companies involved
in tobacco, arms, environmental or
human rights abuses. Ironically, it is
now reviewing whether to disinvest
from fossil fuel companies because of
the damage they do to the climate.
But there is one way in which
Scotland would probably not be able
to copy Norway: the Norwegian
government’s 67 per cent ownership
of the oil company Statoil. “To try to
nationalise companies would not be
politically possible either in Scotland
or the UK,” says Uisdean Vass, an oil
specialist at legal firm Bond Dickinson
in Aberdeen.
Perhaps the biggest conundrum,
though, is the climate. According
to WWF Scotland, burning 24bn
barrels of oil and gas could put more
then 10bn tonnes of carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere – more than
120 times Scotland’s current annual
emissions. “The science is clear,” says
the environmental group’s director,
Lang Banks. “The planet certainly
can’t afford to allow all the oil left
in the North Sea to be burned.” ■
Aping Israel:
how to build a
start-up nation
Jessica Griggs, Edinburgh
EDINBURGH, Scotland’s bustling
and aspiring capital, has dubbed
itself the Athens of the North. If
Scotland gets independence, the
new government should instead
consider looking across the
Mediterranean Sea, to Israel, for
some high-tech inspiration.
Israel’s nickname is the Start-Up
Nation, thanks to a 2009 book of
the same name that explored how
a small country with 7 million
people became a global player
in the tech scene. Today, Israel
is thought to boast the highest
number of start-up companies
per person in the world.
So could Scotland follow >
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 13

FOUR FUTURES FOR SCOTLAND
Israel’s example Scotland has
fewer people – about 5.3 million –
but it already has the start of a
healthy tech scene. In 2006,
Edinburgh had just three
incubators – offices where startups
can rent desk space, network
and hold workshops. Now there
are 17. Glasgow is not far behind.
“It’s a pretty vibrant environment,”
says Danny Helson of Informatics
Ventures, a support network set
up to work with start-ups spun
out from the University of
Edinburgh’s School of Informatics.
The biggest challenge, many
involved agree, is scraping
together the funding to help
companies really take off. What
Scotland needs is for a few homegrown
firms to make it big.
“There is nothing like a couple of
exemplar projects to encourage
“ The biggest challenge is
scraping together the
funding to help companies
really take off”
CHRIS RUBEY/GETTY
venture capitalists,” says Tom
Ogilvie of Edinburgh Research and
Innovation, the commercialisation
arm of the university.
In Israel, trendsetters include
Waze, the traffic app bought by
Google for $1.1 billion last year.
Edinburgh-based Skyscanner,
the flight comparison site, is the
closest to aping that success. Last
year the company’s estimated
value was about $800 million.
Letting private investors
shoulder the risk seems to work.
Government funding kick-started
Israel’s tech scene in the early
1990s, but that has since been
taken over by private industry,
SHETLAND
ISLANDS
says Naomi Krieger Carmy,
director of the UK-Israel Tech Hub
at the British embassy in Tel Aviv.
“The government was able to
assume some of the risk, but to a
large degree it left the reward to
the entrepreneurs,” she says.
To emulate this, some want
an independent Scotland to scrap
Scottish Enterprise, the main
provider of public-sector money
to Scottish firms. Without this
investment competition from the
public sector, the thinking goes,
entrepreneurs might be keener to
invest in Scottish start-ups. Israel’s
example also highlights the
economic importance of aligning
research with industry. Nearly
80 per cent of research in Israel is
done by businesses; in Scotland
Wind will power
the figure is closer to 35 per cent.
In the meantime, there are
Scotland’s
other things Scotland could do to
imitate Israel, such as strengthen green ambitions
connections with the US and
Canada, says Jamie Coleman,
SCOTLAND is arguably one of the
managing director of Codebase, greenest countries in Europe. It
a tech incubator in Edinburgh. produces 40 per cent of Scottish
Codebase occupies the top
electricity demand from renewable
floors of an otherwise empty
sources, and models suggest this
government building and has could rise to 67 per cent by 2018.
plans to extend downwards. By That’s closing in on the government’s
the end of the year, it wants to be goal of producing enough green
the biggest incubator in Europe. power to supply the equivalent of
If Scotland can mature into a all of Scottish demand by 2020.
start-up nation, the benefits could Some fear that independence
be huge. “If you can get global means this goal will be too expensive
companies established then that for Scotland because offshore wind is
leads to economic development expensive. “It’s silly to say it’s going to
for Scotland,” says Helson. ■
be expensive,” says David Toke of the
University of Aberdeen, “when in fact
it can be done pretty cheaply onshore.”
Toke and his colleagues published
estimates last year suggesting that
independence would ruin Scotland’s
chances of hitting its green goal. But
later that year the team made a U-turn:
they now say that it will be cheaper
for Scotland to pursue its 2020 target
as an independent nation.
What changed Newly announced
nuclear power stations will need
funding in the UK and new financial
policies heavily favour nuclear over
–Edinburgh, start-up central– wind power. So it now makes more
Scotland is packed with onshore
wind farms and power companies
have ambitious plans to build more
Installed/operating
Application made
Site under consideration
14.8 TWh
Total renewable
generation 2012
8.3 TWh
Onshore wind
generation 2012
*Terawatt-hours
Estimated onshore wind
generation 2018
17.5 TWh*
sense for a green Scottish consumer
to vote for independence, says Toke.
Electricity bills will still go up – by about
7 per cent, he claims – and this will pay
for onshore wind power. In the UK,
bills would rise by 8 to 10 per cent to
pay for new nuclear, Toke says.
An independent Scotland will need
a close electrical alliance with England
and Wales. A power-sharing market
that allows all those involved to
navigate the peaks and troughs of
supply and demand is a tricky business.
This balancing act is particularly tough
when fickle renewables are involved,
but there is a precedent in Scandinavia.
Nord Pool is a power-sharing market on
a grid that runs largely on renewables.
Accordingly, the incumbent Scottish
National Party (SNP) has proposed an
“energy partnership” with the UK.
Don’t be fooled by all this green
ambition – Scotland won’t be kicking
the oil habit. Its target is to produce
the equivalent of 100 per cent of
Scottish demand with renewables,
but the country will remain a big
energy exporter. The excess will come
largely from its traditional fossil fuel
and nuclear power resources.
But the SNP says emphasis will be
placed on developing carbon dioxide
capture and storage for its fossil fuel
power stations. It’s not easy being
green, but independence might make
it a little easier. Catherine Brahic ■
SOURCE: SCOTTISH NATURAL HERITAGE
14 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

For more on this, visit newscientist.com/special/scotland
SCOTLAND
IN NUMBERS
Don’t look back in
anger from 2062
Jacob Aron
IT IS 2062, and the youngest people
to vote in Scotland’s referendum,
then aged 16, are now approaching
retirement age. A perfect storm of
shifting demographics, dwindling
oil and poor health has left those
north of the border worse off than
the rest of the UK, leading many to
question whether they were right
to vote “yes” all those years ago…
Back in the present, it is
impossible to confidently predict
what will happen should Scotland
decide to go it alone. But three
factors will come into play.
The first is an unavoidable
fact of life: we are all getting
older. Developed nations across
the world are set to struggle
with the effects of an ageing
population over the next 50 years,
but demographic projections
suggest the impact will be felt
even harder in Scotland.
The Institute of Fiscal Studies
(IFS), a think-tank in London,
WHAT ABOUT SCIENCE
Where would an independent
Scotland fit in with the rest of the
science world Could Scottish
researchers lose access to other
international facilities, including
ones in the rest of the UK Will
researchers south of the border
still be able to do science in Scotland
The Scottish government says it
will be business as usual. It plans to
reach an agreement with the rest
of the UK and will continue funding
science through the research councils.
But as with most of the debates
over independence, there are
claims and counterclaims. Scottish
science receives a disproportionately
high share of the UK’s research
council funds: Scotland is home to
8 per cent of the UK population
predicts that by 2062 Scotland’s
population will have grown by
just 4.4 per cent, compared with
22.8 per cent in the UK as a whole.
The problem for Scotland is that
its under-65 population will shrink
while its over-65s increase, putting
big pressure on public finances.
The Scottish government says
independence will allow the
nation to pursue a very different
immigration strategy to the rest
of the UK. But if working-age
“ A large proportion of
Scotland’s higher mortality
is simply down to poverty
and deprivation”
migrants don’t come as hoped,
Scotland will find it more difficult
to support its ageing population.
Things get worse when North
Sea oil and gas are taken into
account. “Oil revenues will almost
certainly fall over the longer
term,” says David Phillips at the
IFS. “If it takes decades, that would
but receives over 13 per cent of that
cash. In 2012-13, it amounted to
£257 million in grants.
The UK government says that an
independent Scotland would have to
supply its own funding, and that to
maintain the status quo would cost
0.23 per cent of Scotland’s 2012 GDP.
It also warns that Scots would lose
out on other funding from UK
government departments, such
as the Ministry of Defence.
In truth, nobody knows. In the case
of a vote for independence, research
funding is one of many details that
would need to be hammered out.
There would be a negotiation and
transition period between the vote
on 18 September and the proposed
Independence Day of 24 March 2016.
give Scotland time to adjust,
although it would still involve
some potentially painful choices.”
Addressing the shortfall in
revenues will mean higher taxes
or a fall in living standards –
something Scotland can ill
afford: life expectancy is already
2.3 years lower for Scottish men
than those in the rest of the UK.
The difference is particularly
stark in Glasgow, where life
expectancy at birth is just
72.6 years for boys and 78.5 for
girls, compared with the UK
averages of 78.9 and 82.7 years.
“Health is Scotland’s Achilles’
heel,” says Gerry McCartney of
NHS Scotland. And it’s a relatively
recent phenomenon.
The reason for the disparity is
not entirely clear, as it is difficult
to untangle the interconnected
health effects of lifestyle, culture
and economics, but inequality in
Scotland certainly plays a role.
“Quite a large proportion of the
higher mortality is explicable
simply by poverty and
deprivation,” says McCartney.
The Scottish government says a
vote for independence will reduce
inequality. But a study by David
Comerford and David Eiser at the
University of Stirling suggests that
new Scottish powers to increase
taxes or benefits may have little
effect. That’s because small nations
can find it difficult to implement
radically different policies to their
larger neighbours: people can
simply decide to cross the border
in search of lower taxes, for
example. This is particularly
problematic when it comes to
funding pensions, which depend
on a thriving workforce. “Raising
tax rates to provide pensions
could be a self-defeating policy if
it leads to an exodus of workers,”
says Comerford.
The voting age for the Scottish
referendum has been lowered
to 16 from the normal UK voting
age of 18, to let teenagers have
a say in their country’s future.
If independence goes wrong,
a youthful yes vote could prove
a big mistake. ■
JEFF J. MITCHELL/GETTY
5.3 million
The population of Scotland
99%
Scotland’s share of the UK’s
offshore oil production over
the next 30 years
14 years
The gap in life expectancy
for boys born in the most
deprived areas compared
with the richest areas
25%
Scotland’s potential share
of the European Union’s wind
and tidal energy
£0
Fees paid by Scottish students
going to university in Scotland
£905m
Research funding of Scottish
universities in 2011/12
1707
Year the UK parliament formed
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 15

THIS WEEK
EZEQUIEL SCAGNETTI/LUZ/EYEVINE
Arid Aral Sea could
be resurrected
Jeff Hecht
IN LESS than a century, humanity
destroyed the Aral Sea. It is one of
the emblematic environmental
disasters. But now it seems the sea
has collapsed at least twice before,
and recovered both times.
In 1960, the Aral Sea in central
Asia was the world’s fourth largest
lake. But massive irrigation
programmes begun during the
Soviet era diverted water from
the rivers that feed it, reducing
the lake’s volume to just 10 per
cent of what it had been and
leaving large areas dry (see map).
The ecosystem collapsed, the
desiccated lake bed is now laced
with pesticides spread by dust
storms, and drinking water is
polluted.
Now geologists have discovered
that the Aral Sea has previously
recovered naturally from such
severe declines.
“History tells us don’t give up
hope,” says Philip Micklin of
Western Michigan University
in Kalamazoo, who was not
involved in the study. “The sea
really has dried in the past and
has come back.”
Sergey Krivonogov of the
Institute of Geology and
Mineralogy in Novosibirsk,
Russia, and his colleagues have
compiled data showing how the
Aral Sea has changed over the
past 2000 years. Researchers had
carbon-dated the shelves etched
into the shoreline by past waves,
and drilled cores to reveal which
layers were once exposed.
It turns out that water levels in
the Aral Sea have varied widely,
Shrunken sea
Soviet irrigation projects cut off the rivers
feeding the Aral Sea, so it has shrunk to
one-tenth of what it was in 1960
1960 Today
KAZAKHSTAN
UZBEKISTAN
Muynak
says Krivonogov. Humans may
have played a role, because we
have been farming the area for
2500 years.
In 1960, the lake’s surface was
54 metres above sea level. Yet
between AD 400 and 600, it was
just 10 metres above sea level, and
recovered. Then between AD 1000
and 1500 it fell to 29 metres above
sea level. The lake grew again after
1600, until Soviet irrigation began
(Gondwana Research, doi.org/svs).
The modern collapse is no
worse than the older ones. By
1989, the lake was 40 metres
above sea level, and a small
northern lake split from the rest.
Since then the northern part
has rebounded. In 2005, a dam
AMU DARYA
Aralsk
SYR DARYA
50 km
–Land ahoy!–
separated it from the south,
cutting water loss from the north.
The north Aral Sea is back up to
42 metres above sea level, and
native fish have returned from
river refuges, says Nikolay Aladin
of the Russian Zoological
Institute in Saint Petersburg.
“ History tells us don’t give
up hope. The sea really
has dried in the past and
has come back”
“The fish catch is a small
fraction of what it was in the
mid-1950s, but the rehabilitation
of the northern part has been
pretty amazing,” says Micklin.
The southern part is still
shrinking though. It has split
into three salty lakes less than
29 metres above sea level. The
eastern one is so salty that only
brine shrimp live there. No work is
under way to restore this southern
region. It has always looked like a
lost cause. So it will keep shrinking
and getting saltier until only brine
shrimp are left, says Aladin.
Using less water to irrigate
crops could restore the entire Aral
Sea, says Micklin. But it would
devastate the farms, which have
actually increased the irrigated
area since the end of the Soviet era
in 1991. Some have shifted from
water-hungry rice and cotton to
winter wheat, but many farmers
need the cotton money. ■
16 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

