Reading newspaper in English ( P.8 )

BRAIN INVADERS

Is Alzheimer’s triggered
by infectious bacteria?

QUANTUM MAGIC
Schrödinger’s cat
can be sawn in half

WHAT’S IN A FACE

Can you really spot criminals
by their appearance?
WEEKLY June 4 -10, 2016

BREXIT How the most irrational vote ever will be decided
S P E C I A L

I S S U E

T H E E N D

How everything will eventually finish... and what will come next

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CONTENTS

Volume 230 No 3076

This issue online
newscientist.com/issue/3076

Leaders

News

5

8

Free speech has met social media, with
revolutionary results

News

Time-travelling
writing tablets

6

UPFRONT
Why zoo gorilla had to be shot. Should Brazil
hold Olympics? Your phone probably won’t
give you cancer
8 THIS WEEK
Schrödinger’s cat can be split in half. Could
we vaccinate against Alzheimer’s? Stuff of
life found around comet. Neanderthals’
mystery cave building. Cells blog with CRISPR
14 IN BRIEF
Mongol hordes beaten by weather. The
oldest animal ever. Baby black holes. Pain
and pleasure memories take separate paths

MOLA

Britain’s oldest known
writing reveals daily
life in 1st century AD

On the cover

26

10 Brain invaders
Is Alzheimer’s triggered
by infectious bacteria?
9 Quantum magic
Schrödinger’s cat can
be sawn in half
22 What’s in a face
Can you spot criminals
by their appearance?
16 Brexit
How the most irrational
vote ever will be decided

Special issue:
The end
How everything will
eventually finish… and
what will come next

Analysis
16 EU referendum How Britain will decide
18 COMMENT
Why science would benefit from
Brexit – or not
19 INSIGHT
There are better ways to decide the big
issues than referendums

Technology
20 Computers understand phone calls. Smart
shirt for epilepsy. How websites take your
fingerprint. Guessing personality from faces

Aperture

News

16

24 Duck and diving up close

Britain makes
up its mind

26 SPECIAL ISSUE: THE END
How you, the universe, civilisation, life, sex,
disease, science, humankind and much more
will cease to be
38 PEOPLE
Shari Forbes on opening Australia’s first
body farm

FRANCOIS LENOIR / REUTERS

How the most
irrational election
ever will be decided

Features

Culture

Coming next week…
Fat lot of good

Has official nutrition advice caused obesity?

Alien interlopers

The bits of the solar system that don’t fit in

40 The peak oilman Following the trail of
M. King Hubbert, a geologist with a canny idea
41 Stand-up role Sara Pascoe on being female
42 Inside job When’s a parasite not a parasite?

Regulars
52 LETTERS Fudging of data begins early
56 FEEDBACK Noah’s ark minus a captain
57 THE LAST WORD Born to drive

4 June 2016 | NewScientist | 3


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“IT’S confusing the public, it’s
democratic legitimacy: their very
impoverishing political debate...
popularity demonstrates that
the public are thoroughly fed up
they have tapped into the anger,
with it.” That was the verdict last

frustration and patriotism of
week by the chairman of the UK’s
voters who feel their concerns
Treasury Select Committee on the have been ignored. Continuing
war being waged over the country’s to ignore them is not an option.
European Union membership,
But the fitness for office of these
which he says has become an
demagogues can be questioned.
“arms race of ever more lurid
Social media lets them craft
claims and counterclaims”.
messages that fly in some circles,
As in any war, the first casualty
even if they make little sense to
has been truth. Much dissembling outsiders. Should we care if those
of information has taken the form messages are falsehoods – and
of “mathswash”, presenting vague if so, how should we curb them?
estimates as firm predictions with
nary a caveat or error bar in sight. “A cynic might wonder if
politicians are actually
Other claims are misleading but
catchy – designed to spread faster any more dishonest than
they used to be”
than efforts to debunk them.
The net result is that the UK’s
forthcoming vote on “Brexit”
Worries that personalisation
probably won’t be decided on the
on the internet could create “filter

bubbles”, within which people see
basis of level-headed arguments,
only what fits with their existing
but by the cognitive shortcuts we
turn to when we’re clueless about views, have come home to roost.
the right thing to do (see page 16). That turns out to mean not just
convenient truths, but also myths
Truth has also been a casualty
and distortions, propagated by
of Donald Trump’s bid to become
algorithms which score them by
the Republicans’ US presidential
popularity, not truthfulness. And
candidate. His pronouncements,
often made using the megaphone it’s not just ignoramuses whose
news is thus polluted: the recent
of social media, have shown little
furore over Facebook’s curation of
fidelity either to the real world or
to his previous pronouncements. its trending topics suggests that
anyone who leans on social media
Populists all over the world have
for their news may be seeing a
adopted similar tactics. Their
opponents cannot claim they lack funhouse mirror of the truth.

Thus the right to free speech has
morphed into the ability to say and
spread anything, no matter how
daft or dangerous. Hence the buzz

around the idea of “post-truth
politics” – although a cynic might
wonder if politicians are actually
any more dishonest than they
used to be. Perhaps it’s just that
fibs once whispered into select ears
are now overheard by everyone.
We have been here before. As
printing became widely available
in the 1600s, there was a boom
in pamphleteering: cheap, crude
publications, often denouncing
political and social foes in vitriolic
and slanderous terms. These were
important in fomenting both the
English civil war and the
American war of independence.
The idea that the fusion of
technology and media may have
revolutionary outcomes – primed
this time round by politicians
rather than proletarians – will
alarm those who prefer the status
quo: there have been calls for the
new media titans to be regulated.
To be sure, they cannot carry on
dodging their responsibilities. But
the ultimate answer isn’t policing
social media for rabble-rousing
mistruths, but bursting the filter

bubbles and talking to those who
disagree with us. Because we need
democracy to be more than just a
popularity contest. ■
4 June 2016 | NewScientist | 5


BUDA MENDES/GETTY IMAGES

UPFRONT

Olympics Zika threat
NEARLY 200 bioethicists have called
for this year’s Olympic Games to be
moved or postponed due to Zika virus.
The games are set to begin in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, on 5 August. There are
currently 32,000 probable cases
of infection in the city.
In an open letter to the World
Health Organization last week, the
bioethicists said that more people
are likely to get Zika if the games go
ahead than if they are held elsewhere
or delayed until Rio has driven out its
mosquitoes.
The WHO says such drastic
measures won’t change the global
spread of the virus, and that it
can be avoided by preventing

mosquito bites and blocking sexual
transmission. It recommends wearing
insect repellent, avoiding slums and

staying in air conditioned rooms,
and that visitors should use condoms
“or abstain from sex during their
stay and for at least four weeks after
their return”.
August falls in the southern
hemisphere’s winter, meaning that
the games are expected to take place
during the annual low point for
mosquitoes in Brazil. But the letter
says that cases of dengue fever,
which is carried by the same
mosquitoes, are much higher than
usual this year, suggesting that the
insects are unusually numerous and
may not entirely disappear.
It also warns that visitors from
the northern hemisphere could
spread the virus, if they carry it home
to countries that are in the midst of
the mosquito season.

Under the sea

capacity one yet, moving data at
160 terabits per second. Slated to

be completed by October 2017, it
will stretch from the US state of
Virginia to Bilbao in Spain.
Infrastructure like this will
“enable customers to more
quickly and reliably store,
manage, transmit and access
their data in the Microsoft Cloud”,
said the companies in a release.
Microsoft and Facebook aren’t
the only tech giants plotting their
own private cables. In 2014,
Google struck deals to build two,
intended to link the US with Japan
and Brazil.

–Going ahead–

Selling carbon

from the Swiss Federal Office of
Energy to fine-tune the plant’s
design so it runs more cheaply and
efficiently during the three-year
pilot period. The company hopes
it will then run as a self-sustaining
business. The plant will collect 2 to
3 tonnes of CO2 per day.
“The advantage of taking it
out of the ambient air is that

you can do it wherever you are
on the planet,” says Dominique
Kronenberg, chief operating
officer at Climeworks. “You
don’t depend on a CO2 source,
so you don’t have high costs for
transporting it where it is needed.”

WHAT’S the best way to get rid of
greenhouse gases? Swiss company
Climeworks thinks the answer is
to feed them to greenhouses – and
is building the world’s first facility
to do so commercially.

