Scientific American Oct, 2018 #10

SPECIAL
REPORT WHAT’S WRONG WITH SCIENCE—AND HOW TO FIX IT PAGE

50
H E
T BLE
SO LV
UN BLEMA
PR O A journey int
od
o so
e rn
me
m
of
ath
th
an
e
d
str
p h
an
y
ges
sics
t ideas
in m
S
PLU
CLICKS, LIES
AND VIDEOTAPE
Bracing for the age of fake video PAGE 38
EARTHQUAKES IN THE SKY

A controversial theory
for predicting disaster PAGE 44
THE UPSIDE OF RABIES

How the virus helped us better OCTOBER 2018
understand the brain PAGE 68 © 2018 Scientific American ScientificAmerican.com
O c to b e r 2 0 1 8
VO LU M E 3 1 9, N U M B E R 4
M AT H E M AT I C S
28 The Unsolvable Problem
Three mathematicians, a 146-page proof
and a deep, unanswerable question in physics.
By Toby S. Cubitt, David Pérez-García
and Michael Wolf
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
38 Clicks, Lies and Videotape
AI is making it possible for anyone to
manipulate audio and video. By Brooke Borel
S E I S M O LO G Y
44 Earthquakes in the Sky
Can scientists predict temblors by watching
the ionosphere? By Erik Vance
S T A T E O F T H E
W O R L D ’ S S C I E N C E 2 0 1 8
50 How to Fix Science

52 Rethink Funding
The current system does not produce
the best results. By John P. A. Ioannidis
56 Make Research Reproducible
An alarming number of studies cannot
be replicated. By Shannon Palus
60 End Harassment
Wellesley College president Paula Johnson
explains how to make science accessible to
everyone. By Clara Moskowitz
62 Help Young Scientists
It’s hard out there for an early-career
74
researcher. By Rebecca Boyle
64 Break Down Silos
Solving global problems requires inter
disciplinary science. By Graham A. J. Worthy
and Cherie L. Yestrebsky
NEUROSCIENCE
etty Images (flooding in Houston, Tex.)
68 Rabies on the Brain

How neuroscientists use the rabies virus to
map brain circuits. By Andrew J. Murray ON THE C OVER
Three mathematicians spent several years and 146 pages
N AT U R A L D I S A S T E R S proving that the “spectral gap” problem—the question of
74 This Way Out whether materials have a gap between their lowest energy
Detailed new risk maps show who should level and first excited state—is undecidable. To reach this
JABIN BOTSFORD G
conclusion, the researchers investigated the computer

really flee a threatening storm. science of Turing machines, the mathematics of bathroom
By Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio, floor tiles and the foundations of quantum physics.
Devika Subramanian and Robert M. Stein Illustration by Mark Ross Studios.
October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 1
© 2018 Scientific American

4 From the Editor
6 Letters
9 Science Agenda
If pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions on moral
grounds, they are doing patients harm. By the Editors
10 Forum
We need to tap the vast resource of existing drugs
for lifesaving treatments. By Joseph Gogos
12 Advances
Mapping a massive glacier’s rocky slide. A blind woman’s
brain lets her see motion. How birds avoid getting sick.
00
10 Planet-hunting telescopes may be missing E.T.
24 The Science of Health
Weaning patients off opioids is part of the healing
process. By Claudia Wallis
25 TechnoFiles
Soon our cell phones will be cranking up to 5G speed.
y David Pogue
B
80 Recommended
The wildlife black market. Battling to keep food safe. Laika,
the first Earth-orbiting dog. By Andrea Gawrylewski
81 Skeptic
Why do people die by suicide? By Michael Shermer
00
16 82 Anti Gravity
When we stop worrying about the truth. By Steve Mirsky
83 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago
84 Graphic Science
Mammals shrink in places humans migrate.
By Mark Fischetti and Lucy Reading-Ikkanda
ON THE WEB
Forbidden Universes
Scientific American r eports that the multitude of universes
predicted by string theory may not exist after all, a sugges-
tion that has sparked controversy among physicists.
Go to www.ScientificAmerican.com/oct2018/multiverse
00
82
Scientific American (ISSN 0036-8733), Volume 319, Number 4, October 2018, published monthly by Scientific American, a division of Springer Nature America, Inc., 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, N.Y. 10004-1562. Periodicals
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2 Scientific American, October 2018

FROM
THE EDITOR Mariette DiChristinais editor in chief of Scientific American.
Follow her on Twitter @mdichristina
Proof of the Moskowitz, we are looking at the challenges of research today. In

“Make Research Reproducible,” Shannon Palus examines the
Impossible?
problem of reproducibility (page 56): a large percentage of scien-
tific papers cannot be replicated by other researchers. The rea-
sons can include multiple factors, such as imprecise methods,
bad reagents and flaws in data collection. Starting on page 52,
“This idea might seem obvious, b ut mathematics is about es- John P. A. Ioannidis writes about the ways we can “Rethink Fund-
tablishing concepts with absolute certainty,” ing,” from not spending enough to properly financing the work
write Toby S. Cubitt, David Pérez-García and in the first place to problems with the reward sys-
Michael Wolf in this issue’s cover story, “The tems for individuals. He also outlines potential
Unsolvable Problem.” In their feature, they de- solutions. In “Help Young Scientists,” begin-
scribe a mathematical odyssey to demonstrate ning on page 62, Rebecca Boyle discusses the
the “un decidability”—that is, the unsolvable difficulties faced by individuals at the start of
nature—of a certain problem in quantum phys- their career. Rounding out the section, in
ics. The journey takes them on a three-year “Break Down Silos,” Graham A. J. Worthy and
“grand adventure,” from a small town deep in Cherie L. Yestrebsky focus on interdisciplinary
the Austrian Alps into a world of complicated teamwork (page 64).
mathematics. The result was a 146-page proof Elsewhere in the issue, you can discover
and publication in the journal N ature. It all how engineered forms of the rabies virus have
starts on page 28. provided new insights into the brain’s inner
Several years ago a few different trips of my workings (page 68); ponder a controversial
own—to Moscow, Doha (Qatar), Beijing and oth- theory that holds that the best early warnings
ers—inspired the series “State of the World’s Sci- of an earthquake could appear 180 miles
ence.” At the time, I was struck by how other above the ground (page 44); learn about new
countries looked to science and invested in it, ways to evacuate in the event of a hurricane
with a variety of national goals. I decided that (page 74); and consider the all too disturbing reality
Scientific American, with 14 translated editions, should make a of fake videos (page 38). As always, we hope that you enjoy
point of taking an annual look at this global enterprise. making your way through the feature articles in this edition.
In this year’s special report, headed by senior editor Clara We welcome your comments.
BOARD OF ADVISERS
Leslie C. Aiello Jonathan Foley Daniel M. Kammen Miguel Nicolelis Terry Sejnowski
President, Wenner-Gren Foundation Executive Director and Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor Co-director, Center for Professor and Laboratory Head
for Anthropological Research William R. and Gretchen B. Kimball Chair, of Energy, Energy and Resources Neuroengineering, Duke University of Computational Neurobiology
Roger Bingham California Academy of Sciences Group, and Director, Renewable and Martin A. Nowak Laboratory, Salk Institute for
Co-Founder and Director, Appropriate Energy Laboratory, Director, Program for Evolutionary Biological Studies
Kaigham J. Gabriel University of California, Berkeley
The Science Network Dynamics, and Professor of Biology and Michael Shermer
President and Chief Executive Officer,
Arthur Caplan Christof Koch of Mathematics, Harvard University Publisher, Skeptic m
agazine
Charles Stark Draper Laboratory President and CSO,
Director, Division of Medical Ethics, Robert E. Palazzo Michael Snyder
Department of Population Health,
Harold “Skip” Garner Allen Institute for Brain Science Dean, University of Alabama at Professor of Genetics, Stanford
NYU Langone Medical Center Executive Director and Professor, Morten L. Kringelbach Birmingham College of Arts and Sciences University School of Medicine
Primary Care Research Network Associate Professor and Senior Carolyn Porco Michael E. Webber
Vinton G. Cerf
and Center for Bioinformatics and Research Fellow, The Queen’s College, Leader, Cassini Imaging Science Co-director, Clean Energy Incubator,
Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
Genetics, Edward Via College University of Oxford Team, and Director, CICLOPS, and Associate Professor,
George M. Church Space Science Institute
of Osteopathic Medicine Steven Kyle Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Director, Center for Computational
Professor of Applied Economics and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran University of Texas at Austin
Genetics, Harvard Medical School Michael S. Gazzaniga
Management, Cornell University Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, Steven Weinberg
Rita Colwell Director, Sage Center for the Study University of California, San Diego
Robert S. Langer Director, Theory Research Group,
Distinguished University Professor, of Mind, University of California, David H. Koch Institute Professor, Lisa Randall Department of Physics,
University of Maryland College Park Santa Barbara Department of Chemical University of Texas at Austin
Professor of Physics, Harvard University
and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School David J. Gross Engineering, M.I.T. (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1979)
Martin Rees
of Public Health
Professor of Physics and Permanent Lawrence Lessig Astronomer Royal and Professor George M. Whitesides
Richard Dawkins Member, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Professor, Harvard Law School of Cosmology and Astrophysics, Professor of Chemistry and
Founder and Board Chairman, John P. Moore Institute of Astronomy, University Chemical Biology, Harvard University
Physics,University of California, Santa
Richard Dawkins Foundation Professor of Microbiology and of Cambridge Anton Zeilinger
Barbara (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2004)
Drew Endy Immunology, Weill Medical Jeffrey D. Sachs Professor of Quantum Optics,
Professor of Bioengineering, Lene Vestergaard Hau
College of Cornell Univetrsity Director, The Earth Institute, Quantum Nanophysics, Quantum
Stanford University Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Columbia University Information, University of Vienna
M. Granger Morgan
Edward W. Felten of Applied Physics, Harvard University
Hamerschlag University Professor Eugenie C. Scott Jonathan Zittrain
Director, Center for Information Danny Hillis Engineering and Public Policy, Chair, Advisory Council, Professor of Law and of Computer
Technology Policy, Princeton University Co-chairman, Applied Minds, LLC Carnegie Mellon University National Center for Science Education Science, Harvard University
4 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Nick Higgins

LETTERS
[email protected]
“It may not be have conscious experiences; (2) my tooth-

ache hurts; (3) ergo, Dennett is wrong.
a question of Those who have read Dennett carefully
whether the universe should recognize the falsity of the initial
premise. He understands fully the reality
is stranger than of pain. His goal is to encourage thinkers
we understand to exercise greater caution when theoriz-
ing about their own consciousness: given
but whether it is the human brain’s complexity, it is to be ex-
stranger than we pected that some of our casual intuitions
regarding its operation may be misguided.
can understand.” Christopher Taylor M adison, Wis.
barry maletzky portland, ore.
KOCH REPLIES: Dennett argues in his
1991 book Consciousness Explained that
Carr that his work must be included in a people are terribly confused about con-
longer piece, which I did in my book The sciousness. What they mean when they re-
Island of Knowledge. F or this essay, space count their experiences—for that is con-
June 2018 allowed me to focus only on the physical sciousness—is that they have certain be-
sciences. [Editors’ note: Read more about liefs about their mental states; each state
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems in “The has distinct functional properties with
GRASP CEILING Unsolvable Problem,” on page 28.] distinct behaviors. Once these outcomes
In raising the question “How Much Can are explained, there is nothing left to ac-
We Know?” [The Biggest Questions in GAME OF LIFE count for. Consciousness is all in the doing.
Science], Marcelo Gleiser focuses on hu- Erik Vance’s “Can You Supercharge Your He and others who take his eliminative
man consciousness and the extent to Baby?” is a sensible article on the limita- materialist view of conscious experiences
which we can “make sense of the world.” tions of modern toys, videos and other deny the existence of anything above and
He misses the larger issue: our brains paraphernalia in helping augment young beyond associated behavioral dispositions
evolved to help us survive and reproduce, children’s mental development. Yet there and function. I find this position bizarrely
not to understand the cosmos. It may not is another aspect of child play he over- incongruous with my lived experience.
be a question of whether the universe is looks: the substitution of social games How is my back pain a belief and not an
stranger than we understand but whether with “passive” toys used mostly alone, excruciating subjective state? Having
it is stranger than we can u
nderstand. typically via a television, computer or cell spent many a wonderful dinner with Den-
Barry Maletzky P ortland, Ore. phone, without exercise. nett, one of the most eloquent and knowl-
Social games are vital for the mental edgeable philosophers I have encountered,
Gleiser exposes the limits of knowledge in and physical development of children. Per- I know that outside business hours, he acts
the physical sciences. Kurt Gödel settled haps most important, such games are like he has experiences like everyone else.
this subject in mathematics with his in- based on rules that are accepted by all
completeness theorems in 1931. Because players, and they are fun only if everybody LIGHT AND DARK
the sciences are rooted in mathematics, it abides by those rules. Children who play “What Is Spacetime?” [The Biggest Ques-
is only natural to include his work in any with cell phones can cheat at will; they are tions in Science], George Musser’s article
such discussion of epistemology. the masters of their digital universe and on quantum gravity, makes me wonder if
Avery Carr N esbit, Miss. thus become self-centered, without consid- there are differences we can observe be-
eration for resolving social conflicts. tween the cases of dark matter falling into
GLEISER REPLIES: R egarding Maletzky’s Eduardo Kausel a black hole and normal matter doing so.
observation: It is indeed remarkable that Massachusetts Institute of Technology Wontaek Yoo P ittsburgh
brains that evolved to maximize our sur-
vival chances are able to write poetry, CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE I have long wondered why the speed of
compose symphonies and prove theorems. Christof Koch’s opening salvos against light exists. What is it and why is it so fun-
Why this is so remains a mystery. It may Daniel Dennett of Tufts University and damental to physics? Musser presents the
well be that the universe is the puzzle we like-minded philosophers in “What Is Con- idea that atoms of space might undergo
can’t solve. It’s hard to get out of the box sciousness?” [The Biggest Questions in “phase transitions” and that black holes
when the box is everything that exists. Science] are misguided. Koch’s basic argu- could be places where space “melts.” It oc-
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems did ment is: (1) Dennett, motivated by the be- curs to me that the speed of light could
expose the limitations of mathematics as a lief that we live in a “meaningless universe represent the melting point of spacetime.
self-contained logical process. I agree with of matter and the void,” denies that we Erik Eason O regon City, Ore.

