PDF Discover Magazine October 2016 | Science of Aging PDF Download

SPACE

MEDICINE

To Planet 9 . . . and Beyond! p.70

Crowdsourcing Cancer Research p.24

SCIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS

®

SCIENCE
of
AGING
Does DNA
hold the secrets
to longevity?
p.28

PLUS

The Power
of One Brain
Drilling to Doomsday
The Science Behind
Your Credit Score
p.18

p.50

p.42

BONUS
ONLINE
CONTENT
CODE p.5


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Contents
OCTOBER 2016
VOL. 37, NO. 8

About 66 million years ago, an asteroid plummeted into the

Gulf of Mexico and changed life on Earth forever. See page 42.

4

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Website access code: DSD1610
Enter this code at: www.DiscoverMagazine.com/code
to gain access to exclusive subscriber content.

FEATURES

28 What It Takes to Reach 100

Live long and prosper, as the Vulcan salute goes. Some people have managed
that first part much better than others, and the key could be in their DNA.
BY LINDA MARSA

36 Your Attention, Please

MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller has made a name for himself with his research on
working memory, the brain’s scratchpad. His next goal? To make us all smarter.

ON THE COVER

BY ADAM PIORE

To Planet 9 . . . and Beyond! p.70

42 Drilling to Doomsday

Beneath the Gulf of Mexico lies evidence of one of Earth’s most cataclysmic
events. Now, experts are getting their closest look yet. BY ERIC BETZ

50 Weapons of Math Destruction

Sure, credit scores are important, but they hold more sway than you’d think.
And in many cases, that can be a very bad thing. BY CATHY O’NEIL

Crowdsourcing Cancer Research p.24
Science of Aging p.28
The Power of One Brain p.18
Drilling to Doomsday p.42
Science Behind Your Credit Score p.50
Cake photo: William Zuback/Discover; DNA candle:
Jay Smith; background: Melis/Shutterstock

COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS
6

EDITOR’S NOTE

Chasing Longevity
Living to 100 takes a stroke of genetic
luck and a dose of resilience.

7

24

BIG IDEA

Fighting Cancer With Data

THE CRUX

How experts plan to give
the Ignorosphere some
love, an update on surgeon
Anthony Atala’s work on
3-D bioprinting, we add to
our blog family and more!

18 PROGNOSIS
A Mind in Time
Researchers are spending some quality
one-on-one time with patients’ brains.
The results could steer the course for
future clinical treatment. BY ADAM HADHAZY
MARK GARLICK

Lady Macbeth’s book and try washing
your hands. It works, and neuroscience
backs it up. BY MALLORY LOCKLEAR

22 MIND OVER MATTER

Think Outside the Brain

Cracking the human genome means
doctors can now personalize cancer
treatments. But not without teamwork
and a whole lot of computing power.
BY AIMEE SWARTZ

70

OUT THERE

74

NOTES FROM EARTH

The Judas Fish
In Montana, the invasive lake trout is
choking native fish populations. With
a secret weapon, ecologists are finally
turning the tide. BY JANINE LATUS

78

HISTORY LESSONS

A Profile of Plague
The deadly pestilence of old is still
around, and scientists are learning about
its past and future. BY HILLARY WATERMAN

To Planet 9 — and Beyond!

82

Past the celestial body formerly known
as a planet, i.e., Pluto, astronomers are
continuing their hunt for the elusive
Planet 9. BY COREY S. POWELL

Forget your stereotypes, there’s more to
these winged mammals of the dark than
vampire lore. BY GEMMA TARLACH

20 THINGS YOU DIDN’T
KNOW ABOUT … BATS

57 OUT THERE SPECIAL BONUS SECTION
Crucial tips for your 2017 eclipse planning, the amateur astronomer who
beat NASA to the punch with his observations of Saturn, and how one
legendary meteorite hunter has turned his eyes from the ground to the skies.

Feeling guilty? Take a page from

October 2016 DISCOVER

5


Discover
SCIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS

Editor's Note

®

BECKY LANG Editor In Chief
DAN BISHOP Design Director

Chasing 100, With
Cellular Mechanics
Resilience. For those who live
into their 90s and past 100, it’s a
crucial part of the equation, as
you’ll find out in our cover story
(see page 28). It’s grounded them
through wars, the Depression,
civil unrest and their individual
daily stressors.
The notion of resilience has
been running through my head
lately, as I’ve watched footage
from the aftermath of police
shootings and terror attacks.
What does it take to prevail
through that kind of pain, both
on an individual basis and across
society? I would argue that
resilience in the face of today’s
social upheaval is so grounded,
it’s in our bones, it’s in the very
structure of our cells.

It’s those cellular mechanics — the clockwork — that
appear to drive how we age. The notion of a timekeeper is
at the heart of some researchers’ work to crack the code of
aging. For most of us, the very process of aging eventually
dooms us to disease. But for those of us who live beyond
100, it’s as if the cellular clocks have slowed down.
In addition, scientists have found that how these
centenarians live makes a difference. A safety net of friends
and family. Plenty of walking. Real food. Experiences
throughout their lives will shape how their genes function.
In the quest for longevity, here’s to a big dose of resilience
and a way to slow down that cellular ticktock.