The firm expects to open the
plant near Zurich in September
or October. Its technology will
suck carbon dioxide out of the air
and sell it to nearby greenhouses
to spur the growth of lettuce,
cucumbers and tomatoes.
CO2 is already taken out of
the air in enclosed spaces such as
submarines and space capsules.
Climeworks will use a similar
process, called direct air capture.
With this method, normal air is
pushed through a sponge-like
filter material impregnated

with chemicals called amines,
which are derived from
ammonia and bind to CO2.
Climeworks will use funding
6 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

FOTOGLORIA/LUZ/EYEVINE

“The advantage is that you
can suck CO2 out of the air
wherever you are, keeping
transport costs down”

AIN’T no ocean deep enough to
keep them from you. On 26 May,
Microsoft and Facebook
announced plans to lay a fibreoptic cable 6600 kilometres long
under the Atlantic Ocean.
Undersea cables criss-cross the
ocean floor, as a key part of the
internet’s infrastructure, enabling
transcontinential exchange of
digital information.
Microsoft and Facebook say
their new cable – named Marea,
which means “tide” in Spanish –
will be the Atlantic’s highest-

Phones are fine
KEEP talking. Scientists have

cast doubt over evidence that
cellphone radiation may
cause cancer.
The US National Toxicology
Program last week released some
results from a two-year study in
which more than 1000 rats were
exposed to differing levels of
cellphone radiation for 9 hours
a day, for the whole of their lives.
No increases in brain or heart
–No need to hang up– tumours were observed in female


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

No more passwords

rats. But around 3 per cent of
males developed a brain cancer
known as malignant glioma, and
up to 6 per cent grew heart
tumours called schwannomas
(BioRxiv, doi.org/bjfm).
Michael Lauer of the US
National Institutes of Health says
the results should be interpreted
with caution. The number of
cancers was small, meaning they
could be statistical blips, he says.

Most of the rats in the study
were exposed to radiation levels
higher than those permitted in
current phone models, and on
average, the exposed rats lived
longer than the controls.

YOU’VE been hearing it for years,
now it might really be happening:
the password is almost dead.
At Google’s I/O developer
conference, Daniel Kaufman,
head of the company’s advanced
technology projects, announced
that Google plans to phase out
password access to its Android
mobile platform in favour of a
trust score. This would be based
on a suite of identifiers: what
Wi-Fi network and Bluetooth
devices you’re connected to and
your location, along with
biometrics, including your typing

HPV vaccine trial

60 SECONDS

speed, voice and face.
The phone’s sensors will

harvest this data continuously to
keep a running tally on how much
it trusts that the user is you. A low
score will suffice for opening a
gaming app. But a banking app
will require more trust.
It’s part of a trend towards
building security and privacy into
design, instead of making it the
user’s responsibility. Kaufman
said that the method is better
than two-factor authentication
because it does not break down
if a phone signal is unavailable.
Developer kits will be available
by the end of 2016.

Child with gorilla was in danger

VIRALHOG

THE UK is to trial offering the HPV WHEN a small child managed to
get into the gorilla enclosure at
vaccine to gay and bisexual men,
Cincinnati Zoo on 28 May, the child
but campaigners are calling for it
was approached and grabbed by a
to be given to all boys, as is done
180-kilogram male silverback. Zoo
in the US and Australia.

officials shot the animal dead,
Since 2008, girls in the UK
causing outrage on social media.
have been vaccinated against the
The zoo said it had no choice.
human papillomavirus, which
“It was an incredibly dangerous
can cause cervical cancer. But the
situation for the child,” says Kirsten
virus, which is spread by sexual
Pullen, head of the British and Irish
activity, can also trigger anal,
Association of Zoos and Aquariums,
penile and throat cancer.
and an expert in gorilla behaviour.
The pilot programme,
“The silverback, Harambe, grabbed
announced by the UK public
the child by the leg and whooshed
health minister Jane Ellison,
him through the water. He was
will offer the shot to 40,000
using the child as part of a display.
men who have sex with men. The
We can’t see the gorilla’s expression
plan has been welcomed, but has
so we don’t know if he is being
prompted calls for vaccination to
aggressive, but the display
be extended to all boys in the UK.

“Ideally, you must get people
before their sexual debut, and
a gender-neutral programme
would cover all the bases,” says
Carrie Llewellyn at the University
of Sussex, UK.
A decision on vaccinating all
boys is unlikely to be made until
2017, when an advisory panel is
due to report on the possible costs
and health impact of such a move.
But sexual health charity the
Terrence Higgins Trust believes
this is unnecessary stalling.
“We’re urging them to roll it out
as soon as possible for all boys,”
a spokesperson told New Scientist. –Unpredictable situation–

indicates an agitated animal, and his
behaviour is very unpredictable.”
Harambe, a 17-year-old western
lowland gorilla, was also seen
standing over the child. Many people
interpreted this as Harambe guarding
the child, but that’s not necessarily
the case, says Pullen.
“The silverback’s job in the group
is to put himself between his family
and the unknown,” she says. The
appearance of a child in the enclosure

is an unknown, and represents a
possible threat to the group.
Gorillas have been known to
“rescue” children who fall into their
enclosure, but the children had been
knocked unconscious in those cases,
which would not add to the tension
of the situation, says Pullen.

Moth classic in action
It is a textbook example of evolution:
the rise of industrial cities led to the
darkening of the peppered moth —
an adaptive response to pollution
and bird predation. Now two studies
have independently picked up a
single gene behind this trait (Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/nature17951 and
10.1038/nature17961).

Pump up the module
NASA has successfully puffed
up its new inflatable on the
International Space Station –
on the second try. Astronauts first
attempted to inflate the Bigelow
Expandable Activity Module (BEAM)
on 26 May, but while pressure inside
the module increased, its volume did
not keep up. A second attempt on

28 May did the trick.

Carbon aliens
If aliens exist on one of the most
alluring worlds spotted by NASA’s
Kepler probe, it’s a big thank you to
carbon dioxide. Planet Kepler 62f
gets less heat from its star than we
do. So, unless its atmosphere is
packed with the greenhouse gas,
any surface water will be frozen,
climate simulations suggest
(Astrobiology, doi.org/bhz8).

Electric bumblebees
Bumblebees can detect and make
sense of electric fields using the
tiny hairs on their body. Their
mechanosensory hairs bend in
response to an electric field,
triggering neural activity. Since
such hairs are common in
arthropods, many insects may
be equally skilled  (PNAS, DOI:
10.1073/pnas.1601624113).

Heimlich’s first
Ironically, Henry Heimlich who gave
his name to the famous anti-choking
manoeuvre, has only recently used it

himself. The 96-year-old retired
surgeon reportedly performed the
technique on an 87-year-old woman
at a retirement home who was
choking on a piece of hamburger.

4 June 2016 | NewScientist | 7


MOLA

THIS WEEK

Britain’s oldest
writing found
Roman messages buried for 2000 years have
been unearthed beneath a London station
Joshua Howgego

Before the Romans invaded,
London didn’t exist, says Roman
historian Roger Tomlin at the
University of Oxford. There were
just “wild west, hillbilly-style
settlements” scattered in the area.
The documents are written in
Latin and date from between
AD 43 and AD 80. They show that
the city quickly became filled with
a variety of characters, including

BETTER smarten up if you want
to get ahead in business. That’s
advice from the earliest writing
ever discovered in the UK.
The message is part of a haul of
405 writing tablets unearthed in
the heart of London, metres from
Bank underground station. They
date from as early as AD 43, the
year the Romans started their
“I never imagined that in
conquest of Britain.
the late 1st century AD,
The tablets reveal a rich cast of
there was a community of
1st-century Londoners, contain
people very much like us”
the first ever written reference to
the city and hint at Britain’s very
first school (see “What the ancient soldiers, merchants, judges and
texts say”, below).
even a brewer.
“It’s exceptional, really
“I’ve been digging around
wonderful,” says Michael Speidel
in London for years and never
of the Mavors Institute for
quite imagined that in the late
Ancient Military History in Basel,

1st century, there was a
Switzerland. “Looking at things in community of people who are very
the past is usually a bit like glaring much like us,” says Sophie Jackson,
into a fog and we can’t really see
who manages the dig for the
beyond. With documents like this, Museum of London Archaeology.
the fog clears away a bit.”
Aside from a few pottery shards

–Clues to Roman London–

that have been scrawled on, the
next-earliest known example of
writing in Britain is the huge
cache of inked wood scraps and
wax tablets excavated from the
Vindolanda fort near Hadrian’s
Wall in northern England.
The earliest of these is at least
40 years later than some of the
new haul. This “pushes the
written record almost back to the

conquest”, says Andrew Birley,
director of the Vindolanda
excavations.
Examples of Roman writing are
rare because ancient stationery
tends to degrade easily. The
London tablets survived because

of a quirk of fate. In the mid-1st
century, the course of the Thames
ran about 100 metres further
north, and the area between the