For daily news stories, visit newscientist.com/news
JESSIE JEAN/GETTY
Surprising origin of the
gut flora in newborns
BABIES in the womb are not as
sheltered from the outside world
as you might think. The placenta
harbours a unique ecosystem of
bacteria that may have a surprising
origin – the mother’s mouth.
Disturbances of the placenta’s
bacterial community may explain
why some women give birth
prematurely. It could also be
one of the ways that a woman’s
diet affects her offspring’s gut
bacteria, and as a result, the child’s
disease risk. “Different nutrients
[in the mother’s diet] are a huge
determinant of which microbes
take up residence in the placenta,”
says Kjersti Aagaard of the Baylor
College of Medicine in Houston.
In the past decade there has
been growing awareness of the
role that our microbiome – the
bacteria, viruses and fungi that
live on and in our bodies – plays in
our health. Disturbances to the
gut microbiome have been linked
with conditions ranging from
obesity to autism.
Until recently it was generally
thought that babies are born with
a sterile gut and that they pick up
microbes on their journey through
their mother’s vagina, which are
the first to colonise the gut. This
theory was challenged when
bacteria were found in the
meconium – a baby’s first stool,
passed within hours of birth.
We now have a clue to where
these bugs are coming from.
Aagaard and her team sequenced
the DNA of bacteria in the
placenta, which transfers
nutrients and oxygen from the
mother’s blood to the fetus. They
took samples from inside the
placentas of 320 women after
they had given birth.
The team found a broad range
of bacteria, including those
necessary for metabolising
nutrients needed by the fetus.
But they were surprised to find
that the bacterial species were
most similar to those normally
found in the adult mouth, as
opposed to the vagina or gut.
“The placenta has its own ecology
and these were not the bacteria
we were expecting,” says James
Kinross, a surgeon at Imperial
College London, who researches
–Born colonised–
gut bacteria and was not involved
in the new work. “Most people
would have expected it to be a
vaginal flora,” he says, because
of its proximity.
The fact that it was most similar
to the mouth microbiome suggests
these bacteria are somehow
finding their way through the
blood to the placenta. Aagaard
suggests that having got that far,
they could reach the fetus either
by crossing into its blood vessels
within the placenta or by passing
into the amniotic fluid and being
swallowed by the fetus.
“ The placenta has its own
ecology and these were
not the bacteria we were
expecting to see”
The team also found different
amounts of some of the bacterial
species in women who had
given birth prematurely – before
37 weeks of pregnancy – compared
with the typical bacterial profile
of the women who went to full
term (Science Translational
Medicine, doi.org/sv5).
This tallies with previous
studies which found that
gum disease raises the risk
of premature birth. Aagaard
speculates that if oral bacteria
do reach the placenta through the
blood, it is possible that diseased
and bleeding gums could allow
harmful bacteria to reach and
colonise the placenta, possibly
triggering an early birth.
In a separate study in monkeys,
Aagaard’s team showed that
giving pregnant animals a highfat
diet altered their offspring’s
microbiome (Nature
Communications, doi.org/sv7).
Many studies have shown that
a person’s risk of obesity and
heart disease is affected by their
mother’s diet, but it was thought
this was passed on through
epigenetic mechanisms – chemical
changes that switch the offspring’s
genes on or off. “But layered on
top of that are variations in the
microbiome,” says Aagaard.
Clare Wilson ■
Epilepsy pill to
switch brain
cells on and off
THERE is a new way to hack the brain.
A technique that involves genetically
engineering brain cells so that they
fire in the presence of certain drugs
has been used to treat epilepsy in
rats, and it could soon be tested
in humans.
Chemogenetics builds on
optogenetics, which involves
genetically engineering brain cells
so that they fire in the presence of
light. Selected neurons can then be
turned on or off with the flick of a
switch, but this requires implanting
fibre-optic cables in the brain, which
is impractical for treating human
brain disorders.
In chemogenetics, however, no
cables are needed because neurons
are altered to fire in the presence of
a certain chemical rather than light.
“It’s got more potential in that you
can give drugs to people more easily
than you can get light into their
brains,” says Dimitri Kullmann of
University College London.
Kullmann’s team tested the
approach by using a harmless virus to
deliver a gene into the brains of rats.
The gene encoded a protein that stops
neurons from firing – but only in the
presence of a chemical called
clozapine N-oxide (CNO).
Several weeks later they injected
the rats with chemicals that trigger
brain seizures, to mimic epilepsy.
If the rats were then given CNO, the
severity of their seizures reduced
significantly within 10 minutes.
(Nature Communications, DOI:
10.1038/ncomms4847).
Kullmann sees chemogenetic
therapy benefiting people with focal
epilepsy, a form of the condition that
is triggered in part of the brain and
then spreads. People with it can often
feel when a seizure is about to come
on, so at that point they could take
CNO as a tablet, or by injection or nasal
spray. The effect would only be
temporary, Kullmann says, because
the drug has a half-life of around
7 hours in humans. Clare Wilson ■
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 17

IN BRIEF
THEO ALLOFS/MINDEN
Big flightless birds get a
shake up of their family tree
HUGE flightless birds like emus and the extinct moa may
look alike, but an analysis of ancient DNA reveals they are
more distantly related than we expected.
Moas, which lived in New Zealand, and emus belong to
a flightless group called ratites. Until now the assumption
was that early ratites spread around the world on foot
while Africa, New Zealand and Australia were one
land mass. When this broke up, the birds were separated
and evolved independently, producing everything from
Madagascar’s huge extinct elephant birds to the smallest
ratite, New Zealand’s kiwis.
Planet-munching suns are messy eaters
HUNGRY suns are unlikely to
be good hosts. Sun-like stars
sometimes devour their Earth-like
planets, and astronomers have
figured out how to identify the
grizzly leftovers.
Stars are mostly made of
hydrogen and helium, but they
can also contain a spattering of
other elements on their surfaces.
Analysing starlight lets scientists
see which elements are present.
Keivan Stassun at Vanderbilt
University in Nashville,
Tennessee, and his colleagues
used telescopes in Chile to look
at the light from a pair of sun-like
stars (The Astrophysical Journal,
doi.org/sv8). Both stars host
relatively large planets, with
masses between those of Neptune
and Jupiter. The team analysed
15 elements, including known
building blocks of rocky worlds.
But their DNA begs to differ. Alan Cooper of the
University of Adelaide in Australia sequenced DNA from
the bones of Madagascan elephant birds, and compared
it with that of other flightless birds. This showed that
elephant birds and moas are not evolutionary siblings at
all, but evolved separately from small flying birds. And
while Madagascar’s elephant birds are indeed closely
related to New Zealand’s kiwis, their last common
ancestor lived much more recently than 100 million years
ago, which is when Madagascar and New Zealand split
apart. This implies that they must have descended from
a bird capable of flying across the oceans.
Moas were most closely related to South American
flying birds called tinamous, which also supports the idea
that it evolved from a flying bird (Science, doi.org/swq).
They found that both stars had
much higher levels of Earth-like
components than our sun,
suggesting that these stars ate
rocky planets that once orbited
alongside the existing gas giants.
Finding stars that show signs
of planet-eating can speed up the
hunt for habitable worlds, because
systems that are unlikely to host
life can be quickly ruled out. “The
one that looks like it swallowed its
Earth already is probably not the
one to start with,” says Stassun.
Unique ‘potter’ frog
packs eggs in mud
A NEWLY discovered frog is the
only amphibian that coats its eggs
in mud. Doing so might protect
the eggs, but beyond that it may
also pay the frogs to be different.
The kumbara night frog lives in
south India. Kotambylu Vasudeva
Gururaja of the Indian Institute of
Science in Bangalore, who found
it, saw them pick up mud with
their forelimbs and spread it on
their eggs (Zootaxa, doi.org/sv6).
They might do it to stop the
eggs drying out, says Gururaja,
or to hide them from predators.
But he thinks the real reason is
that the frogs simply need to be
different from their neighbours.
Two related species, Jog’s night
frog and Rao’s dwarf wrinkled
frog, share the area. So each
species needs to differentiate
itself with distinct behaviours
to avoid futile interbreeding.
Gururaja found that they all make
unique calls, mate differently and
care for their young differently.
Fix leaky gut lining
to slow HIV’s attack
PLUG the gut to stall HIV.
It seems the virus damages the
gut, allowing bacteria to leak out
and spark an immune response,
triggering many lethal diseases.
Ivona Pandrea at the University
of Pittsburgh and colleagues gave
a drug used to treat kidney disease,
called sevelamer, to monkeys
newly infected with the simian
equivalent of HIV. The drug binds
to bacteria, keeping them safely
inside the gut. Those given the
drug had a dramatically reduced
immune response compared with
a control group (Journal of Clinical
Investigation, doi.org/swc).
Because an increased immune
response triggers many lethal
diseases in people with HIV, giving
the drug to people soon after
infection may prolong lives.
18 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

For new stories every day, visit newscientist.com/news
MATTHEW ASHTON/PA
Maths reveals the
best football team
PUBS around the world echo with
the debate: Which is the best
football team of all time Statistics
doesn’t have an answer yet – but it
can crown the best team in the
history of the English league.
Ian McHale and Rose Baker at the
University of Salford, UK, created a
statistical model of team strengths.
They used this to analyse goal data
from 200,000 matches in England
and Wales that occurred between
1888, when the Football League
was founded, and 2012. The games
cover the top four English leagues,
the FA Cup and the League Cup.
The model assessed teams
using three measures: attack
ability divided by an opposite team’s
defence, a team’s strongest average
performance over a 10-year period
and the probability of a team
winning against the second-best
team over a 10-year period.
By the first two measures, the
Chelsea team of 2005/06 comes out
on top, followed by the Manchester
United team of 2007/08. The United
team of 1992-2002 had the best
odds of beating their next best rival
(Journal of the Royal Statistical
Society: Series A, doi.org/swd).
Sanjit Atwal, who runs football
stats site Squawka, agrees with the
result, but says the stats are just
more fuel for the debate. “Fans will
take whatever they can out of the
data to win an argument,” he says.
Lifespan boost for mice that feel less pain
NO PAIN, lots of gain Mice
lacking a type of pain receptor
live significantly longer than
other mice, and have a more
youthful metabolism.
Many researchers suspect a
link between pain and lifespan.
We know that people with chronic
pain often die young, and that
worms and flies lacking certain
sensory neurons live longer than
expected. Now Andrew Dillin at
the University of California,
Berkeley, and his colleagues have
shown that similar findings apply
in mammals too.
Watch crystal grow
one atom at a time
NANO builders rejoice: for the
first time scientists have watched
crystals grow atom by atom,
offering incredible control over
their microscopic structure.
In the nanoscale world, rods,
spheres and dots made from the
same material have dramatically
different chemical and physical
properties. But until now, our
control over such structures has
been limited because they grow
too fast for even the best electron
microscopes to follow.
Nicolas Barry at the University
of Warwick, UK, and his colleagues
fired a beam of electrons at a thin
film of molecules containing the
metal osmium, carbon and other
elements. Most molecules broke
down to release single osmium
atoms, and the remaining film
fused into a graphene lattice.
Left-over atoms created
impurities of boron and sulphur
in the graphene, which slowed
the osmium atoms enough to let
researchers see a crystal grow
(Nature Communications, DOI:
10.1038/ncomms4851). The
method should make it possible
to watch different chemical
recipes in action and figure out
how to make customised crystals
for use in diverse fields.
He found that mice genetically
engineered to lack TRPV1 pain
receptors – which are activated
in response to high temperatures
and hot chilli peppers in food –
live almost 14 per cent longer than
those with the receptor. Mice
lacking the receptors also retain
some youthful features into old
age, such as efficient oxygen
metabolism (Cell, doi.org/swb).
As well as these advantages
to lacking TRPV1 there are
disadvantages, says Dillin. For
example, being able to sense pain
helps animals avoid harmful
Dancing bees report on their habitat
EAVESDROPPING may be rude, but
snooping on honeybees could reveal
a lot about the environment. Their
waggle dance contains clues about
the health of their ecosystem.
Honeybees perform the waggle
dance to tell hive mates about food
sources, so people have wondered
whether the dance might identify
healthy areas of the landscape and
thus evaluate conservation schemes.
To find out, Margaret Couvillon
and her colleagues at the University
of Sussex in Brighton, UK, videoed
5484 waggle dances from three
British honeybee colonies living near
objects and life-threatening
situations. This probably explains
why natural selection has retained
the pain receptors in mammals.
The lifespan-boosting
properties of TRPV1 come as a
surprise, says Gerard Ahern at
Georgetown University in
Washington DC. However, he
thinks applying the discovery
to human health won’t be easy.
Drugs that block TRPV1 have failed
safety testing, he says, because the
people who took them were prone
to burning themselves because of
an impaired heat sensation.
several conservation schemes.
Most bees danced to inform
others about a nature reserve rich in
wildflowers. They also praised farms
covered by Higher Level Stewardship
schemes, which set aside wild land.
But they were less keen on Organic
Entry Level Stewardship farms,
where regular cutting means there
are fewer flowers (Current Biology,
doi.org/sv9).
But honeybees may not tell us all
we need to know, says Lars Chittka of
Queen Mary, University of London.
“What’s good for the honeybee is not
necessarily good for other species.”
SCOTT CAMAZINE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 19

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TECHNOLOGY
For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology
PATRICK BROWN/PANOS
Hands off
An app that creates maps of sexual harassment
could help women in Bangladesh fight back
Paul Marks
WOMEN walking down the streets
of cities in Bangladesh face a daily
onslaught of sexual harassment.
Euphemistically known as
“Eve teasing”, it takes many forms,
from women being told by men to
adjust their clothing or headgear
to suit religious mores, to sexually
suggestive remarks, groping –
and more serious sexual assaults.
Now a smartphone app has
been created to help combat this.
While making women feel safer
is a major aim of the project,
the creators also want to reduce
the toll on the political lives
of Bangladeshi women. By
discouraging access to public
space, street harassment silences
women’s voices and quashes
their participation in public life,
the team behind the app told
a computing conference in
Canada earlier this month.
The app has been developed by
teams at Bangladesh University of
Engineering and Technology and
North South University – both in
Dhaka – alongside Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York.
Ishtiaque Ahmed at Cornell
says the app – called Protobadi,
meaning “one who protests” in
Bengali – allows women to combat
public harassment in three ways.
First, it has an on-screen button
that if pressed turns the phone
into a shrill rape alarm. This
action also sends text messages to
the woman’s emergency contacts
saying where she is and that she
needs help. Lastly, the incident
data from all users is collated to
create a heat map showing the
areas where harassment is at its
worst. In addition, the user can
annotate the data with a brief blog
post about the type of harassment
they experienced.
Last summer, after publicising
the app on Facebook and at their
respective universities, the team
–Don’t touch–
asked 10 of the 110 people who
signed up whether they felt the
app helped or hindered them day
to day. “They all felt safer having
the app installed on their phone.
They loved the fact that they had
one-touch emergency access to
their friends any time they needed
help,” says Ahmed. “Most of the
“ The idea is to bring highrisk
areas to the attention
of the authorities so
action can be taken”
participants considered the map
useful in choosing their routes
around Dhaka city.”
Some had concerns, however,
saying the maps, while useful,
could also create no-go areas for
women. But the aim, says Ahmed,
is quite the opposite: the idea
is to bring such areas to the
attention of the authorities so
action can be taken. “That way
no-go areas can never be created.”
That’s easier said than done,
however, because the definition
of sexual harassment is far from
a hard and fast one in the
subcontinent’s highly patriarchal
societies, says Priya Virmani, a
political and economic analyst
based in Delhi, India. While she
welcomes the app as a “great tool”
with which women can begin
fighting street harassment, she
points out that the perpetrators
could also consult the maps. “That
could disperse the trouble – they
might move to other parts of the
city.” What could improve the app,
she says, would be linking it to a
radio taxi service, which could
prioritise the sending of cabs to
women in distress – even if they
have no cash on them.
The team sees possibilities in
expanding the app’s use to other
countries where women suffer
serious sexual harassment.
For example, India, where
“Eve teasing” is also common
and where the fatal gang rape
of a woman on a Delhi bus in
December 2012 prompted the
Indian government to classify
sexual harassment as an offence.
“Bottom-up initiatives like
our app are also necessary to
eradicate problems like sexual
harassment,” says Ahmed.
Phone sensors offer other
improvement possibilities, says
Samuel Johnston of OpenSignal,
a London-based company that
crowdsources mobile signal
strength maps from apps on
users’ phones. Getting out a
phone and pressing a button in a
harassment situation could invite
violence. “So enabling them to do
this in less obvious ways could be
a huge benefit,” Johnston says.
Emergency contacts could be
triggered by rotating the phone
or tapping on the screen in a
certain way, he says.
Changing male behaviour could
be a far harder task, however:
a female Protobadi researcher
experienced harassment, abuse
and ridicule for posting flyers
about the app at a university. The
study there was suspended. ■
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 21