LETTERS
[email protected]
ESTABLISHED 1845
EDITOR IN CHIEF AND SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT

Mariette DiChristina
Curtis Brainard Maria-Christina Keller Michael Mrak
MUSSER REPLIES: I n answer to Yoo: Most MANAGING EDITOR COPY DIRECTOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR
physicists think that dark matter is a hith- EDITORIAL

CHIEF FEATURES EDITOR Seth Fletcher CHIEF NEWS EDITOR Dean Visser CHIEF OPINION EDITOR Michael D. Lemonick
erto undetected but otherwise unexception- FEATURES
al type of particle, which would behave SENIOR EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Mark Fischetti SENIOR EDITOR, SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Madhusree Mukerjee
SENIOR EDITOR, CHEMISTRY / POLICY / BIOLOGY Josh Fischman SENIOR EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY / MIND Jen Schwartz
like ordinary matter, as far as black holes SENIOR EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Clara Moskowitz SENIOR EDITOR, EVOLUTION / ECOLOGY Kate Wong
are concerned. Gravitation is a universal NEWS

SENIOR EDITOR, MIND / BRAIN Gary Stix ASSOCIATE EDITOR, BIOLOGY / MEDICINE Dina Fine Maron
force that no matter is immune to. Al- ASSOCIATE EDITOR, SPACE / PHYSICS Lee Billings ASSOCIATE EDITOR, SUSTAINABILITY Andrea Thompson
ASSOCIATE EDITOR, TECHNOLOGY Larry Greenemeier ASSISTANT EDITOR, NEWS Tanya Lewis
though dark matter can fall into a black
DIGITAL CONTENT
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SENIOR EDITOR, MULTIMEDIA Steve Mirsky COLLECTIONS EDITOR Andrea Gawrylewski
ly dark, it cannot lose energy by emitting
ART
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SENIOR COPY EDITORS Michael Battaglia, Daniel C. Schlenoff MANAGING PRODUCTION EDITOR Richard Hunt
time does emerge from deeper ingredients, COPY EDITOR Aaron Shattuck PREPRESS AND QUALITY MANAGER Silvia De Santis
as I speculate in my article, the speed of D I G I TA L
light can no longer be taken as a given and TECHNICAL LEAD Nicholas Sollecito SENIOR WEB PRODUCER Ian Kelly WEB PRODUCER Jessica Ramirez
will have to be explained. The answer is CONTRIBUTOR S
not yet known. In some scenarios, the speed EDITORIAL David Biello, Lydia Denworth, W. Wayt Gibbs, Ferris Jabr, Anna Kuchment, Robin Lloyd,
Melinda Wenner Moyer, George Musser, Christie Nicholson, John Rennie, Ricki L. Rusting
of light arises from the dynamics of the ART Edward Bell, Bryan Christie, Lawrence R. Gendron, Nick Higgins
building blocks of spacetime. Like the rest EDITORIAL ADMINISTRATOR Ericka Skirpan SENIOR SECRETARY Maya Harty
of the structure of the spacetime we ob-
serve, the speed of light is a property of one
of the phases that theorists hypothesize. It PRESIDENT
loses meaning in the others. Think of the Dean Sanderson
EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT Michael Florek
speed of surface waves in liquid water: the VICE PRESIDENT, COMMERCIAL Andrew Douglas
waves cease to exist in the water’s solid PUBLISHER AND VICE PRESIDENT Jeremy A. Abbate
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ERRATA
“A Painful Mystery,” by Jena Pincott, should I N T E G R AT E D M E D I A S A L E S
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that David Hsieh of the California Insti- CUSTOM PUBLISHING EDITOR Lisa Pallatroni
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Scientific American, 1 New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, NY 10004-1562 or [email protected]
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SCIENCE AGENDA
O PINI O N A N D A N A LYS I S FR OM
S C IENTIFIC A MERIC AN ’ S B OA R D O F E D ITO R S
birth control that a woman might take contraceptives, ranging

from regulating menstrual cycles to helping manage endome-
triosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome. Failure to obtain legiti-
mately prescribed drugs could result in significant pain or oth-
er medical complications, in addition to the obvious risk of
unwanted pregnancy. But in these states, pharmacies and phar-
macists can just say no.
Such policies are a particular problem in rural parts of the
country where drugstores may be located very far apart, forcing
people to travel significant distances to find a cooperative phar-
macist. There are no official tallies on how often such incidents
occur, although some anecdotal examples of such arbitrary
refusals are chilling. In January 2007, for example, a 23-year-old
mother in central Ohio went to her local Walmart for emergen-
cy contraception.
According to the National Women’s Law Center, the pharma-
cist on staff “shook his head and laughed” and told her that no
one there would sell her the medication even though the store
had it in stock. As a result, she had to drive 45 miles to find
another pharmacy that would provide her with the drug. This
Druggists
woman’s experience is particularly worrisome because delays
taking emergency birth-control medication can increase the
odds of pregnancy.
Shouldn’t Be
In states with “conscience carve-outs” for druggists, pharmacies
honoring those policies should be required to preemptively notify
state authorities and medical providers that they might refuse ser-
Morality Police
vice. That way, women and their doctors could make alternative
arrangements to fill prescriptions at pharmacies that will give
them the medications they need—avoiding situations such as the
recent one in Arizona. This follows a model worked out in 2014,
Some states let them deny care when the U.S. Supreme Court told the Obama administration that
for nonmedical reasons certain employers with religious objections did not have to offer an
By the Editors insurance plan with birth-control coverage. But these employers
did have to notify the Department of Health and Human Services
In June, an Arizona woman was told by her doctor that her so the government and insurers could provide birth-control cover-
nine-week-old fetus had no heartbeat and that she was miscar- age via a private insurance plan or a government-sponsored one.
rying. She was given a prescription for misoprostol, a drug that (The Trump administration has since complicated this approach
would help induce her body to clear the dead fetus. She went to and scrapped government notification requirements.)
a local Walgreens to get that medication, but the pharmacist And in situations where individual pharmacists may refuse
there refused. Instead he told her she could return when he service—even if their pharmacies generally fill family-planning
was not working or have her prescription passed along to an prescriptions—there should be a legal requirement to automat-
other pharmacy. The woman said she was left explaining in ically refer that prescription to another pharmacy within a
front of her seven-year-old and other customers that she had certain reasonable distance or to have a backup druggist on
wanted to have a baby but that there was no heartbeat. Yet she call to do the work so that patients can get medications quickly
was still refused the medication. and efficiently.
In Arizona and at least six other U.S. states, pharmacists Pharmacists play a vital role in the health care system: help-
have the legal right to refuse to fill emergency contraception ing patients treat illnesses, maintain their health, educating them
prescriptions—not for medical reasons but simply based on about drug interactions and answering questions. But these pro-
moral grounds. In such cases, the law allows druggists in Arizo- fessionals are hurting people—especially women—when they
na, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, South Dakota and force them to go hunting for a place to fill a prescription.
Texas to override the judgment of physicians.
This puts patients at risk—primarily women, because moral
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E
qualms nearly always have to do with birth control or with so- Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
called abortion pills. But there are many reasons other than or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]
Illustration by Samantha Mash October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 9

FORUM
C OMM E N TA RY O N S C IE N C E IN
T H E N E W S FR OM T H E E X PE R T S Joseph Gogos is a neuroscientist at the Zuckerman Institute
at Columbia University.
New Drugs
from Old
Repurposing medications could
let us treat intractable illnesses
By Joseph Gogos
Despite decades of research, disorders of the brain
have proved especially difficult to treat. Consider
Alzheimer’s disease. To date, every single clinical tri-
al of a treatment for Alzheimer’s has failed to halt its
progress. In January, Pfizer announced that it had
ended research on drugs for it, as well as for Parkin-
son’s disease. Autism has been similarly frustrating.
Then there is schizophrenia, which has not seen
a breakthrough for more than 60 years, since the
discovery of chlorpromazine (brand name: Thora-
zine)—which happened largely by chance. legal framework that lets companies protect their interests while
But the story of chlorpromazine offers a powerful lesson: orig- sharing drug data. Other initiatives to create similar databases of
inally an antihistamine, it was repurposed as an antianxiety med- approved and failed drugs are also under way.
ication. That led to doctors trying it in people with pathological If this information could be funneled into a centralized re-
anxiety and in agitated psychotic patients. Finally, with a few source, along with existing data on approved drugs—and com-
modifications, it was reborn as an antipsychotic, ushering in a bined with the explosion in genetic knowledge related to the un-
generation of medications to treat a variety of psychiatric disor- derlying disease mechanisms—it would be a revelation. Research-
ders, from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to severe depres- ers could employ the latest tools in bioinformatics, data science
sion and anxiety. These are not miracle cures, and they have seri- and machine learning to uncover common molecular themes
ous side effects—but they are far better than what existed before. among or between diseases and potential drugs.
As a neuroscientist who has studied schizophrenia for decades, Ultimately the key is access, but many pharmaceutical compa-
I am convinced that we could have similar successes with other nies are still reluctant to reveal anything that might jeopardize
medicines already on our shelves, which may hold untapped their intellectual property. Even academics may hesitate to share
promise for treating brain diseases—if only pharmaceutical com- with competing laboratories. To remedy this, the fda and similar
panies can be prompted to share their data with scientists. Be- entities must develop incentives for sharing data, such as by cre-
cause an existing drug has already passed fda tests to prove it is ating legal safeguards for privacy and commercial interests.
nontoxic to humans, successfully repurposing it could take less These incentives could then open the floodgates for easy-to-use,
than half of the estimated 13 years and significantly less than the open platforms for efficiently sharing and mining data. This
average $2-billion to $3-billion cost of developing a single drug would not have been possible five years ago. But now is a pivotal
from scratch. The thousands of fda-approved drugs thus repre- moment, and we have never been closer to real breakthroughs.
sent a vast resource that can potentially be modified to target any In my lab, we are testing certain cancer drugs that restore
number of conditions. But this potential is largely unexplored, in some of the biological processes that are disrupted in schizophre-
part because companies focus on specific diseases and would have nia. We want to see if the drugs have the same restorative proper-
to restructure their R&D programs to look at others. ties in the brain cells of schizophrenia patients. This is a proof of
There are also thousands of drugs that are not f da-approved, concept for the idea that a systematic and strategic approach to
such as those stalled in clinical trials or discontinued by drug- drug repurposing could actually move the needle. There is no
makers. When a company abandons development of a drug, time to waste. We now have the capabilities to deploy a legion of
whatever researchers know is locked up in that company’s files virtual researchers in search of these eureka moments. What we
and might as well be lost. Scientists need access to this informa- need is cooperation from drug companies and academic scientists
tion, and we need it now. Starting in the early 2010s, the U.S. Na- alike—and access to the lifesaving data they hold.
tional Institutes of Health and the U.K.’s Medical Research Coun-
cil have been striking deals to take abandoned drugs from their
pipelines and release that information publicly. The nih’s Nation- Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
al Center for Advancing Translational Sciences even provides a or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]
10 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Jori Bolton

ADVANCES
Glacier emptying into Antarctica’s Pine Island Bay

has undergone massive breakups in recent years.

D I S PATC H E S FR OM T H E FR O N TIE R S O F S C IE N C E , T E C H N O LO GY A N D M E D I C IN E IN S ID E
• A blind woman’s unusual condition

lets her see motion
• What it is like to be a scientist
in Congress
• Rethinking the search for
extraterrestrial life
• A pungent dating service for
captive cheetahs
C L I M AT E S C I E N C E
Slippery Slope
Seafloor maps reveal Antarctic
glacier had a bumpy ride
Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier h olds
a dubious honor—it is currently the largest
Antarctic contributor to global sea-level
rise, thanks to the enormous amount of ice
it has lost in recent decades. Now scien-
tists have identified the likely cause of
some of the glacier’s most spectacular
calving events, which have birthed ice-
bergs several times the size of Manhattan.
The culprit: submerged rock ridges that
poke up high enough to occasionally hit
the bottom of the glacier. This activity cre-
ates small cracks that grow and eventually
cause massive chunks of ice to break off.
But the undersea rocks are not all bad
news—they can also help stabilize the gla-
cier by grinding against its underside, but-
tressing it against flowing faster out to sea.
Jan Erik Arndt, a geophysicist at the
Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center
for Polar and Marine Research in Germany,
and his colleagues departed Punta Arenas,
Chile, in February 2017 onboard the ice-
breaker Polarstern. A week or so later they
arrived in Pine Island Bay, an inlet filled
with icebergs and dominated by the gla-
cier’s 40-meter-high face. They were there
to figure out what controlled the stability
of this expanse of ice.
Arndt and his colleagues launched
sound waves from the P olarstern’s hull into
ALAMY
the near-freezing water. By measuring how
J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter

ADVANCES
long it took the waves to bounce off the it probably also acted as a brake, prevent- versity, who was not involved in the re
seafloor and return to the ship, the team ing the glacier from flowing unimpeded search. This study is “addressing an inter-
mapped hundreds of square kilometers into the ocean, the researchers hypothe- esting question in a fascinating place,”
of the bay’s underwater topography. The size. They suspect it had been effectively Alley says. Jeremy Bassis, a glaciologist
researchers focused on an area exposed pinned that way since the 1940s. at the University of Michigan, adds: “The
by the glacier’s recent calving—a swath But the brake eventually failed; Pine troughs and bumps in the bottom of the
of seafloor that used to lie below about Island Glacier probably lost contact with ocean beneath the ice play a huge role
400 meters of ice. “It was a good opportu- the ridge in 2006, after a warmer current in regulating when the ice will break.”
nity to go in there and map this area that of water eroded the glacier’s underside. As glaciers flow into the sea and melt,
was not accessible before,” Arndt says. That is when the rumple disappeared in sea levels rise. That is bad news for a large
He and his team discovered a complex satellite images, the team reported in June chunk of the world’s population; roughly
undersea landscape. One feature literally in the Cryosphere. (Scientists say a volcano 40 percent of all people live within 100
stood out—a rocky outcropping that, at its under the glacier, discovered earlier this kilometers of a coastline. Some U.S. cities,
tallest point, reached within 375 meters year, most likely contributes to its thinning such as New Orleans, already lie below
of the surface. “We were surprised to see as well.) As Pine Island Glacier once again sea level. Others, including Miami, cur-
this huge ridge,” Arndt says. This rock, slid toward the sea, it probably hit other rently experience regular flooding.
the team realized, had very likely pushed submerged rock features the P olarstern’s For now, Pine Island Glacier is stable—
against the bottom of Pine Island Glacier mapping identified, the researchers say. its northern section is pinned by a small
in the past. The giveaway was a bump on Those collisions stressed the ice, creating hill on land, and its southern front is cor-
the glacier’s surface—glaciologists call it kilometer-long rifts spotted in images tak- ralled by a thick stream of ice. But change
a “rumple”—directly above the location of en in 2007 and 2011. These rifts then grew, is on the way, Arndt and his colleagues
the ridge in archival satellite images. “We finally spawning giant icebergs. predict. Late last year they spotted
saw the surface imprint of the topography Seafloor features are “really important” a 30-kilometer-long rift in the glacier—
underneath on the ice shelf,” Arndt ex to an ice shelf’s stability, says Richard Alley, the likely site of its next calving event.
plains. As the ice pressed against the ridge, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State Uni- —Katherine Kornei
COGNITIVE SCIENCE blind to other visual stimuli. Jody Culham, a neuroscientist at West-
ern University in Ontario, and her colleagues launched a 10-year
Seeing Blind investigation into Canning’s remarkable vision and published the
results online in May in N europsychologia. T
he team confirmed that
A visually impaired woman Canning was able to detect motion and its direction. She could see a
can still perceive motion hand moving toward her, but she could not tell a thumbs-up from a
thumbs-down. She was also able to navigate around obstacles, reach
Milena Canning can see s team rising from a coffee cup but not and grasp, and catch a ball thrown at her.
the cup. She can see her daughter’s ponytail swing from Scans of Canning’s head showed an apple-sized hole
side to side, but she can’t see her daughter. Canning where the visual cortex should be. But the lesion
is blind, yet moving objects somehow find a way apparently spared the brain’s motion-processing
into her perception. Scientists studying her region, the middle temporal (MT) visual area.
condition say it could reveal secrets about “All the credit [for Canning’s perception]
how humans process vision in general. must go to an intact MT,” says Beatrice de
Canning was 29 when a stroke Gelder, a neuroscientist at Maastricht Uni-
destroyed her entire occipital lobe, the brain versity in the Netherlands, who was not
region housing the visual system. The event involved in the study.
left her sightless, but one day she saw a flash The next mystery is how information
of light from a metallic gift bag next to her. from the eyes gets to the MT without travel-
Her doctors told her she was hallucinating. ing through the visual cortex. “I think of the
Nevertheless, “I thought there must be some- primary visual pathway as a highway. In Mile-
thing happening within my brain [allowing me to na’s case, the highway dead-ends, but there are
see],” she says. She went from doctor to doctor until all these side roads that go to the MT,” Culham says.
she met Gordon Dutton, an ophthalmologist in Glasgow, “It’s got to be one of these indirect routes, but we are not
Scotland. Dutton had encountered this mystery before—in a 1917 yet sure which one.” These side roads most likely exist in all our
paper by neurologist George Riddoch describing brain-injured brains as remnants of the early visual system that evolved to detect
World War I soldiers. To help enhance Canning’s motion-based approaching threats even without full-fledged sight, Culham says.
vision, Dutton prescribed her a rocking chair. Canning is an eager participant in the researchers’ ongoing study.
Canning is one of a handful of people who have been diagnosed “If I can help them understand the brain more,” she says, “I could
with the “Riddoch phenomenon,” the ability to perceive motion while understand why I’m seeing what I’m seeing.” —Bahar Gholipour
14 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