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KATHI KUBE Managing Editor
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LINDA MARSA, STEVE NADIS,
ADAM PIORE, COREY S. POWELL,
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STEVE VOLK, PAMELA WEINTRAUB,

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THE

CRUX

The Latest Science News & Notes

LIFE’S LIMITS
They might be tiny, but these microscopic plankton fossils, called planktonic foraminifera, are a nearly continuous 65 million-year record
of life on Earth. University of Southampton evolutionary ecologist Thomas Ezard and his team compared the collection’s number of species

with markers of ocean temperature and sediment composition during their life spans. Data revealed a broader picture of how environmental
variations affect biodiversity. Cardiff University earth scientist Paul Pearson took this composite photo of Ezard’s subjects, each less than
a millimeter wide, with a scanning electron microscope.  ERNIE MASTROIANNI; PHOTO BY PAUL PEARSON/CARDIFF UNIVERSITY

October 2016 DISCOVER

7


THE

CRUX

Destination: Ignorosphere
All aboard, scientists studying climate change.
Ever heard of the Ignorosphere? It’s what scientists have jokingly nicknamed the mesosphere, the third
atmospheric layer from Earth’s surface. It’s always been tough for researchers to access and so has been
largely ignored. But that’s about to change, thanks to work done by Project PoSSUM (Polar Suborbital
Science in the Upper Mesosphere).
While unmanned rockets, satellites and balloons — most
notably NASA’s AIM satellite — have taken images of and
collected data from the layer in the past, new suborbital
vehicles will make it possible to send actual human
scientists to the mesosphere to study noctilucent (NLC)
clouds. These ragged, spidery clouds began appearing
in the late 1800s, and their increasing frequency and
geographic spread are believed to be a marker for
climate change. They’ve been difficult to study,
however: They’re too high for detailed data collection
via ground-based instruments, balloons or aircraft,

and too low for orbital satellites. The complex
equipment that can measure fine-scale changes in
the clouds’ composition needs a human operator.
Noctilucent clouds
Project PoSSUM’s executive director,
Jason Reimuller, says suborbital rocket
planes are scheduled to launch from Alaska in 2018. They’ll head into the Ignorosphere
with scientific instruments like the ones pictured here.  CAROLINE BARLOTT

Making Manned
Flights Possible
PoSSUM plans to use XCOR
Aerospace’s suborbital rocket
plane Lynx; two people fit in
its flight pod.

Unlike commercial planes, which can use the
lower atmosphere’s oxygen to give their fuel
systems a boost, suborbital rocket planes use
liquid oxygen tanks to compensate for the
thin air and get the thrust they need.

8

DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

CLOUDS: JAN ERIK PAULSON/
NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY

Extra Thrust Required

Thermosphere

+4.6 MINUTES

During the
30-minute
round-trip
flight, PoSSUM
personnel will
only have about
four minutes
to collect data.

MICROGRAVITY
ENVIRONMENT
328,000 feet

350,000
325,000
300,000
275,000

ENGINES OFF
190,000 feet

Glide and circle

250,000

225,000
200,000
175,000
150,000

Horizontal landing

Stratosphere

Horizontal
takeoff

125,000

Troposphere

Powered ascent

MAX AIRSPEED: MACH 2.9

50,000

Altitude (feet)

Coast
upward

Mesosphere

+3 MINUTES

Re-entry

100,000
75,000

25,000
0

These rocket engines can be
used for thousands of flights,
potentially making scientific
ventures more affordable.

LYNX PLANE, FLIGHT PLAN AND ENGINE TEST: XCOR;
EXPERIMENTS FROM LEFT: PROJECT POSSUM; ZOLTAN STERNOVSKY;
GERALD LEHMACHER

Rocket engine test

PoSSUM’s Technology
In addition to shooting traditional video
of the NLC clouds, an
automated
infrared imager
will record a layer
of molecules — the
airglow — that sits just above
them. The images will give
experts a better idea of the

mesosphere’s overall structure.

As the vehicle
passes through
clouds, a
shoebox-sized
instrument
will capture
air to compare
carbon
dioxide and
nitric oxide
levels with
surface levels.

An aerosol sampler
will collect fine particles
from the atmosphere,
believed to be leftover
meteor bits,
which may
explain
how the
clouds
form in
the first
place.

The Mesosphere Clear
Air Turbulence

instrument will use
pressure data to calculate
temperatures
that will
help
determine
how the
clouds
grow.