(AD 43-53) “…because they are
boasting through the whole market
that you have lent them money.
Therefore, I ask you in your own
interest to not appear shabby.
You will not thus favour your
own affairs…”
This seems to be business advice.
It’s not clear if the “market” is real,
and refers to a forum, the centre of
Roman public life, or if the word is
being used metaphorically.
(AD 62-65) “…I ask you by bread
and salt that you send as soon as
possible the 26 denarii in victoiriati
8 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

and the 10 denarii of Paterio…
Bread and salt represents
hospitality in many cultures,
so this expression might be
appealing to the recipient to be
kind and offer a loan as a favour.
(AD 57) “In the consulship of Nero
Claudius Caesar Augustus

Germanicus for the second time
and of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, on the
6th day before the Ides of January.
I, Tibullus the freedman of Venustus,
have written and say that I owe
Gratus the freedman of Spurius 105
denarii from the price of the

merchandise which has been sold
and delivered. This money I am due
to repay him or the person whom
the matter will concern…”
This might be Britain’s earliest IOU.
Romans had a cumbersome way of
defining years – naming the two
consulates elected for that year –
but in this case it means the
document effectively dates itself.
(AD 60-62) “…ABCDIIFGHIKL,
MNOPQRST…” (shown right)
This looks like writing practice,
so could be evidence of Britain’s
first school.

MOLA

WHAT THE ANCIENT TEXTS SAY


In this section

■ Could we vaccinate against Alzheimer’s?, page 10
■ Brexit: how the most irrational vote ever will be decided, page 16
■ Computers guess personality from faces, page 22

Underground river
During excavations between 2010
and 2014, Jackson’s team found
the river Walbrook – underground.
The waterlogged ground 6 metres
down was free from oxygen,
saving artefacts from oxidation,
which normally degrades them.
The team found 400 shoes and
the leather backs from six dining
chairs. But the prize discovery
was the wooden tablets. These
were once filled with wax,
which people would scratch
messages into with an iron stylus.
Sometimes the scratches would
leave traces on the wood behind.
It was tough deciphering these
traces, says Tomlin, because the
wax on tablets was replaced, and
there are often several sets of
scratches on top of each other.
So he took pictures of the tablets
illuminated from four directions
and superimposed the images to
get sharper resolutions.

The messages hold clues to
what society was like at the time.
The tablets from the Vindolanda
fort typically see people
addressing each other as dearest
brother or sister. The London
tablets, used for keeping records,
as notebooks and for letters, will
reveal how urban society was
organised, says Birley.
It’s the earliest evidence of
writing in Britain so far. No
evidence of writing by the Celts
who lived there at the time has yet
been discovered.
However, merchants operated
in Britain before this, and
probably communicated with the
Romans. “So it is still technically
possible that somewhere in
Britain we might get a collection
of earlier material,” says Birley.
“But I have to say that’s
extremely unlikely.” ■

Schrödinger’s cat can
survive being split in two
HOW’S this for a quantum magic
trick? A clever experiment keeps
Schrödinger’s cat alive – and dead –

after being sawed in half. The stunt
could help knit quantum circuits into
a working computer.
Fortunately, the technique was
tested not on a real cat, but on
electromagnetic waves, which
can be analogous to the cat in
Erwin Schrödinger’s famous
thought experiment.
Quantum particles can exist in a
superposition of states, or two
modes of being at once. A photon,
for instance, can simultaneously be
polarised vertically and horizontally.
This superposition holds until
someone makes a measurement, at
which point the photon picks a state.
Schrödinger argued that if quantum
rules applied in the macroscopic world,
a cat stuck inside a closed box could be
both alive and dead at the same
time – at least until you open the box.
Microwave photons trapped in a
box can be coaxed into a so-called
“cat” state. Normally, electromagnetic
waves in the box will oscillate in
strength, like a pendulum sweeping
back and forth. But it’s possible to

the same time. “Once that happens,

both cavities will have two
frequencies at once,” Wang says.
The magician’s flourish is to sever
the link and show that the two sides
introduce the opposite wave, creating are still connected – with a whole,
a cat state in which two contradictory
functioning, half-alive, half-dead cat
things are happening at once.
shared between two boxes, like the
“A mechanical analogue of
magician’s assistant smiling and
this would be a pendulum that is
waving after being sawed in half.
simultaneously oscillating to the left
Wang’s team switched the chip to
and to the right,” says Chen Wang,
completely “off” and tested whether
then at Yale University.
the two cavities were still working
Wang’s experiment goes a step
together. To find out whether he
further, though. His team prepared
had a cat state, though, he couldn’t
two cavities of aluminium in which
just open the box and look.
microwave photons could bounce
“You can always ask the question,
around. Then they connected the
are you dead or alive?” Wang says.
cavities with a channel: a

“But this question doesn’t tell you
superconducting sapphire chip and
whether it is a true quantum
aluminium circuit, across which
superposition, or whether you
electrical signals could travel.
prepared half the chance of a dead
Think of that chip like an on-off
one and half the chance of a live one.”
switch. When the switch is on and the
Instead, the team had to ask a
channel is open, microwaves inside a
question that would reveal the cat
cavity connected to it would oscillate
state without disturbing it. They
at a different frequency than they
measured the number of photons
would if the switch was off.
in each box, knowing that cat states
This being the quantum world,
made from electromagnetic waves
though, it is possible to have the
should always turn up with an even
linking bridge be both on and off at
number of photons.
Measured separately, the two
“The two sides are still
boxes sometimes contained even
numbers of photons and sometimes
connected, like the

odd. But both boxes added together
magician’s assistant after
always turned out even.
being sawed in half”
“That shows you that when you
combine the two boxes, you get a true
Schrödinger’s cat state,” Wang says
(Science, doi.org/bhz5).
The idea of building a cat state in
just one cavity is a few decades old,
and helped win Serge Haroche a Nobel
prize, points out Myungshik Kim of
Imperial College London.
“You might think oh well, that’s a
small extension of what Haroche did,”
he says. “But it’s an interesting
extension.” Kim suggests linking two
cavities in a cat state could help with
the problem of precisely measuring
the phase of light.
The real pay-off, Wang hopes,
is that entangled cavities could be
the building blocks of computers
that exploit the properties of
quantum superpositions to blaze
through calculations at lightning
–Useful in quantum computing– speed. Joshua Sokol ■
ANTHONY PLEVA / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

modern sites of the Bank of

England and St Paul’s Cathedral,
where the dig is, was a hilly area
bisected by the river Walbrook.
The dig was started as part of an
archaeological assessment before
building new offices.

4 June 2016 | NewScientist | 9


JUAN GAERTNER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

THIS WEEK

Could a vaccine
beat Alzheimer’s?
Anil Ananthaswamy

OUR brain’s defence against
invading microbes might cause
Alzheimer’s disease – which
suggests that vaccination could
prevent the condition.
Alzheimer’s disease has long
been linked to the accumulation
of sticky plaques of beta-amyloid
proteins in the brain, but the
function of plaque has remained
unclear. “Does it play a role in
the brain, or is it just garbage

that accumulates,” asks Rudolph
Tanzi of Harvard Medical School.
Now he has shown that these
plaques could be defences for
trapping invading pathogens.
Working with Robert Moir at the
Massachusetts General Hospital
in Boston, Tanzi’s team has shown
that beta-amyloid can act as an
antimicrobial compound, and
may form part of our immune
system (Science Translation
Medicine, doi.org/bhzt).
To test whether beta-amyloid
defends us against microbes that
manage to get into the brain, the
team injected bacteria into the
brains of mice that had been bred
to develop plaques like humans
do. Plaques formed straight away.

Building blocks
of life spotted
around a comet
A FROSTY comet could have delivered
the ingredients for life on Earth. The
European Space Agency’s Rosetta
spacecraft has spotted an amino acid
on the comet it orbits – confirming
that a ball of ice and dust can hold

one of life’s major building blocks.
Amino acids are the building
blocks of proteins, which control
essential reactions in living cells.
10 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

“When you look in the plaques,
each one had a single bacterium
in it,” says Tanzi. “A single
bacterium can induce an entire
plaque overnight.”
This suggests that infections
could be triggering the formation
of plaques. These sticky plaques
may trap and kill bacteria, viruses
or other pathogens, but if they
aren’t cleared away fast enough,
they might lead to inflammation
and tangles of another protein,
called tau, causing neurons to
die and the progression towards
Alzheimer’s disease.
“The stickiness of amyloid
is both a godsend and a curse,”
says Samuel Gandy at the Mount
Sinai Hospital in New York.
“This work is really important
for showing that amyloid can
be related to infection,” says
Brian Balin at the Philadelphia

College of Osteopathic Medicine
in Pennsylvania. His work
has implicated Chlamydia
pneumoniae as a possible
trigger for beta-amyloid
formation, and other research
has implicated the herpes virus.
But until now, there has been no
good explanation for why the
plaques form and accumulate.