TECHNOLOGY
Information
from the inside
A device that keeps tabs on inmates’ vital
signs could save lives in the slammer
CARLOS JAVIER ORTIZ/REDUX/EYEVINE
Aviva Rutkin
US PRISONS could soon have their
fingers on inmates’ pulses. A new
device that can detect a prisoner’s
vital signs from a wall or ceiling
metres away could be used to
tackle steep suicide rates in the
penal system.
The sensor, which was funded
by the US Department of Justice,
monitors inmates’ heartbeat,
breathing and movements for
signs of self-harm.
Suicide is a big problem among
inmates in the US, accounting for
35 per cent of deaths in local jails
and 5.5 per cent of deaths in staterun
facilities in 2011. Inmates who
appear to be at risk can be
assigned extra personnel to check
on them several times every hour,
but this is expensive and invasive.
Sensors would be cheaper and
intrude less, while still alerting
prison officers when they need
to intervene.
Developed by General Electric,
the devices can be mounted inside
prison cells, where they keep track
of inmates’ movements and
vital signs using Doppler radar.
The company modified standard
radar equipment to pick up
the delicate movements of the
chest caused by breathing and
heartbeat. The system can
penetrate non-metallic objects
such as furniture, which could
be useful if an inmate tries to
hide under a bed.
The technology was trialled last
year at the Western Correctional
Institution in Cumberland,
Maryland. Ten members of the
prison staff spent around 90
minutes locked in cells, moving
“Standard radar equipment
was modified to pick up the
delicate movements of the
chest caused by breathing”
around, breathing at different
rates and holding their breath as
if they had stopped breathing.
The device proved to be 86 per
cent accurate at determining
whether someone in a cell
required assistance.
The technology could help
alleviate what is a major issue
for prisons, says Kevin Lockyer,
a criminal justice consultant in
Lincolnshire, UK. But he says
it should be combined with
preventative services such as
therapy to tackle the underlying
causes of suicide.
“It’s got to be part of a holistic
response to those individuals and
the issues,” he says. “Do you deal
with the symptoms or do you deal
with the disease”
General Electric is exploring
ways to commercialise the system
– not just for prisons. It could be
–Help in a heartbeat–
adapted to look after newborn
babies or elderly people that
require close monitoring, says
company spokesman Todd Alhart.
However, Moeness Amin, an
electrical engineer at Villanova
University, Pennsylvania, says
such applications would be
difficult because the environment
outside prisons is more chaotic
and could trip up the system.
“You have many issues in a
typical home that do not exist
in a cell. An empty room with
a person is much easier than a
person in a typical bedroom,”
says Amin. ■
Let your phone
help you tell right
from wrong
FACING a moral quandary and want to
do the right thing Well, there’s now
an app for that.
Ethical Decision Making, as the
iPhone app is helpfully named,
doesn’t need the details of your
problem or the options you’re
considering. It simply asks you to
consider each solution and rate it
from five standpoints: utility, virtue,
rights, justice and the common good.
Each is actually shorthand for a
framework developed by moral
philosophers over the centuries. After
that, you assign a weighting to each of
these factors. You could, for example,
give justice more emphasis than the
rest. The app then scores the solution
according to the customised moral
framework you have just set up.
Distilling ethics down into an app
might be problematic for some
philosophers, but not for Miriam
Schulman, associate director of the
Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at
Santa Clara University in California,
where the app was developed.
“How do we use these very
ancient traditions to help people
who are making these really difficult
decisions” she asks. She says people
could use the app for anything from
weighing up whether to put their
parents in a nursing home to choosing
ethical investments.
The app has been tested with a
group of school principals and in a
communications class focused on
ethical issues. One student said the
tool changed her mind about how to
handle an issue with her boyfriend.
Apps like these aren’t a one-stop
solution but can help initiate
discussion, says Evan Selinger,
a philosopher at the Rochester
Institute of Technology in New York.
“If you come to this hoping it’s
going work out your ethics for you,
you’re up the creek,” he says. “But if
you see this as a tool to be used for
conversation with other people,
thinking out loud and expanding your
mental models, it might make sense.”
Aviva Rutkin ■
22 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology
ONE PER CENT
Pirates incoming! Smart
radar stands watch
BEFORE dawn on 5 May, two pirates
armed with knives boarded a ship in
the Sierra Leone port of Freetown.
They took the duty cadet hostage,
stole some mooring ropes then
slipped back into the darkness. No one
saw them coming, but a new kind of
intelligent radar might have done.
The system, called WatchStander,
uses radar mounted on either side of
a ship to scan the surrounding water
for small objects that look like they
are moving to intercept. It can
automatically sound an alarm and
dispense countermeasures to deter
the approaching vessels.
The system is meant to tackle one
of the biggest issues with preventing
piracy at sea: spotting them coming.
“The problem is that pirates use
skiffs – small, fast fishing boats with
a very low profile on the surface of
the ocean,” says Giacomo Persi Paoli,
a piracy analyst with the RAND
Corporation in Cambridge, UK.
Large ships’ radar systems are
designed to pick up large objects
that are collision risks and to filter out
waves. This means they often miss
skiffs. By contrast, WatchStander’s
radar uses shorter radio wavelengths,
allowing it to see smaller objects.
If WatchStander detects a skiff
that’s heading to intercept the ship,
it will automatically target the boat
it deems most threatening with a
countermeasure. The current system
shines a powerful strobe light
designed to confuse incoming pirates.
In a test earlier this year,
WatchStander was deployed on a
ship carrying liquid natural gas
through the Strait of Hormuz, south
of Iran. The system detected a swarm
of Iranian fishing boats crossing the
ship’s path long before anyone on
board saw them. “These were 12
Iranian skiffs that came bowling past
us. You couldn’t see them at first. We
were getting ready to run a test on the
“ Pirates are hard to spot
because they use small,
fast fishing boats with a
low profile on the ocean”
system when all of a sudden the alarm
went off,” says WatchStander founder
David Rigsby. “The ship’s crew said
they are smugglers, you see them all
the time out in the Strait.”
Paoli likes the idea of the
anti-pirate system, but worries that
allowing it to automatically activate
countermeasures might unfairly
target innocent fishing skiffs or
other boats. “The wakes of these big
commercial ships attract fish to the
surface,” he says. “The fishermen wait
for ships to pass and then go full
speed behind along the wake and
catch the fish.” Hal Hodson ■
HO/REUTERS/CORBIS
Mix real and digital with iPad game
iPad games just got real. Osmo is a new accessory that clips
onto the iPad’s camera to track the games children are
playing on the table in front of it. Alongside Osmo’s character
recognition software, this blend of physical and digital space
lets children play games where they place letters on the
table to spell out the name of an object shown on screen.
Osmo, which can be pre-ordered for $57, also lets children
complete shape puzzles guided by the iPad, or draw on paper
to control games and puzzles on the tablet’s screen.
233 m
The number of eBay users who have had their personal details
stolen by hackers, the site admitted last week. The security
breach occurred between late February and early March. eBay
has told its customers to change their passwords immediately.
Perfect camouflage from every angle
Got something ugly you want to hide An algorithm can
generate a skin that could hide unsightly electrical boxes or
cellphone towers from every possible angle. The system,
developed by Andrew Owens at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, stitches together multiple photos of a scene,
taken from different angles, to generate a camouflage
pattern that would make an object blend into the background
when seen from any direction.
Encrypted email from CERN
–Stop them boarding–
A team at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, has hit back at the
US National Security Agency with ProtonMail, an encrypted
email service. The site is free, anonymous and requires two
passwords to log in. Its servers are housed in Switzerland,
where they are insulated by the country’s strict privacy laws.
ProtonMail also features a special self-destruct option: when
users send an email, they can add a time limit before the
message disappears forever.
OSMO
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 23

TECHNOLOGY
INSIGHT Gadget design
MICHAEL NELSON/EPA/CAMERAPRESS
Bending the rules
Smartphones and TVs with curved screens
make our brains light up, says Peter Nowak
THE future looks curvy. A spate of
gadgets sporting concave displays
has already been launched, and the
big manufacturers will soon be hurling
yet more TVs and smartphones with
curved screens on to the shelves.
Rumours continue to swirl that even
Apple’s forthcoming iPhone 6 will bend
to the craze later this year.
There’s more to the trend than
just a novel shape, though. It may be
tapping into a deep-seated desire to
get away from the hard corners and
rectangles that have defined our
appliances for decades. The craze
for curves is also fueling a search for
materials and manufacturing
techniques that will help companies
exploit it to the full.
“The first adjective used by people
to describe curves is ‘soft’,” says
Oshin Vartanian, a neuroscientist at
the University of Toronto, Canada.
“The story about curvature is a real
story about emotion in the brain.”
Vartanian and colleagues espouse
the fledgling field of neuroaesthetics –
understanding the neurological basis
for our appreciation of beauty. Last
year, he used functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) to test
people’s reactions to pictures of
household interiors, asking them to
rate rooms as “beautiful” or “not
beautiful”. A large majority favoured
rooms with curved features and
furnishings over ones packed with
straight lines. The scans revealed
that curved contours tended to
stimulate the pleasure centres of
the brain, whereas angles activated
“ Electronics has been
trapped in a straight
paradigm, mostly owing to
manufacturing limitations”
circuits in areas that detect threats
(PNAS, doi.org/swv).
The findings reinforce a similar
study conducted in 2010 at the
Walters Art Museum in Baltimore,
Maryland, where visitors were
shown objects with straight or curved
outlines. Here, too, fMRI showed
they had a preference for curves.
But electronics has been trapped
within a straight paradigm for
decades, mostly because of limitations
in our manufacturing know-how.
24 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology
That’s changing. Samsung’s Galaxy
Round smartphone, released in South
Korea last October, uses a bendable
version of Corning’s Gorilla Glass called
Willow. Corning has since announced
an upgraded version, its 3D Gorilla
Glass, which it says can bend up to
75 degrees without breaking. And in
an industry where even a small
advantage in a product’s looks can
translate into billions in extra revenue,
some manufacturers are turning to
sheets of artificially grown sapphire
for their next-generation screens.
Companies selling curved screens
say they offer tangible benefits. The
concave shape reflects less light at the
viewer, allowing screens to be dimmer
and thus extending battery life. Adding
a curve to a widescreen TV enhances a
screen’s central sweet spot, giving the
viewer the illusion of being immersed
in the action.
Not everyone finds curviness a big
deal. “It’s distinct and different and
unique. It does create a ‘wow’ factor,”
says Paul Gray of industry analysts
NPD DisplaySearch. “But the reasons
for curvature beyond the styling seem
to be extremely tenuous.”
Some industry-watchers believe
the fascination will prove to be a fad,
but curved screens remain a fastgrowing
market. Gray’s firm projects
that global curved TV shipments will
grow from 800,000 units this year to
more than six million by 2017 – proof
that we like what we see. ■
TARA ROMASANTA/GETTY IMAGES
Smart collar
brings poorly
pooches to heal
YOUR dog can’t tell you when it’s
sick, but maybe this gadget can.
A smart collar studded with wireless
sensors can now monitor the vital
signs of man’s best friend and alert
the owner as soon as it starts feeling
under the weather.
The device, developed by PetPace
in Burlington, Massachusetts, keeps
track of temperature, pulse and
respiration, as well as activity
patterns and the number of calories
burned. While the dog plays, eats
and sleeps, software compares this
information with other breedspecific
data. If an animal’s statistics
deviate in a way that indicates a
possible problem, an alert is sent
to the owner’s smartphone and
to the vet.
Many pets instinctively hide their
symptoms when they are sick, so
the collar could help detect health
issues early on, says Asaf Dagan,
chief veterinary scientist at PetPace.
The smart collar ensures that “your
pet’s disease, pain or discomfort will
not go unnoticed”, he says.
Because the device works in real
time, vets have more information
on which to base their diagnoses.
They can also keep track of how the
animal responds to treatment,
Dagan says.
The collar costs $150 plus $15 per
month for the monitoring service.
Lauren Hitchings ■
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 25

APERTURE
26 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

Spot the galactic coyote
“CAPTURE & name your own NASA Spitzer
space image! It’s easier than you might think.”
With this tweet, the operators of the Spitzer
Space Telescope invited people to roam around
a gigantic mosaic of the Milky Way.
Composed of more than 2 million infrared
images taken by the telescope over the last
decade, the complete panoramic image can be
viewed online using NASA’s GLIMPSE360 tool.
Released in March, it allows people to explore
more than half of our galaxy’s stars.
Twitter user Kevin Gill (@kevinmgill) discovered
the nebula pictured and tweeted it. “I was
interested in the awesomeness of the data and
the high-resolution views into the depths of space
that no one has ever seen before,” says Gill. “I had
found two other interesting things, but this one
struck me as the funniest, looking like a Minecraft
creeper just staring us down.”
The image has been likened to a fish, a raccoon
and most notably a “cute coyote’s head”. This has
landed the once-unknown region a nickname:
the Coyote Head Nebula. It’s like a Rorschach inkblot
test, say the team. What do you see
Lauren Hitchings
Photography
JPL-Caltech/NASA
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 27

OPINION
A vote against science
UKIP’s strong showing in the European elections could be the first
step towards disaster for British researchers, warns Michael Brooks
POLITICS has become a strange
place. In last week’s European
Parliament elections, many right
wing parties, some of them
extreme, got into their stride.
The upshot is that the elected
body of the European Union will
be stuffed to the gunnels with
people who would rather it didn’t
exist, but will now spend the next
five years representing their
constituents there.
Prominent among them is
Nigel Farage, leader of the UK
Independence Party (UKIP).
Already a member of the
European Parliament, Farage’s
main aim is to get the UK out of
the EU. Its freedom of movement
rules have caused an influx of
migrant workers, which has
served as the backdrop to UKIP’s
rise. While the UK remains within
the EU, it is impossible to stem
this “tide”, Farage says, and
withdrawal is the only solution.
While political scientists watch
this narrative unfold with
fascination, natural scientists
in the UK should do so with
alarm; Farage could turn out to
be a disaster for them.
That’s because they have a lot
to lose. In global terms, the UK
punches above its weight in
science. Although our population
makes up just 1 per cent of the
global total, scientists here
publish 16 per cent of the world’s
most-cited research papers. EU
policy is to “encourage the highest
quality research in Europe
through competitive funding... on
the basis of scientific excellence”.
What this means is that British
scientists get a disproportionate
amount of money from the EU.
For every £1 we contribute to
the research pot, we get
approximately £1.40 back.
If we were to withdraw in the
way UKIP hopes, we would lose
access to the source of much
of this funding: the European
Research Council. British
scientists would also lose
influence over the research
agenda and would be unable
to control the distribution of
funding across research areas.
Just as importantly, they would
haemorrhage collaborators.
The days of the lone scientist
are largely gone. International
collaboration is now vital and
near-ubiquitous. More than a
third of the papers published in
high quality journals are the
result of such links, and EUfunded
science projects require
the involvement of at least three
different member or associate
states.
Ousted from Europe, British
scientists would be out in the
cold. We know this because it has
already happened to scientists in
Switzerland, a non-EU state that
until recently enjoyed access to
EU research funding.
At the end of February, Swiss
voters rejected a deal that would
“British scientists get a
disproportionate amount
of money from the EU.
They have a lot to lose”
allow Croatians free movement
across the country’s borders. It
was a result of campaigning by
the Swiss People’s Party, which
is Eurosceptic and wants strict
limits on immigration, just like
UKIP. Limiting the movement of
people from the newest member
state didn’t comply with EU
principles, so Switzerland was
stripped of its “associate
member” status.
Associate members enjoy
almost full participation in EU
programmes, including research
projects funded from the EU pot.
Switzerland, however, now has
“third country” status, on a par
with the US and Japan.
The latest set of EU-funded
projects is known as Horizon
2020 and has about £65 billion to
allocate over the next six years.
Swiss researchers are now
excluded from receiving any of
its grants. Before February, Swiss
students could get grants to work
in labs anywhere in Europe under
the EU’s Erasmus programme –
not any more.
Researchers report that, as
a result, Switzerland has lost
international competitiveness.
There is a brain drain as senior
researchers head to countries
where they can access EU funds.
Young researchers are also
leaving – many of them rely on
the kudos of prestigious EU grants
to advance their careers. In other
countries, Swiss scientists are
being shed as collaborators.
Christian Sengstag, head of
research at the University of Basel
in Switzerland, warned in April
that the top candidates for
research jobs “will think twice
28 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