U.S.
U.S. FINLAND
FINLAND
IN THE NEWS A fifirst-of-its-kind
rst-of-its-kind lawsuit claiming that the federal gov- settle
About 10,000 years ago humans lived in settle-
Quick
ernment’s actions caused climate change is moving for- ments in a part of southern Finland that is now under
ward. The U.S. Supreme Court dismissed an attempt by several meters of lake water, researchers found.
Hits the Trump administration to halt the lawsuit, filed

young plaintiffs
plaintiffs in Oregon.
filed by A team
A team of archaeologists and marine experts dove
deep into the lake to fifind
nd what are now the earliest
known signs of human habitation in the region.
By Maya Miller
MONGOLIA
MONGOLIA
People were performing den-
tistry on horses on the vast
MEXICO
MEXICO grasslands of the Mongolian
A Mexico City–based social enter- steppe roughly 3,000 years
prise is providing computer pro- ago, according to a research
gramming training to teenagers team’s fifindings.
ndings. The study sug-
deported from the U.S. The orga- gests nomads there were some
offering
nization, Hola<code/>, is off ering of the fifirst
rst humans to use the
fifive-month
ve-month software engineering animals for wide-scale trans-
“boot camps” in a bid to give the port, spurring the early begin-
young deportees employable nings of globalization.
skills and ultimately boost the INDIA
INDIA
nation’s technology sector. KENYA
KENYA Scientists wrote a letter to the Indian president to
Nairobi, a city with some of the world’s worst traffic,
traffic, voice concerns over alleged political attacks on science.
is planning to implement car-free Wednesdays and The letter criticized the government’s decision to
Saturdays in two of its most congested areas. Policy influential
transfer a senior scientist to a less infl uential post after
For more details, visit makers hope this will encourage public transporta-
www.ScientificAmerican.com/
he complained about moves to privatize parts of the
oct2018/advances tion use and reduce air pollution. nation’s central space agency.

ADVANCES
A N I M A L P H Y S I O LO G Y
Flock
lished in May in Nature
Ecology & Evolution.
“Migratory birds, because of the life-
styles they have, have to deal with two
Immunity separate sets of pathogens,” O’Connor
says. “I was expecting them to have the
Birds’ ability to fight germs highest gene diversity of all the groups, so
depends on migration patterns I was really surprised to find it was really
similar to [that of] the European birds.”
As autumn slides into winter e very year, Young birds are most susceptible to
many birds in Europe and Asia pack up and pathogens just after hatching, and the
fly south to bask in the tropical African stress of reproduction makes their parents
sunshine. When spring rolls around, they Meadow pipit more likely to get sick then, too. For both
return to the temperate Palearctic zone to reasons, O’Connor suspects that evolution
mate and raise their offspring. Researchers trapped wild birds from a representative may have pushed migratory species to fa-
wanted to know why these long-distance subset of 32 species, taking blood samples vor genes associated with resistance to
fliers do not get travelers’ flu. for genetic analysis. The researchers were pathogens common in the north, where
“When we go abroad on holiday, we looking for genes that encode a class of im they are born, at the expense of those that
need all sorts of vaccinations,” says Emily mune system proteins called MHC-I, which protect against tropical germs.
O’Connor, an ecologist at Lund University are involved in recognizing pathogens. The Alternatively, migratory species may
in Sweden. “But birds don’t have the option greater the number of such genes, the more have invested in other forms of immunity
of pharmaceutical protection. It puzzled us: kinds of invaders an animal’s immune sys- that are not pathogen-specific, says Univer-
How is it they can cope so well with some- tem can detect, O’Connor says. sity of Exeter evolutionary biologist Camille
thing so difficult for us to cope with?” By this measure, sedentary African birds Bonneaud, who was not involved in the
To find out, O’Connor and her col- had the most robust immune systems. Be- study. “We now need to further explore
ABI WARNER G etty Images

leagues classified more than 1,300 songbird cause most Palearctic birds first evolved in whether migratory species invest less in
species as migratory, sedentary African or the tropics and later spread northward, the fighting pathogens,” Bonneaud says, and
sedentary Palearctic—an example of the researchers suspect these species developed “more in other types of immune processes.”
last is the meadow pipit (shown). They then less MHC-I diversity. The results were pub- —Jason G. Goldman
B I O LO G Y Díez and his team Developing mouse fetus
Body Balance
created a model in
mice. Borrowing a
technique previously
How different limbs grow at the developed for modi-
same rate during development fying cells in a labo-
ratory dish, the re-
Species with symmetrical b ody plans have searchers injected
been roaming the earth for about 400 mil- into the mouse fe-
lion years. Human beings have long shown tus’s left hind leg
an intense interest in this property in our a type of cell that re-
own species—take the importance of sym- stricted the leg’s
metry in perceptions of beauty or the fa- growth. They found
mous depiction of the outstretched human that the cells sur-
body in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. rounding the suppressed tissue communi- anism makes it possible for the slower one
Now scientists have gone a step further. cated with the placenta, which then sig- to catch up,” Cooper says.
Alberto Roselló-Díez, a developmental bi- naled the rest of the organism’s tissues— The study offers insight into limb devel-
ologist currently at the Australian Regener- including the other hind leg—to slow their opment and so-called catch-up growth.
ative Medicine Institute at Monash Univer- growth until the hindered limb caught up. But the research also raises new questions:
sity, led a study of how a mouse fetus main- Then, uniform growth resumed. The find- for example, once the limb has reached the
tains symmetry as it develops. By making ings were published in June in P LOS Biology. same level of growth, how does the other
STEVE GSCHMEISSNER S cience Source
one of the fetus’s limbs grow more slowly Think of this process as a “three-legged limb know to start growing again? “We
than the other, the team observed how race,” says Kim Cooper, a cell and develop- kind of expect symmetry in our limbs,” says
cells communicate to ultimately correct mental biologist at the University of Cali- Adrian Halme, a cell biologist at the Univer-
the asymmetry. No study had successfully fornia, San Diego, who was not involved in sity of Virginia, who was also not involved
examined this phenomenon until now. the study. “If one person is going faster, it’s with the study. “But how they achieve that
After a year of failed attempts, Roselló- harder to stay in sync. This placenta mech- symmetry is really striking.” —Maya Miller

NEUROSCIENCE
New Version!
Brain Bar Codes
New technique lets scientists map
the organ in unprecedented detail
Neuroscientists know a lot lot about how indi-
vidual neurons operate but remarkably little
about how large numbers of them work to-
gether to produce thoughts, feelings and be-
havior. They need a wiring diagram for the
brain—known as a connectome—to identify
the circuits that underlie the organ’s functions.
Now researchers at Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory and their colleagues have devel-
oped an innovative brain-mapping technique
and used it to trace the connections emanating
from nearly 600 neurons in a mouse brain’s
main visual area in just three weeks. This tech-
nology could someday be used to help under-
stand disorders thought to involve atypical
brain wiring, such as autism or schizophrenia.
The technique works by tagging cells with
genetic “bar codes.” Researchers inject viruses
into mice brains, where the viruses direct cells
to produce random 30-letter RNA sequences
(consisting of the nucleotide “letters” G, A, U
and C). The cells also create a protein that binds
to these RNA bar codes and drags them the
length of each neuron’s output wire, or axon.
The researchers later dissect the mice brains
into target regions and sequence the cells in
each area, enabling them to determine which
tagged neurons are connected to which regions.
The team found that neurons in a mouse’s
primary visual cortex typically send outputs to
multiple other visual areas. It also discovered
that most cells fall into six distinct groups based
on which regions—and how many of them—
they connect to. This finding suggests there are
subtypes of neurons in a mouse’s primary visual
cortex that perform different functions. “Be-
cause we have so many neurons, we can do sta-
tistics and start understanding the patterns we
see,” says Cold Spring Harbor’s Justus Keb-
schull, co-lead author of the study, which was
published in April in N ature.
Nature. Over 75 New Features & Apps in Origin 2018!
The bar-coding method represents a major
For a FREE 60-day
leap for connectome mapping. With just 30 Over 500,000 registered users worldwide in: evaluation, go to
nucleotides, a researcher can generate more ◾ 6,000+ Companies including 20+ Fortune Global 500 OriginLab.Com/demo
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the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthal-
mology Basel in Switzerland, who was not in-
volved in the work: “I predict that as this tech-
nology matures, it will be a key way we analyze 25+ years serving the scientific & engineering community
connectivity.”
brain connectivity.” —SSimon
— imon Makin
Makin
Untitled-194 1 ScientificAmerican.com 17
18/07/2018 22:26

ADVANCES
Representative Bill Foster
of Illinois, a former physicist. Does partisan politics limit your
ability to raise scientific issues?
In a typical hearing of the House Commit-
tee on Science, Space, and Technology or
Financial Services Committee—both of
which I am on—you will get three Republi-
can witnesses and a single Democrat.
These committee policies are largely at the
discretion of the chairman. When you look
at simple reforms that would make [Con-
gress] work in a more bipartisan, fact-
based way, just having an equal number
of witnesses from both sides would be
a real step forward. I think it’s incumbent
on us, if the Democrats do take over again,
that we go out of our way to make sure the
rules are not so winner-takes-all.
Politics is very different from science—
in science, if you stand up and say some-
thing that you know is not true, it is a career-
ending move. It used to be that way in poli-
tics. It has taken me a while to adjust to
SCIENCE POLIC Y politics where, for many who practice it,
A Conversation with the

the question is not “Is it true?” but “What
can I convince the voting public is true?”
Only Physicist in Congress

That psychology has bled into politics more
than it should.
Representative Bill Foster weighs in on the most What is the most important science-
important science issues facing the country related issue now facing Congress?
Aside from evidence-based political de-
Before being elected t o Congress in Ehlers of Michigan—a very moderate bate, I think it is understanding that tech-
2008, Bill Foster, a Democrat, worked Republican and a thoughtful guy. We still nology is changing our society, our country
for more than 20 years as a physicist at have a Ph.D. in mathematics, Representa- and our world at an unprecedented rate.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory tive Jerry McNerney of California (a Dem- It has already upended labor markets. We
in Batavia, Ill. Now, as one of a handful ocrat). But in terms of physics, chemistry, should have a dedicated tech committee.
of members of Congress with a Ph.D. in et cetera, I’m all that’s left. I think there are six or seven House com-
science, he says there is an urgent need mittees that claim they are doing informa-
for more scientists in politics. At least eight Does this background affect your tion technology. We should consolidate
candidates with science backgrounds— role as a politician? tech and get a core competence in that.
though not necessarily doctorates—will Almost every issue that comes up has a
be on the ballot for seats in the House or technological edge to it. For example, with What are some of your specific
Senate in November. Foster sat down with the Iran nuclear deal, I found that mem- technology concerns?
Scientific American to discuss science’s bers of Congress—both Democrats and If the U.S. started issuing digital cash [mean-
role on Capitol Hill amid the current divi- Republicans—would just come to me, ing virtual currency that would pass be-
sive political climate. An edited excerpt of asking me to serve as an interpreter on tween individuals with no transaction fee],
the conversation follows. the purely technical aspects of it. There’s immediately people would use that instead
— Dina Fine Maron only one of me, and there are 434 other of credit cards. That would affect a huge
members of the House, so I simply couldn’t source of revenue for banks large and small.
How does it feel to be one of the only provide the diffusion of technical knowl- Other countries are already moving in that
scientists in Congress? edge that is missing here. I spent a long direction. And if we just say, “No, we’re go-
Lonely. I was actually the third Ph.D. physi- time in classified briefings with the experts ing to stick with our way of doing things”—
TOM WILLIAMS Getty Images
cist when I came to Congress. We had then at the weapons labs and asked all the and the European Union starts issuing digi-
Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey (a “What if” questions and “Would we be tal euros, for example—you would find that
Democrat), who is now running the Amer- able to detect something under the agree- the whole world will just walk away from
ican Association for the Advancement of ment?” Then I had to translate all that the U.S. dollar. I don’t think that’s a recipe
Science, and the late Representative Vern technical information. for making American finance great again.