Astrobiologists have long wondered
whether they could have reached
early Earth on the backs of comets
or asteroids.
Now Rosetta, which has been
orbiting comet 67P/ChuryumovGerasimenko since 2014, has
definitively seen the amino acid
glycine in the gas cloud surrounding
the comet. The probe also picked up
phosphorus, a component of DNA.
Previously, the spacecraft had
found alcohols, sugars and oxygen
compounds, which are also needed
for life and cellular structure. The
addition of glycine and phosphorus

–Plaquing up the works–

Support for the immune

defence idea comes from work
by Jacobus Jansen of Maastricht
University in the Netherlands.
Using MRI brain scans, his team
has found that people in the early
stages of Alzheimer’s disease have
more permeable blood-brain
barriers, suggesting that they
may have developed the disease
because their brains were more
vulnerable to attack (Radiology,
DOI: 10.1148/radiol.2016152244).
“The microbe hypothesis seems
plausible,” says Jansen.
If infectious agents are kicking
off the formation of plaques, then
means that all the major types
of prebiotics have been discovered
on the comet (Science Advances,
doi.org/bjfn).
“The beauty of it is that now
we see all the ingredients which
are needed for life in one place,”
says Kathrin Altwegg, who directs
Rosetta’s chemical detector.
How Earth got its prebiotic
molecules is a mystery, because

“The beauty of Rosetta’s
discovery is that we see

all the ingredients needed
for life in one place”

vaccines could head them off.
“You could vaccinate against
those pathogens, and potentially
prevent this problem arising later
in life,” says Moir.
If many microbes are involved,
immunising against them all will
be hard, says Jansen. “But if the
frequency of certain pathogens
is quite high, there might be a
possibility.”
It won’t be easy though. Balin
says developing vaccines against
herpes and chlamydia has proven
difficult. “People have been trying
for many years now.” ■

Additional reporting by Alice Klein

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

a decade ago showed how these
reactions can happen, he says, but
“it’s a really nice confirmation”.
Rosetta is now just 5 kilometres
above the surface of the comet.
Analysing data from this low
orbit could reveal more complex
components. Conor Gearin ■


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ETIENNE FABRE - SSAC

THIS WEEK
Cells use CRISPR
to blog about
their lives

Neanderthals built
stalagmite circles
Colin Barras

including a ring 7 metres across,
built from stalagmites snapped
from the cave floor.
Natural limestone growths have
begun to cover the ring structure,
so by dating these growths a
team led by Jacques Jaubert at
the University of Bordeaux could
work out an approximate age for
the stalagmite constructions
(Nature, doi.org/bhzs).
They are roughly 175,000 years
old, which means they easily

predate the arrival of modern
humans in Europe. They were built

THEY worked by torchlight,
following the same procedure
hour after hour: wrench a
stalagmite off the cave floor,
remove the tip and base, and
carefully lay it with the others.
Today we can only guess as
to why a group of Neanderthals
built a series of large stalagmite
structures in a French cave – but
the fact they did provides a rare
glimpse into our extinct cousin’s
potential for social organisation
in a challenging environment.
“The enigmatic structures
Gone are the days when we
include a ring 7 metres
thought of Neanderthals as
across, and are built from
crude and unintelligent.
around 400 stalagmites”
Archaeological evidence now
suggests they were capable of
symbolic thought, had a basic
at a time when Neanderthals were
knowledge of chemistry,
the only hominins in the region.

medicine and cooking, and
The stalagmite structures are
perhaps some capacity for speech. 50 centimetres high in places,
A reassessment of evidence
says Jaubert. They are built
from Bruniquel cave, near
from around 400 individual
Toulouse in south-west France,
stalagmites with a combined
suggests even more Neanderthal
weight of about 2 tonnes.
sophistication. In one chamber,
“That must take time [to shift],”
336 metres from the cave entrance, he says – although exactly how
are enigmatic structures,
long it took the Neanderthals to
12 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

THIS week I beat an invading virus,
copied all my DNA, and split in two.
#blessed #yolo #celllife.
What would our cells say if they
could blog? We’ll soon know: the
CRISPR gene-editing technique has
been adapted to make cells log what
happens to them, written inside their
own DNA.
Such CRISPR-based logging could
have a huge range of uses, from smart
cells that monitor our health from

–Created 175,000 years ago– within, to helping us understand
exactly how our bodies develop.
Darren Nesbeth, a synthetic
build the structures isn’t clear.
“As often in prehistory, measuring biologist at University College London,
says this is an exciting technology
time is not easy.”
that could record the biography of a
What we do know is that the
cell. For example, immune cells could
structures were built in dark,
be engineered to patrol a person’s
challenging conditions and the
body, recording what they see and
builders had no natural light
reporting back when recaptured.
to help them. Indeed, Jaubert’s
CRISPR-based logging was
team found traces of fire at
developed by Timothy Lu and his
several points around and on
colleagues at the Massachusetts
the structures.
Institute of Technology. They
The simplest explanation is
that the structures served as some designed a system allowing CRISPR
sort of shelter or refuge – perhaps to be activated in a cell whenever
it encounters a particular event –
the stalagmite “walls” supported
such as exposure to a chemical.

a roof of perishable wood, for
When this happens, CRISPR
example. But there are no other
generates mutations in a specific
artefacts and very few signs of
region of the cell’s DNA, effectively
domestic activity in the chamber
leaving a mark to log the event.
beyond the presence of a charred
Analysing how many mutations
bone fragment possibly from a
there are reveals roughly how many
bear or large herbivore.
of these events have occurred.
That draws comparisons with
To show that the technique works,
much later cave sites such as
Lu’s team engineered cells that could
Chauvet, a 30,000-year-old site
monitor inflammation levels. When
of modern human occupation
they put these monitor cells into mice,
that is rich in cave art but
those that were in mice that had been
contained a mere handful of
provoked to have higher levels of
artefacts. So perhaps Bruniquel –
inflammation logged more mutations
like Chauvet – served some ritual
(bioRxiv, doi.org/bhzv).

role. If so it would provide more
Geneticist Gaetan Burgio at the
evidence for the Neanderthal’s
Australian National University in
capacity for symbolic thought.
Canberra says the technology could
Paola Villa at the University
be used to understand exactly what
of Colorado in Boulder says the
happens to a cell when a virus or
new work lends weight to her
bacterium invades. “The method
view that Neanderthals should be
considered on a similar intellectual shows great promise,” he says.
Michael Le Page ■
plane to modern humans. ■


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IN BRIEF
Gas giants’ gravity
could herd meteors

Fear and pleasure work their
way separately into memory
ONE region, two routes. Memories of pleasure and fear
are laid down in the same part of the brain, but along
different pathways.
Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University and his team
gave mice a pleasurable experience using cocaine, or
frightened them with electric shocks. After death, the

team washed away the fatty materials in the mouse
brains, making them transparent. Dyes that highlighted
previously active cells allowed them to see which
networks of neurons were involved in each experience.
Although both types of memory were laid down in

the medial prefrontal cortex, they were stored along
separate paths or axonal projections, which in turn
linked to different brain regions (Cell, DOI: 10.1016/
j.cell.2016.05.010).
This could have implications for treating mental health
disorders, says Deisseroth. Some drugs, as well as
transcranial magnetic stimulation, target the prefrontal
cortex. “Now we know the signals for fear and pleasure
can be transmitted by different axonal projections,
new targeted treatments might be envisioned,” he says.
Joff Lee at the University of Birmingham, UK, agrees
that the finding might lead to better treatments. If we do
not target the right neurons, drugs intended to reduce
fear may inadvertently also affect how we process
pleasure, Lee says.

Mongol hordes beaten by rainy weather
IT HAS always mystified historians.
After a string of major victories, the
Mongol army suddenly retreated
from central Europe in 1242.
Some argue that Mongolian
politics forced the withdrawal,
while others credit the strength of

fortified towns. But Europe could
have been rescued by its own bad
weather, an analysis of tree rings
and historical documents finds.
The Mongol cavalry fed its
14 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

horses on the grassy Eurasian
steppe, says Nicola Di Cosmo of
Princeton University. A warm
climate in the early 1200s made
the grasslands lush and this, in
turn, helped the Mongols extend
their empire into Russia, he says.
But Hungary has a high water
table compared with the rest of
the steppe and floods easily.
Analysing tree rings in the region,
Di Cosmo and his colleagues

found that Hungary had a cold,
wet winter in early 1242 that
turned Hungary’s central plain
into a huge swamp.
Lacking pasture for their
horses, the Mongols fell back to
drier highlands and then to Russia
(Scientific Reports, doi.org/bhxt).
While climate wasn’t the only
factor in the retreat, it would

be a mistake to ignore it, says
Di Cosmo. “It’s like saying the
winter in Russia had no effect
on Napoleon’s army.”