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before accepting a position in
this country”.
Could the same thing happen
in the UK It is entirely possible.
The UKIP surge in the run up to
last week’s vote was widely seen
as a protest against traditional
politics. Much of UKIP’s support
has come from those who usually
vote Conservative, a situation that
caused UK prime minister David
Cameron, leader of the
Conservatives, to commit to a
referendum on EU membership
should he be re-elected in 2015.
He wants to halt the drift of his
party’s supporters to UKIP.
The Conservatives’ main rival,
Labour, has offered no such sop
should they win power. However,
there is always a danger that
politicians will yield in the face
of a popular movement; Farage
has already said UKIP aims to win
enough MPs next year to hold the
balance of power in the UK.
And, if UK voters can push
UKIP onto the European scene,
there is no reason to believe that
they would not win a national
referendum to quit the EU.
The full process of withdrawal
would take years, but the impact
on science would be nearimmediate.
British science would
find itself in a similar position to
that in Switzerland, assuming a
comparable stand over migration.
It would have third-country
status, and its researchers would
be unable to apply for EU grants.
We wouldn’t be completely
without funds – the UK’s seven
research councils invest about
£3 billion every year. But on the
European stage, British scientists
would suddenly find that they
count for nothing.
Mainstream parties had little
to celebrate after last week’s vote;
but for British researchers it could
be even gloomier if the outcome
proves to be the first step on a
path that ends up with UK science
as the biggest loser of all. ■
Michael Brooks is a consultant for New
Scientist and the author of The Secret
Anarchy of Science (Profile)
ONE MINUTE INTERVIEW
I’d go ‘laughing and crying’
A one-way trip to Mars won’t be too harsh for someone who has
already run telescopes at the South Pole, says Robert Schwarz
PROFILE
Robert Schwarz is an astrophysicist and manages
the Keck Array, a collection of telescopes peering
back at the early universe from the South Pole. He
is one of 705 shortlisted applicants for Mars One,
which aims to colonise the Red Planet by 2025
What is your job at the South Pole
I basically man the telescopes and make sure the
data is coming in. I’m responsible for everything
from electronics to system administration, optics
to mechanics – whatever is needed.
How long do you stay there for
Right now I’m doing back-to-back winters, so I’m
here for nine-and-a-half months. This is my tenth
winter at the South Pole.
Is it hard to adjust when you return home
I’ve done it so many times now it’s like flipping a
switch. I remember my first year it was like, “Wow,
grass, oh, trees”, and things like that. Now I’m back
down here in Antarctica the green world seems
far, far away.
Why did you sign up for the Mars One
enterprise
Becoming an astronaut was always a big dream.
I am from Germany and I applied to the European
Space Agency in 2008 when they had their last
selection, but I didn’t make the last two rounds.
A lot of things have to happen for Mars One to
really take place, but why not give it a shot
In what ways have the long periods in
Antarctica prepared you for living on Mars
I know what it is to live in a remote environment
where you can’t just say, “Oh, I forgot that, I’ll just
order it or go around the corner and buy it.” Also
it’s a harsh environment psychologically because
of the extreme cold and dryness, and the fact that
it’s six months of darkness, six months of light.
How do you think the South Pole compares to
living on the International Space Station
If something happens, people on the ISS can jump
into their Soyuz spacecraft and be back on Earth
in 3 hours. If we lose electricity and can’t start our
backup generators, we’re kind of doomed: it will
take weeks to get a plane down here. If the shit
hits the fan, weeks are definitely too long.
On Mars it might be years until help arrives.
As a colonist, how would you cope
I’m good at fixing electronic and mechanical stuff.
Down here you have limited resources, so must
come up with solutions with the stuff you have.
That will be even harder on Mars.
Does leaving Earth behind scare you
I would leave laughing and crying, as we say in
German. If it happens in 10 years’ time I’ll be 54.
That would be an age where I would say, yes,
okay, I’m ready to leave now. I think the best Mars
astronaut would be between 60 and 70, because
you’d still be healthy enough to have your wits
about you, but you’d had a life on Earth as well.
What about never seeing your family again
I am not married. I still have my parents, a brother
and nieces. It’s certainly something you have to
consider. Going to Antarctica, you never know
what’s going to happen and you can’t just fly
home. Going to Mars is a step farther because
you’re never coming back.
Interview by Jacob Aron
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 29

OPINION INTERVIEW
Cracking the code
to regrow limbs
Lizards, tadpoles and zebrafish can all regenerate lost limbs –
so why can’t we Biologist Michael Levin is working to change
that. He tells Katia Moskvitch why his approach may be the
most effective way to regrow our own organs
You are working on ways to regrow body parts.
Can many species naturally regenerate limbs
A number of animals can regrow lost limbs.
If a predator catches a lizard by the tail, for
example, it will often end up with just the tail
as the lizard scurries off. To escape, lizards can
shed their tails on purpose, and they also have
a remarkable ability to regrow them.
Some insects, such as cockroaches, can
regenerate their legs, as can salamanders,
starfish and lobsters. Zebrafish fins are also
a popular model of regeneration, since they
regrow after amputation. Interestingly,
zebrafish also have a limited capacity to
regenerate their hearts. Deer regenerate their
antlers – regrowing huge amounts of bone,
nerve and skin every year.
When something is regenerated, is it exactly
the same as the lost part
Sometimes, but not always. Salamander limbs,
for example, can regenerate completely, while
tadpole tails are very good structurally but
are missing a few nerve types. Perhaps the
champions are Planaria flatworms. Their
regeneration is perfect; they can regrow every
part of their body – including their head. In
fact, in a recent study we showed that Planaria
flatworms regenerate their heads complete
with information they learned prior to
decapitation!
You have also triggered the regrowth of legs
in young frogs. How did you do it
A few years back my lab investigated the
bioelectrical signals – the change in the
distribution of cells’ resting potentials within
a tissue or organ – that allow young tadpoles
to regenerate their tails. We found that two
components were required on the surface of
cells in a wound to set up a bioelectric state
that allows regeneration: a proton pump,
which pumps hydrogen ions out of the cell
surface, and a specific sodium channel, which
allows sodium ions to flow across the cell
membrane. This bioelectric state was crucial
for cells to multiply enough to rebuild the
structure, for regeneration-specific genes to
be turned on, and for nerves to develop in the
direction of new growth.
How were you able to recreate this crucial
bioelectric state in older tadpoles and frogs
The idea is to trigger a “leg-building module”.
Our data over the last decade suggest that such
modules are encoded in the pattern of cells’
resting potentials across the tissues of the
body – this pattern is what determines which
“ Our goal is to understand
the patterns that encode
the ‘make a limb’ signal”
tissues and organs are made and where.
First we used gene therapy to introduce
a proton pump from yeast to induce the
regenerative bioelectric state in older tadpoles,
which can’t normally regrow their tails. This
forced the regeneration of functional tails,
complete with spinal cord.
We then created a drug cocktail that induced
this same state without gene therapy. When
we gave the drug cocktail to froglets it worked,
inducing the regeneration of hind legs.
Can we apply what we learn about regrowth
in other animals to humans
Humans and simpler animals share most
cell biology pathways, including the pattern
PROFILE
Michael Levin is
director of the Center
for Regenerative and
Developmental Biology
at Tufts University in
Medford, Massachusetts.
He is investigating
bioelectric medicine
and its potential for
regeneration in animals
and humans
formation mechanisms – the basic step-bystep
processes – needed to regenerate complex
organs. The basic mechanisms of bioelectrical
control are likely similar as well.
Since the German physiologist Emil du
Bois-Reymond first used a galvanometer to
measure currents in human skin and wounds
in 1843, they have been studied in hundreds of
experiments with animals. These currents
have important roles in wound healing.
Our recent work on human adult stem
cells, in collaboration with David Kaplan’s
bioengineering lab here at Tufts, showed that
the resting potentials across the cell surface
can control how they differentiate into other
types of cells. But the real power of this
30 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

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Photographed for New Scientist by Scott Brauer
approach isn’t in the control of single cells,
but in understanding how bioelectric
conversations among large groups of cells
direct the growth of complex structures.
So, in principle, one day it will be possible
to regrow human limbs. What do we need
to accomplish that
We need two things. First, we need to crack the
bioelectric code – to figure out how patterns of
bioelectrical gradients map to the creation of
specific organs. We have recently shown that
we can reprogram just about any region in the
frog embryo into a complete eye. We have also
reprogrammed posterior flatworm tissue into
complete heads. But this is just the tip of the
iceberg; we are only beginning to understand
which signals indicate the geometric
arrangement of organs in the body. Our goal
now is to understand which bioelectric
patterns encode the “make a limb” signal.
What else do we need
Second, we need a delivery vehicle – a way to
impose the correct bioelectric state onto cells
in a wound. One example is the BioDome
device made by bioengineers in Kaplan’s lab.
This is a wearable bioreactor that creates an
aqueous environment like amniotic fluid.
Within this we can induce appropriate ion
currents – and thus the correct voltage states –
in the wound and new tissue.
So the road map to eventually being able
to regrow human limbs is to first perfect the
signalling, then the delivery vehicle. That
should someday enable this to be used in
serious limb injuries – likely starting with
regrowing human hands.
Are many researchers working on this type
of regeneration
There are still very few people working in this
field. Some very good work has been done on
the effects of applied electric fields on cell
behaviour, but the key here is to molecularly
understand and control the distribution of
natural voltage gradients – these are the
control knobs that determine the structure >
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 31

OPINION INTERVIEW
LETTERS
and position of complex organs such as limbs,
eyes, the brain and so on.
Most labs are focused on biochemical
and mechanical controls of stem cells so
they can bioengineer and build organs for
transplantation. Of course, even if you could
solve all the problems of stem cell biology and
turn a stem cell into any desired cell type, you
would still have the problem of how to build a
complex organ such as a limb.
Micromanaging the direct assembly of
complex organs from stem cells will be very,
very difficult. Bioelectricity can trigger largescale
reprogramming – not just turn single
stem cells into different cell types. That’s why
I think focusing on a strategy that harnesses
what the host organism already knows about
how to build its organs is the way to go.
If we can harness the potential of this
technology, how else might it be used
If we had control over pattern formation,
we could induce the repair of any organ
Using a technique called “hugging”
a researcher collects frog eggs
damaged by injury, disease, degeneration,
cancer or even ageing. For example, Planaria
flatworms have no known lifespan limit, as
they continuously regenerate tissues that age.
Fundamentally, broad control of
regeneration is the solution to most problems
in biomedicine. Moreover, it will have an
immense impact on the economics of
societies. We face the unavoidable spiral of
treatments needed to prolong the last years
of life becoming increasingly more expensive.
As each new advance patches up the sinking
ship of the ageing body, it makes it that much
more expensive for the next advance to keep
the person alive. Regeneration could break
this cycle by inducing regrowth of healthy
organs throughout the lifespan.
You have a road map – how long do you think
it will take us to get there
I can’t make a solid guess about when – it all
depends on how the science goes and, of
course, how the funding for this expensive
research goes. But I think that experiments
in animals like frogs will allow us and others
to finally crack the bioelectric code and
understand how cell groups can store a
geometric “memory” or template of the
organs they are supposed to become.
Once we learn to speak this bioelectrical
language, we will be able to take advantage
of it and induce regeneration as needed. And
these same signals will be capitalised upon
in synthetic bioengineering as we not only
repair natural organs, but use bioelectrical
shape control to make new hybrid structures –
biobots – to desired specifications.
I am not certain when or how we will be
able to overcome the challenges to get the
technique into medicine. But as to the
approach as a whole – I’m very optimistic. ■
Quantum quirks
From Peter Standen
I greatly enjoyed Matthew
Chalmers’s article on the
subjective nature of reality and
how “quantum weirdness is all in
the mind” (10 May, p 32). The same
problem of subjectivity arises in
psychology when theorists tie
themselves in knots trying to
relate abstractions such as
intelligence or personality to
everyday experience.
Quantum theory cannot “make
sense” without a human to make
sense of it. What a scientist’s
apparatus registers while they are
unable to record it is unknowable
and therefore scientifically
meaningless. Quantum theory
comes up with “the right answer”
because people have struggled
hard to make it that way.
As David Mermin says in the
article, “it really is that simple”,
just as long as we remember that
theories are human constructions
and imperfect for that.
Darlington, Western Australia
From Edward Williams
If quantum weirdness is all in
the mind, what about optical
interference
Set up apparatus that can
record the arrival of an individual
photon on a screen after passing
through one of two slits, and then
ask: “Which slit did that particular
photon pass through”
It will never arrive at a point
not allowed by the two-slit
interference of waves.
Light travels as waves and
32 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

To read more letters, visit newscientist.com/letters
arrives as particles. This is a
weird duality that is inescapable.
Malvern, Worcestershire, UK
From Edward Miller
Quantum Bayesianism, which
views quantum states as existing
only in our minds, seems a red
herring that leads you into a
strange maze of inter-subjectivity.
What happens when the
scientists communicate with each
other and collate their individual
observations They cannot help
but arrive at objective laws of
physics, such as entanglement,
and so we end up coming full
circle back to objectivity.
Cardiff, UK
From Neil Hunt
Chalmers highlights the way a
metaphor may be mistaken for
reality. This reminded me of
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s
book Metaphors We Live By, which
reveals how fundamentally these
structure our thinking.
They demonstrate the deeply
embedded nature of metaphor
within language, and the way this
routinely escapes our notice. For
me, their ideas also made it easy
to view a quantum Bayesianist
argument as plausible.
Eccles, Kent, UK
Attitude adjustment
From Bill Pring
Clare Wilson’s article on how
doctors diagnose mental health
problems took a tone that was
rather sensationalist and negative
(10 May, p 10).
It strikes me that those working
at the front line of anthropogenic
climate change are generally
portrayed in your magazine as
heroes. Their scientific evidence
requires further refinement, but
it is considered by most that we
should act prudently to prevent
climate deterioration.
Psychiatrists treat people
more effectively now than 20 or
50 years ago, using the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM) as a rough guide.
We understand that it is flawed,
and don’t use it as a bible.
There are other areas of
medicine in which doctors have
fairly generic approaches to
treating conditions that require
further research to clarify the
cause. Prostate cancer,
rheumatism and even skin
conditions remain somewhat
mysterious but do not face the
same kind of criticism. Those
specialists are not in need of a
“reboot”, so why is psychiatry
Burwood, Victoria, Australia
■ The editor replies:
The view that psychiatry needs
a reboot comes not from our
own quarters, but from the
practitioners themselves. Last
year, Thomas Insel, director of the
US National Institute of Mental
Health, announced on his blog
(bit.ly/ns-Insel) that the
organisation “will be re-orienting
its research away from DSM
categories”.
Mind altering
From Kevin Jones
In Anil Ananthaswamy’s piece
on why robots will never be
conscious, Phil Maguire says
that his team’s proof would not
hold up if information integration
in the brain was reversible
(17 May, p 12).
He will be disappointed to
learn that memories can indeed
be broken down and edited.
Memories are also not lossless;
the act of recalling them changes
them. Some things get added
during the process of recall, some
reinforced, and others subtracted.
In light of this, we can say that
memory is not unchanging, like
a photograph, but something
rather fluid and in flux. Perhaps
the brain really is continually
haemorrhaging information.
Ambergate, Derbyshire, UK
Mars attacks
From Andrew McKenna
I am appalled by the proposal
from Explore Mars to use a
battery of ground-penetrating
missiles in the search for life on
the Red Planet (10 May, p 14).
Clearly executive director Chris
Carberry slept through Ethics 101.
If there is life of any sort on Mars,
by what right do we rain down
bombs on their heads
Buderim, Queensland, Australia
Infinite failure
From Kate Lee
In discussing the infinitely
multiplying multiverse, Lisa
Grossman states that given
enough time, anything that has a
chance of happening will happen
(17 May, p 8). This is not the case.
If you start counting in the
usual way: “1, 2, 3…” and carry on
until infinity, you will never get
to -3, 42.5 or Pi.
It is quite possible for the
number of things spawned by
the multiverse to be infinite,
but to exclude infinitely many
configurations. Much to my
disappointment, therefore,
an infinite multiverse is not
guaranteed to contain a perfect
replica of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Or indeed, Boltzmann brains.
London, UK
A stitch in time
From Brian Bennett
Aviva Rutkin’s article about a
3D printer that uses yarn sounds
very much like knitting, and in
particular a Jacquard machine
(17 May, p 21).
This specialised loom uses a
device to carry the yarn over a
series of programmable knitting
needles, allowing various 3D
articles to be made.
One could use yarns with
different properties to make
products more flexible at
different points, and it may
be possible to incorporate
electrically conductive yarns.
The company where I worked
40 years ago produced a
safety glove with electronic
components, but there was not
a lot of interest because of the
difficult economic conditions
at the time.
No doubt modern sensors
and electronics could produce a
similar piece of clothing which
would save lives and money.
Lathom, Lancashire, UK
For the record
■ Our logic got fuzzy when
considering the likelihood of
conscious robots (17 May, p 12). The
outputs should be swapped in our
description of an XOR logic gate.
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31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 33