A S T R O B I O LO G Y
Missing E.T.
Ancient Earth’s atmosphere
raises questions in the search
Enjoy by the glass.
for extraterrestrial life Zzysh® keeps wine fresh for several
weeks after the bottle is open.
Take a deep breath. About bout 20
A 20 percent
percent of
the air that just moved through your mouth
or nostrils is oxygen—the gas much of life on
Earth needs to survive. If you had taken that
breath about 1.87 billion
1.87 billion years ago, however,
you would have croaked.
Until recently, little was known about oxy-
gen’s abundance in the atmosphere back then,
when microbes were the only life on the plan-
et. Now geologists doing fieldwork in north-
ern Canada have confirmed for the first time
that oxygen was extremely scarce.
The fact that life flourished amid such low
oxygen levels presents a problem for scientists
hunting for extraterrestrial life. The presence THE WORLD’S LEADING
of the
of the gas in the atmosphere of a planet is con-
sidered a telltale sign that it could harbor life, WINE PRESERVER
explains Noah Planavsky, a biogeochemist at vinturi.com
© 2018 Vinturi
Yale University and a co-author of the new
study, published in July in the P roceedings of the
Proceedings
National Academy of Sciences USA. B But
ut if envi-
ronments with extremely low oxygen concen-
trations can still support life, space telescopes
Untitled-27 1
IN REASON WE TRUST 24/08/2018 20:08
“
designed to detect an abundance of the gas
may never find such life. “Even [if such planets
are] teeming with complex life, they may ap- Religion has
pear—from a remote detectability point of
view—as dead planets,” Planavsky says.
historically
Planavsky and his team tested rocks for been the greatest
”
concentrations of the element cerium, which bludgeon crushing
serves as a proxy for ancient oxygen levels.
Oxy
Oxyg en binds to cerium in seawater and re-
gen women’s freedom.
Photo by Michelle Frankfurter
moves it, leaving less cerium behind to be

deposited in sedimentary rock. The measured — Robin Morgan
cerium levels correspond to oxygen concentra- Author - Sisterhood Is Powerful, The
tions of about 0.1 percent
0.1 percent of present atmo- Burning Time, Fighting Words: A Toolkit
spheric levels, the team reported. for Combating the Religious Right.
Such hard data, Planavsky says, should
help inform the construction of the next gener-
ation of telescopes designed to hunt for life on
Join the nation’s largest association of freethinkers,
other worlds. Those currently in the works— working to keep religion out of government.
such as nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope For a free sample of FFRF’s newspaper, Freethought Today:
(JWST)—cannot detect oxygen at such low
concentrations, says Edward Schwieterman, Call 1-800-335-4021
an astrobiologist at the University of California, FFRF is a 501(c)(3) educational charity. Deductible for income tax purposes.
Riverside, who was not involved in the work.
Future space telescope missions may be bet-
ter able to detect low oxygen concentrations.
ffrf.org/reason-must-prevail
1-800-335-4021 | ffrf.org/pence
For now, researchers scanning the night sky for
E.T. should not hold their breath. —LLucas
breath. — ucas Joel
Joel
F R E E D O M F R O M R E L I G I O N F O U N DAT I O N
Untitled-222 1 23/08/2018 16:23

ScientificAmerican.com 19

ADVANCES
Winner of the
PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary SPORTS MEDICINE
Science Writing Award
Heading Off
generally have less muscle mass than men
to stabilize the neck and skull. Alternative
Injury
ly, a dip in progesterone, a hormone that
protects against swelling in the brain,
could heighten women’s vulnerability to
Female soccer players are brain injury during certain phases of their
more vulnerable to brain menstrual cycle.
damage than males are Thomas Kaminski, a sports physiolo
gist at the University of Delaware, who
Repeatedly heading a soccer ball exacts was not involved in the work, calls it
a toll on an athlete’s brain. But this cost— “truly groundbreaking.” The research is
measured by the volume of brain cells unique in highlighting the cumulative
damaged—is five times greater for wom effect of repetitive knocks on the skull, as
en than for men, new research suggests. opposed to major traumatic injuries, he
The study provides a biological expla says. “Very few of these subjects had a
nation for why women report more severe history of concussion.”
symptoms and longer recovery times Researchers are now eager to deter
than men following brain injuries in sports. mine if these white matter changes carry
Previously some researchers had dis long-term cognitive consequences. Until
missed female players’ complaints be be more is known, Kaminski advocates a pro
cause there was little physiological evi active approach to limiting the damage
dence for the disparity, says Michael Lipton, caused by headers. In August he met with
a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein U.S. Soccer Federation officials to craft
science-based guidelines for practicing the
“Warning: She spares no the paper.
the paper.
co-author of
College of Medicine and a coauthor sciencebased
move in youth leagues.
detail!” Lipton’s team used magnetic resonance Carla Garcia, a participant in Lipton’s
study, says that after 47 years of playing
imaging to peer into the skulls of 98
98 adult
adult
—Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake
amateur soccer players—half of them soccer, she has no plans to quit using her
female and half male—who headed the ball head. But she notes, “If there’s any way
“Atmospheric . . . with varying frequency during the prior we can make the sport safer for children,
The story it tells is one of year. For women, eight of the brain’s signal- important.”
that’s important.” Daniel Ackerman
—Daniel
—
carrying white matter
abiding fascination.” regions showed struc
—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times tural deterioration,
compared with just
“A formidable achievement— three such regions
in men (damage
a rousing tale told with brio, increased with the
featuring a real-life hero number of reported
headers). Furthermore,
worthy of the ages and jolts female athletes in the
of Victorian horror to rival the study suffered damage
to an average of about
most lurid moments of 2,100 cubic millimeters
Wilkie Collins.” of brain tissue, com
pared with an average
—John J. Ross,
The Wall Street Journal of just 400 cubic
millimeters in the
male athletes.
Lipton does not yet
know the cause of
these sex differences,
but he notes two pos
Images
G etty Images
sibilities. Women may

books.scientificamerican.com
ISAKSON Getty
books.scientificamerican.com suffer stronger whip

ERIK ISAKSON
Scientific American is a registered

ScientificofAmerican
trademark Springer isNature
a registered
America,trademark
Inc. of Nature America, Inc. lash from a cranial
blow because they
ERIK

20

Captive cheetahs
Captive cheetahs can
can be
be picky
picky about
about mates.
mates.
C O N S E R VAT I O N
do not always result in a mating success.
Tinder for In the wild, female cheetahs wander
far and wide, apparently staking out poten-
Cheetahs tial mates by sniffing the scent markings
males leave around their territories. So the
The scent of urine could help researchers wanted to test the idea of
captive big cats find partners using urine to introduce possible partners
to one another in captivity. Mossotti and
Zoos looking to breed cheetahs iin n cap- her team drove around the U.S. collecting Gentlemen, it’s time
Untitled-126 1
to
30/07/2018 23:50
tivity face a serious matchmaking problem.

But researchers may have found an uncon-
bottles of cheetah pee at various zoos.
The researchers then exposed 12 female
upgrade your wallet.
ventional solution: letting feline bachelor- cheetahs to samples from 17 male “urine
ettes choose a mate based on the scent donors” of varying genetic relatedness
of his
of his pee. and assessed the big cats’ responses to
New research shows that female chee- the specimens. They found that females
tahs can detect the genetic relatedness of always spent more time in the vicinity
a potential
a potential mate from the smell of his urine of the pee from felines less closely related
alone—and prefer that of more distantly to them.
related males. The finding could improve Paul Funston, a
Funston, a senior program director
captive-breeding programs and help con- at the global wild cat conservation organi-
serve the speedy cats. “There’s so much zation Panthera,
zation Panthera, who was not involved
information that passes through urine. It in the research, says it is useful and has
makes sense that it’s a conduit for [the a good experimental design—but he ques-
cheetahs] to be able to make a choice on tions the utility of zoo breeding programs
what would be a good mate,” says Regina for these animals. “There’s not a lot of evi-
Mossotti, director of animal care and con- dence that captive cheetahs can be suc-
servation at the Endangered Wolf Center cessfully rewilded,” he says, but he adds
in Eureka,
in Eureka, Mo., and lead author of the that there may be a better argument for
cheetah study, which was published in in the captive breeding of some particularly
the July/August issue of Z oo Biology.
Zoo endangered subspecies.
Mossotti says zoos hoping to breed The next phase in the research would
cheetahs generally attempt to arrange be to see if this pee test translates to great-
G etty Images
Rogue Industries
liaisons with animals at other facilities in er mating success. Although doing so
SANDY HUFFAKER Getty
an effort
an effort to avoid inbreeding—which can may take some work, Mossotti says the
re
result in less
in less healthy offspring. Zoos use team’s research is already changing the
a matchmaking
a matchmaking system based primarily way zoos think about managing their
588 Saco Road | Standish, Maine
800.786.1768 | rogue-industries.com
on genetic
on genetic similarity, but their calculations captive ppopulations.
opulations. ——JJoshua
oshua Rapp Learn
Rapp Learn
Untitled-225 1 23/08/2018 16:47

ScientificAmerican.com 21

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THE SCIENCE Claudia Wallis is an award-winning science journalist whose
OF HEALTH work has appeared in the New York Times, Time, Fortune a nd the
New Republic. She was science editor at Time a nd managing editor
of Scientific American Mind.
Latin is off opioids and handles her pain with meditation, exercise,
psychological counseling and nonopioid nerve pain drugs.
Alas, few of the 10 million or so Americans taking opioids
long term for chronic pain have access to such a stellar program.
Around the country, state and federal authorities and insurance
companies are cracking down on opioid prescriptions in the
wake of a 345 percent spike in opioid-related deaths between
2001 and 2016. In some states, legislatures have restricted what
doctors can readily prescribe. As a result, many patients are be
ing forced to reduce their drug use without the support to do it
safely and effectively. “If somebody is on opioids at high doses
for many years, it takes time and work to help them come down
from those doses. How any politician thinks they know the
answer to this in a one-size-fits-all solution beats me,” says opi-
oid researcher Erin Krebs of the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs
Health Care System.
In fact, there’s very little research on how best to taper opioids
for chronic pain patients. For example, although studies show that
drugs such as buprenorphine can help addicts recover, little is
known about their value in the context of chronic pain. Last year
Krebs and her colleagues published a review paper that examined
67 studies on tapering opioids for pain patients and found only
three to be of high quality and 13 to be “fair.” The good news,
Coming Down Krebs says, “was that as you reduce dosages, most people do bet-
ter” in terms of pain and quality of life. The challenging news is
from Opioids
that the better studies emphasized multidisciplinary care and very
close patient follow-up—labor-intensive methods that are not
widely available in the U.S. and rarely covered by insurance.
One thing seems clear from research and clinical experience:
The search is on for safe ways to taper reckless restriction is not the right response to reckless prescrib-
ing. “Forced tapers can destabilize patients,” says Stefan Kertesz,
the drugs for people in chronic pain an addiction expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham
By Claudia Wallis School of Medicine. Worried clinicians such as Kertesz report
growing anecdotal evidence of patient distress and even suicide.
Shelley Latin’s odyssey w ith chronic pain and opioids began The brightest rays of light in this dark picture come from a
innocuously enough in June 2011, when she awoke with a stom- burst of new research. In May a team led by Stanford pain psy-
achache. It took a year for the cause to be correctly diagnosed— chologist Beth Darnall published the results of a pilot study with
a bacterial infection in her gut—and arrested with antibiotics, 68 chronic pain patients. In four months, the 51 participants who
but by then the pain had taken on a life of its own, no longer completed the study cut their opioid dosages nearly in half with-
linked to the infection. “I couldn’t drive, or walk, or sit. I could out increased pain. There were no fancy clinics, just an attentive
only lie in bed on my back,” she recalls. community doctor and a self-help guide written by Darnall. A key
Over the next five years Latin, a legal aid lawyer in Oregon, element was very slow dose reduction during the first month. “It
found herself taking ever higher, doctor-prescribed doses of allows patients to relax into the process and gain a sense of trust
hydrocodone to manage her misery. It was disastrous. She could with their doctor and with themselves that they can do this,” Dar-
not focus, she felt crushing fatigue and, inexplicably, she says, “I nall says. She is now recruiting 1,300 patients for a multicenter
cried constantly.” Worse, her entire abdomen became so hyper- study of this method that will also assess the value of adding
sensitive that just wearing clothes was painful. This was likely behavioral support such as cognitive-behavioral therapy.
caused in part by a paradoxical side effect of the painkillers Other big studies are also getting under way. One headed by
known as opioid-induced hyperalgesia. Krebs will compare a pharmacist-led program to modify drug
By last year, Latin had had enough. She enrolled for a week at regimens with one in which a medical and mental health team
Stanford University’s Comprehensive Interdisciplinary Pain Pro- helps patients decrease opioid use in the context of setting per-
gram, where she worked with doctors to taper her meds, occupa- sonal goals. Given the high level of fear that most patients feel
tional and physical therapists to get moving again, and psycholo- about making changes, it’s a safe bet that any successful program
gists to work on her pain-related anxiety and catastrophizing. Now will be long on patience and compassion.
24 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Celia Krampien

David Pogueis the anchor columnist for Yahoo
TECHNOFILES
Tech and host of several NOVA miniseries on PBS.
5G Is Just around For example, apps will no longer degrade your video or post-
pone downloading when you’re out of Wi-Fi range. In fact, you’ll
the Corner
probably p refer to do your downloads when you’re on cellular be-
cause 5G will be much faster than whatever service you’ve got at
home or work. Furthermore, our phones can become radically
more powerful. Today the processors in our devices are limited by
It will make 4G phones heat and battery capacity. But imagine, Hanna says, if your phone
seem positively quaint is tied, by a 5G connection, to a much beefier computer online.
“It’s happening remotely, but because it’s such a high-speed con-
By David Pogue
nection, it will feel as though the additional processor is inside
You’re probably used to the periodic upgrades in our cell- your device, in your hand,” he says.
phone networks. There was 2G, which came along in 1991, re- Another big change: 5G is not just for phones. It reflects the new
placed with 3G in 2001, followed by 4G in 2009. Now we’re hear- world of Internet-connected gadgets, industrial machines, farming
ing about the coming of 5G. equipment and even cars. For example, the 5G protocol allows
But 5G is a much bigger leap than what’s come before. Qual- some transmissions to cut in front of others. In, say, 2023 when two
comm’s Web site, in fact, calls it “as transformative as the auto- self-driving cars need to communicate to avoid a collision, their
mobile and electricity.” (One of the world’s leading makers of data will get priority over your stream of S tar Wars: Episode XXV.
phone-networking chips, Qualcomm was a key player in the de- Not everyone is thrilled by the 5G development. The new stan-
velopment of the 5G standard—and stands to profit handsomely dard gets its speed partly by using existing transmission frequen-
from its success.) cies more efficiently and partly by harnessing the millimeter-
Of course, 5G is much faster than 4G—in the real world, a 5G wave spectrum. That’s a big, juicy swath of radio frequencies that
phone in a 5G city will enjoy Internet speeds between nine and 20 are currently underused—because millimeter wave is “really hard
times as fast. The latency of 5G (the delay b efore t hose fast data to use—very finicky, very tricky,” Hanna says.
begin pouring in) is one tenth as long. These frequencies are much higher than anything we’ve used
The arrival of 5G also means enormous leaps forward in capac- for cellular. (Your Wi-Fi network uses the 2.4- or 5.8-gigahertz
ity—so much that every cell-phone plan will offer cheap, truly un- bands. Millimeter wave is 24 gigahertz and up.) Which means they
limited Internet access. “The consequences of that are immense,” can offer unbelievable speed—but at the expense of range. Milli-
says Sherif Hanna, Qualcomm’s director of 5G marketing. meter-wave cellular towers have to be about 500 feet apart. Cell
carriers not only will have to upgrade all their cell transceivers
(called small cells) but will install a lot more of them as well.
That’s why the millimeter-wave flavor of 5G—the superfast
coverage—will be available only in densely populated cities such
as New York and San Francisco. In suburban and rural areas, 5G
will bring a speedup of “only” nine times faster.
The need to install more small cells means more rectangular
boxes on lampposts, more wires on utility poles and more indus-
trial-looking ugliness in places where local residents don’t always
want it. Lawsuits, fines and battles between towns and cell carri-
ers are already under way.
But 5G is a train that can’t be stopped. The big cell carriers will
be turning on 5G in a handful of cities by the end of 2018, and the
first 5G-enabled smartphones are expected to go on sale in early
2019. “I don’t think most people realize [that] initially 5G was tar-
geted for 2020, and now we’re talking about late 2018,” Hanna
says. “We’re working around the clock. Weekends, nights—it’s re-
ally pretty brutal right now, to be honest.”
Here’s to all those engineers and their millimeter waves.
Someday we’ll tell our grandkids about the days when YouTube
videos paused annoyingly, people paid for data by the gigabyte
and the only way cars could communicate was by honking.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE

READ MORE ABOUT THE IMPLICATIONS OF 5G:
scientificamerican.com/oct2018/pogue
Illustration by Jay Bendt October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 25


The
M AT H E M AT I C S
Un(solv)able
Problem
After a years-long intellectual journey, three
mathematicians have discovered that a problem
of central importance in physics is impossible
to solve—and that means other big questions
may be undecidable, too
By Toby S. Cubitt, David Pérez-García
and Michael Wolf
Illustration
October by Mark Ross Studios
2018, ScientificAmerican.com 29

Toby S. Cubitt is a Royal Society University Research Fellow
and reader in quantum information at University College
London. After a Ph.D. in physics, postdoctoral positions in
mathematics and a faculty position in computer science, he
now works on quantum problems that straddle these areas.
David Pérez-García is a professor of mathematics at

Complutense University of Madrid and a faculty member at
the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Madrid. He works
T
on mathematical problems in quantum physics.
Michael Wolf is a professor of mathematical physics in the

department of mathematics at the Technical University
of Munich. His research focuses on the mathematical and
conceptual foundations of quantum theory.
he three of us were sitting together in a café in Seefeld, a small town deep in the
Austrian Alps. It was the summer of 2012, and we were stuck. Not stuck in the café—the
sun was shining, the snow on the Alps was glistening, and the beautiful surroundings
were sorely tempting us to abandon the mathematical problem we were stuck on and
head outdoors. We were trying to explore the connections between 20th-century math-
ematical results by Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing and quantum physics. That, at least,
was the dream. A dream that had begun back in 2010, during a semester-long program
on quantum information at the Mittag-Leffler Institute near Stockholm.
Some of the questions we were looking into had been ex- about. The “spectral gap” problem Michael was proposing that
plored before by others, but to us this line of research was en- we tackle (which we will explain later) was one of central im-
tirely new, so we were starting with something simple. Just portance to physics. We did not know at the time whether this
then, we were trying to prove a small and not very significant problem was or was not decidable (although we had a hunch it
result to get a feel for things. For months now, we had a proof was not) or whether we would be able to prove it either way. But
(of sorts) of this result. But to make the proof work, we had to if we could, the results would be of real relevance to physics, not
set up the problem in an artificial and unsatisfying way. It felt to mention a substantial mathematical achievement. Michael’s
like changing the question to suit the answer, and we were not ambitious suggestion, tossed off almost as a jest, launched us
very happy with it. Picking the problem up again during the on a grand adventure. Three years and 146 pages of mathemat-
break after the first session of talks at the workshop in Seefeld ics later, our proof of the undecidability of the spectral gap was
that had brought us together in 2012, we still could not see any published in N ature.
way around our problems. Half-jokingly, one of us (Michael To understand what this means, we need to go back to the
Wolf ) asked, “Why don’t we prove the undecidability of some- beginning of the 20th century and trace some of the threads
thing people really care about, like the spectral gap?” that gave rise to modern physics, mathematics and computer
At the time, we were interested in whether certain problems science. These disparate ideas all lead back to German mathe-
in physics are “decidable” or “undecidable”—that is, can they matician David Hilbert, often regarded as the greatest figure of
ever be solved? We had gotten stuck trying to probe the decid- the past 100 years in the field. (Of course, no one outside of
ability of a much more minor question, one few people care mathematics has heard of him. The discipline is not a good
IN BRIEF
Kurt Gödel f amously discovered in the 1930s that physics—the so-called spectral gap question—falls midnight calculating and much theorizing over cof-
some statements are impossible to prove true or into this category. The spectral gap refers to the fee, the mathematicians produced a 146-page proof
false—they will always be “undecidable.” energy difference between the lowest energy state that the spectral gap problem is, in fact, undecid-
Mathematicians recently s et out to discover a material can occupy and the next state up. able. The result raises the possibility that other
whether a certain fundamental problem in quantum After three years o f blackboard brainstorming, important questions may likewise be unanswerable.

route to fame and celebrity, although it has its
own rewards.)
The Spectral
HE MATHEMATICS OF
T
QUANTUM MECHANICS
Nucleus
Energy
Gap
Electron
Hilbert ’s influence o n mathematics was The authors’ mathematical proof took on
immense. Early on, he developed a branch the question of the “spectral gap”—the
of mathematics called functional analysis— jump in energy between the ground state
in particular, an area known as spectral theo- Ground state and first excited state of a material. When
ry, which would end up being key to the ques- we think of energy states, we tend to think
tion within our proof. Hilbert was interested in Excited state of electrons in atoms, which can jump up and
this area for purely abstract reasons. But as so of- down between energy levels. Whereas in atoms
ten happens, his mathematics turned out to be ex- there is always a gap between such levels, in larger
actly what was necessary to understand a question materials made of many atoms, there is sometimes no distance between
that was perplexing physicists at the time. the ground state and the first excited state: even the smallest possible
If you heat a substance up, it begins to glow as amount of energy will be enough to push the material up an energy level.
the atoms in it emit light (hence the phrase “red Such materials are called “gapless.” The authors proved that it will never
hot”). The yellow-orange light from sodium street be possible to determine whether all materials are gapped or gapless.
lamps is a good example: sodium atoms predomi-
nantly emit light at a wavelength of 590 nanome-
ters, in the yellow part of the visible spectrum. At-
oms absorb or release light when electrons within Gapped System
them “jump” between energy levels, and the precise There are discrete gaps between each energy level, and the material must reach
a certain energy to make the leap to the next level.
frequency of that light depends on the energy gap
between the levels. The frequencies of light emitted
by heated materials thus give us a “map” of the gaps Excited state (level 4)
High
System’s Energy Levels
between the atom’s different energy levels. Explain- Excited state (level 3)
ing these atomic emissions was one of the problems Excited state (level 2)
physicists were wrestling with in the first half of the
Excited state (level 1)
20th century. The question led directly to the devel-
opment of quantum mechanics, and the mathemat- Gaps
Low
ics of Hilbert’s spectral theory played a prime role. Ground state

One of these gaps between quantum energy lev-
els is especially important. The lowest possible en-
ergy level of a material is called its ground state. Gapless System
This is the level it will sit in when it has no heat. To No expanse separates the ground state and first excited state, and the material
may become excited with just the tiniest input of energy.
get a material into its ground state, scientists must
cool it down to extremely low temperatures in a
laboratory. Then, if the material is to do anything Any energy level
High
System’s Energy Levels
other than sit in its ground state, something must above the ground
state is possible
excite it to a higher energy. The easiest way is for it
to absorb the smallest amount of energy it can, just
enough to take it to the next energy level above the
ground state—the first excited state. The energy
Low
gap between the ground state and this first excited Ground state
state is so critical that it is often just called the
spectral gap.
In some materials, there is a large gap between
the ground state and the first excited state. In other materials, happen even when the temperature is kept extremely low. For
the energy levels extend all the way down to the ground state example, changing the magnetic field around a material or the
without any gaps at all. Whether a material is “gapped” or pressure it is subjected to can cause an insulator to become a
“gapless” has profound consequences for its behavior at low superconductor or cause a solid to become a superfluid.
temperatures. It plays a particularly significant role in quan- How can a material go through a phase transition at a tem-
tum phase transitions. perature of absolute zero (−273.15 degrees Celsius), at which
A phase transition happens when a material undergoes a there is no heat at all to provide energy? It comes down to the
sudden and dramatic change in its properties. We are all very spectral gap. When the spectral gap disappears—when a mate-
familiar with some phase transitions—such as water transform- rial is gapless—the energy needed to reach an excited state be-
ing from its solid form of ice into its liquid form when heated comes zero. The tiniest amount of energy will be enough to
up. But there are more exotic quantum phase transitions that push the material through a phase transition. In fact, thanks to
Illustration by Jen Christiansen October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 31

Turing Machine
Before modern computers e xisted,
mathematician Alan Turing imag-
ined a hypothetical device called a
Turing machine that defined what it
meant to “compute.” The machine
reads and performs operations on
the symbols written on an infinitely
long strip of tape that runs through Infinitely long tape
it. The concept turned out to be
central to the authors’ proof of Read, erase and write unit
the undecidability of the spectral
gap problem. Bidirectional tape movers turn
clockwise or counterclockwise,
according to set rules
Turing Machine Basics
The symbols written on the tape initially are the
machine’s input, and those left on the tape at
the end are the answers. The tape can advance
or rewind, and the “head” can read, write or
erase the tape’s symbols to produce the output.
Halting Problem
Turing devised a simple question known as
the halting problem: Will a Turing machine running
on a given input ever stop? Furthermore, Turing proved
that no mathematical procedure could ever answer this
question. The authors built on Turing’s work to show that the
spectral gap is similar to the halting problem and is likewise undecidable.
the weird quantum effects that dominate physics at these very trying to solve them, though. Our proof shows that the general
low temperatures, the material can temporarily “borrow” this problem is even trickier than we thought. The reason comes
energy from nowhere, go through a phase transition and “give” down to a question called the E
ntscheidungsproblem.
the energy back. Therefore, to understand quantum phase tran-
sitions and quantum phases, we need to determine when mate- U NANSWERABLE QUESTIONS
rials are gapped and when they are gapless. By the 1920s H ilbert had become concerned with putting the
Because this spectral gap problem is so fundamental to un- foundations of mathematics on a firm, rigorous footing—an en-
derstanding quantum phases of matter, it crops up all over the deavor that became known as Hilbert’s program. He believed
place in theoretical physics. Many famous and long-standing that whatever mathematical conjecture one might make, it will
open problems in condensed matter physics boil down to solv- in principle be possible to prove either that it is true or that it is
ing this problem for a specific material. A closely related ques- false. (It had better not be possible to prove that it is both, or
tion even crops up in particle physics: there is very good evi- something has gone very wrong with mathematics!) This idea
dence that the fundamental equations describing quarks and might seem obvious, but mathematics is about establishing con-
their interactions have a “mass gap.” Experimental data from cepts with absolute certainty. Hilbert wanted a rigorous proof.
particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider near Gene- In 1928 he formulated the Entscheidungsproblem. A lthough
va support this notion, as do massive number-crunching results it sounds like the German sound for a sneeze, in English it
from supercomputers. But proving the idea rigorously from the translates to “the decision problem.” It asks whether there is a
theory seems to be extremely difficult. So difficult, in fact, that procedure, or “algorithm,” that can decide whether mathemati-
this problem, called the Yang-Mills mass gap problem, has been cal statements are true or false.
named one of seven Millennium Prize problems by the Clay For example, the statement “Multiplying any whole number
Mathematics Institute, and anyone who solves it is entitled to a by 2 gives an even number” can easily be proved true, using ba-
$1-million prize. All these problems are particular cases of the sic logic and arithmetic. Other statements are less clear. What
general spectral gap question. We have bad news for anyone about the following example? “If you take any whole number,
32 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Ben Gilliland

and repeatedly multiply it by 3, and add 1 if it’s odd or divide it to the E ntscheidungsproblem. B y giving a precise, mathemati-
by 2 if it’s even, you always eventually reach the number 1.” cally rigorous formulation of what it meant to make a computa-
(Have a think about it.) tion, Turing founded the modern field of computer science.
Unfortunately for Hilbert, his hopes were to be dashed. In Having constructed his imaginary mathematical model of a
1931 Gödel published some remarkable results now known as computer, Turing then went on to prove that there is a simple
his incompleteness theorems. Gödel showed that there are per- question about Turing machines that no mathematical proce-
fectly reasonable mathematical statements about whole num- dure can ever decide: Will a Turing machine running on a given
bers that can be neither proved nor disproved. In a sense, these input ever halt? This question is known as the halting problem.
statements are beyond the reach of logic and arithmetic. And At the time, this result was shocking. Mathematicians have be-
he proved this assertion. If that is hard to wrap your head come accustomed to the fact that any conjecture we are work-
around, you are in good company. Gödel’s incompleteness theo- ing on could be provable, disprovable or undecidable.
rems shook the foundations of mathematics to the core.
Here is a flavor of Gödel’s idea: If someone tells you, “This W HERE WE COME IN
sentence is a lie,” is that person telling the truth or lying? If he In our result, we had to tie all these disparate threads back to-
or she is telling the truth, then the statement must indeed be a gether. We wanted to unite the quantum mechanics of the spec-
lie. But if he or she is lying, then it is true. This quandary is tral gap, the computer science of undecidability and Hilbert’s
known as the liar paradox. Even though it appears to be a per- spectral theory to prove that—like the halting problem—the
fectly reasonable English sentence, there is no way to deter- spectral gap problem was one of the undecidable ones that
mine whether it is true or false. What Gödel managed to do was Gödel and Turing taught us about.
to construct a rigorous mathematical version of the liar paradox Chatting in that café in Seefeld in 2012, we had an idea for
using only basic arithmetic. how we might be able to prove a weaker mathematical result
The next major player in the story of the Entscheidungsprob- related to the spectral gap. We tossed this idea around, not even
lem is Alan Turing, the English computer scientist. Turing is scribbling on the back of a napkin, and it seemed like it might
most famous among the general public for his role in breaking work. Then the next session of talks started. And there we left it.
the German Enigma code during World War II. But among sci- A few months later one of us (Toby Cubitt) visited Michael
entists, he is best known for his 1937 paper “On Computable in Munich, and we did what we had not done in Seefeld: jotted
Numbers, with an Application to the E ntscheidungsproblem.” some equations down on a scrap of paper and convinced our-
Strongly influenced by Gödel’s result, the young Turing had giv- selves the idea worked. In the following weeks, we completed
en a negative answer to Hilbert’s E ntscheidungsproblem by the argument and wrote it up properly in a private four-page
proving that no general algorithm to decide whether mathe- note. (Nothing in mathematics is truly proved until you write it
matical statements are true or false can exist. (American math- down—or, better still, type it up and show it to a colleague for
ematician Alonzo Church also independently proved this just scrutiny.) Conceptually this was a major advance.
PAGE Cthe undecidabil- PAGE C
before Turing. But Turing’s proof was ultimately more signifi- Before now, the idea ofT •proving T•
cant. Often in mathematics, the proof of a result turns out to be N
ity of the spectral gap was more of a joke than N
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our lap or even in our pocket. But computers as we know them undecidability of the spectral gap problem itself.
did not exist in 1936. In fact, “computer” originally meant a per-
son who carried out calculations with pen and paper. Neverthe- B URNING THE MIDNIGHT COFFEE
less, computing with pen and paper as you did in high school is We attempted to make the next leap by linking the spectral gap
mathematically no different to computing with a modern desktop problem to quantum computing. In 1985 Nobel Prize–winning
computer—just much slower and far more prone to mistakes. physicist Richard Feynman published one of the papers that
Turing came up with an idealized, imaginary computer launched the idea of quantum computers. In that paper, Feyn
called a Turing machine. This very simple imaginary machine man showed how to relate ground states of quantum systems to
does not look like a modern computer, but it can compute ev- computation. Computation is a dynamic process: you supply the
erything that the most powerful modern computer can. In fact, computer with input, and it goes through several steps to com-
any question that can ever be computed (even on quantum pute a result and outputs the answer. But ground states of quan-
computers or computers from the 31st century that have yet to tum systems are completely static: the ground state is just the
be invented) could also be computed on a Turing machine. It configuration a material sits in at zero temperature, doing noth-
would just take the Turing machine much longer. ing at all. So how can it make a computation?
A Turing machine has an infinitely long ribbon of tape and a The answer comes through one of the defining features of
“head” that can read and write one symbol at a time on the tape, quantum mechanics: superposition, which is the ability of ob-
then move one step to the right or left along it. The input to the jects to occupy many states simultaneously, as, for instance, Er-
computation is whatever symbols are originally written on the win Schrödinger’s famous quantum cat can be alive and dead at
tape, and the output is whatever is left written on it when the the same time. Feynman proposed constructing a quantum
Turing machine finally stops running (halts). The invention of state that is in a superposition of the various steps in a compu-
the Turing machine was more important even than the solution tation—initial input, every intermediate step of the computa-