A RARE cosmic balancing act
could create spectacular meteor
showers. The effect requires
clockwork precision – but it may
be responsible for some of the
best showers in recent memory.
The Perseid meteors, which
occur every August, come from
fragments of ice and rock ejected
by comet Swift-Tuttle. From
1989 to 1994, the meteors came
in bright, oddly staccato bursts.
Now a team led by Aswin Sekhar
at the University of Oslo in Norway
thinks they know why: a rare
gravitational dance between
the Perseids, Saturn and Jupiter.
At key points in the Perseid
stream, meteors may clump due to
nudges from what’s called a threebody orbital resonance (arxiv.org/
abs/1605.06340). The showers of
the early 1990s may have occurred
when Earth passed through a
clump of Perseids herded together
by the resonance – but the next

such event may not be until 2111.

Vaccinations rise,
web searches fall
NO NEED to Google it. Chickenpox
vaccination programmes have
meant that fewer people are
looking up the disease online.
Australia, Germany and the US
have been immunising children
against the varicella zoster virus
for more than a decade, but the
success of these initiatives is
hard to pin down.
Now Kevin Bakker of the
University of Michigan and his
colleagues have found that
between 2004 and 2015, Google
searches for chickenpox fell in
various countries once they began
immunising against it (PNAS,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1523941113).
Compared with clinical
reporting, such “digital
epidemiology” is much quicker
and cheaper, Bakker says.


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

JANEZ TARMAN

GOLDEN jackals are often seen
as a pest, blamed for the death of
livestock and wild animals as they
move from south-central Eurasia
into northern Europe. But they are,
in fact, saving countries millions
of euros in waste management.
“We want to change people’s
opinions about jackals,” says
Duško C´irovic´ at the University of
Belgrade, Serbia. “They are blamed
for hunting wild and domestic
animals, but we found that they
are only eating the carcasses and
remains left by people.”
C´irovic´ and his colleagues
analysed the stomach contents of
606 golden jackals (Canis aureus)
in different areas of Serbia that
had been shot or killed on roads.
They found that most of the jackals’
diet was made up of the skin or
intestines of domestic or wild
animals that are usually discarded
by farmers or hunters. They also ate
small rodents – which are crop pests.
Considering the jackal population
in Serbia, the team estimates that

they remove 3700 tonnes of animal
remains and 13.2 million crop pest
rodents every year, a service that
would cost half a million euros.
Based on estimates of Europe’s total
jackal population, the overall figures
could be as high as 13,000 tonnes
of animal remains and 158 million
rodents, they claim (Biological
Conservation, doi.org/bhxn).

Bloated baby black holes spotted in the distant universe
EVEN giants were small once.
Two blobs spotted in the distant,
ancient universe may be the seeds
of the supermassive black holes
that now dominate the core of
every galaxy.
We think that massive black
holes existed when the universe
was less than a billion years old.
But we don’t understand how they
grew so large in such a short time.
Either they formed from
massive stars and fattened up at
breakneck speed by swallowing
gas, or they had a head start – by
being born more than 100,000

times heavier than the sun.

Now a team led by Fabio Pacucci
at Scuola Normale Superiore in
Pisa, Italy, thinks it has found two
examples of the latter: baby black
holes that formed directly from
a collapsing gas cloud without
becoming a star first.
The team screened distant
galaxies for red objects that also
emitted X-rays. Light from near a
baby black hole still enshrouded
in a gas cloud would emerge in
infrared wavelengths, so redness
is a good indicator that you’ve
found one. Another clue is

X-rays – which typically come
from gas falling onto black holes –
passing through the gas cloud.
The team found only two
candidates for baby black holes
in thousands of ancient galaxies
(arxiv.org/abs/1603.08522). This is
puzzling given that supermassive
black holes are in almost every
galaxy in the modern universe.
But Mitchell Begelman at the
University of Colorado in Boulder
suggests you wouldn’t need many
baby black holes for a supermassive

one to take root at the heart of a
big galaxy like the Milky Way.
ALECIA CARTER

Trash-eating
jackals clean up

Sea sponge may be
oldest living animal
DEEP in the waters off the
Northwestern Hawaiian Islands
lurks a behemoth. A sponge the
size of a car has been discovered
that could be hundreds, if not
thousands, of years old.
Daniel Wagner of the NOAA
Papahanaumokuakea Marine
National Monument and his
colleague spotted the giant, a
member of the Rossellidae family,
during an expedition last year.
Images of the sponge taken at
a depth of just over 2100 metres
revealed that it was 3.5 metres
long, 2 metres high and
1.5 metres wide. The stable,
relatively undisturbed habitat
of the conservation site has
probably aided the sponge’s
unfettered growth (Marine

Biodiversity, doi.org/bhxx).
“A lot of organisms in deep seas
grow very slowly, so they need
their habitats to remain stable
over a long time to be able to grow
larger and larger,” Wagner says.
“Sponges don’t have things like
growth rings that can be used to
estimate age. My best guess is that
this is likely a very old sponge on
the order of century to millennia.”
The discovery of the sponge at
the site underscores the need to
protect the area, the team says.

Compare the meerkat - in the wild
IN THE race to the top of the breeding
tree, meerkats pig out to boost their
own growth in response to a rival
gaining weight.
In the strict social hierarchy of
meerkats, a dominant pair all but
monopolises breeding. Up-andcomers of both sexes can wait
for years for the top spot to free
up – and when the time comes, it’s
usually the fattest meerkat that wins.
“Those that become dominant
and keep their rivals down hit
the reproductive jackpot,” says
Alex Thornton at the University

of Exeter, UK.

Tim Clutton-Brock at the
University of Cambridge and his
colleagues conducted an experiment
in 14 breeding groups in the Kalahari
desert. They took 48 pairs of
same-sex siblings and bulked up
selected lighter siblings with doses
of boiled egg for three months.
When faced with a rival fattening
up, meerkats actively increased their
own food intake – and subsequent
growth rate.
Also, when a meerkat becomes
dominant, it grows bigger if its
nearest rival is close to its own
weight (Nature, doi.org/bhxc).

4 June 2016 | NewScientist | 15


EU REFERENDUM ANALYSIS

How Britain will decide
On 23 June, the UK public will decide whether the country should leave the
European Union. Despite politicians claiming otherwise, no one knows the
consequences of Brexit. So with reliable information hard to come by, what will
determine whether Brits put a cross in the Remain or the Leave box?
Gut instinct

FRANCOIS LENOIR / REUTERS

THE EU referendum could be the
most irrational yet. Uncertainty
over consequences, and
contradictory economic and
political information, mean that
voters will be swung even more
than usual by feelings and biases
that have nothing to do with the
issues at stake.
“Polls show that knowledge
about the EU in Britain is low,”
says John McCormick, who studies
EU politics at Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis.
“To a large extent it’s going to be
a domestic protest vote”.
He predicts that instead of EU
considerations, many voters will
be guided by their entrenched
views on immigration, the
Conservative government and
political figures such as David
Cameron, Boris Johnson and
Nigel Farage.
In this, the EU referendum is
similar to the UK’s Alternative
Vote referendum in 2011, in which
voters were asked if they wanted

to replace the first past the
post voting system with the
“alternative vote”. The result was
no: 68 per cent to 32 per cent.
Surveys conducted in the weeks
before showed that many people
didn’t understand what the
alternative system was or what
would change were it adopted. Yet
many voted anyway, led by their
perceptions of party leaders –
whether they thought them
competent or likeable, for example.
This is the kind of cognitive
shortcut that psychologists have
found we all use in the face of
Will the UK go it alone?
16 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016


There are some assumptions
pollsters can make, such as voters
who have previously supported the
UK Independence Party are very
likely to be in favour of Brexit. But
in general the EU issue cuts across
party lines, says John Curtice of
the University of Strathclyde in
Glasgow, UK, making prediction
even more fraught. Jacob Aron

Your Facebook feed

POLITICIANS like to say that the
only poll that matters is the one
on election day, but opinion polls
shape the narrative of a vote.
“The polling sets the territory
for the debate,” says Anthony
Wells at polling firm YouGov.
“If the polling shows Leave might
win, all the media talk will be

CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES

What the polls say

THE power of social media to
influence politics is one of the
narratives of our time – Obama’s
US presidential win in 2008 was
hailed as the Facebook election
and the debate over how much
social media jump-started the
Arab Spring still goes on. But can
social media messaging really
make up or change minds on an
issue as unemotive as Europe?
Campaigners think it’s worth
a punt. Paul Stephenson of the

campaign group Vote Leave says
Facebook is the prime social
media platform. “Both campaigns
have £7 million to spend and we’ll
be putting a large chunk of that in
Facebook,” he says.
On the face of it it’s a good bet. In
the 2015 UK general election, the
Conservatives spent £1.3 million on
Facebook adverts, targeting people
who lived in the 40 constituencies
they needed for a majority.
But despite the myriad startups that analyse what likes, shares
and comments really mean, it’s
hard to find out whether this
converts to votes. In the case of
the 2015 campaign, “all we can do
is correlate Facebook spend with
the results in those seats that were
targeted”, says Darren Lilleker at
Bournemouth University, UK.
Doing well on social media
doesn’t always lead to a win,
however. In the 2014 Scottish
referendum, the Yes campaign
was ahead on social media
throughout – and lost.
Graeme Baxter of Robert
Gordon University in Aberdeen,
UK, says politicians of both sides

weren’t using social media’s full

power. In general, he says,
campaigns often use it as a
broadcast platform. But a
monologue tends to appeal only
to those who already agree with
everything a campaign is saying.
It ignores social media’s potential
to draw voters into a richer twoway conversation – the digital
equivalent of door-to-door
canvassing.
Stephenson says Leave does
respond to direct messages but not
to all the posts people put on their
feed: “That would be impossible!”
The reticence may also be down
to the fact that something said in
Boris Johnson wants to Leave

STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES

overwhelming or uncertain
about contingency plans.” That
information. The problem is that
could push people into worrying
they aren’t necessarily accurate
about the uncertainty of Brexit
and may be completely irrelevant. and opting to remain, something
One of the most common

that happened in 2014’s Scottish
shortcuts is “status quo bias”.
independence referendum.
This is the tendency of people
A consistent set of neck-andwho aren’t politically engaged
neck polls is likely to galvanise
or who are confused about the
people to get out and vote, but
possible consequences to vote
the Leave camp has an advantage
against change. It has played a role when it comes to voter turnout,
in many referendums including
as older people are both more
the alternative vote, says Paul
likely to vote and to be in favour
Whiteley at the University of
of Brexit. One thing a close poll
Essex, UK, and is likely to be even
won’t do is encourage tactical
more important in this one.
voting – while in a general election
Brexit is more important for
voters may switch allegiance to a
the future of the UK than a switch third party to block another, that
to the alternative vote, he says, so
can’t happen in a referendum.
more people will feel they have a
Whatever the result, polling
duty to vote even if they really
firms can’t afford to get it wrong.

don’t know what to do.
They are still licking their wounds
One of the greatest unknowns
after an industry-wide failure to
is how the current widespread
predict a Conservative majority
mistrust of political elites will
play out. This has contributed to “Knowledge about the EU
the success of Syriza in Greece and is low. It will be a domestic
protest vote guided by
Podemos in Spain, as well as the
entrenched views”
rise of Donald Trump and the
election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader
of the UK’s Labour party. Anger at in the UK’s 2015 general election.
A report into that failure,
political elites – including those in
Brussels – may be more influential published in March, concluded
that companies had relied on
than traditional concerns such as
biased samples that underhow the EU affects British values,
represented Conservative voters.
says Stephen Reicher at the
Unfortunately for pollsters,
University of St Andrews in the UK.
forecasting the results of a
“What so many politicians fail
referendum brings its own
to understand is that, in this antichallenges. “For a referendum,
political age, politics as usual

there isn’t a previous one four
doesn’t work and that doing
years ago that you can base things
things that might conventionally
on,” says Wells.
doom you now doesn’t,” he says.
“It might even help you,
Young people tend to back Remain
something Trump has mastered
to perfection.” Michael Bond

response to an individual could
get rebroadcast across the web
and sound inappropriate. “There
have been so many high-profile
faux pas over the years, I can
understand why some are
reluctant,” says Baxter.
Perhaps the biggest input of
social media will be to draw in
people who haven’t been thinking
about the referendum – whether
that’s via campaign content that
people share or via friends’ own
grassroots endorsements. “There
will be an element of accidental
exposure,” says Lilleker, which
could push people who hadn’t
considered voting to vote. Friends
can put information in front of

us we may not have sought out
ourselves, says Nigel Jackson of
Plymouth University, UK, adding
that friends are one of the most
powerful influences on who we
vote for. Hal Hodson ■
4 June 2016 | NewScientist | 17


EU REFERENDUM COMMENT

Brexit, or not?
The UK and its science will thrive outside the EU, says Chris Leigh.
Vote leave and risk big collective gains, warns Mike Galsworthy

THE UK SHOULD LEAVE

CAN the UK thrive outside the
European Union? This is a central
question in the EU referendum
debate, and the fate of British
science is part of it.
The UK’s scientific status is
beyond dispute. A recent UNESCO
report confirms British researchers
excel globally. They generate
around 15 per cent of the world’s
most-cited papers. Of the world’s
top 20 universities, the five that
are in EU nations are all British.

Voting to exit the EU won’t
throw this into reverse.
Recent Royal Society figures
show that EU research funding
supports just 3 per cent of UK R&D.

“Ill-thought-out and
burdensome EU regulation
is a major threat to UK
innovation”
That was UK taxpayer money in
the first place, part of the nation’s
£13 billion annual contribution.
On the whole, our scientific and
academic base gains no more than
a marginal benefit from political
membership of the EU.
And while international
collaboration is essential for
science to excel, Scientists for
Britain is confident that after a vote
to leave, the UK would continue to
work with EU science networks. It
could be an associated member of
EU research programmes, along
with 16 other non-EU nations,
including Norway, Switzerland,
Israel and Tunisia. They pay in to
access grants on an equal footing
with member states.

Add in British involvement
18 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

with European projects that are
not EU entities – such as CERN,
the European Molecular Biology
Laboratory and the European
Space Agency – and it’s clear the
UK would still play a major and
productive role in European
science from outside the union.
What’s more, non-EU scientists
can sit on the governing body of
the European Research Council,
with both Israel and Switzerland
on it in recent years. And the new
Scientific Advice Mechanism,
which helps shape EU policy, also
allows for non-EU members.
Finally, the fact that the US,
Canada and Australia recruit a
greater percentage of overseas
researchers than the UK, France
and Germany shows that political
union is not essential to the flow
of scientific talent.
British science can gain from
Brexit. The greatest threat to UK
innovation comes from illthought-out and burdensome EU
regulations, such as the 2001

Clinical Trials Directive, which led
to the UK’s global share of clinical
trials dropping dramatically in
the years that followed.
The referendum is not a vote on
membership of a science club, as
that can continue. For people in
the UK, it is a once-in-a-generation
opportunity to decide who we are
and who we want to govern us.
Which brings us to another key
question: do we want to be a selfgoverning nation with a global
vision, or remain as a reluctant
participant in a political union set
upon the path to federalism? ■
Chris Leigh is part of the Scientists for
Britain group

THE UK SHOULD STAY

THE EU is the world’s science
superpower and the UK is in
the driving seat. The union of
28 nations produces a third of the
world’s research output – 34 per
cent more than the US. That gap
has widened by 4 per cent over the
past six years. Collectively, Europe
produces more researchers than
China or the US.