COVER STORY
The world’s favourite over-the-counter pain remedy,
paracetamol, has a dark side, finds Tiffany O’Callaghan
YOU’VE got a terrible headache. Niggling
knee pain. An aching back. What do
you reach for Chances are that you’ll
open your medicine cabinet and grab some
paracetamol. Half an hour or so later, you’ll
feel a lot better. Or will you
Paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen,
is the cure-all of our age, used to treat
everything from sprained ankles to
toothaches and even labour pain. It is on the
first rung of the World Health Organization’s
“analgesic ladder”, which doctors use to treat
cancer pain. We spoon it to our children to
fight fever; as adults we pop it to relieve
headaches or period cramps, and as we get
older we’re prescribed it to soothe arthritis
or backache. In the US, 27 billion doses of the
drug are sold each year, and it is found in
more than 600 products.
Given its ubiquity, you might assume that
paracetamol is safe and effective – at least at
the recommended dose. That’s why we lean
on it more than aspirin or ibuprofen, which
can irritate the stomach lining and cause
bleeding. But as it turns out, this stalwart of
the medicine cabinet is not quite as reliably
gentle as you might think.
Paracetamol was discovered in the late
19th century, but it was rejected almost
immediately because of a bizarre side effect:
it seemed to turn some people blue (see
timeline, page 36). That was probably because
of contamination with a different drug, but as
a result paracetamol was sidelined until the
1940s, when further tests showed it was good
at reducing fever. Later studies concluded that
it was a pretty effective painkiller too. But it
really took off in the 1960s, in response to
emerging concerns about the long-term side
effects of aspirin and other non-steroidal antiinflammatory
drugs (NSAIDs). Today in the
US, there are about 16,500 NSAID-related
deaths a year in people with arthritis alone.
Paracetamol, on the other hand, we think of
as relatively safe. Sure, if you take lots of
tablets it could seriously damage your liver,
but at the recommended dose, it’s fine, right
This assumption is now being challenged
by research suggesting that, when taken for
prolonged periods, it may damage the
stomach as much as NSAIDs. That might be
an acceptable risk in exchange for pain relief,
but in many of those who take it, paracetamol
barely works better than a placebo.
Mysterious drug
How could this be The fact is, despite its
ubiquity, we still don’t really understand how
paracetamol works. A leading theory is that,
in part, it works like aspirin and ibuprofen, by
blocking enzymes known as cyclooxygenases.
These enzymes are responsible for making
hormone-like compounds called
prostaglandins, which trigger pain and
swelling in the body as well as stimulating
production of the mucous that shields our
stomachs against digestive acids. NSAIDs halt
the swelling process, but leave the stomach
vulnerable. The suspicion was that
paracetamol inhibited cyclooxygenases,
but to a much lesser extent; it doesn’t reduce
inflammation as these other drugs do.
Although studies in the past decade have
hinted that long-term use of paracetamol
might trigger internal bleeding, these findings
were widely dismissed by critics who cited
shortcomings of the study designs. In 2011,
however, Michael Doherty of Nottingham
City Hospital, UK, published a study that was
harder to ignore. He followed the progress of
892 men and women with the niggling knee
pain that often sets in at middle-age – usually
an early symptom of osteoarthritis. Some
were given paracetamol, others ibuprofen,
while a third and fourth group took either a
high or low-dose combination of the two.
Paracetamol is the first drug most doctors
turn to for patients with such symptoms, but
when Doherty looked at the blood results of
those taking it, he was shocked: levels of
haemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen
in the blood, were dropping fast. What’s more,
their red blood cells were growing smaller and
paler. The most logical explanation was that
they were losing blood internally, and
significant quantities of it. After three months,
a fifth of them seemed to have lost the
equivalent of an entire unit of blood (about
400 millilitres). That was the same amount
as those taking ibuprofen – only the ibuprofen
group reported feeling less pain (Annals of the
Rheumatic Diseases, vol 70, p 1534).
In those combining high doses of both
paracetamol and ibuprofen, the haemoglobin
loss after three months was even more
startling: 7 per cent of the people in that group
lost the amount of haemoglobin you would
find in two units of blood. The upshot: when
taken for long periods, paracetamol may be
just as damaging to the stomach lining as
NSAID drugs are.
“The horrifying aspect of this is that
people look at me and say ‘it’s over the
counter, it must be safe’,” says Kay Brune, a
professor of pharmacology and toxicology
at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in
Germany. Brune has been campaigning to
have paracetamol removed from over-thecounter
sale in Germany, but has so far been
unsuccessful. “Before, physicians simply said
‘OK, if it doesn’t work, it may not do any harm’.
But now we know it can do harm,” he says. >
34 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

JONATHON KAMBOURIS/GALLERYSTOCK
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 35

The rise of paracetamol
Early 1880s: German
doctors accidentally
give a patient a
recently synthesised
chemical, acetanilide:
his fever drops
dramatically
1893 German physiologist Joseph von
Mering discovers the acetanilide
derivative, N-acetyl-p-aminophenol
(paracetamol) but thinks it is too
toxic. It still turns people blue
1947 Paracetamol is rediscovered by
physiologists at Yale University. Reduces pain
and fever, without the side effects of
acetanilide. Original observations of toxicity
assumed to be down to contamination
1886 Acetanilide sold under the trade name Antifebrin.
Successful, despite turning some people’s lips and skin blue
Internal bleeding isn’t the only issue that’s
keeping drug regulators on their toes. In
January, the US Food and Drug Administration
asked manufacturers to stop producing
prescription drugs containing more than
325 milligrams of paracetamol per tablet
because of the risk of accidental overdose.
Paracetamol poisoning is responsible for
nearly 80,000 visits to the emergency room
in the US each year, and a third of these are
people who overdosed accidentally.
Although pill packets clearly state that the
maximum recommended dose is no more
than 3 or 4 grams spread over 24 hours
(or six to eight 500 g tablets), because of
paracetamol’s reputation for safety, some
people take more than this. “They know
they’re not supposed to take maybe six or
eight tablets at a time, but they have a
toothache and they just don’t want to go to
the dentist,” says Daniel Budnitz at the US
Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta,
Georgia, who has studied overdose cases.
If you regularly exceed 4 g, you can quickly
enter dangerous territory. During the
breakdown of paracetamol, a toxin is
produced that has to be mopped up by a
specific enzyme in the liver, and if you take too
How effective is your painkiller
much too fast, the supply of that enzyme
quickly dwindles.
As little as 5 to 7.5 g per day can cause serious
liver complications in otherwise healthy
people. For people with compromised liver
function due to alcoholism or liver disease,
a harmful dose can be lower still. And despite
the fact that the recommended maximum
dose is no more than 4 g per day, roughly 6 per
cent of US adults – about 14 million people –
are routinely prescribed more than this, often
in prescriptions that combine the drug with
opioids to treat severe pain.
Do these risks matter Because of the huge
numbers of people who take paracetamol,
and the relative ease with which it is
purchased and consumed, even small risks
become significant. Even so, paracetamol is
valued by medical authorities – not just for
treating life’s little hurts, but for persistent
and potentially debilitating conditions. The
UK’s National Institute for Health and Care
Excellence (NICE), the body that sets standards
for medical practice, recommends
paracetamol as the first-choice drug for
treating the chronic pain associated with
conditions like osteoarthritis and lower back
pain. The American College of Rheumatology
When it comes to relieving acute pain, such as a headache, sprain or post-operative pain, not all drugs are equal
1 2 3 4
Etoricoxib 120mg (Arcoxia)
n=500
Paracetamol 1000mg + Codeine 60mg*
Ibuprofen 400mg
Naproxen 500mg
Diclofenac 50mg
Tramadol 150mg
Paracetamol 1000mg
Aspirin 600mg
Number of people who would have to take a drug for one of them
to experience a 50% reduction in pain over 4-6 hours (smaller
number = better) Data sets vary in size
197
Prescribed drug
Over-the-counter drug
*Codeine 60mg on its own has a poor score (11-48) but combined with paracetamol is more effective
5456
784
1296
561
2759
5061
SOURCE: THE OXFORD LEAGUE TABLE OF ANALGESIC EFFICACY
also recommends it for arthritis.
In the US, an estimated 43 million people
take paracetamol each week, and nearly twothirds
of them take the drug routinely for
longer than six months.
If paracetamol was effective against
chronic pain, you might consider the trade-off
worthwhile, but the drug has been found
seriously wanting. A review of research that
looked at people taking paracetamol to relieve
“ Why are we bothering
to give a drug to people
that’s toxic, when it
often doesn’t work”
chronic joint pain found seven studies that
compared the drug with a placebo. Five of
these found it to be marginally more effective,
but two found no difference.
“Why are we bothering to give a drug to
people that’s toxic, that has significant
potential problems, when it doesn’t work”
asks Andrew Moore, an anaesthetist and
director of pain research at the University of
Oxford. “It’s unethical.”
Of course, placebos can themselves make
people feel better: another review of placebocontrolled
trials for treating joint pain found
that many people experienced moderate relief
from sham treatment, particularly when it was
given as an injection. For ethical reasons, doctors
don’t usually prescribe placebos, so the safest
active pill is often the next best thing.
“Is paracetamol a safe placebo” asks John
Dickson, a rheumatologist with the Redcar
and Cleveland Primary Care Trust in the UK,
and a consulting clinician for the 2008 NICE
guidelines. “The work Doherty did shows
it is not.”
In March, the Osteoarthritis Research
Society International changed its paracetamol
guidelines to “uncertain” to reflect growing
safety concerns. And for a while at least, it
looked like these concerns would be similarly
heeded in the UK. When NICE issued new draft
guidelines for osteoarthritis in August last
year, it did away with the recommendation of

1962 Concerns surface about
stomach bleeding and ulcers
associated with NSAIDs and aspirin.
Paracetamol sales boosted
1955/56 Paracetamol
sold in the US as Tylenol
and in the UK as Panadol
1966 Reports of severe liver
damage from intentional
overdose with paracetamol
1982 Discovery that
aspirin puts small
children at increased risk
of Reye’s syndrome
2013 In the UK, draft guidelines
from NICE recommend removing
paracetamol as first-line
treatment for osteoarthritis
2014 Final NICE guidelines,
keep paracetamol
as first-line treatment
for osteoarthritis
2011 Study suggests
paracetamol causes
reductions in haemoglobin
similar to ibuprofen
paracetamol as a first resort, and flagged its
potential dangers. “On balance, the risks of
paracetamol outweigh the benefits of any gain
in symptom control,” the report read.
Yet by the time the final version was
published in February, the old advice had
been reinstated. This was partly down to
objections raised by doctors about having few
alternative options, though NICE says it is also
awaiting the results of a more comprehensive
review of over-the-counter painkillers by the
UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products
Regulatory Agency. Dickson, like others,
was disappointed. “If paracetamol isn’t safe,
we shouldn’t be prescribing it,” he says.
Of course, most of us don’t take
paracetamol every day; it’s a drug we reach
for when we develop a headache or sprain
an ankle. And for acute pain of that nature,
paracetamol performs reasonably well,
if not as spectacularly as its popularity
might suggest. Pharmacists measure the
effectiveness of painkillers by looking at
whether they can reduce your reported
sensation of pain by at least 50 per cent, and
by counting how many people would need to
take it for one person to experience this level
of relief compared with placebo. This is
known as the number needed to treat (NNT).
Effective relief
For example, in the case of the moderate
pain of a sprained ankle, 3.8 people would
need to take a standard 1 g dose of paracetamol
(2 tablets) for one of them to get effective
relief. For a standard 400-milligram dose of
ibuprofen, the NNT is 2.5 (see table, left).
Most people suffering from acute pain
are unlikely to take these drugs for more
than a few days, so the risk of internal bleeding
is less of a concern than in those taking it
for prolonged periods. But, given that
paracetamol isn’t as effective as some
alternatives for short-term pain, it could
make more sense to take one of them, or a
combination of drugs that work through
So many painkillers:
which to choose
GRANT DELIN/MILLENNIUM IMAGES
different pathways, such as paracetamol
plus ibuprofen.
Should we do away with paracetamol
entirely Most experts believe it’s still a useful
tool in the arsenal against fevers, headaches
and sore muscles because, in the people for
whom it does work, it tends to work fairly well.
It’s just that, as with many analgesics, the
chances are hit-and-miss that it will work for
you – possibly because everyone’s body is
slightly different.
However, when it comes to chronic pain,
it could be time for a rethink. Moore suggests
measuring your pain, tracking whether a drug
makes a difference, and if it doesn’t, quickly
moving on. “Frankly, with paracetamol, if it’s
not going to work within a week, it’s never
going to work with you,” he says.
Indeed, a spokeswoman for McNeil
Consumer Healthcare, which makes Tylenol in
the US, points out that the drug’s label clearly
states that consumers should stop use and ask
a doctor if they have pain that gets worse or
lasts more than 10 days.
Of course, the ideal would be to develop a
paracetamol variant that worked better and
had fewer drawbacks. Stuart Bevan and David
Andersson at King’s College London recently
found that when paracetamol is given, one of
its break-down products activates a protein on
the surface of nerves in the spinal cord and
reduces their ability to transmit pain signals.
If confirmed, targeting this protein could be a
promising starting point.
Pharmaceutical companies are also
researching and developing new analgesics.
But given the huge regulatory hurdles for
over-the-counter drugs, few are focusing on
that market. “It is more likely that medicines
currently available on prescription would
become available over the counter, as they
will already have a good amount of safety
data,” says Roger Knaggs at the University of
Nottingham, UK.
Still, it’s possible that a promising
alternative already exists. Just as paracetamol
was consigned to a dusty back room for half a
century, other analgesics may have been
overlooked or condemned for the wrong
reasons. Safety hurdles today are much higher
than when drugs like paracetamol were first
approved. If it were a new drug, says Moore,
it probably wouldn’t get approval.
It could also be that some drugs which fail
to win approval are doing so because of poor
study design, rather than serious flaws with
the drugs themselves. Robert Dworkin at the
University of Rochester in New York, is the
director of an initiative with the FDA that is
taking a second look at analgesics that didn’t
pass muster in earlier clinical trials. It is
currently focused on prescription-strength
drugs, but Dworkin says a similar approach
could work for over-the-counter remedies too.
In the meantime, what should you do with
the paracetamol in your own cupboard For
short-lived aches and pains, the advice hasn’t
changed much. “If you follow the instructions
and if you don’t take it in too-large doses,
paracetamol is very safe,” says Bevan.
But for ongoing pain, it may be time to start
looking for alternatives. With any drug, there’s
a risk that side effects will outweigh benefits.
For paracetamol, we need to decide which risks
are still worth taking. ■
Tiffany O’Callaghan is senior opinion editor
at New Scientist
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 37