tion and final output—all at once. Alexei Kitaev of the California
Institute of Technology later developed this idea substantially
by constructing an imaginary quantum material whose ground Tiling an Infinite
state looks exactly like this.
If we used Kitaev’s construction to put the entire history of a Bathroom Floor
Turing machine into the material’s ground state in superposi- To connect the spectral gap problem to the halting problem, the
tion, could we transform the halting problem into the spectral authors considered the classic mathematical question of how to tile
gap problem? In other words, could we show that any method an infinitely large floor. Imagine you have a box with a certain selection
for solving the spectral gap problem would also solve the halt- of tiles, and you want to arrange them so that the colors on the sides
ing problem? Because Turing had already shown that the halt- of each tile match those next to them. In some cases, this is possible
ing problem was undecidable, this would prove that the spec- by tiling the floor in either a repeating “periodic” pattern or a fractal-
tral gap problem must also be undecidable. like “aperiodic” pattern.
Encoding the halting problem in a quantum state was not a
new idea. Seth Lloyd, now at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, had proposed this almost two decades earlier to Periodic Tiles
show the undecidability of another quantum question. Daniel One version of the classic problem concerns tiles that come in
Gottesman of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in three varieties containing five different colors. In this particular
case, it is possible to tile the floor with all sides matching up by
Waterloo and Sandy Irani of the University of California, Irvine, creating a rectangle that repeats. On each side of the rectangle,
had used Kitaev’s idea to prove that even single lines of inter- the colors match so that many versions of the same rectangle
acting quantum particles can show very complex behavior. In can be placed next to one another in an infinite pattern.
fact, it was Gottesman and Irani’s version of Kitaev’s construc-
tion that we hoped to make use of. 3 tile options Foundation sequence
But the spectral gap is a different kind of problem, and we
faced some apparently insurmountable mathematical obstacles.
The first had to do with supplying the input into the Turing ma-
chine. Remember that the undecidability of the halting prob-
lem is about whether the Turing machine halts o n a given input.
How could we design our imaginary quantum material in a way
that would let us choose the input to the Turing machine to be
encoded in the ground state?
When working on that earlier problem (the one we were still
stuck on in the café in Seefeld), we had an idea of how to rectify
the issue by putting a “twist” in the interactions between the
particles and using the angle of this rotation to create an input
to the Turing machine. In January 2013 we met at a conference
in Beijing and discussed this plan together. But we quickly real-
ized that what we had to prove came very close to contradicting
known results about quantum Turing machines. We decided we
Foundation sequence
needed a complete and rigorous proof that our idea worked be-
fore we pursued the project further.
At this point, Toby had been part of David Pérez-García’s
group at Complutense University of Madrid for more than two
years. In that same month he moved to the University of Cam-
bridge, but his new apartment there was not yet ready, so his
friend and fellow quantum information theorist Ashley Montan-
aro offered to put him up. For those two months, he set
PAGEwork
to
T • His
producing a rigorous
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the morning, a row of empty coffee mugs next

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to him, about to head to bed, having worked

0 29
00through 4
the night figuring out details and typ-
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Toby sent around the completed proof.
I N REMEMBRANCE OF TILINGS PAST

This 29-page proof showed how to overcome one of the obstacles
to connecting the ground state of a quantum material to compu-
tation with a Turing machine. But there was an even bigger
obstacle to that goal: the resulting quantum material was always
34 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Jen Christiansen

Aperiodic Tiles
In their proof, the authors used a particular set of tiles designed by mathematician Rafael Robinson in 1971. Robinson’s tiles fit together in an ever expanding sequence
that does not quite repeat but instead creates a fractal-like pattern. All rotations of the six tiles shown here are allowed. There are also other ways to fit these pieces together
in a periodic pattern, but by adding more markings to these tiles (not shown), Robinson designed a set of 56 tiles for which no pattern is possible other than the one shown.
6 tile options

gapless. If it is always gapless, the spectral gap problem for this this idea, and it was a big one. As the number of particles increased,
particular material is very easy to solve: the answer is gapless! the additional contribution to the ground state energy got closer
Our first idea from Seefeld, which proved a much weaker re- and closer to zero, leading to a material that was always gapless.
sult than we wanted, nonetheless managed to get around this But by adapting Berger’s tiling construction, we could in-
obstacle. The key was using “tilings.” Imagine you are covering stead encode m any copies of exactly the same Turing machine
a large bathroom floor with tiles. In fact, imagine it is an infi- into the ground state. In fact, we could attach one copy to each
nitely big bathroom. The tiles have a very simple pattern on square in Robinson’s tiling pattern. Because these are identical
them: each of the four sides of the tile is a different color. You copies of the same Turing machine, if one of them halts, they all
have various boxes of tiles, each with a different arrangement of P halt.
AGEThe energy contributions from all these cop-
• PAGE C T • ies addC up. As the number PAG EC
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PAGE C
67
colors. Now imagine there is an Tinfinite supply of tiles in each increas-
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box. You, of course, want to tile the infinite bathroom floor so es, the number of squares in the tiling pattern
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that the colors on adjacent tiles match. Is this possible? 29
gets bigger. Thus, the number of copies of the
The answer depends on which boxes 000 of tiles you have avail- Turing machine increases, and their energy
4
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able. With some sets of colored tiles, you will be able to tile the contribution becomes huge, giving us the pos-
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infinite bathroom floor. With others, you will not. Before you se- sibility of a spectral gap.
lect which boxes of tiles to buy, you would like to know whether
or not they will work. Unfortunately for you, in 1966 mathema- E XAMS AND DEADLINES
tician Robert Berger proved that this problem is undecidable. One significant weakness remained in the result we had proved.
One easy way to tile the infinite bathroom floor would be to We could not say anything about how b ig t he energy gap was
first tile a small rectangle so that colors on opposite sides of it when the material was gapped. This uncertainty left our result
match. You could then cover the entire floor by repeating this open to the criticism that the gap could be so small that it might
rectangular pattern. Because they repeat every few tiles, such as well not exist. We needed to prove that the gap, when it exist-
patterns are called periodic. The reason the tiling problem is un- ed, was actually large. The first solution we found arose by con-
decidable is that nonperiodic tilings also exist: patterns that sidering materials in three dimensions instead of the planar ma-
cover the infinite floor but never repeat. terials we had been thinking about until then.
Back when we were discussing our first small result, we stud- When you cannot stop thinking about a mathematical problem,
ied a 1971 simplification
PAGE C of Berger’s original proof
PAGE C made by Rafa- you make progress in the most PAunexpected places.
T• T• • PAGE C GE
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el Robinson
N of the University of California,
N Berkeley. RobinsonNT David worked on the details
N
C idea in his
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constructed a set of 56 different boxes of tiles that, when used to head while he was supervising an exam. Walk-
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29
tile the floor, produce an interlocking pattern of ever larger ing along the rows of tables in the hall, he was
00 fractal pattern looks periodic, but in fact, it never totally oblivious to the students working fever-
squares.0This 4
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quite repeats itself. We extensively discussed ways of using tiling ishly around him. Once the test was over, he
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results to prove the undecidability of quantum properties. But committed this part of the proof to paper.
back then, we were not even thinking about the spectral gap. We now knew that getting a big spectral gap
The idea lay dormant. was possible. Could we also get it in two dimensions, or were
In April 2013 Toby paid a visit to Charlie Bennett at IBM’s three necessary? Remember the problem of tiling an infinite
Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Among Bennett’s many bathroom floor. What we needed to show was that for the Rob-
achievements before becoming one of the founding fathers of inson tiling, if you got one tile wrong somewhere, but the colors
quantum information theory was his seminal 1970s work on Tur- still matched everywhere else, then the pattern formed by the
ing machines. We wanted to quiz him about some technical details tiles would be disrupted only in a small region centered on that
of our proof to make sure we were not overlooking something. He wrong tile. If we could show this “robustness” of the Robinson
said he had not thought about this stuff for 40 years, and it was tiling, it would imply that there was no way of getting a small
high time a younger generation took over. (He then went on to very spectral gap by breaking the tiling only a tiny bit.
helpfully explain some subtle mathematical details of his 1970s By the late summer of 2013, we felt we had all the ingredients
work, which reassured us that our proof was okay.) for our proof to work. But there were still some big details to be
Bennett has an immense store of scientific knowledge. Be- resolved, such as proving that the tiling robustness could be
cause we had been talking about Turing machines and undecid- merged with all the other proof ingredients to give the complete
ability, he e-mailed copies of a couple of old papers on undecid- result. The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Science in
ability he thought might interest us. One of these was the same Cambridge, England, was hosting a special workshop on quan-
1971 paper by Robinson that we had studied. Now the time was tum information for the whole of the autumn semester of 2013.
right for the ideas sowed in our earlier discussions to spring to All three of us were invited to attend. It was the perfect opportu-
life. Reading Robinson’s paper again, we realized it was exactly nity to work together on finishing the project. But David was not
what we needed to prevent the spectral gap from vanishing. able to stay in Cambridge for long. We were determined to com-
Our initial idea had been to encode one copy of the Turing ma- plete the proof before he left.
chine into the ground state. By carefully designing the interactions The Isaac Newton Institute has blackboards everywhere—
between the particles, we could make the ground state energy a bit even in the bathrooms! We chose one of the blackboards in a cor-
higher if the Turing machine halted. The spectral gap—the energy ridor (the closest to the coffee machine) for our discussions. We
jump to the first excited state—would then depend on whether the spent long hours at the blackboard developing the missing ideas,
Turing machine halted or not. There was just one problem with then divided the task of making these ideas mathematically rig-

146
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orous
67
N among us. This process 74
N always takes far more N actions betweenNTa material’s particles is not always enough
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time and effort than it seems on the blackboard. As to deduce its macroscopic properties.
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the date of David’s departure loomed, we worked You may be asking yourself if this finding has any im-
without interruption all day and most of the night. plications for “real physics.” After all, scientists can al-
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Just a few hours before he left for home, we finally
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had a complete proof. Imagine if we could engineer the quantum material from
In physics and mathematics, researchers make most our mathematical proof and produce a piece of it in the lab.
results public for the first time by posting a draft paper to the Its interactions are so extraordinarily complicated that this task
arXiv.org preprint server before submitting it to a journal for is far, far beyond anything scientists are ever likely to be able to
peer review. Although we were now fairly confident the entire do. But if we could and then took a piece of it and tried to mea-
argument worked and the hardest part was behind us, our proof sure its spectral gap, the material could not simply throw up its
was not ready to be posted. There were many mathematical de- hands and say, “I can’t tell you—it’s undecidable.” The experi-
tails to be filled in. We also wanted to rewrite and tidy up the pa- ment would have to measure something.
per (we hoped to reduce the page count in the process, although The answer to this apparent paradox lies in the fact that,
in this we would completely fail). Most important, although at strictly speaking, the terms “gapped” and “gapless” only make
least one of us had checked every part of the proof, no one had mathematical sense when the piece of material is infinitely large.
gone through it all from beginning to end. Now, the 1023 or so atoms contained in even a very small piece of
In summer 2014 David was on a sabbatical at the Technical material represent a very large number indeed. For normal ma-
University of Munich with Michael. Toby went out to join them. terials, this is close enough to infinity to make no difference. But
The plan was to spend this time checking and completing the for the very strange material constructed in our proof, large is
whole proof, line by line. David and Toby were sharing an of- not equivalent to infinite. Perhaps with 1023 atoms, the material
fice. Each morning David would arrive with a new printout of appears in experiments to be gapless. Just to be sure, you take a
the draft paper, copious notes and questions scribbled in the sample of material twice the size and measure again. Still gap-
margins and on interleaved sheets. The three of us would get less. Then, late one night, your graduate student comes into the
coffee and then pick up where we had left off the day before, lab and adds just one extra atom. The next morning, when you
discussing the next section of the proof at the blackboard. In measure it again, the material has become gapped! Our result
the afternoon, we divided up the work of rewriting the paper proves that the size at which this transition may occur is incom-
and adding the new material and of going through the next putable (in the same Gödel-Turing sense that you are now famil-
section of the proof. Toby was suffering from a slipped disc and iar with). This story is completely hypothetical for now because
could not sit down, so he worked with his laptop propped on we cannot engineer a material this complex. But it shows, backed
top of an upturned garbage bin on top of the desk. David sat by a rigorous mathematical proof, that scientists must take spe-
opposite, the growing pile of printouts and notes taking up cial care when extrapolating experimental results to infer the be-
more and more of his desk. On a couple of occasions, havior of the same material at larger sizes.
we found significant gaps in the proof. These turned 146
And now we come back to the Yang-Mills problem—the
out to be surmountable, but bridging them meant question of whether the equations describing quarks and
adding
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substantial material to
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it. The page count
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their interactions have a mass gap. Computer simulations
N 74 to grow. N N indicate that the answer is yes, but our result suggests
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After six weeks, we had checked, completed and that determining for sure may be another matter. Could
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improved every single line of the proof. It would it be that the computer-simulation evidence for the
take another six months to finish writing every- Yang-Mills mass gap would vanish if we made the simu-
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• EC • EC • lation just a tiny bit larger? Our result cannot say, but it
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paper to arXiv.org. does open the door to the intriguing possibility that the
Yang-Mills problem, and other problems important to physi-
W HAT IT ALL MEANS cists, may be undecidable.
Ultimately w hat do these 146 pages of complicated mathemat- And what of that original small and not very significant re-
ics tell us? sult we were trying to prove all those years ago in a café in the
First, and most important, they give a rigorous mathematical Austrian Alps? Actually, we are still working on it.
proof that one of the basic questions of quantum physics cannot
be solved in general. Note that the “in general” here is critical.
Even though the halting problem is undecidable in general, for
MORE TO EXPLORE
particular inputs to a Turing machine, it is often still possible to
Undecidability and Nonperiodicity for Tilings of the Plane. R aphael M. Robinson
say whether it will halt or not. For example, if the first instruction in Inventiones Mathematicae, Vol. 12, No. 3, pages 177–209; September 1971.
of the input is “halt,” the answer is pretty clear. The same goes if Undecidability of the Spectral Gap. Toby S. Cubitt, David Pérez-García and Michael M.
the first instruction tells the Turing machine to loop forever. Thus, Wolf in Nature, V
ol. 528, pages 207–211; December 10, 2015. Preprint available at
although undecidability implies that the spectral gap problem https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04573
cannot be solved for a ll m
aterials, it is entirely possible to solve it F R O M O U R A R C H I V E S
for specific materials. In fact, condensed matter physics is littered Ultimate Clocks. W . Wayt Gibbs; September 2002.
with such examples. Nevertheless, our result proves rigorously
s c i e n t if i c a m e r i c a n . c o m /m a g a zi n e /s a
that even a perfect, complete description of the microscopic inter-