October 2016 DISCOVER

9


THE

CRUX

The Lure of the Landfill
Birds give up on migrating and gorge on garbage instead.
trips from their permanent nests to
landfills dozens of miles away —
something previously unheard of.
some European birds would vanish
Aldina Franco and a team from
after summer and reappear in
the University of East Anglia
spring. A hunter in Mecklenburg,
followed the birds as they feasted

Germany, killed a white stork that
behind dump trucks dropping
already had an African projectile
off discarded meat at a landfill.
lodged in its neck. Nearly
Incredibly, the steady supply has
two centuries later, European
allowed stork populations to
researchers are trying to explain
increase tenfold since the 1980s.
a new phenomenon: Why have
“The landfill food enables the
many storks stopped migrating?
storks to raise a larger number of
Roughly 14,000 of the fairchicks per nest,” Franco says.
weather fowl in Portugal have
The storks are just one of many
given up flying south. In a recent
The easy access to food is just too enticing for white storks in
species shifting their migration
study published in the journal
Portugal. The birds have stopped migrating in favor of feasting
at garbage sites like this one.
patterns because of human behavior.
Movement Ecology, conservation
And these birds might soon reroute
ecologists used GPS tags to track
again: The European Union recently revised landfill rules so that
17 of those white storks through their normal migration period
food waste is handled under cover. That could leave the storks

to figure out why.
looking elsewhere for their junk-food fix.  ERIC BETZ
Instead of heading to sub-Saharan Africa, the birds made regular

10

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In 1822, a well-placed
arrow solved the mystery of why


TH AT WOR D YOU HEA R D

No, it’s not the little glob that
clogs up your Elmer’s bottle. A
glueball is a particle comprising

only other particles called gluons,
which have no mass. Gluons are the
force particles that hold together
quarks, which make up protons and
neutrons. That means a glueball
is made up entirely of force. And
scientists can’t even observe this
unstable particle; they can only
detect it by trying to calculate its
decay. But in 2015, researchers
announced a promising new
calculation technique that could
help them finally pin down the
elusive glueball.
 LACY SCHLEY; ILLUSTRATION BY CHAD EDWARDS

October 2016 DISCOVER

11


THE

CRUX

ReDISCOV ER

A Faster Way
to 3-D Printed
Organs

New tech makes bioprinting more efficient.
In 2001, Anthony Atala became the first surgeon to build a human bladder and
implant it, helping pioneer the field of bioprinting.
At the time, Atala was using a multistep process. First, he would create a frame
from biodegradable, synthetic polymers, which are essentially plastics. Then he’d paint
cells grown from the patient’s bladder onto the frame with a custom 3-D printer — a
technique Discover detailed in a profile of Atala last year.
Now, Atala and a team from
the Wake Forest Institute for
Regenerative Medicine have
combined both processes with
a new tabletop device called an
integrated tissue organ printer.
A scanner traces the patient’s
body part, creating instructions
for the printer’s three ink nozzles.
The “ink” is a clear gel mixture
of mature tissue cells, immature
stem cells and polymers designed
to mimic real tissues’ consistency.
The ink looks syrupy at first, then
hardens to resemble the texture
The new, simplified organ-printing system developed
of gelatin. It’s printed in a layered
by Anthony Atala and his team is hard at work
lattice, which leaves tiny channels
creating a jawbone structure.
throughout the organ that act like
blood vessels and allow nutrients to be dispersed through the tissue.
Atala has now printed an ear, jawbone and muscle tissue with the integrated printer,

all of which held their shape after being implanted into rodents. Blood vessels grew
into the microchannels, and the rodents’ cells proliferated, making the implanted tissue
more resilient over time.
Printed, personalized organs for human transplants are a long way off, but Atala’s
studies show scientists are getting ever closer to finding a technological solution to one
of medicine’s greatest challenges.  CLAIRE CAMERON

£

ON THE WEB

• In July, ace science writer Liz Kruesi launched her blog, Astrobeat, where
she’ll tune in to the rhythms of the universe and tell the stories of those who
are also listening. For her first post, Liz dives into one of her favorite topics: the
perplexing black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Check out more of her
unique takes on the cosmos at blogs.DiscoverMagazine.com/Astrobeat
• Senior Editor Gemma Tarlach is Discover’s authority on dinosaurs — she’s
obsessed over them since she was a little girl. So in addition to writing about
Spinosaurus and serving up 20 things you didn’t know about any given topic,
she’s also launched a new blog, called Dead Things. Gemma’s digging the dirt
on the latest finds, from dinosaur fossils to relics of lost civilizations. Head over
to blogs.DiscoverMagazine.com/Deadthings

12

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WAKE FOREST INSTITUTE FOR REGENERATIVE MEDICINE

The Discover blog network continues to grow.

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THE

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Ask Discover

INBOX
Thank You
“All in His Head,” from

the June 2016 issue,
peered into Einstein’s
creative mind as he
changed the rulebook of
physics.

Some Killer Insight
In the June 2016 issue, “The Psychopath & The
Hare” looked at Robert Hare, who developed a
widely used test to identify psychopaths.
I have subscribed to Discover magazine almost
from the time it was established, and have always
enjoyed each issue.
However, your last issue with the article on
psychopathy has changed my life. I immediately
got a copy of Kent Kiehl’s book The Psychopath
Listener. I’ve read it twice. The second reading
was to better understand how the work he has
done — amassing an unbelievable amount of data,
including fMRI records of psychopaths and nonpsychopaths of all ages — could help society.
No question in my mind that this data will
dramatically change our legal and prison systems to
make them more evidence-based.
A.J.
San Jose, CA

DID YOU Honeybees might be getting
their buzz from caffeine. A study
KNOW?