IN APRIL, a landfill in New Mexico disgorged
proof of a decades-old rumour.
The story goes back to 1983, when James
Heller was given an unusual job. His bosses at
video-game maker Atari wanted him to drive
out to the desert with 750,000 copies of their
latest game, and bury them there. Over
decades the story acquired the status of urban
legend, an illustration of the quality of the
game in question, ET: The Extraterrestrial.
Despite a $21 million outlay, Atari’s expected
blockbuster was an unmitigated flop, and was
later dubbed “The worst game of all time”.
Now consider Flappy Bird, a game that,
despite having been created by a single
developer in a couple of days, became an
accidental global obsession. At its peak earlier
this year, Flappy Bird was being played by so
THE
many people on their phones that Dong
Nguyen was making $50,000 a day. “Flappy
Bird was designed to play in a few minutes
when you are relaxed,” he said at the time.
But things took a dark turn. People became so
obsessed with the game that they showered
Nguyen with angry abuse online. In the end it
was too much for him. Nguyen withdrew
Flappy Bird from public circulation.
It has never been possible to know ahead of
time whether your painstakingly crafted game
will soar to the heights of Flappy Bird or
require desert burial. Game designers relied
on a combination of intuition, sheer luck and
years of toil – and have often been taken by
surprise by the runaway success of their own
games. But that’s all about to change.
Although game science is in its infancy, it is
already feeding insights from psychology back
into design to produce what looks like very
much like a recipe for obsession. It has
attracted the attention of interests beyond
OBSESSIONEERS
As psychologists begin to diagnose what gets
us addicted to games, we are zeroing in on a
recipe for obsession. Douglas Heaven finds
that it could hurt us – or heal us
the gaming industry. Will they use it to hurt
us – or help us
We have been aware of some basic
ingredients of habit-forming games since
at least the 1990s. That could explain the
similarity of so many popular puzzle games
like Tetris, Bejeweled and Puyo Puyo: random
shapes appear on a screen that the player must
match up with complementary shapes to clear
the board and score points. Rearranging these
shapes is undeniably, deeply, satisfying.
But why The psychological underpinnings
have only recently begun to be examined in
any detail. Many researchers have suggested
that a love of matching patterns taps into a
basic human compulsion, giving the same fix
we get as an infant pushing shaped blocks into
their corresponding holes. “It’s hard-wired in
our brain to organise things,” says Angelica
Ortiz de Gortari at Nottingham Trent
University, UK.
Perhaps no game has harnessed psychology
as deftly as Candy Crush Saga. Its basic
construction is familiar: presented with a grid
full of colourful “candies”, you line up at least
three matching sets in a row to meet different
targets and progress to subsequent levels.
Unlike some other puzzle games, Candy Crush
has become an instant, unstoppable
juggernaut and a pop culture phenomenon.
Since its introduction two years ago, the
game has become the focus of obsessive
analysis and sordid confessions. Journalists
have openly declared themselves addicts, with
more than a few admitting they have paid
extravagant sums to play. They played on the
train, at work, at weddings, while driving and
during bathroom breaks (according to one
anonymous web confessor, when she finally
got off the toilet after 4 hours of play, her legs
collapsed beneath her).
This is no niche market; no group seems
immune to its charms. So what did Candy
Crush get so right
Its designers appear to have hit upon a
formula that’s beginning to emerge from the
academic discipline of game studies as the
“ludic loop”. Ludic loops are tight, pleasurable
feedback loops that stimulate repetitive, if not
compulsive, behaviour. “It definitely takes us
back to behaviourist psychology,” says
Natasha Dow Schüll at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, whose research on
games anthropology led her to study this
phenomenon in popular gaming.
Her formulation has come largely from her
studies of slot machines and their allure to
addicts. Slot machines perfectly illustrate the
concept of the ludic loop. They lure people >
38 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

PATRICK GEORGE
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 39

into short cycles of repeated actions using
tricks familiar to behavioural psychologists:
you do something, the machine responds with
lights, jingling sounds and occasionally cash
rewards. You do it again. And again, and again.
Our affinity for this kind of activity is
typically ascribed to dopamine, a brain
signalling chemical that has been the source
of much confusion about the links between
addiction, reward, gambling and gaming.
Dopamine was long thought to be a simple
reward or pleasure chemical, but the last
decade has brought evidence that its action
in the brain is in fact much more subtle. It is
linked to the compulsion to repeat an activity,
whether or not that activity is pleasurable
(Behavioral Neuroscience, vol 119, p 5).
That would explain the appeal of slot
machines, which beget compulsive behaviour
despite offering virtually no chance of a
tangible long-term reward. Beneath the
obvious blinking lights, Schüll thinks, the real
draw of the slot machine – and all ludic loops –
is a constant, repetitive switching between
certainty and uncertainty. A moment of
uncertainty opens up as the symbols whir
inexorably toward resolution. When it
resolves, “that moment is shut down
immediately”, Schüll says. “But then you
want it again. It’s open, close, open, close.
Uncertainty and then closure.” Pull someone
into this pattern and you can keep them
repeating small actions over and over, with
neither reward nor end in sight. “There’s no
goal here, just the pleasure of being in the
zone created by this machine,” says Schüll.
The ludic loop is its own reward.
Granted, makers of slot machines would
never admit to soliciting licensed psychologists
to help them make the machines more
addictive. Similarly, Candy Crush’s developer,
“ A sense of mastery is a
powerful motivator, even
when we’re not actually
getting any better”
King Digital Entertainment of Dublin, Ireland,
is more likely to have relied on the expert
intuition of game designers and the
exhaustive testing of prototypes on sample
players. “I doubt any of these designers are
sitting around reading behaviourist
psychology,” says Schüll. “Intentionally or not,
“they’ve hit upon this formula.”
So what’s Schüll’s recipe for a ludic loop
The first ingredient is engineered
randomness. Aaron Steed, an independent
game developer who has studied Candy Crush
closely, thinks that if the algorithm that
decides what shapes to drop were truly
random we would see more matches than we
do. That suggests the game’s “randomness”
has been fine-tuned to a sweet spot between
pure chance and the illusion of control. “You
think surely because it’s random there’ll be
something I can solve there. It’s what makes
gambling games popular in general.”
Then there’s the jackpot moment. The most
satisfying thing that can happen in Candy
Crush is when you think you’re matching up
a single row of sweets, but trigger an
unexpected cascade of further matches.
“It makes the game freak out,” says Jamie
Madigan, a psychologist based in St Louis,
Missouri, who specialises in games.
Candy crush nation
Like pattern-matching, our response to
unexpected rewards is hard-wired.
Psychologists have long understood that
random windfalls are better at making us
compulsively repeat a certain behaviour than
predictable ones. This effect, known as the
variable-ratio schedule of reinforcement, was
demonstrated in the 1950s by behavioural
psychologist B. F. Skinner. When his lab rats
received unpredictable and occasional rewards
for pressing a lever, they would continue
pressing that lever long after the rewards
stopped coming, says Luke Clark of the
University of Cambridge, who specialises in
gambling disorders. “Once it’s been set up,
the conditioning is incredibly persistent.”
There’s another reason we find variable
rewards so compelling: they make us think
we are mastering the game. Psychologists
have long understood that a sense of mastery
at some venture seems to be a powerful
motivator, even when we’re not actually
getting any better at it. Even a fleeting
illusion of control puts us in mind of efforts
characterised by setbacks and improvements,
like tennis or golf. And, Clark says, the
cognitive distortion caused by the fuzzy line
between skill and luck in Candy Crush is key
to engineering this illusion. “You’re not really
sure if you’ve caused it,” he says.
Stitch together what appear to be random
rewards with the illusion that we’re somehow
earning them, and we’re hooked.
Whether or not this precise winning formula
was hit upon by accident, Schüll says, it won’t
stay accidental for much longer, now that it’s
clear what’s to be gained from deliberately
engaging the psychology of compulsive play.
King has crushed its competition. At least
500 million people – equivalent to two-thirds
of the population of Europe – have
downloaded Candy Crush, and 7 million of
them play every day. Enough of them pay for
the privilege that King’s revenue is estimated
at about $900,000 per day. But the formula
isn’t easily copied. Even King hasn’t been able
to replicate Candy Crush’s success.
That could explain why psychologists are at
the centre of an industry now springing up to
formalise their understanding into design at
very early stages of game development.
Feeding psychological research back into
game development will take the guesswork
out of design and yield recipes for making
games more compulsive, says Richard Ryan at
the University of Rochester, New York. Ryan
co-founded Immersyve, a consultancy that
advises game studios on how to make their
40 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

games more engaging, in 2003. “We have
developed a lot of metrics so we can measure
whether games are hitting a psychological
satisfaction mark in people,” he says.
They’re not the only ones. “You’re going to
see games companies of all kinds increasingly
adding scientists to their teams,” says Ramin
Shokrizade, an economist at games studio
Wargaming America in Austin, Texas, who
advises game designers.
What happens when this industry matures
Like Candy Crush, it will probably compel an
ever wider net of casual gamers to pay for a
game that they could play for nothing –
something that has until recently been the
purview of specialist gambling apps.
Candy Crush is free, but it requires small
payments if you want to extend your stay in
the ludic loop. For example, you get five free
lives, but each lost life takes half an hour to
refresh. Lose five lives in quick succession and
you have to wait two-and-a-half hours till
“ When you’re immersed,
you don’t stop and say,
wait, this dollar would be
better spent elsewhere”
you’re back with your full complement of
lives. Unless… you’re willing to pay a small
fee, or give up some data through social media.
“When you’re already immersed, you don’t
stop and say ‘Wait, this dollar would be better
spent somewhere else,’ ” says Shokrizade.
As our understanding of the function and
motivation of ludic loops has grown, we are
seeing more games work this way to squeeze
cash out of us. “When games get more
effective – and trust me, they’re going to get
much more effective – we won’t be converting
just some of the population,” he says.
“We could be converting 90 per cent.”
In light of that, it’s not surprising that ludic
loops have caught the attention of industries
beyond gaming. Bite-size loops can turn
dreary tasks into activities many of us will
happily snack on whenever we have a spare
minute. In 2006 Google hit upon the idea of
turning manual image-tagging into a quickfire
game where your input – a word to
describe the content of a given image – was
quickly followed by feedback telling you
whether it matched the input of a random
online collaborator.
Ludic loop mechanisms are also apparent
in the success of projects like EyeWire, a
collaborative online brain-mapping effort.
EyeWire recruits players around the world to
do the painstaking work of colour-coding the
brain, neuron by neuron. The ludic loop is
engaged with frequent feedback. Colour in an
area and you immediately learn whether you
answered with the majority.
Both EyeWire and Google image-tagging
involve tasks that would normally be
outsourced to paid workers. But suck your
workers into a ludic loop and the labour is free.
That’s also appealing to the makers of
healthcare self-tracking apps, who have tried
desperately to find ways to make logging food
intake or other arduous self-monitoring
appealing and compulsive. “Often they point
to Candy Crush as something good to imitate,”
says Schüll.
She is concerned that too many people are
jumping on a bandwagon that nobody fully
understands. “Every time I give a talk, I get
dozens of people coming up to me afterwards
and asking for these secrets for their particular
industry.” She has noticed an slight upturn in
the number of people who refer to themselves
as “behaviour designers”, which she says feels
a little creepy.
If this is all beginning to sound a bit
dystopian, it’s not all bad news. Plenty of
people are trying to hijack our compulsive
tendencies for our own good.
Digital healing
Engaging the ludic loop with interactive
media, for example, could make it easier
for students to learn. Engaging compulsive
mechanisms causes information to get
encoded on a deeper level, says Berni Good
of Cyber Psychologist, a consultancy in
Birmingham, UK, specialising in games
psychology. “It goes into long-term memory
more readily,” she says. The extremely
popular game Minecraft – which has also
inspired musings about compulsion – has
even been used as a teaching aid for subjects
as diverse as quantum physics, geology
and etiquette.
We might even use the ludic loop to heal,
or prevent, psychological damage. Playing
Tetris after viewing a traumatic film, for
example, was found to reduce the likelihood
of flashbacks. The researchers who did the
study suggest games that engage compulsive
behaviours could be used as a “cognitive
vaccine” for post-traumatic stress disorder
(PLoS One, vol 5, p e13706).
It’s not just people with PTSD who need
soothing, though. Shokrizade thinks we all do.
“As society gets more stressful, we need more
entertainment, in any place, at any time.”
Schüll thinks smartphone apps designed
around ludic loops act as digital pacifiers,
damping down stress. “They turn our phones
into mood modulators, little self-medicating
devices,” she says. She remains unconvinced
that turning people into game-addicted
zombies is ever justified. When people ask
for her help in making their product as
compelling as Candy Crush, she tries to
encourage them to avoid the baser
manipulations of the ludic loop. “Just because
these things work doesn’t mean you want to
imitate them,” she says.
But her words are likely to fall on deaf ears:
game developers would prefer not have to
bury the bodies of their failed games in the
desert. And if the ludic loop is a bit of a
Pandora’s box, it’s full of great tricks. ■
Douglas Heaven is a feature editor at New Scientist
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 41

The
secret
ones
In an inaccesible valley in Mali lives a language that hides as
much as it communicates. How did this “anti-language” emerge,
asks Matthew Bradley
ABBIE HANTGAN
42 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

WHEN Westerners say “Timbuktu”,
it is as if we are talking about the ends
of the earth. But the city’s remoteness
is nothing compared to the small village of
Bounou, tucked inside a rugged cul-de-sac
valley 250 kilometres to the south. No
European had ever visited the surrounding
Bandiagara region until French colonial officer
Louis Desplagnes reached it in 1904 – and even
he didn’t get as far as Bounou.
Abbie Hantgan is one of the few Westerners
to have reached the village in recent years.
She can still recall the last leg of her journey,
after an arduous two-day bus trip to the small
market town of Konna (see map, page 45).
It was the height of the rainy season, meaning
that a 5-hour journey by donkey cart was the
only way to traverse the canyon where
Bounou perches.
“The track was flooded waist-high,” she
says. “But the floodwater didn’t keep the cart
from finding every rock and rut in the track
along the way.” Eventually, they reached a
boulder marking the end of the track and
she saw Bounou “hanging on the cliff side”.
It was, she says, “a scene out of time”.
For Hantgan, Bounou’s remoteness was
one of its main attractions. She wanted to
document the words spoken by its
inhabitants, the Bangande. Although these
people share much of their culture with the
surrounding Dogon people, their language,
called Bangime, is very different and has many
unusual characteristics. Understanding its
origins could therefore tell us a lot about the
history of this little-explored area of Africa,
while also offering a way to investigate the
birth and evolution of languages.
As Hantgan embarked on her visit to the
region, she knew it came with its share of risks.
She was taking over research started by the
young Dutch linguist Stefan Elders, who
passed away while working in Bounou the
previous year. He had contracted a stomach
ailment and the isolation of the village meant
he couldn’t reach a hospital in time.
Elders’s work was part of the US National
Science Foundation’s Dogon Project, headed
by linguist Jeffrey Heath at the University of
Michigan. The project investigates
relationships between the various languages
spoken by the Dogon peoples living on the
Bandiagara Escarpment and the adjacent Seno
Plain. Some 80 named Dogon speech varieties
exist, which Western linguists categorise as 22
separate languages and many more dialects.
Hantgan’s experience meant she was ideally
qualified to take Elders’s place in the project.
While volunteering with the US Peace Corps in
Mali, she had learned Fulfulde and a Dogon
language called Bondu-so. Both would
prove useful in her doctoral research into
Bangime. Fulfulde, used as a lingua franca
or bridge language in Bounou, provided her
with a tool to talk to local people and elicit
words in Bangime, while Bondu-so helped
illustrate possible connections with the other
Dogon languages.
Hantgan began by compiling a list of
common words in Bangime – a task that often
attracted derision from the locals. “Every day,
villagers on the way to their day’s work in the
fields would see me seated inside with my
notebook and pen, asking a consultant to
repeat the difference between ‘moon’ and
‘water’ over and over again,” she remembers.
“With their hoes over their shoulders, they
would make fun of me for spending another
day sitting in the shade instead of going out
to tend crops.”
It was a lonely and frustrating time for her,
cut off from contact with family and friends
and without even a shortwave radio to remind
her of home. But she soon found an ally in the
village chief – although he had initially been
anxious about her research. He said it upset
him that visitors from other Dogon villages
often asked why the Bangande have different
surnames and don’t look like the rest of the
Dogon, even though the Bangande consider
themselves to be a Dogon people. Despite
concerns that the research might emphasise
those differences, he could see how much
effort Hantgan was putting in. When villagers
would chide her within the chief’s earshot, he
would say: “She is tending her crops! The pen
is her hoe, and the notebook is her field.”
Once Hantgan had compiled a suitable >
A Bangande family
relaxes outside their
home (left); the village
of Bounou perches on
the side of a remote
canyon (top)
DOGONLANGUAGES.ORG
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 43