CLICKS,
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
LIES
AND
VIDEOTAPE Artificial intelligence is making it possible for anyone
to manipulate audio and video. The biggest threat is
that we stop trusting anything at all
By Brooke Borel
IN BRIEF
Rapidly evolving AI technologies allow for the Computer scientists are working on AI detection Written fake news was a troubling factor in the 2016
automated creation of fake video and audio. Some tools to flag fake videos, but they lag behind the abili- U.S. elections. Research suggests that fake video may
experts worry that the spread of disinformation via ty to create manipulated content. Meanwhile social be especially effective at stoking fear—an emotion
social media could have profound effects on public scientists warn that policing fakes post hoc is not a that powers viral content. One concern is that it could
discourse and political stability. sufficient solution. erode our trust in all media, including what is real.
Illustration by Taylor Callery October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 39

Brooke Borel is a journalist and author of
The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking. She
recently competed against an AI fact-
checker and won by a worrying margin.
T his past April a new video of Barack Obama surfaced on the Internet. Against a
backdrop that included both the American and presidential flags, it looked like many of
his previous speeches. Wearing a crisp white shirt and dark suit, Obama faced the
camera and punctuated his words with outstretched hands: “President Trump is
a total and complete dipshit.”
Without cracking a smile, he continued. “Now, you see, I
would never say these things. At least not in a public address. But
someone else would.” The view shifted to a split screen, revealing
the actor Jordan Peele. Obama hadn’t said anything—it was a real
recording of an Obama address blended with Peele’s imperson
ation. Side by side, the message continued as Peele, like a digital
ventriloquist, put more words in the former president’s mouth.
Stanford University. Persily studies, among other topics, how the
Internet affects democracy, and he is among a growing group of
researchers who argue that curbing viral disinformation cannot
be done through technical fixes alone. It will require input from
psychologists, social scientists and media experts to help tease
out how the technology will land in the real world.
“We’ve got to do this now,” Persily says, “because at the mo
In this era of fake news, the video was a public service an ment the technologists—necessarily—drive the discussion” on
nouncement produced by BuzzFeed News, showcasing an appli what may be possible with AI-generated video. Already, our trust
cation of new artificial-intelligence (AI) technology that could do in democratic institutions such as government and journalism is
for audio and video what Photoshop has done for digital images: ebbing. With social media a dominant distribution channel for
allow for the manipulation of reality. information, it is even easier today for fake-news makers to
The results are still fairly unsophisticated. Listen and watch exploit us. And with no cohesive strategy in place to confront an
closely, and Obama’s voice is a bit nasally. For brief flashes, his increasingly sophisticated technology, our fragile collective trust
mouth—fused with Peele’s—floats off-center. But this rapidly is even more at risk.
evolving technology, which is intended for Hollywood film edi
tors and video game makers, has the imaginations of some na INNOCUOUS BEGINNINGS
tional security experts and media scholars running dark. The The path to fake video t races back to the 1960s, when computer-
next generation of these tools may make it possible to create con generated imagery was first conceived. In the 1980s these spe
vincing fakes from scratch—not by warping existing footage, as in cial effects went mainstream, and ever since, movie lovers have
the Obama address, but by orchestrating scenarios that never watched the technology evolve from science-fiction flicks to For
happened at all. rest Gump shaking hands with John F. Kennedy in 1994 to the
The consequences for public knowledge and discourse could revival of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher in R ogue One. T
he goal
be profound. Imagine, for instance, the impact on the upcoming has always been to “create a digital world where any storytelling
midterm elections if a fake video smeared a politician during a could be possible,” says Hao Li, an assistant professor of comput
tight race. Or attacked a CEO the night before a public offering. A er science at the University of Southern California and CEO of
group could stage a terrorist attack and fool news outlets into Pinscreen, an augmented-reality start-up. “How can we create
covering it, sparking knee-jerk retribution. Even if a viral video is something that appears real, but everything is actually virtual?”
later proved to be fake, will the public still believe it was true any Early on, most graphics came from artists, who used comput
way? And perhaps most troubling: What if the very idea of perva ers to create three-dimensional models and then hand-painted
sive fakes makes us stop believing much of what we see and textures and other details—a tedious process that did not scale
hear—including the stuff that is real? up. About 20 years ago some computer-vision researchers start
Many technologists acknowledge the potential for sweeping ed thinking of graphics differently: rather than spending time on
misuse of this technology. But while they fixate on “sexy solutions individual models, why not teach computers to create from data?
for detection and disclosure, they spend very little time figuring In 1997 scientists at the Interval Research Corporation in Palo
out whether any of that actually has an effect on people’s beliefs Alto, Calif., developed Video Rewrite, which sliced up existing
on the validity of fake video,” says Nate Persily, a law professor at footage and reconfigured it. The researchers made a clip of JFK

1 is not a face. E ventually when the tool en
counters a new person, it will recognize
patterns that make up human features and
say, statistically speaking, t his is also a face.
Next came the ability to concoct faces
that looked like real people, using deep-
learning tools known as generative net
works. The same logic applies: computer
scientists train the networks on hundreds
or thousands of images. But this time the
network follows the patterns it gleaned
from the examples to make a new face.
Some companies are now using the same
approach with audio. Earlier this year
Google unveiled Duplex, an AI assistant
based on software called WaveNet, which
can make phone calls and sounds like a
real person—complete with verbal tics
2 such as uhs and hmms. In the future, a fake
video of a politician may not need to rely on
impersonations from actors like Peele. In
April 2017 Lyrebird, a Canadian start-up,
released sample audio that sounded creep
ily like Obama, Trump and Hillary Clinton.
But generative networks need big data
sets for training, and that can require sig
nificant human labor. The next step in im
proving virtual content was to teach the AI
to train itself. In 2014 researchers at the
University of Montreal did this with a gen
erative adversarial network, or GAN, which
puts two neural networks in conversation.
The first is a generator, which makes fake
images, and the second is a discriminator,
which learns to distinguish between real
and fake. With little to no human supervi
TECHNOLOGY t hat was originally developed to create virtual scenes in film (1) has sion, the networks train one another
evolved into a tool that can be used to make fake videos (2) to spread disinformation. through competition—the discriminator
nudges the generator to make increasingly
realistic fakes, while the generator keeps
saying, “I never met Forrest Gump.” Soon after, scientists at the trying to trick the discriminator. GANs can craft all sorts of stuff.
FILM STILL FROM F ORREST GUMP. PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 1994 (1 ) ; FILM STILL FROM YOU WON’T BELIEVE
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Ger At the University of California, Berkeley, scientists built one that
WHAT OBAMA SAYS IN THIS VIDEO! M ONKEYPAW PRODUCTIONS AND BUZZFEED, APRIL 17, 2018 (2 )
many, taught a computer to pull features from a data set of 200 can turn images of horses into zebras or transform Impressionist
three-dimensional scans of human faces to make a new face. paintings by the likes of Monet into crisp, photorealistic scenes.
The biggest recent jump in the relationship among computer Then, this past May, researchers at the Max Planck Institute
vision, data and automation arguably came in 2012, with advanc for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, and their colleagues
es in a type of AI called deep learning. Unlike the work from the revealed “deep video,” which uses a type of GAN. It allows an actor
late 1990s, which used static data and never improved, deep to control the mouth, eyes and facial movements of someone else
learning adapts and gets better. This technique reduces objects, in prerecorded footage. Deep video currently only works in a por
such as a face, to bits of data, says Xiaochang Li, a postdoctoral trait setup, where a person looks directly at the camera. If the
fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in actor moves too much, the resulting video has noticeable digital
Berlin. “This is the moment where engineers say: we are no longer artifacts such as blurred pixels around the face.
going to model things,” she says. “We are going to model our igno GANs are not yet capable of building complex scenes in video
rance of things, and just run the data to understand patterns.” that are indistinguishable from ones captured in real footage.
Deep learning uses layers of simple mathematical formulas Sometimes GANs produce oddities, such as a person with an
called neural networks, which get better at a task over time. For eyeball growing out of his or her forehead. In February, however,
example, computer scientists can teach a deep-learning tool to researchers at the company NVIDIA figured out a way to get
recognize human faces by feeding it hundreds or thousands of GANs to make incredibly high-resolution faces by starting the
photographs and essentially saying, each time, t his is a face o
r this training on relatively small photographs and then building up

the resolution step by step. And Hao Li’s team at the University marked a low point in the public’s trust in journalism. By one
of Southern California has used GANs to make realistic skin, estimate, just 51 percent of Democrats and 14 percent of Republi
teeth and mouths, all of which are notoriously difficult to digi cans said they trusted mass media.
tally reconstruct. The science on written fake news is limited. But some research
None of these technologies are easy for nonexperts to use well. suggests that seeing false information just once is sufficient to
But BuzzFeed’s experiment hints at our possible future. The video make it seem plausible later on, says Gordon Pennycook, an assis
came from free software called FakeApp—which used deep learn tant professor of organizational behavior at the University of
ing, though not GAN. The resulting videos are dubbed deepfakes, Regina in Saskatchewan. It is not clear why, but it may be thanks
a mash-up of “deep learning” and “fake,” named after a user on the to “fluency,” he says, or “the ease at which it is processed.” If we
Web site Reddit, who, along with others, was an early adopter and hear Obama call Trump a curse word and then later encounter
used the tech to swap celebrities’ faces into porn. Since then, ama another false instance where Obama calls Trump obscene names,
teurs across the Web have used FakeApp to make countless vid we may be primed to think it is real because it is familiar.
eos—most of them relatively harmless pranks, such as adding According to a study from the Massachusetts Institute of
actor Nicolas Cage to a bunch of movies he was not in or morphing Technology that tracked 126,000 stories on Twitter between 2006
Trump’s face onto the body of German chancellor Angela Merkel. and 2017, we are also more likely to share fake news than real
More ominous are the implications. Now that the technology is news—and especially fake political stories, which spread further
democratized, anyone with a computer can hypothetically use it. and quicker than those about money, natural disasters or terror
ism. The paper suggested that people crave novelty. Fake news in
CONDITIONS FOR FAKE NEWS general plays to our emotions and personal identity, enticing us
Experts have long worried t hat computer-enabled editing would to react before we have had a chance to process the information
ruin reality. Back in 2000, an article in MIT Technology Review and decide if it is worth spreading. The more that content sur
about products such as Video Rewrite warned that “seeing is no prises, scares or enrages us, the more we seem to share it.
longer believing” and that an image “on the evening news could There are troubling clues that video may be especially effec
well be a fake—a fabrication of fast new video-manipulation tech tive at stoking fear. “When you process information visually, you
nology.” Eighteen years later fake videos
don’t seem to be flooding news shows. For
one thing, it is still hard to produce a real
ly good one. It took 56 hours for BuzzFeed “We will not win this game. It’s
to make the Obama clip with help from a
professional video editor.
just that we will make it harder and
The way we consume information,
however, has changed. Today only about
harder for the bad guys to play it.”
half of American adults watch the news —Alexei Efros University of California, Berkeley
on television, whereas two thirds get at
least some news via social media, accord
ing to the Pew Research Center. The Internet has allowed for a believe that this thing is closer to you in terms of space, time or
proliferation of media outlets that cater to niche audiences— social group,” says Elinor Amit, an assistant professor of cogni
including hyperpartisan Web sites that intentionally stoke anger, tive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University,
unimpeded by traditional journalistic standards. The Internet whose work teases out the differences in how we relate to text
rewards viral content that we are able to share faster than ever and images. She hypothesizes that this distinction is evolution
before, Persily says. And the glitches in fake video are less dis ary—our visual development came before written language, and
cernible on a tiny mobile screen than a living-room TV. we rely more on our senses to detect immediate danger.
The question now is what will happen if a deepfake with sig Fake video has, in fact, already struck political campaigns. In
nificant social or political implications goes viral. With such a July, Allie Beth Stuckey, a TV host at Conservative Review, posted
new, barely studied frontier, the short answer is that we do not on Facebook an interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Dem
know, says Julie Carpenter, a research fellow with the Ethics + ocratic congressional nominee from New York City. The video
Emerging Sciences Group, based at California State Polytechnic was not a deepfake but an old-fashioned splice of a real interview
University, San Luis Obispo, who studies human-robot interac with new questions to make Ocasio-Cortez appear to flub her
tion. It is possible we will find out soon enough, with key elec answers. Depending on your political persuasion, the video was
tions coming up this fall in the U.S., as well as internationally. either a smear job or, as Stuckey later called it in her defense, sat
We have already witnessed the fallout when connectivity and ire. Either way, it had 3.4 million views within a week and more
disinformation collide. Fake news—fabricated text stories de than 5,000 comments. Some viewers seemed to think Ocasio-
signed to look like legitimate news reports and to go viral—was a Cortez had bombed a real interview. “Omg! She doesn’t know
much discussed feature of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. what and how to answer,” one wrote. “She is stupid.”
According to collaborative research from Princeton University, That all of this is worrying is part of the problem. Our dark
Dartmouth College and the University of Exeter in England, ruminations may actually be worse for society than the videos
roughly one in four Americans visited a fake news site during the themselves. Politicians could sow doubt when their real misdeeds
five weeks between October 7 and November 14, 2016, mostly are caught on tape by claiming they were faked, for example.
through the conduit of their Facebook feeds. Moreover, 2016 Knowing that convincing fakes are even possible might erode our