The EU is the glue that has
networked European countries
into a powerful hub with
global reach. A common budget,
common policies and freedom of
movement harness an economy
of scale to lower barriers,
unleash academic freedom

and return huge added value.
EU researchers form a talent
pool from which universities
and small businesses can hire
without visa hurdles. Its science
programmes are growing rapidly,
facilitating multinational
research between 170 countries.
On policy, EU members
collaborate to design science
programmes, common academic
standards and the innovation
standards of the single market.
All of these magnify British
science. Whether it’s UK technical
standards becoming EU standards
then global standards thanks to
the single market’s size, or the fact
that international collaborations
have 50 per cent more impact

For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion

Mike Galsworthy (@mikegalsworthy) is
programme director of Scientists for EU
(@scientists4EU)

INSIGHT Alternative democracy

EMMA ESPEJO/GETTY

than domestic research, it’s all
about increased value through
team play.
The overwhelming majority
of UK researchers and engineers –
93 per cent in a recent survey –
regard the EU as a “major benefit”
to UK research. It’s less about
the money, which “only” funds
17 per cent of science contracts
in universities and about 5 per
cent of the total UK research
landscape. It’s more that crossborder policies and funding
cannot be replaced at national
levels. The EU is the glue between
European institutions catalysing
our multinational capacity.
Brexiteers regularly argue that
the UK could buy back into the EU

science programme from outside,
citing examples of small non-EU
countries. Their presumptions
show little understanding of
the balance of interests for the
remaining EU members. Yes, the
UK would get some access, most
probably partial access like
Switzerland has. However, full
associated status is most likely
to be dependent upon retaining a
freedom of movement agreement
and also some net financial
contribution. Even then, there’s
no guarantee and the UK would
have given up its policy voice.
Some might muse that issues
of science are trivial relative to
the issues of “democracy” or
“sovereignty” proclaimed with
zeal from some quarters. To
quote the English novelist John
Galsworthy: “Idealism increases
in direct proportion to one’s
distance from the problem.” Those
that work in science policy see the
EU’s democratic processes working
well for science and the UK’s
leading voice in decision-making.
EU science works. That’s why

every UK minister for universities
and science for the last 25 years
has warned against leaving, and
there isn’t one UK university vice
chancellor that supports Brexit. ■

–Who’s unsure about the facts? –

Therearebetterways
todecidethebigissues
Niall Firth

So, if we do want the public
involved in big decisions, what’s the
best way of going about it? One of the
wackier ideas is liquid democracy, in
which every voter has a mandate they
can exercise as they see fit. The
mandate is transferable, so voters can
pass theirs to someone they trust.
The whole process happens online
and at any point you can retrieve a
vote you’ve allocated to someone else
and use it yourself.
It puts power directly in the people’s
hands, while making sure it’s not just a
case of who shouts the loudest. But it
too has flaws: individuals can garner a

REFERENDUMS are “a splendid

weapon for demagogues and
dictators”, argued Margaret Thatcher
in a debate over Britain’s place in the
EU in 1975.
Was that anything more than a
snappy sound bite? Do referendums
appeal to the darker side of democracy?
Referendums are the embodiment of
direct democracy, which means every
citizen gets a vote on an issue. That
seems entirely fair, but one argument
against them is that they oversimplify
complex arguments. They usually
frame things in the binary, which is
“Baking public involvement
rarely how people see an issue.
into the democratic
Some places have thrived under
process would better
direct democracy for years. Swiss
than referendums”
citizens have the right to call a
referendum to make changes to the
huge number of mandates and wield
country’s constitution if enough
a disproportionate amount of power.
people sign a petition. That sounds
A more fundamental problem of
reasonable too, but it has revealed
such set-ups is political legitimacy.

another flaw of referendums – that
decisions made by a majority are often Any level of complexity, like the
transfer of mandates, makes it harder
made at the expense of the minority.
to trace how a decision was made.
For example, in 2009, Switzerland
Demagoguery it might be, but when
banned the building of Islamic
minarets after 57 per cent voted for it. . the UK public votes on the country’s

future in the EU, the choice is clear,
even if the knock-on effects are not.
A referendum makes voters feel as if
they are directly influencing a
situation.
Trouble is, most people don’t feel
well equipped with facts, leaving a
vacuum that is filled with endless spin
and fearmongering, as we have seen
so far in this campaign. Online tools
such as FullFact.org can help, which
fact-check arguments made by both
sides. Online questionnaires can also
be useful, letting you choose the
issues you feel strongly about and
then suggesting how you should vote.
But people still have to search for
these tools. A more satisfying option
would be to bake public involvement
into the democratic process.

Enter “deliberative democracy”. This
involves a group of citizens discussing
issues and making suggestions to the
electorate. One example is the Citizens’
Initiative Review Commission in
Oregon, where a panel of randomly
selected people discusses issues
before voting day. After this, a
“Citizens’ Statement” is included with
each ballot paper, summarising the key
points as decided by the voters’ peers .
It’s a bit late to get the electorate
better informed for this referendum,
but it won’t be long before another
one looms. Doing it deliberatively
next time, in a way that engages
people with an issue, and with
politics itself, is an opportunity the
establishment should grasp. ■
4 June 2016 | NewScientist | 19


TECHNOLOGY

They are listening
Computers can now speed through thousands of phone conversations
to pick out suspect behaviour, finds Hal Hodson
SAY it out loud and the machines
will know. Search engines are
moving beyond the web and

into the messy real world. And
they’re finding some odd things.
Every call into or out of US
prisons is recorded. It can be
important to know what’s being
said, because some inmates
use phones to conduct illegal
business on the outside. But
the recordings generate huge
quantities of audio that are
prohibitively expensive to
monitor with human ears.
To help, one jail in the Midwest
recently used a machine-learning
system developed by London firm
Intelligent Voice to listen in on the
thousands of hours of recordings
generated every month.
The software saw the phrase
“three-way” cropping up again
and again in the calls – it was one

churning through the recordings.
This story illustrates the speed
and scale of analysis that
machine-learning algorithms are
bringing to the world. Intelligent
Voice originally developed the
software for use by UK banks,
which must record their calls to

comply with industry regulations.
As with prisons, this generates
a vast amount of audio data
that is hard to search through.
The company’s CEO Nigel
Cannings says the breakthrough

of the most common non-trivial
words or phrases used. At first,
prison officials were surprised by
the overwhelming popularity of
what they thought was a sexual
reference.
Then they worked out it was
code. Prisoners are allowed to
call only a few previously agreed
numbers. So if an inmate wanted
to speak to someone on a number
not on the list, they would call
their friends or parents and ask
for a “three-way” with the person
they really wanted to talk to – code
for dialling a third party into the
call. No one running the phone
surveillance at the prison spotted
the code until the software started
20 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

MARMADUKE ST. JOHN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

“No one at the prison
spotted the code word
until software started
churning through calls”

came when he decided to see
what would happen if he pointed
a machine-learning system at the
waveform of the voice data – its
pattern of spikes and troughs –
rather than the audio recording
directly. It worked brilliantly.
Training his system on this
visual representation let him
harness powerful existing
techniques designed for
image classification. “I built
this dialect classification
system based on pictures of

the human voice,” he says.
The trick let his system create
its own models for recognising
speech patterns and accents that
were as good as the best handcoded ones around, models built
by dialect and computer science
experts. “In our first run we were
getting something like 88 per cent
accuracy,” says Intelligent Voice
developer Neil Glackin.

The software then taught itself
to transcribe speech by using
recordings of US congressional
hearings, matching up the audio
with the transcripts.

Cheap as chips

The power of machines that
can listen and watch is not
that they can do better than
human ears or eyes. In fact,
they perform much worse –
especially when confronted
with data from the real world.
Their power, like all applications
of computation, lies in speed,
scale and the relative cheapness
of processing.
“The cost would work out at
4 pence per hour of audio,” says
Cannings. Human transcription
costs can be 1000 times that. An
automated transcription service
is something Intelligent Voice is
considering, but for now they are
focusing on search.
Most large tech companies are
developing neural networks for
understanding speech, opening

up data sets that were previously
difficult, or impossible, to search.
Voice-activated virtual assistants
like Google Now, Apple’s Siri,
Amazon’s Echo and Microsoft’s
Cortana must also make sense
of the quirks of human speech.
And Facebook recently
announced that it has repurposed
its image-recognition software
to draw maps based on satellite
photos of Earth. These maps
are of lower quality than those
produced by humans but, again,
the advantage is speed. Facebook’s
system can map the entire land
surface of the planet – every road
–All on record– and house – in just a few hours. ■


PLAINPICTURE

For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology

NHS may soon use
a smart shirt to
diagnose epilepsy
A SHIRT and cap that can diagnose
epilepsy quickly and easily has been
approved for use by European health

services, including the UK’s NHS.
Epileptic seizures are the result
of excessive electrical discharges
in the brain. More than 50 million
people worldwide have the condition,
including 6 million in Europe, making
it one of the world’s most common
serious neurological conditions.
To diagnose epilepsy, someone
must typically have a seizure recorded
by an EEG machine in a hospital. But
seizures rarely coincide with hospital
visits. “The diagnosis can take several
years and is often imprecise,” says
Françoise Thomas-Vialettes,
president of French epilepsy society
EFAPPE. Seizures are so difficult to
record that 30 per cent of people with
epilepsy in Europe are misdiagnosed.
To make diagnosis easier, French
start-up BioSerenity developed the
Neuronaute, a smart outfit that
monitors people as they go about
their day. The shirt and cap are
embedded with sensors that record
the electrical activity of the wearer’s
brain, heart and muscles. If a seizure
occurs, the outfit can send an EEG
recording to doctors via a smartphone.
The Neuronaute has recently

completed trials at Pitié-Salpêtrière
Hospital in Paris. It could be especially
useful for diagnosing children, says
Thomas-Vialettes. Frances Marcellin ■