number of words, her next task was to identify
any that were “cognates” with the other Dogon
languages. Cognates are words originating
from a common root. For instance, the word
“luna” in Italian is related to the word “lune”
in French, “lluna” in Catalan and “lua” in
Portuguese; all come from “luna” in Latin, the
mother tongue from which these Romance
languages diverged. Identifying cognates can
therefore help demonstrate whether two
languages have a common origin.
Hantgan and her colleagues found that it
was not unusual for at least 50 per cent of the
vocabulary of a given Dogon language to be
cognate with the vocabulary of another
Dogon language – whereas just 10 per cent of
Bangime’s vocabulary seemed to share roots
with Dogon terms. Rather than reflecting a
common mother language, this small shared
vocabulary may simply be due to Bangime
speakers borrowing a few words from their
neighbours, in the same way that cultural ties
resulted in English borrowing words like sushi,
pergola and pyjamas.
In this way, Hantgan’s research seemed
to mark out Bangime as the most recently
discovered language isolate – a tongue not
related to any other language. That is of
interest to historical linguists like Lyle
Campbell at the University of Hawaii in
Honolulu, who points out that scholars tend
to classify African languages as belonging to
one of four major families: Afro-Asiatic,
Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congo or Khoisan. The
recognition of Bangime as an isolate might
suggest that the classification system needs
a rethink, he says.
Orphaned tongues
Further evidence for Bangime’s uniqueness
resides in the fact that its grammar is radically
different from that of the other languages
spoken by Dogon groups. To give an example:
although the Dogon languages join words to
form compounds, as does English (think
football, rainstorm or driveway), Bangime
doesn’t. On the other hand, prefixes are found
in Bangime, while being notable by their
absence in the Dogon languages.
These differences are somewhat surprising,
because in other ways, the Bangande and
Dogon cultures are very similar. The Bangande
wear the same clothing and jewellery as the
Dogon people, and both use Tellem
architecture – mud brick, coiled clay and
stone masonry structures set into the cliff
face – for granaries and burial grounds.
Looking at the archaeological record, it is
ABBIE HANTGAN
Abbie Hantgan’s “assigned daughter” (right)
and a friend fetch water from the well
easy to assume that people who share such
material cultures are part of a single language
community. This has been the basis for
theories about the origins of the Indo-
European languages spoken in Europe and
Asia, for instance. Yet the unusual relationship
between the Dogon and Bangande reminds us
that we can’t rely on these assumptions.
What leads to a language becoming an
isolate Campbell notes that isolates may
be the orphans of larger linguistic families
whose other members have slowly died out –
perhaps because the speakers adopted other
languages. Many social, political and
economic factors probably influence which
languages survive, and which perish. Tongues
like Bangime could represent a concerted
effort to resist shifting to others’ words.
The first hint of this comes from the very
name Bangande. Bang translates as secret,
hidden, or furtive, and -ande is a plural
suffix – like -s in English – so the combination
translates as “furtive ones”. The word Bangime
is formed in a similar fashion, with the suffix
-ime signifying language; thus it translates
as “secret language”. Clearly, they were once
keen to keep to themselves.
Hantgan discovered further clues as to
why that might be when she moved from
compiling words and phrases to collecting
longer portions of continuous speech. Along
the way, she documented oral histories of
the Bangande villages as places of refuge for
escapees from Fulani slave caravans, which
served the internal and transatlantic slave
trades. Peoples such as the Bobo, Samo and
the Bangande themselves were commonly
targeted by slave traders because Islamic
law afforded non-Muslims no protection
against enslavement.
“ The slave trade may
explain why the
Bangande were
determined to keep
their own language’”
ABBIE HANTGAN
The oral histories described many of these
escapees as children who were seized while
they were gathering firewood and water
outside their villages. They had sacks placed
over their heads for several days to make sure
they were unable to orient themselves and
attempt escape back to their home village.
Some of those who did escape eventually
found their way to the Bangande settlements,
where they were integrated into the
community and learned Bangime.
The integration of individuals from across
the Sahel to the north and the Volta river
basin to the south may explain the physical
distinctiveness of the Bangande people. Being
joined by runaways seeking sanctuary from
slave raiders may be one reason the Bangande
have come to refer to themselves as “the
furtive ones” – and might explain why they
44 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

Beyond Timbuktu
The Bangande people live in one of the remotest parts of Mali: a village called Bounou. The region was first
visited by Westerners in 1904 - even then, the explorer didn't reach this particular village. Perhaps because
of their remoteness, the Bangande have developed a unique language that is of great interest to linguists
have been determined to keep their own
language.
The Bangande’s eagerness to retain their
secrecy may even have led Bangime to develop
what British linguist Michael Halliday calls an
anti-language. That’s a distinct “dialect that
serves to mark off a group of speakers from
the larger society”, resulting in an “antisociety”.
Jargon is one common element of
such dialects, but Bangime’s anti-language
also uses more elliptical tactics.
Hantgan didn’t become aware of the
existence of the anti-language until near
the end of her third year of work in Bounou,
when she had gained some conversational
proficiency in Bangime. She started to see a
pattern in which some terms were the polar
opposites of the things they described. For
example, a particular white-barked tree was
referred to as “black-eyed,” and a particular
black-barked tree as “white-eyed”.
As her mastery of the language improved
even more, Hantgan began to notice that
many words she had asked the villagers for
didn’t regularly appear in natural speech,
where circumlocutions were often preferred.
For example, she had previously recorded the
term sáàn for fence. Yet one day, she heard a
garden fence being referred to as “stick(s) put
into the ground so that people may pass next
to the rice”. Similarly, cakes were sometimes
called “powder which has been sweetened”,
while sunglasses were “black things to hide
the eyes”.
This sort of linguistic theatricality and
Villagers in Bounou
are nominally Muslim
and celebrate some
major Islamic festivals
Bemako
deception are an example of what Mark Pagel
at the University of Reading, UK, calls “a
powerful social anchor”. He has argued that
languages evolve to deceive and exclude
others, as much as to ease communication.
A roundabout way of describing objects is
just one strategy that helps the Bangande set
themselves apart from other group – and
perhaps helped them to distance themselves
from the passing traders who may have begun
to pick up their everyday words.
Nuances and exceptions
Today, Bounou is accessible only
after a 5-hour donkey-cart ride
from the nearest town, Konna
MALI
Timbuktu
BANDIAGARA
ESCARPMENT
Niger
Mopti
Bani
The slave trade also seems to have left its mark
in the way Bangime distinguishes social class.
The “aristocracy”, who claim to descend from
the families who harboured the escaped
slaves, speak in a high register associated with
a more complex tonal system, compared with
the speech of the “serf” population, who are
thought to be descended from those escapees.
A process known as over-regularisation may
account for the distinction. Learners tend to
assume regular patterns in a language until
a wealth of exposure or being corrected shows
them the nuances and exceptions. For
instance, non-native speakers of English may
say “catched” instead of “caught”.
Such errors can be difficult to overcome,
and they sometimes feed back into the native
language. Indeed, many linguists now believe
this can explain why grammar gets simpler
over time for languages that have a lot of
contact with outsiders, like English. It is easy
to imagine that the escapees learning Bangime
as a second language over-regularised its tonal
system – leading to patterns that are distinct
from those used by people descended from
the native inhabitants.
The ongoing conflict in Mali means that
fieldwork has been halted for the foreseeable
future – yet there is much more to discover.
Konna
Bounou
The first European explorer to
reach a village in this area was
Louis Desplanges in 1904
50 km
Kani Gogouna
BANDIAGARA ESCARPMENT
One of Hantgan’s long-term research goals is
to investigate links between the origin of the
Bangande people and the Dogon cultures.
Previous researchers had suggested that
when the Dogon arrived about 600 years ago,
they displaced the existing populations in the
region. As evidence, they pointed out that
historical Tellem structures and funerary
remains don’t seem to correspond to presentday
Dogon material cultures.
The Ounjougou research project at the
University of Geneva, Switzerland, however,
has revealed how pre-Dogon and Dogon
material culture and funerary practices subtly
influenced each other. It could be that the
Bangande were those people who lived in the
region before the Dogon arrived and shared
some of their cultures with the newcomers,
explaining the similarities we see today.
Alternatively, the ancestors of the Bangande
may have arrived along with those of today’s
Dogon, but speaking an unrelated language.
Other groups may have also moved to the
area, with only the Bangande resisting the
shift to using a Dogon language. Until the
security situation in Mali improves, it won’t
be possible to gather fresh data related to
these hypotheses.
At present, Hantgan is eagerly working as
a newly minted postdoctoral fellow at the
School of Oriental and African Studies in
London. Her position will see her beginning
field research soon in rural Senegal, but she
also hopes to return to her friends and
research in Bounou. Despite the hardships,
her enthusiasm is as strong as ever.
“Investigating the warp and weft of tone, the
rainbow of vowel harmony and the ladder of
consonant mutation, these are the intricacies
that make human speech so fascinating to
me,” she says. ■
Matthew Bradley is a writer based in Massachusetts
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 45

CULTURELAB
The Tao of Systems
Holistic thinking is hard work for humans, but we will need
to learn to do it if we are to solve Earth’s most pressing
problems, finds Mark Buchanan
The Systems View of Life: A unifying
vision by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi
Luisi, Cambridge University Press,
£24.99
WHEN I was about
17, I was briefly
transfixed by the
teachings of
Eastern mysticism.
I read everything
I could about Zen
Buddhism and
Taoism, and pored over books by
spiritual figures who claimed that
ordinary consciousness could be
transcended through discipline
and meditation. I had tantalising
visions of suddenly achieving
“enlightenment” or “oneness”
with the Godhead (although I had
no idea what that was). To me,
it all sounded impossibly cool.
As I also loved mathematics
and physics, I picked up the
bestselling book The Tao of Physics
by physicist Fritjof Capra. It
introduced me to weird concepts
from quantum theory: things like
entanglement and non-locality,
which Einstein famously called
“spooky action at a distance”.
Capra convinced me there
were surprising parallels between
these aspects of modern physics
and Eastern mysticism, that
what Buddhists had been
saying for centuries about the
interconnectedness of everything
in the universe sat quite well with
today’s physics. His wonderful
book kindled a fascination with
quantum theory which I have
never lost (although I gave up on
mystic enlightenment long ago).
I think Capra is now ready to
inspire a new generation of
young readers in much the same
way, only with a focus on
systems biology rather than
quantum physics.
In The Systems View of Life,
Capra and biochemist Pier Luigi
Luisi explore how modern
biology, in trying to understand
the self-organising, adaptive and
creative aspects of life in all its
forms, has by necessity turned
to a holistic, systems view
emphasising pattern and
organisation.
But the main point of the book
isn’t merely that systems biology
is fascinating. More importantly,
Capra and Luisi argue that many
of the most important problems
we face today – from financial
instability to climate change and
ecological degradation – reflect
our collective inability to
appreciate just how the world
operates as a holistic, networked
system in which every part
depends on every other.
“ The 21st-century zeitgeist
is changing from one
of world-as-machine to
world-as-network”
There may be solutions – even
simple ones, they suggest – if we
could manage to start thinking
in this way, and the book is their
effort to help this along. It’s partly
an enjoyable survey of exciting
new developments in systems
biology, valuable to any student
of biology or science, and partly a
bold blueprint for how we might
preserve our future on Earth
using the systems perspective
on life and what sustains it.
You won’t find much by way
of dramatic narrative about
scientists making discoveries.
Rather, this is a book of ideas and
argument. Some of the scientific
history is quite familiar, and
many readers will be able to skim
earlier sections on the rise of
classical physics, or revolutions
of Darwinian evolution, relativity
and quantum theory. That said,
Capra and Luisi use this history
as a useful lens to examine how
human thought has had an onagain,
off-again relationship with
systems thinking for centuries.
They also bring back to life
some of the foundational figures
in systems science, now mostly
forgotten. For example, I had
heard of the Austrian biologist
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who in
the 1930s developed general ideas
about the organising principles of
living systems. What I didn’t know
is that he also introduced the
important notions of open and
closed systems. An open system is
“open” to an outside world, as our
planetary biosphere is to the flow
of the sun’s energy. Such systems
naturally develop complex,
dynamic structures reminiscent
of life, things absent in closed or
isolated systems.
I had also heard the name
Bogdanov, but had no idea
that Alexander Bogdanov was a
Russian polymath who developed
similar ideas around the turn of
the 20th century; his work is still
largely unknown in the West.
It isn’t until chapter 7 that the
book really takes off, moving
with full force into the more
recent systems revolution in
biology. Capra and Luisi take an
adventurous expedition through
topics from genetic regulation to
ecology, and from climate science
to the origins of life, in every case
DAVID MAITLAND/MILLENNIUM IMAGES, UK
Causality works bottom-up
and top-down, at once
emphasising the necessity of
taking a holistic perspective if
we are to make progress.
They ask: can we understand
the dynamics of the human heart
in terms of the interactions of its
cells No, because the behaviour
of every cell depends on the
overall state of the heart itself.
Causality works in both
directions, bottom-up and topdown,
at once. What happens
cannot be understood by
46 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culturelab
studying any one level on its own.
The book will be a terrific
resource for anyone who wants to
learn about cutting-edge research
into creating artificial cells or
other aspects of synthetic biology,
or in areas such as epigenetics,
where the old gene-centric point
of view has been more or less
completely undermined.
These ideas have helped drive
complexity science forward over
the past few decades. Indeed,
Capra and Luisi argue that the
21st-century zeitgeist is changing
from one of world-as-machine to
world-as-network, a holistic
system in precise interrelation
rather than a collection of
dissociated parts. That sounds
fine in theory, but how can we
put it to use
This is the focus of the third
and final broad section of the
book: on sustaining the web of
life. Here, Capra and Luisi make
some fairly routine observations,
for example, that our success will
require a shift to more sustainable
kinds of economic growth, and
finding ways to organise our
activities in a manner that doesn’t
interfere with nature’s inherent
ability to support life.
Ideas like these are hardly
new, and that could also be said of
much of the book, especially its
discussion of systems theory,
complexity science, ecology and
the roots of our global problems.
“ We are not ecologically
literate or systems literate:
these are languages we
will have to learn ”
But this is a broad synthesis,
linking many areas of science to
make one very important point:
that there’s very little we can do
without holistic thinking, despite
the obvious difficulties involved
in doing it well. We are, they
suggest, not “ecologically literate”
or systems literate, and these are
languages we will have to learn.
As in The Tao of Physics, there is
some Eastern mysticism in this
book, and rightly so. After all,
those philosophies have always
emphasised the deep dependence
of everything human on nature
and the environment, and have
taught living with nature rather
than trying to dominate it.
We should have been listening
long ago. I hope that Capra and
Luisi will manage to persuade
many that we must start listening
now – or face the consequences of
our own ignorance. ■
Mark Buchanan is a visiting professor
at the IMT Institute for Advanced
Studies in Lucca, Italy
JENS RYDELL/NATURBILD/CORBIS
In praise of hoverflies
There is subtle treasure in the indistinct
boundary between science and literature
The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjöberg,
Particular Books, £14.99
Bob Holmes
“LIMITATIONS
cheer me up,”
writes Fredrik
Sjöberg. By that
standard, he
should be
positively radiant.
He finds travel
neither pleasant nor instructive,
preferring to spend his days on a
small island off the Swedish coast
near Stockholm, where he is one
of just 300 permanent residents.
There, the great passion of his
life – and the ostensible subject
of The Fly Trap – is collecting and
studying hoverflies. No flashy
butterflies or beetles here, not
even an ambitious attempt at the
hoverflies of the world: just the
202 species on his island that he
has come to know like old friends.
Of course, as Sjöberg himself
admits, “the hoverflies are only
props… Here and there, my story
is about something else. Exactly
Studying Swedish hoverflies
was a passion for Sjöberg
what, I don’t know.” The reader
doesn’t either, not at first.
Sjöberg, a translator and
literary critic as well as a hoverfly
expert, thrives in the indistinct
boundary between science and
literature. “I used to say that I was
a writer,” he tells us, “but all the
women on the island felt so sorry
for my wife that I started insisting
I was a biologist instead.”
The book unfolds like a leisurely
after-dinner conversation, as
Sjöberg meanders through the
pleasures of collecting hoverflies
on a summer’s day, the
eccentricities of entomologists
and the surprising intimacy of
conversations between strangers
on a ferry (the end of a crossing sets
a time limit, focusing the mind).
Along the way, he indulges a
fascination for the life of Swedish
entomologist René Malaise. Best
known today as the inventor of
an insect trap – hence the book’s
title – he was, in many ways, the
anti-Sjöberg, someone who never
acknowledged limits. As a young
man in the 1920s and 30s, he
collected insects and acquired
a reputation as an intrepid
adventurer and a bit of a ladies’
man: Sjöberg tracks his love life
by noting which women he
named insects after.
But the real message of the
book, published in Swedish a
decade ago and now translated
into English, is the quiet pleasure
to be found in reading the fine
print of knowledge. “A world full
of highly personal mastery
without petty rivalries would be
a nice place to live,” he writes. In
this subtle book, Sjöberg provides
a convincing example. ■
Bob Holmes is a consultant for
New Scientist
31 May 2014 | NewScientist | 47