14

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Are we any closer to understanding the root cause of
gravity between objects with mass? Can we use our newly
discovered knowledge of the Higgs boson or gravitational
waves to perhaps negate mass or create/negate gravity?

— Jeff Lepler, Redford, Michigan

A

Sorry, Jeff, but scientists still don’t really know why
gravity works. In a way, they’ve just barely figured out
how it works.
The Higgs boson discovery four years ago helped verify
how objects acquired their mass, but that doesn’t shed much
light on gravity itself.
In the 17th century, Isaac Newton was the first to formally
connect an apple falling toward Earth and Earth itself “falling”
around the sun. The force behind both was gravity, and Newton
understood it as just an attraction that grew stronger between
two objects the more massive and the closer they were.
Albert Einstein came along a few centuries later and
provided an interpretation: According to his general theory
of relativity, gravity is a property of space-time, the fabric of
the universe. The more massive an object, the more it warps
space-time, causing nearby objects to “fall” toward each other.
If an object is massive enough, it can actually create detectable

gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time, which scientists
saw for the first time earlier this year.
But gravity is also one of the universe’s four fundamental
forces (the others being electromagnetism, and the strong
and weak nuclear forces). Because the other forces use “force
carrier particles” to impart the force onto other particles, for
gravity to fit the model, all matter must emit gravitons, which
physically embody gravity. Note, however, that gravitons are
still theoretical.
Trying to reconcile these different interpretations of gravity,
and understand its true nature, are among the biggest unsolved
problems of physics. But, alas, what we do know does suggest
antigravity is impossible.  BILL ANDREWS

£

published in Current Biology
found a boost in foraging
activity among bees that
frequented plants with naturally
occurring caffeine in their nectar.

Q

Visit DiscoverMagazine.com/Ask for more. To submit a question,
email us at

TOP: MOPIC/SHUTTERSTOCK. BOTTOM: WILLIAM RITCHIE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Andy Berger’s article

on Einstein’s thought
experiments is brilliant! I haven’t
encountered a clearer description since I was a little
girl in the early ’50s, when my father would tell me
about scientific principles and curiosities as bedtime
stories. I went to sleep with visions of Einstein’s
thought experiments, the redshift, photosynthesis,
infinite regressions and so on dancing in my head.
No, I didn’t go into science, but I have tried to
pass on to my children and grandchildren a sense
of wonder and curiosity about the natural world.
Thank you, Andy Berger.
Cia Gadd
Alberta, Canada


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THE

CRUX

BOOKS
UTOPIA IS CREEPY
AND OTHER
PROVOCATIONS
By Nicholas Carr

THE HIDDEN
LIFE OF TREES

It’s ironic that Carr, a Pulitzer Prize finalist,
takes on modern life’s short attention
spans and worship of the superficial in a
series of essays, some barely a page and
one merely a sentence. But, as the title
promises, these are rapid-fire volleys of
ideas deceptively designed to engage at
a depth greater than 140 characters. By
turns wry and revelatory, and occasionally
maddening, Carr succeeds in shaking the
reader out of screen-zombie complacency.

What They
Feel, How They
Communicate

SUN MOON EARTH

By Peter Wohlleben

Some hikers
enjoy traveling
through forests
because trees
don’t talk — but
it turns out they
do. Wohlleben,
a forester by
profession, blends
years of personal
experience with
new research
into how the
organisms
exchange
information,
react to threats
and even raise
their young.
While the science
is interesting,
it’s Wohlleben’s
gentle storytelling
that makes
the read such
a pleasure.
 ALL REVIEWS BY
GEMMA TARLACH

16

DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

OTHER
PAGES
WE’RE
TURNING

SEEDS
ON ICE
Svalbard
and the Global
Seed Vault
By Cary Fowler

Deep in Arctic Norway
sits a collection
of seeds from
around the world,
a stockpile of genetic
diversity that’s fast
disappearing from
cultivation. Fowler,
a key player in the
banklike facility’s
creation, uses
stunning images
of the site and
its surrounding

landscape as a
springboard into
bigger-picture issues,
including the need
for what some have
called a “doomsday
vault.” His tone is
more hopeful than
gloomy, however, in
this fascinating look
at a place few of us
would otherwise visit.

HOW TO MAKE
A SPACESHIP

The History of Solar Eclipses
From Omens of Doom
to Einstein and Exoplanets

A Band of Renegades,
an Epic Race, and
the Birth of Private
Spaceflight

By Tyler Nordgren

By Julian Guthrie

When the moon clips our view of

the sun or our own shadow blots
out our satellite, we experience
it with the benefit of millennia
of knowledge. We know years
in advance when an eclipse will
happen, where on the planet it
will be visible and, perhaps most
importantly, that the world will
not end
because of it.
Our ancestors
were not
so wellprepared.
Astronomer
and physicist
Nordgren
charts the
path our
species has
taken from terror to scientific
understanding, and he’s done it
with wit and clarity.