–Who’s surfing who?–

How websites take your
fingerprint on the sly

BIOSERENITY

THE web is watching you. Chunks party, sometimes dozens of
of code hide inside every website,
times. The audit also revealed
tracking your online behaviour.
several previously unknown
Now, a pair of computer
“fingerprinting” techniques that
scientists have published their
sites are using. Here, the website
attempt to spy back. They audited asks the browser to perform a task
1 million of the most popular
that is hidden from the user. The
websites for tracking behaviours – site then fingerprints individual
more than anyone has looked at
machines based on slight
before. Their investigation gives
differences in their performance.
new insight not only into what

Trackers used to do this by
sites might know about you,
watching how the browser draws
but how they’re figuring it out.
“The audit found that some
Studying a million websites is
hard. To do it, Arvind Narayanan – websites were asking for
who heads the Web Transparency data on a visiting device’s
battery level”
and Accountability Project at
Princeton University – built a tool
called OpenWPM with graduate
a graphic; now, they check
student Steven Englehardt.
what fonts are installed or how
OpenWPM can visit and log in to
the browser processes audio.
websites automatically, taking
A couple of trackers even gathered
more than a dozen measurements the device’s battery level.
of each one. It took two weeks to
Tracking lets websites serve
crawl through the top million
targeted ads, personalise what
websites, as ranked by web traffic
users see, or even price products
firm Alexa.
differently. Audits like this one
Narayanan and Englehardt
can make the process behind

discovered that many trackers
these behaviours more
are sharing the information they
transparent, says Narayanan.
–At home diagnosis– gather with at least one other
“You often don’t know how

much tracking is going on, who’s
doing the tracking, or what data
they’re collecting about you and
what that will be used for,” he
says. “There needs to be external
oversight, somebody holding
companies’ feet to the fire.”
Overall, they discovered more
than 81,000 third-party trackers.
News websites had the most, on
average. Adult websites and those
owned by government agencies
and universities tended to have
the fewest.
Information like this could
be helpful for privacy tools like
Ghostery, a popular browser
extension that blocks trackers,
says Narayanan. “A big part of our
research is helping [software] like
Ghostery,” he says. “Tools like this
can block only the known stuff,
not the unknown stuff.”

David Choffnes of Northeastern
University in Boston says it’s
hard to be surprised by revelations
like this when web tracking is so
ubiquitous. “Is it frustrating and
disappointing? Very much,” he
says. “Such studies are important
to keep consumers aware of
privacy risks while browsing
the web, informing regulators,
and guiding the design of
countermeasures for those
who do not want to be tracked.”
Aviva Rutkin ■

4 June 2016 | NewScientist | 21


TECHNOLOGY

ONE PER CENT

Spot that poker face
New tech claims to tell personalities from faces, says Sally Adee

LIOBA SCHNEIDER/PLAINPICTURE

suitable candidates,” says Wilf.
Many machine vision
researchers are crying foul,

however, including Emin Gün
Sirer at Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York. “A classifier that
tries to flag every single person of
Arab descent could identify 9 out
of the 11 Paris attackers at the cost
of falsely flagging 370 million out
of the 450 million Arabs in the
world,” he says. “Such a classifier
is completely useless.”
Wilf says that for each of their
classifiers, the training sets of
images run in the thousands. But
for behaviours as uncommon
as terrorism or paedophilia, this
will still lead to a number of false
positives and Wilf acknowledges
this. “There are always accuracy
issues with machine learning
algorithms,” he says. For that
reason, the algorithm will always
defer to human judgement.
What that means in practice
is unclear, as the human ability
to infer personality from facial
traits is only slightly better
than chance, says David Perrett
at the University of St Andrews
in the UK.
Face recognition technology

has been the subject of many
ethics debates in recent years.
Most recently, there was an
outcry over FindFace, a Russian
app which uses data from social
network Vkontakte to enable
users to identify people they
snapped on the street.
“We would never license
our IP to someone who would
use it for those kinds of purposes,”
says Wilf. But Gilad Bechar, a cofounder of the company, says
one of its clients is an unnamed
security contractor outside of
the US.
“This is a new idea,” Wilf says.
“New ideas are often greeted
–Anyone for bingo?– with friction.” ■

22 | NewScientist | 4 June 2016

Traffic-jam buster
What carries 1400 passengers and
travels at 60 kilometres an hour
but takes up no space on the road?
Step forward the “straddling bus”
(see model above), which aims to
solve China’s urban congestion
problems by carrying passengers
in cabins 2 metres above the road,

letting cars pass underneath.
Beijing-based company Transit
Explore Bus plans to test a full-size
model in July or August.

60k

The number of workers to be
replaced by robots at a Foxconn

factory in Kunshun, China, according
to local authorities. Foxconn supplies
electronics to Samsung and Apple

Robots in disguise
Do we trust robots too much?
Serena Booth and her colleagues
at Harvard University tested the
idea by placing a wheeled robot
outside different student
residences. When it asked to be
let in a pass-protected door, only
17 per cent of people did so when
approached on their own. But this
rose to 76 per cent when the robot
was disguised as a cookie-delivery
bot from a made-up outfit called
RobotGrub. Only one person out
of 108 asked to see an access card.

IMAGINECHINA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

CAN software identify complex
terrorist, paedophile, white-collar
personality traits simply by
criminal, poker player, bingo
analysing your face? Faception, a
player and academic. To come up
start-up in Tel Aviv, Israel, courted with its custom archetypes, Itzik
controversy this week when it
Wilf, Faception’s chief technology
claimed its tech does just that. And officer, says the system was
not just broad categories such as
trained on the facial features of
introvert or extrovert: Faception
thousands of images of known
claims it can spot paedophiles,
examples. The software only
terrorists – and brand promoters. looks at facial features, he says,
Faception’s algorithm scours
and ignores things like hairstyle
images of a person from a variety
and jewellery.
of sources, including uploaded
“Faception claims it can spot
photos, live-streamed video
terrorists, paedophiles –
and mugshots in a database. It
and even brand promoters
then encodes facial features,

and bingo players”
including width and height ratio,
and key points – for example, the
corners of the eyes and mouth.
Wilf says this has led to notable
“Using automated feature
successes. When presented with
extraction is standard for face
the photos of the 11 people behind
recognition and emotion
the 2016 Paris attacks, the
recognition,” says Raia Hadsell,
algorithm was able to classify nine
a machine vision engineer at
of them as terrorists. Similarly,
Google DeepMind.
it spotted 25 out of the 27 poker
The controversial part is what
players in an image database.
happens next. Faception maps
The Faception site also lists
these features onto a set of
more prosaic uses for its tech,
15 proprietary “classifiers” that
including marketing, insurance
it has developed over the past
underwriting and recruiting.
three years. Its categories include
“HR could use it to identify

INTRODUCING THE THIRD IN A NEW SERIES
OF WHITE PAPERS FROM NEW SCIENTIST
What’s the future of business?
We at New Scientist decided to take a look at how three of its key
drivers – energy, automation and money – might change over the
next decade. To do that, we’ve asked three writers with a deep
understanding of these areas to tell us how they think the future
could unfold, and how it might confound our initial expectations.
In this report, author David Wolman looks at the future of money
in a world increasingly divorcing itself from centralised institutions.
With technology already disrupting the role of the middleman,
he examines how long banks can expect to eke out an existence.
By a subtractive process, Wolman identifies how much of banking
is “socially useless activity” ripe for technological disruption. Even
ostensibly specialist products like initial public offerings and
insurance are being brought to the masses. He also sees a threat
over the horizon to the US dollar’s globally privileged status.
To download your free copy, register online
at newscientist.com/gamechangers.
Sally Adee
Editor, GameChangers

GET YOUR COPY
NEWSCIENTIST.COM/GAMECHANGERS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author of our third GameChangers report in the series is David Wolman,
who wrote the book The End of Money. Wolman is a contributing editor at Wired,
and has written for a range of international publications including The New York

Times, The Wall Street Journal and New Scientist

GAME
CHANGERS
MONEY
IN THIS EXCLUSIVE
NEW REPORT FIND OUT:

] Why trust in traditional finance
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]Why control of credit is shifting from
banks to individuals with the advent of
disruptive technology and new P2P
business models
] Where is the smart money heading?
Find out about the rise of the blockchain
and understand what’s driving it