CULTURELAB
The world, for free
Measuring human worth by possessions or productivity looks barbaric in Jeremy Rifkin’s future world
PROFILE
Jeremy Rifkin is president of the
Foundation on Economic Trends in
Bethesda, Maryland. His book The Zero
Marginal Cost Society is published by
Palgrave Macmillan (£17.99)
STEPHEN JAY GOULD called one
of Jeremy Rifkin’s early books
“anti-intellectual propaganda
masquerading as scholarship”.
In the 30 years since, Rifkin
has prepared governments,
companies and the public for
his controversial version of the
future. Liz Else talks to him
about his latest book.
Your book is called The Zero
Marginal Cost Society. Why
Marginal cost is the cost of
producing an additional unit of
something after the fixed costs
have already been absorbed.
Sellers look for technologies to
increase productivity, and to win
over consumers by offering
cheaper products. But no one ever
imagined marginal costs could
approach zero, making goods
and services potentially free and
therefore beyond market forces.
What is driving this change
Over the past 15 years, millions
of consumers have become
prosumers, producing and
consuming and sharing their
own information goods – music,
film, videos, entertainment,
blogs, knowledge. This shift
devastated the music and media
industries because their high
overheads make it hard for them
to compete. You can argue that
the more you give away, the more
people will be interested in your
premium services. But this hasn’t
really happened on a major scale.
HANS BLOSSEY/IMAGEBROKER/FLPA
Where can we see this idea of
“free” gaining the most ground
It is affecting the provision of
energy at a fantastic rate. There
are more than 3 billion sensors
operating in the world, embedded
in everything from warehouses
and assembly lines to domestic
TVs and washing machines, and
they’re continually feeding data
to the “internet of things”. By
2030, US manufacturer Fairchild
Industries estimates there will be
100 trillion such sensors globally.
Over that time, the internet of
things will evolve into three
internets: for communication,
“ No one ever imagined
marginal costs could
approach zero, making
goods and services free”
Houses planned in Germany
harvest ever-cheaper solar energy
energy and logistics. Take energy.
Forty years ago, a watt of solar
electricity cost $66. Now it costs
66 cents and the price is falling.
You have to install that solar
panel, wind turbine or
geothermal heat pump and pay
for it, but you’re then producing
energy at near-zero marginal cost.
How will this affect our wealth
People who produce their own
energy and physical goods need
less income. There are still going
to be a lot of goods and services
that aren’t free, so we’ll still need
jobs. But there is an institutional
mechanism we all use every day
to obtain goods and services
provided by neither government
nor private enterprise.
Economists call it the not-forprofit
sector, but it’s bigger than
that. It covers everything from
producing and sharing things to
education, healthcare, day care for
children, assisted living for the
elderly, cultural events, sport, arts
and environmental activities.
All these generate a worldwide
revenue of $2.2 trillion – and that’s
only the small bit we know how to
quantify. For the past 20 years,
the not-for-profit sector has been
growing faster than the private
sector. More than 10 per cent of
the UK, US and Canadian
workforce operates in this sector.
What’s in this future for me
The emerging new economy
offers more intense rewards and
greater opportunities for selfdevelopment.
In an economy
centred on sustainable abundance
rather than scarcity, our
grandchildren may look back at
mass-market employment with
the same disbelief with which we
look on slavery and serfdom. The
idea that a human’s worth was
measured almost exclusively by
their productive output of goods,
services and material wealth will
seem primitive, even barbaric.
What could prevent this utopia
Climate change – and so also food
insecurity – and cyberterrorism.
Can we outrun these risks
I’m guardedly hopeful, but not
naive. Our world is becoming
dysfunctional in terms of the
environment we’ve created and
the inequalities we’ve contrived.
If we don’t embark on this
journey, what would be the
alternative ■ Interview by Liz Else
48 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

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VLJQLÀFDQWFRQWULEXWLRQVWR$UJRQQH·VVWUDWHJLFPLVVLRQWKURXJKH[LVWLQJSURJUDPVRUE\
LQLWLDWLQJQHZUHVHDUFKDUHDV$'LUHFWRU·V)HOORZLVKLUHGDVDQ$UJRQQH6FKRODUZLWK
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FEEDBACK
For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback
PAUL MCDEVITT
GOOD news for South Carolina. Earlier,
its House of Representatives opposed
creationist references that the state
Senate slipped in while enacting
8-year-old Olivia McConnell’s proposal
to name the Columbian mammoth as
the state fossil (26 April). Then an
inter-house “conference committee”
backed the House, despite the
majority of its members initially
voting in favour of the “created on the
Sixth Day” language. On 16 May, the
bill was approved by governor Nikki
Haley. That was wise politics: Olivia had
told CBS News she was determined to
have the unadulterated bill passed,
even if it “might not be until I’m 23 or
40… If it doesn’t pass this year, I’m
going to be back next year.”
EDITING this week’s column, we
found ourselves writing to a
colleague: “next week, Thursday
will take place on Wednesday
21 May.” This is a consequence of
the UK public holiday that some
readers may have enjoyed not
long before reading this, requiring
that everything be done early.
In turn, as we draft this on
Friday 16 May, the word “today”
would mean “Saturday 31 May” –
the date on the cover. Meanwhile,
we are discussing with a colleague
an idea for another publication, in
which “today” is “Friday 23 May”.
So why was it not a journalist but a
patent examiner who realised the
relative nature of time
THERE will now be a short pause while
Feedback savours the phrase “Swiss
patent-attorney humour”. New
Scientist published a letter from Alan
Wells about the patent work of Albert
Einstein, including the phrase: “back
then, the Swiss Patent Office only
examined patent applications relating
to timing means” (12 April, p 32). Alan
now confesses that this sentence was
“ein Schnappsidee” – a term that he
says is “not easily translatable” but
Mail from crowdprediction.cfpf.org.uk tells of
“a ‘Crowd Prediction’ experiment to see if the date
of future catastrophes can be predicted” – but
wouldn’t it be nicer to start with lottery numbers
which we recognise all too easily,
knowing that Schnapps is alcoholic
and Idee is “idea”.
He looks forward to his letter being
cited to support the notion that, as
Graham Greene put it in The Third
Man, 500 years of Swiss democracy
and peace produced “the cuckoo
clock”. In patent-attorney terms, that
would be a “mechano-avian timing
means”. For the record, Alan directs
us to the Swiss Patent Office in Bern
listing patents examined by Einstein,
which include a gravel sorter and an
“electrical typewriter with shuttletype
carrier” (bit.ly/AlbertPatents).
DISCUSSING with colleagues the
prospects for the climate change
talks in Bonn, Germany, next
month, we recalled the immortal
intent of a diplomat in Geneva
“not to move the discussion
unnecessarily forward” (8
February). Other favourite
diplomatic language includes
“I shall have to refer to my
capital,” meaning: “I don’t care
what you lot say for the rest of the
week, I’m not consenting to
anything until we next meet.”
In the record of a meeting, the
words “one country said…” are a
delicate way, in our experience, of
recording occasions when the US,
specifically, means: “dream on,
people, that is so not happening.”
Feedback expects readers have
similar favourites. Will you reveal
them, strictly between us
THE Australian firm behind
georesonance.com claims to detect
metals and minerals. We observed
that in 2011 it was promoting
“Geo-Resonance Rejuvenation – An
Innovation in Holistic Healing”, but
skipped the technicalities (17 May).
Now we have found more similar
claims. In Ukraine, geonmr.com opens
with the wonderfully gnomic “When
we have picked up all grain about new,
very weak, but very ‘powerful’ signals,
we saw a new truth about deep
underground vision…” In Spain we
find esproenko.org, with subsidiaries
in, among other countries, Ukraine.
But how is it supposed to work The
company transcomplex.uk.com
provides a translation of a Ukrainian
patent to which all the above refer.
This specifies that “a black-and-white
negative is used as an aerospace
photograph [and packaged with a]
test wafer and X-ray film, the formed
package is treated with gamma rays.”
The X-ray film is then “chemically
processed and placed in an alternating
electric field of high pressure”. This
method somehow reminds us of
“aura-imaging” practices like Kirlian
photography. How it enables the
detection of underwater or buried
metals or oil, Feedback has no idea.
FINALLY, an update on the
mapping service of a famous web
search engine (FWSE). We reported
that if you locate London and
zoom out to see all of England, the
nearest place shown was Leighon-Sea
in Essex (10 May). This is
still true. But when Viv Brown,
Andrew MacGregor and we last
looked, Brussels had reappeared
and a place called “TOWN
CENTRE” was prominent. Only
zooming back in until we can spot
the trains in the station revealed
that this was Basingstoke.
Feedback has fond memories of
wangling a press visit to the secret
nuclear bunker under an office
block on Alencon Link, by the
station. Could this be connected
with its anonymity
You can send stories to Feedback by
email at feedback@newscientist.com.
Please include your home address.
This week’s and past Feedbacks can
be seen on our website.
56 | NewScientist | 31 May 2014

THE LAST WORD
Last words past and present at newscientist.com/lastword
Lemon, and on, and on
Why does nature like the taste of
lemons so much There is lemonscented
thyme, lemongrass and, of
course, lemons. I can’t think of any
other commonly occurring flavour.
Is it the same flavour, or do we just
have a very broad definition of
“lemon-flavoured”
■ Your correspondent is probably
right that we have a broad
definition of “lemon-flavoured”;
for instance, the characteristic
sourness of lemons is caused by
citric acid, but the other plants
“For humans, lemoniness
is distinctly attractive
rather than repulsive and
we use it extensively”
mentioned don’t contain this
substance. It is more the smell
or “essence” of lemon that nature
loves. I can add quite a few plants
to the list, including lemon balm,
lemon myrtle, lemon tea-tree,
lemon verbena, lemon eucalyptus
and lemon mint.
Chemically, the flavour
similarities arise largely thanks to
a fragrant compound called citral
that is prominent in all lemony
plants. Citral is a mixture of
chemicals called terpenoids. Two
other important bearers of lemon
flavour, which appear in varying
concentrations in the species
listed above, include limonene
and citronellal.
So why is lemon such a popular
flavour We can approach this in
terms of natural selection, by
which complex mechanisms arise
gradually when random genetic
mutations are accumulated and
passed on. Lemony plants are
found all around the world and
most are only distantly related.
But then again, the synthesis of
citral is well-established in plants
and may date back millions of
years. The process might even be
simple enough to have developed
independently in different plants.
After an initial lucky accident
generated floral citral – a cosmic
ray striking and altering a gene,
perhaps – it may have acted as a
lure for pollinators or a repellent
to animals, both of which would
have ensured the mutation’s
natural selection.
For humans, lemoniness is
distinctly attractive rather than
repulsive. We are somewhat
obsessed with the flavour,
employing it extensively in
beauty products, cleaning
agents and, of course, food.
The only other commonly
occurring flavour I can think
of is anise, an essence of aniseed,
fennel, liquorice, star anise
and even a type of mushroom.
However, anise doesn’t come
close to the prevalence of lemon.
Sam Buckton
Chipperfield, Hertfordshire, UK
Dream on
Why do I have recurring dreams, years
after I left university, of being about
to sit an exam but knowing nothing of
the subject matter I’m not alone, lots
of people I speak to have the same.
■ This question sent me back to
the 1930s and Freud’s The
Interpretation of Dreams. In
this book he provided a brief
section about examination
dreams, a kind most students
have experienced. His
interpretation, as I understand
it, was that they derive from
childhood punishments,
although whether in resentment
or guilt was not clear.
This is rather over the top, I feel.
It seems to me that such dreams
are simply an individual’s brain
chewing over an occasion when
they did not quite meet the
standard they hoped they would.
Over the years dreams begin
to echo more recent painful
encounters: disappointing
interviews and the like.
John Postgate
Lewes, East Sussex, UK
“Dreams that wake us are
usually exaggerations of
situations that bother us
in our waking lives”
■ Recurrent dreams that have
the emotional impetus to wake us
up – and hence be remembered –
are usually exaggerations of
situations that bother us in our
waking lives. The setting of the
dream is often concrete and
simplified, in a way that makes
the dreamer unlikely to
misinterpret the emotions
being displayed.
Dreaming of finding oneself
totally unprepared for an exam
is an exaggeration of a current
sponsored by
anxiety that one is unprepared
to cope with. The dream uses an
experience in the person’s life
where dread of being found
wanting is intense.
This is similar to another
common recurrent dream of
finding oneself outside with little
clothing. Here the clear message
is that the dreamer is afraid of
being exposed in some way, such
as not being as knowledgeable
about a subject as expected, and
facing possible shame or
embarrassment. The lack of
clothing is a concrete and
exaggerated manner of
portraying such feelings.
Anne Gray
Paisley, Renfrewshire, UK
This week’s questions
LIGHT AS AIR
While on the scales this morning
I wondered, would passing gas
affect the weight of the human
body at sea level and, if so, in
which direction
Chris Gilfillan
Surrey Hills, Victoria, Australia
STRIPED SWEATER
Years ago I was told that the black
hairs on a zebra heat up while the
white hairs stay cooler. This sets
up a temperature difference
between the stripes, which creates
an air flow by convection and
helps to keep the zebra cool. Does
anyone out there know any more
Rachael O’Brien
Tamworth South,
New South Wales, Australia
The writers of answers published in the
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Send questions and answers to
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Unanswered questions can also be found
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THE LAST WORD ON ENERGY
Win £100 by answering our monthly question about energy issues
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which suggests they are expending energy. So why don’t they run
out of juice and fall off after a few years
Answers should reach us by 23.59 GMT on 3 June 2014 to answers@
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