Guthrie reveals the
roots of the current
space race among
entrepreneurs in this
fast-paced account of
would-be rocket men
chasing the $10 million

XPRIZE, announced in
1996 but unclaimed
until 2004.

GIANTS OF THE
LOST WORLD
Dinosaurs and Other
Extinct Monsters
of South America
By Donald R. Prothero

From the horned and
particularly hideous
Carnotaurus of some
70 million years
ago to more recent
200-pound, sabertoothed relatives of
the possum, South
America was home
to some of evolution’s
greatest oddities.


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Prognosis

A Mind
in Time
An unprecedented view

of one person’s brain function
over many months could
unlock new therapies.
BY ADAM HADHAZY

Two mornings a week for the
better part of an 18-month
stretch, you could find Russell
Poldrack with his head inside a giant
metal doughnut — the business end
of a magnetic resonance imager. As
Poldrack lay still for 10 noisy minutes,
the machine measured the activity
throughout his brain’s neural networks.
Roughly once-a-week blood draws
followed, checking nutrient and gene
expression levels in his body.
In total, Poldrack racked up 104
gratingly loud brain scans. He got
stuck by needles, oh, four dozen times.
On top of all that probing and poking,
he also kept frequent logs of diet, sleep
and stress.
Poldrack took the axiom “know
thyself ” to obsessive new levels in
the service of his MyConnectome
project, the most intensive examination
undertaken of a single living person’s
brain. MyConnectome aims to plug
gaps in the fundamental understanding

of how activity varies in the human
brain, across the 100 trillion interconnections of its 100 billion-odd
neurons.
One of these knowledge gaps is
temporal. Scientists have studied brain
changes on short terms of seconds and
minutes, such as when research subjects
complete a task, as well as on the long
term of years, documenting cognitive
decline during the aging process. But
anything in between is unknown,
essentially mentis incognita.

18

DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

“No one has ever looked at how the
brain varies over the course of days,
weeks and months,” says Poldrack,
a psychologist and neuroscientist at
Stanford University.
A second gap is personal. Imaging
studies — which for decades have
revealed the brain regions behind
our behaviors, appetites and mental
disorders — have tended to lump
together scans from a bunch of
people, in the process overlooking
individual cerebral variations.

Studies have also largely assumed
that measuring someone’s brain
function at a point in time is generally
representative of that person’s daily
function at that point in life.
That notion appears way off the
mark, though, for people diagnosed
with specific psychiatric disorders. For

example, those with schizophrenia may
end up in weeks-long active phases of
disease, experiencing hallucinations,
delusions, even full-blown psychosis.
Depression and bipolar disorder
are other conditions that flare, then
dissipate as the brain returns to an
even keel.
To open up new roads into
treating these and other diseases,
MyConnectome and studies like it
are capturing a normal brain’s ebbs
and flows. The approach should help
make personalized medicine possible,
tailored to each patient’s unique neural
wiring diagram, or connectome.
“If we want to understand
fluctuations in disease, the first thing
we need to do is to understand how
a healthy person’s brain function
fluctuates,” says Poldrack.

SIMONE GOLOB/GETTY IMAGES

→


CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ALEXANDER WANG/THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN (3); POLDRACK, R. A. ET AL. LONG-TERM NEURAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL PHENOTYPING OF A SINGLE HUMAN. NAT. COMMUN. 6:8885 DOI: 10.1038/NCOMMS9885 (2015), CREATIVE COMMONS 4.0

Neuroscientist Russell Poldrack undergoes one of 104 MRI scans at the University of
Texas Imaging Research Center. At right, a slice of his brain is shown on a monitor.

TAKING THE PLUNGE
Logistical roadblocks have long
stymied the collection of brain-andbody fluctuations. What healthy
person would want to report to a lab
for frequent MRIs and jabs? And who
would pay for the procedures?
Those objections became moot for
Poldrack several years ago, while at
the University of Texas at Austin. A
friend involved in the Quantified Self,
a movement embracing technology for
self-tracking, finally convinced him.
“My friend was goading me,” says
Poldrack. “She said, ‘You’ve got
an MRI scanner in your basement.
You’ve got to get in there!’ ”
(Poldrack’s lab still had to pay for
scans, but at an early-bird, pre-8 a.m.
rate of $150 a go.)

In subjecting himself to
MyConnectome’s demands, Poldrack
drew inspiration from numerous
self-experimenting scientists. One such
“human guinea pig,” Michael Snyder,
is now a colleague at Stanford.
In 2012, Snyder and his research
team published a groundbreaking
study in which they analyzed the
levels of 40,000 molecules from 20 of
Snyder’s own blood samples, taken
over 14 months. The effort yielded
the first “integrative personal-omics
profile,” or iPOP, documenting Snyder’s
unique set of active genes, metabolites,
proteins and other biomolecules.

Tuesday:
fasted,
no caffeine

Thursday:
fed,
caffeinated

Data from Poldrack’s brain scans show changes in coordination between regions for movement
control, attention and vision, as he shifted between states of being fasted and fed.

Snyder’s research goals were similar
to Poldrack’s MyConnectome in

pointing the way toward a precision
kind of medicine, focusing on patients’
particular biochemistries, as opposed
to today’s one-size-fits-most approach.
“Snyder’s work made me think I
can do interesting science with an
n of 1,” says Poldrack, using the
scientific jargon for a sample size
consisting of just a single individual.
MyConnectome was born.

SELF-EXAMINATION
Although analysis continues for the
massive pile of data gathered from
September 2012 to March 2014 for
MyConnectome — or the “Russome,” as Poldrack’s labmates call
it — some intriguing correlations have
already emerged.

Before his Tuesday MRI scans,
Poldrack fasted and gave up his
morning coffee. On those days, the
scan revealed stronger signals of
coordination between regions for
somatomotor (which senses touch and
controls movement), attention and
vision. “These studies are a window
into the brain-body connection,” says
Poldrack. Also, the metabolic markers
and levels of gene activity in Poldrack’s

blood varied considerably with diet and
brain function, as well as the severity
of his psoriasis, an autoimmune
disease that causes his scalp to flake.
Another important finding was
the fluctuating activity within certain
regions in Poldrack’s brain, which
stood out from the averaged pointin-time scans of multiple people
used in conventional research. Those

October 2016 DISCOVER

19


Imaging studies that combine scans from many people, such as this diffusion
image (above) from the Human Connectome Project, don’t identify brain
variations in individuals. In contrast, Poldrack’s individual scan (right) shows
an area in yellow, indicating an anomaly in his corpus callosum.

blended scans usually find the greatest
difference in subjects’ prefrontal cortex,
the seat of individual personality.
Poldrack’s data suggests researchers are
missing the even greater fluctuations in
an individual’s other brain regions over
time. That means data on potentially
key differences within individuals
— and their relation to wellness and
illness — is getting lost in the wash,

Poldrack says.
Future studies could flesh out the
significance of the “Russ-ome’s”
idiosyncrasies by comparing them
with the Human Connectome Project
(HCP), which Poldrack has served on
the advisory board of since it launched
six years ago. This major international
effort is pooling the snapshot scans
of 1,200 individuals to create a
generic, but authoritatively thorough,
baseline brain map.
“When we put the datasets side
to side, there will likely be some
interesting insights about how Russ’
brain and its structural organization
relate to the hundreds of individuals
we have charted,” says HCP
neuroscientist David Van Essen of
Washington University in St. Louis.

THE “ME” IN “MEDICINE”
Numerous researchers are currently
delving into Poldrack’s public datasets

20

DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

“The more we get,

the more we learn,
and we’re already
learning that everyone’s
baseline is different.”
and have expressed interest in pursuing
their own MyConnectome-style
studies, this time involving multiple
individuals.
Stanford’s Snyder is pleased about
the growing push to understand
human biological variation via
personal connectome and other
“-ome” profiles, such as metabolomes
(the total metabolites present at
a given time in our bodies) and
proteomes (ditto for proteins). “My
own view about this is you can’t have
enough of these profiles,” Snyder
says. “The more we get, the more we
learn, and we’re already learning that
everyone’s baseline is different. People
are poised very differently to respond
to environmental cues.”
Poldrack and Snyder hope that the
vastly expanded and frequent testing
they’ve tried to pioneer on themselves
will help personalize medicine, leading
to improved diagnoses and prognoses.
“We’ll have a whole different world

where we’re measuring people in a lot
more sensitive fashion,” says Snyder.
His own experience is a telling one:
During Snyder’s deep, inward look for
the iPOP project, he witnessed himself
in real-time unexpectedly develop
Type II diabetes. He had none of the
common risk factors and knew of no
family history of diabetes. Thanks to
the frequent monitoring, and catching
the disease early, Snyder was able to
respond and slow its progression.
Poldrack is likewise hoping for
further insight into the foods, mental
states and other factors that exacerbate
his psoriasis. As researchers tease out
the daily goings-on of singular minds,
perhaps millions of those with mental
illness can hold out similar longings
for relief as certain “triggers” of their
conditions are identified.
“Probably the best thing that can
come out of [MyConnectome] is
inspiring someone to go and do a
really great job with a big population
of people studied over a long period
of time,” says Poldrack. “We want to
answer the question of what’s going
wrong in the brain and the body.” D
Adam Hadhazy is a freelance science

writer based in New Jersey. He writes for
New Scientist and BBC Future, among
other publications.

LEFT: DAVID SHATTUCK AND PAUL THOMPSON/HUMAN CONNECTOME PROJECT. RIGHT: POLDRACK, R. A. ET AL. LONG-TERM NEURAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL PHENOTYPING OF A SINGLE HUMAN. NAT. COMMUN. 6:8885 DOI: 10.1038/NCOMMS9885 (2015), CREATIVE COMMONS 4.0

Prognosis


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L

ong ago, we made a vow: We would not produce a five-opal
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“Opal’s spectacular play-of-color can
display all the colors of the rainbow.”
— Gemological Institute of America

“The play of color in opals is so gorgeous they sometimes don't even
seem real and yet they are.” — from 2015 Couture Show

Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. Slip this rainbow on her
finger. If she’s not absolutely delighted simply send it back within
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Your Insider Offer Code: OAR1͛͝­01
Please use this code when you order to receive your discount.

Stauer

®

14101 Southcross Drive W., Dept. OAR1͛͝­01,
Burnsville, Minnesota 55337 www.stauer.com

Rating of A+

* Special price only for customers using
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1.5 ctw Ethiopian opal • Gold­finished .925 sterling silver setting • Whole ring sizes 5–10

Smar t Luxuries—Surprising Prices™


Mind
Over
Matter

Think
Outside
the Brain
How our body can
influence our mind.
BY MALLORY LOCKLEAR

→

22

DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

In Shakespeare’s famous play, Lady Macbeth’s guilt over her role in a murder is so great that she
imagines bloodstains on her hands and compulsively washes them. This phenomenon, called
the Macbeth effect, ties into what scientists call embodied cognition.

Somehow, I hid that he was getting
a monthly hot sauce subscription.

I just attributed it to the oh-so-clever
way I’d disguised my deception.
But the motivation to suddenly
brush my teeth may have been
rooted in something much deeper:
the Macbeth effect, named after
the scene in the Shakespeare play
where Lady Macbeth’s complicity
in a murder leads her to imagine
bloodstains on her hands. Her guilt
makes her feel physically unclean even
though she actually isn’t.

ABSOLUTION
Studies have found Lady Macbeth’s
reaction to be more than drama.
For instance, researchers have shown
hand-washing can assuage guilt

over past misdeeds. Similarly, after
thinking about an unethical act,
people tend to rate household cleaning
products more highly.
All of this has to do with something
called embodied cognition, a relatively
new idea asserting that as the mind
influences the body, the body influences
the mind. “Embodiment is very
interesting because it’s a new way to
do research on [sub]consciousness,”

says neuroscientist Michael Schaefer
at Medical School Berlin, “so we
really can try to unravel things that we
cannot see in a regular way.”
Going beyond ethics, scientists
have found that physical experiences
influence other aspects of cognition,
too. In 2014, researchers in Germany
had people read an ambiguous

WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

It was December, and my
boyfriend and I were teasing
each other about the gifts we’d gotten
for one another.
“Well, it’s a thing that I purchased
from a store,” I said, washing my face
as I got ready for bed.
“It’s stuff in a box, but originally it
was in a bag,” he responded from the
other room.
Fun, useless banter. But at some
point, I got too specific. I told him
one of his gifts was something
I ordered, but the particular things
would be a surprise to both of us
when he opened it. As soon as I said
it, I knew I’d given too much away
— there were going to be follow-up

questions.
And what I did next felt strange,
even as I was doing it. I stopped
in the middle of my nightly ritual
of moisturizing my face and started
brushing my teeth instead.
At the time, I thought maybe I
switched to the toothbrush because
lying to my boyfriend about his
gift would be less obvious if my
fibs were muffled and my face was
partially obscured.
“Is it some sort of subscription
service?”
With brushing sounds: “Mmmm,
no.” (It was.)
“Is it some kind of food thing?”
I brushed harder, smothering
awkward laughter: “Nooo.” (It was
that, too.)


JESSICAHYDE/SHUTTERSTOCK

conversation while touching either
a rough or smooth surface. When
they touched the rough surface,
participants were more likely to think
the conversation was adversarial and
harsh. And a 2010 Science study

found that people tended to rate
a job candidate more highly if the
candidate’s résumé was attached to a
heavy, rather than a light, clipboard.
So my urgent need to brush my teeth
as I steered my boyfriend away from
discovering his gift may not have been
a tool to mask my untruths. Instead,
it might’ve been a personal need to
absolve myself of guilt as I cleaned
my lying mouth. As Schaefer tells me,
“The Macbeth effect is very interesting
because it describes a link between
physical cleaning and moral purity.
When you’ve done something bad to
a person, like lie, you have the need to
clean your body, and if you get to, you
feel better.”
This intrigued me, not only as a
guilty, serial gift-liar, but also as a
neuroscientist. And it has intrigued
other neuroscientists and psychologists,
too, such as Schaefer.
In a study published last December,
he and his team asked 35 participants
to read various scenarios and then
speak or write a prepared response
that was either truthful or a lie. In
one scenario, the volunteers found an
important document that could hurt a

colleague if they didn’t return it. Then
the subjects told the colleague they
did find it (the truth) or didn’t (a lie).
Afterward, researchers showed the
participants two products: a hand soap
and a toothpaste or mouthwash. Then
they asked them to rank each product’s
desirability on a 4-point scale.
Like previous studies, this one
found that if participants lied, whether
verbally or in a written note, they gave
the hygiene products better scores than
after telling the truth. If they spoke
the lie instead of writing it, they rated
toothpaste and mouthwash higher than
hand soap (and vice versa.) So it seems

while people scored toothpaste and
mouthwash products than it was after
they told the truth.

In one study, people read a conversation while
touching a smooth or rough surface. The chat
seemed more hostile while touching the latter.

Going beyond ethics,
scientists have
found that physical
experiences influence
other aspects of

cognition, too.
people find cleaning the “dirty” part of
their body — the part that commits the
lie — more desirable than cleaning the
“honest” parts.
But connections between cleanliness
and morality have been made before;
Schaefer wanted to know what was
happening in the brain. “The interesting
thing is we have a map in our brain of
our body,” he says. “So, everything on
our body surface is represented in that
map.” It’s called the somatosensory
cortex, and it’s organized by body part.
A touch on the foot would register in a
certain part of the cortex, and a touch
on the nose, another.
Using fMRI, Schaefer and his team
saw that when the study participants
were rating hand-washing products,
the part of their brains’ somatosensory
cortex linked to the hand showed a
flurry of activity. Surprisingly, that
activity was much stronger after
writing a lie than writing the truth. The
same thing happened when they rated
mouth-related products. After speaking
a lie, the cortical area dedicated to
their mouth was much more active

WARM FEELINGS
Now I’m faced with a problem. If my
boyfriend reads this, he might wise
up to my own Macbeth effect, giving
me away during future Christmas
discussions. Maybe there’s some other
Shakespearean-inspired psychological
phenomenon to help me deal with my
lies? Or maybe I’ll exploit the findings
of another study.
In a paper published in Social
Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
in 2011, researchers at Yale described
their discovery that people who
touched a warm object were more
likely to invest money with a stranger
than people who touched something
cold. And, like Schaefer’s study,
the team observed the temperatureinfluenced trust effect in the brain, in
an area known as the insula. Along
with regulating other functions, the
insula becomes more active when
someone faces risk.
When a participant held something
cold before deciding whether to trust
a stranger, the activity in the insula
intensified. But when the participant
held something warm, the insula
remained in a calmer state. And a more
relaxed insula is a more trusting insula.

Turns out this warmth angle may
actually be doubly useful for me.
In a 2008 Science study, marketing
professor Lawrence Williams and
social psychologist John Bargh found
that people were more likely to pick
out a treat for themselves if they had
recently held something cold. Yet when
they’d held something hot, they were
more apt to choose a gift for a friend.
So maybe this December I’ll just
manipulate my boyfriend’s insula and
generosity with a warm cup of tea.
What could go wrong? D
Mallory Locklear is a science writer and has
a Ph.D. in neuroscience.

October 2016 DISCOVER

23


Big
Idea

Fighting Cancer With Data
Doctors can now tailor cancer treatments based on their patients’ genes, but expansion
will require new levels of data sharing and computing power.
BY AIMEE SWARTZ

→

24

DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

The initiative enables
cancer centers
to access and analyze
vast amounts
of anonymous
patient information
— from genetic
sequences and
imaging data to
findings in personal
health records.

experimental drug homes in on the
abnormal gene suspected to cause
Dishman’s disease. Within three
months of starting treatment, he was
cancer-free and eligible for the kidney
transplant that ultimately saved his life.
Inspired by the treatment, Dishman
is now on a campaign to make this
kind of tailored cancer care available
to more patients. And, ironically, this
individually focused approach likely
hinges on the efforts of crowds.

DATA-DRIVEN TREATMENTS
The approach is already routine for
some cancer patients, such as women
and men with breast cancer tumors
that have high levels of a protein
called HER2, or lung cancer tumors

RA2STUDIO/SHUTTERSTOCK

Eric Dishman, a former Intel
executive now at the National
Institutes of Health, was a 19-yearold college sophomore when he
was diagnosed with a rare form of
kidney cancer. Over the course of
the next 23 years, he would receive
62 different kinds of chemotherapy,
immunotherapy and radiation. Some
slowed the tumor’s growth, but never
for long. The cancer spread from his
left kidney to right kidney.
Just when it seemed Dishman
had run out of options, a chance
encounter in 2012 with a scientist
working for a now-defunct genometesting company presented an
opportunity he couldn’t refuse. He
had his cancerous tissue sequenced,
a process that would compare his
cancer’s mutated DNA with a healthy
patient’s genome. This would let

doctors look for genetic mutations
and other abnormalities that support
cancer growth, and to use that
information to devise a treatment
strategy. For example, changes in
certain genes could indicate that his
cancer was more likely to respond to a
particular drug, while other mutations
might predict little benefit from a
specific therapy. Once the doctors
sequenced his tumor, all he had to do
was wait. And wait.
Dishman says he was “literally at
death’s door,” when he got the call
from his doctor. It had taken seven
months for a team of oncologists,
computer scientists and data crunchers
to analyze Dishman’s genetic data
and pinpoint a drug — for pancreatic
cancer — that would target the
unique features of his cancer. This