trust in all media, says Raymond J. Pingree, an associate profes SAVING REALITY
sor in mass communications at Louisiana State University. Pin Even if each of us can ultimately use detectors to parse the Inter
gree studies how confident people are in their ability to evaluate net, there will always be a lag between lies and truth. That is one
what is real and what is not and how that affects their willingness reason why halting the spread of fake video is a challenge for the
to participate in the political process. When individuals lose that social media industry. “This is as much a distribution problem as
confidence, they are more likely to fall for liars and crooks, he it is a creation problem,” Edelman says. “If a deepfake falls in the
says, and “it can make people stop wanting to seek the truth.” forest, no one hears it unless Twitter and Facebook amplify it.”
When it comes to curbing viral disinformation, it is not clear
A GAME OF CAT AND MOUSE what the legal obligations are for social media companies or
To a computer scientist, the solution to a bug is often just more whether the industry can be regulated without trampling free
computer science. Although the bugs in question here are far speech. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally admitted that his
more complex than bad coding, there is a sense in the communi platform has played a role in spreading fake news—although it
ty that algorithms could be built to flag the fakes. took more than 10 months following the 2016 election. Facebook,
“There is certainly technical progress that can be made against after all, was designed to keep users consuming and spreading
the problem,” says R. David Edelman of M.I.T.’s Internet Policy content, prioritizing what is popular over what is true. With
Research Initiative. Edelman, who served as a tech adviser under more than two billion active monthly users, it is a tinderbox for
Obama, has been impressed by faked videos of the former presi anyone who wants to spark an enraging fake story.
dent. “I know the guy. I wrote speeches for him. I couldn’t tell the Since then, Zuckerberg has promised to act. He is putting
difference between the real and fake video,” he says. But while he some of the burden on users by asking them to rank the trust
could be fooled, Edelman says, an algorithm might pick up on the worthiness of news sources (a move that some see as shirking
“telltale tics and digital signatures” that are invisible to the responsibility) and plans to use AI to flag disinformation. The
human eye. company has been tight-lipped on the details. Some computer
So far the fixes fall within two categories. One proves that a scientists are skeptical about the AI angle, including Farid, who
video is real by embedding digital signatures, analog ous to the says the promises are “spectacularly naïve.” Few independent sci
intricate seals, holograms and other features that currency print entists have been able to study how fake news spreads on Face
ers use to thwart counterfeiters. Every digital camera would have book because much of the relevant data has been on lockdown.
a unique signature, which, theoretically, would be tough to copy. Still, all the algorithms and data in the world will not save us
The second strategy is to automatically flag fake videos with from disinformation campaigns if the researchers building fake-
detectors. Arguably the most significant push for such a detector video technology do not grapple with how their products will be
is a program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agen used and abused after they leave the lab. “This is my plea,” Persi
cy called Media Forensics, or MediFor. It kicked off in 2015, not ly says, “that the hard scientists who do this work have to be
long after a Russian news channel aired fake satellite images of a paired up with the psychologists and the political scientists and
Ukrainian fighter jet shooting at Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Lat the communication specialists—who have been working on these
er, a team of international investigators pegged the flight’s down issues for a while.” That kind of collaboration has been rare.
ing on a Russian missile. The satellite images were not made with In March, however, the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelli
deep learning, but darpa saw the coming revolution and wanted gence announced a program that will invite psychologists, phi
to find a way to fight it, says David Doermann, MediFor’s former losophers, ethicists and others to help AI researchers to grasp
program manager. the broader social implications of their work. And in April, Persi
MediFor is taking three broad approaches, which can be ly, along with Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard Universi
automated with deep learning. The first examines a video’s digi ty, launched the Social Data Initiative. The project will, for the
tal fingerprint for anomalies. The second ensures a video follows first time, allow social scientists to access Facebook data to study
the laws of physics, such as sunlight falling the way it would in the spread of disinformation.
the real world. And the third checks for external data, such as With a responsibility vacuum at the top, the onus of rooting
the weather on the day it was allegedly filmed. darpa plans to out fake videos is falling on journalists and citizen sleuths. Near
unify these detectors into a single tool, which will give a point the end of the deepfake video of Obama and Peele, both men say:
score on the likelihood that a video is fake. “Moving forward, we need to be more vigilant with what we trust
These strategies could cut down on the volume of fakes, but it from the Internet. It’s a time when we need to rely on trusted
will still be a game of cat and mouse, with forgers imitating digi news sources.” It may have been a fake, but it was true.
tal watermarks or building deep-learning tools to trick the detec
tors. “We will not win this game,” says Alexei Efros, a professor of
computer science and electrical engineering at U.C. Berkeley, MORE TO EXPLORE
who is collaborating with MediFor. “It’s just that we will make it The Science of Fake News. David M. J. Lazer et al. in S cience, Vol. 359, pages 1094–1096;
harder and harder for the bad guys to play it.” March 9, 2018.
And anyway, these tools are still decades away, says Hany Why Do People Share Fake News? A Sociotechnical Model of Media Effects. Alice E.
Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College. As Marwick in Georgetown Law Technology Review, V ol. 2, No. 2, pages 474–512; 2018.
fake video continues to improve, the only existing technical solu FROM OUR ARCHIVES
tion is to rely on digital forensics experts like Farid. “There’s just Don’t Believe Your Eyes. Lawrence Greenemeier; Advances, April 2018.
literally a handful of people in the world you can talk to about
this,” he says. “I’m one of them. I don’t scale to the Internet.”


SEISMOLOGY
ın
the Sky The best early warnings of a big disaster
may appear 180 miles above the ground,
a controversial new theory says
By Erik Vance
Illustration by María Corte October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 45

S cience writer Erik Vance wrote about vaquitas,
threatened porpoises in the Sea of Cortez,
in the August 2017 issue. He lives in Baltimore, Md.
O n Friday afternoon, March 11, 2011, Kosuke Heki was in his office
in Hokkaido University in northern Japan when the ground
began to shake. The pulses were far apart, and each one last-
ed a few seconds. Heki, a geophysicist who studies an arcane
phenomenon involving odd patterns formed by electrons in
the sky after quakes, was interested but not unduly alarmed.
It seemed like a large earthquake but far away. As the shak-
ing continued, he thought perhaps data from the event might help his research. Then someone
flipped on the news, and Heki’s curiosity turned to horror.
The waves he felt had come from the biggest temblor in mod-
ern Japanese history—the devastating magnitude 9.0 To–hoku
earthquake, which cost the country hundreds of billions of dol-
lars and claimed more than 15,000 of his compatriots’ lives. The
tsunami after the quake crippled the Fukushima Daiichi Nucle-
were such a warning, they could save thousands of lives a year.
Heki, whom colleagues describe as unassuming, quiet and
cautious, was immediately skeptical of his own data, so he
pulled up information from two other earthquakes. He saw the
density change again and decided to keep digging. To date, he
ar Power Plant and triggered the worse nuclear disaster in a has found the electron signal before 18 big quakes, and over the
quarter of a century. past seven years he has come to believe it is real.
While emergency personnel worked to evacuate people and Other experts are now starting to take a close look at the
save lives in another part of the country, Heki could only wait idea. “Years ago people didn’t think we could predict the weath-
for spotty phone and Internet service to come back online. By er, but we do now,” says Yuhe Song, an expert in remote sensing
Sunday, the Internet was working, and he quickly downloaded at nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We probably can see
satellite observations of the air over the region of To–hoku and something earlier than when we feel it on the ground. There is
hungrily combed through them. As he expected, electrons in something there . . . I think this warrants a discussion.”
the ionosphere showed a disturbance 10 minutes after the Not everyone agrees. Many scientists see Heki’s work as the
quake. But he could not get his model to fit the data by just latest in a long line of false prediction promises. “These things
looking at the minutes after the quake. So he tried expanding are like the common cold: they’re always going around,” says
the time frame, including the hour before. That is when he saw seismologist Robert J. Geller, an emeritus professor at the Uni-
something that stopped him in his tracks. versity of Tokyo, who has spent years debunking various earth-
Forty minutes before the earthquake struck, there was a sub- quake forecasting ideas. “If you ignore them, they go away.”
tle rise in electron density above the temblor’s epicenter. May- Heki’s idea seems to be sticking around, however, and may be
be it was an anomaly, a one-off or an instrument malfunction. getting stronger. The electron signal has shown up in medium-
Or maybe it was something more. Scientists have yet to find a sized quakes as well as the largest ones. Other scientists have
reliable earthquake precursor—a telltale sign that could alert formed a theory that connects faults in the ground to activity in
people before the onset of a large quake. If electron changes the sky. Heki has published his findings in reputable journals
IN BRIEF
Tens of thousands o f people can be killed by a sin- New observations s uggest that clumps of electrons There have been false promises o f prediction in
gle earthquake, so scientists have struggled to pre- form in the ionosphere, sometimes 30 minutes or the past, so this notion is drawing skeptics—but the
dict quakes well enough to sound an alarm. more before a temblor, giving an early warning. data are beginning to convince more scientists.

From the Ground Up
Electrical disturbances miles above the planet’s surface may occur at least half an hour before major earthquakes, new research indicates.
These could be early warnings of disasters. And there is a theory about the way cracks in rocks might create activity high in the sky.
Electric
field lines
Fractures e¯ Electron
jumps
down, Sparse
into void electrons
e¯
Positive hole
e¯ moves up to Extra Magnetic field
neighboring electrons
Positive oxygen atom
hole e¯
Ionosphere
Microcrack
breaks peroxy - - - Fault Crust
bond, forms - Fault
- - -
positive holes
(orange shells) Upper mantle
1. A Fracture Begins 2. Electrons Jump 3. To the Surface 4. Up in the Air

Within the ground, parts of the The microfractures generate enough This process continues across When positive holes accumulate
earth’s crust slide slowly across force to break peroxy bonds, which adjoining grains of rocks, like chains at the surface, they can pull electrons
one another. Sometimes at a fault hold together oxygen atoms within of falling dominos. Electrons move, from molecules there, generating
line they jerk suddenly, and the molecules in rock grains. This force leaving room for holes and their an electromagnetic field. These
strain of the movement begins alters the energy of negatively positive charges to propagate up fields can form lines that extend
to tear the rock apart, creating charged electrons in these grains, from the original fracture, jumping miles upward. They alter patterns
small breaks called microfractures. making the electrons move. They from grain to grain up to the surface. of electrons in the ionosphere,
leave behind positively charged Behind them, the strain created by making dense clumps in certain
spaces called holes. As more elec- grinding rocks grows. spots and sparse concentrations
trons move, the holes move in the in others. Such anomalies can be
opposite direction, creating a tiny detected by satellites.
electric current in the rock grain.
such as Geophysical Research Letters a nd been invited to lecture Others have looked at wells that suddenly go dry, tempera-
about the results at the American Geophysical Union’s annual ture changes, radon gas emissions and, of course, groups of
meeting. This past spring Japan’s Chiba University hosted an en- smaller foreshocks as possible precursors. In 1975, using a com-
tire meeting to debate quake prediction, including his idea. If bination of these signs (including animal behavior), the Chi-
Heki is right, the implications for public safety are enormous, nese even managed to predict a 7.3 quake early enough to begin
but there are difficult questions about how to use such a precur- evacuating the city of Haicheng. It raised hopes. “In the 1970s
sor. How accurate must a warning system be to sound an alarm, American and Japanese seismologists became pretty optimistic
and what kind of emergency response should ensue? about short-term earthquake prediction,” says Masao Nakatani,
an expert in rock mechanics at the University of Tokyo. “We
PREDICTING THE WORST tended to believe that earthquakes must be predictable.” By the
Charles F. Richter—creator of the quake magnitude scale that 1980s both the U.S. and Japan had created research groups to
carries his name—is said to have remarked that “only fools and pursue the challenge.
charlatans predict earthquakes.” But that hasn’t stopped peo- Reliable signals proved elusive, however. One year after the
ple from trying. In 373 b.c., animals reportedly ran for shelter Chinese success the same techniques failed to spot another,
five days before an estimated 6.0 to 6.7 magnitude temblor larger quake that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
rocked Greece and destroyed the city of Helike. The Japanese Japan, sitting on the tectonically restless Ring of Fire around
once thought that twitching or thrashing catfish could predict the Pacific, put in a fair amount of effort only to find that a pre-
earthquakes. Dogs, sheep, centipedes, cow’s milk and a Suma- cursor would work once and not again. Nature seemed to keep
tran pheasant called the great argus have all been said to changing the rules. The U.S. abandoned forecasting efforts in
change their behavior before a quake. the late 1990s after a predicted quake—based on the pattern of
Illustration by Matthew Twombly October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 47

previous earthquakes—failed to appear
near Parkfield, Calif. (It eventually hit in
2004 but with none of the expected
warning signs.)
The year of the To–hoku quake, an in
ternational commission on prediction,
set up by the Italian government, essen-
tially closed the book on the field. “In
spite of continuous research efforts in Ja
pan, little evidence has been found for
precursors that are diagnostic of impend-
ing large earthquakes,” the members
wrote in May 2011.
Four months later Heki reopened the
book. What he saw were bizarre pockets
of ionized particles not at or on the earth’s
surface but 186 miles above it. The idea of
a connection between ground and sky is
not out of this world. In the 1970s scien-
TOLL OF A QUAKE: With little warning, the deadly To–hoku earthquake and tsunami de
tists first found that rocks under extra
stroyed the Japanese city of Rikuzentakata; afterward, residents walked among the ruins.
pressure create an electric current, like a
very weak battery. The theory goes that
as a rock is pressurized, its oxygen atoms give up electrons, size of the ensuing temblor. “I have never seen such a clear phe-
leaving deficits that physicists describe as positive holes. Elec- nomenon occurring just before an earthquake,” he says.
trons from other nearby atoms move into those holes, leaving
yet more holes behind them, creating a chain reaction of mov- CHAOTIC DEBATE
ing charges. Armed with these data, Heki finally published a paper in Septem-
The holes “have the ability to move around over long distanc- ber 2011, announcing what he found. Other scientists quickly
es—miles, tens of miles, hundreds of miles,” says Friedemann started pointing out problems. Some said the result came from a
Freund, a researcher at nasa and the SETI Institute, who discov- misreading of the data and that disturbances during and after
ered the phenomenon. “It’s like a bucket of water in a fire line. the quake muddied the picture. Heki responded by using a differ-
It’s being handed from person to person to person.” ent analytical method to highlight the prequake effects. He also
Freund says that the holes then roam through rocks, eventu- converted measurements taken at an angle to a bird’s-eye view,
ally reaching the earth’s surface, where they attract negatively thinking this would make the effects easier to spot. But critics
charged electrons from molecules in the air, like a magnet at argued this was just reorganizing the same flawed data. Another
tracting iron shavings. The electrical charges then travel to the Japanese team said the effect was caused by geomagnetic storms.
upper atmosphere. The mechanism is just theory because it is Heki performed another analysis to account for storm effects and
hard to measure directly, but it seems to fit with hints of elec- found that storms could not explain all the changes he saw.
tron clumps seen after an earthquake. But no one had clearly Soon some doubters began to agree with him. “This is by far
seen the effect before a quake. the best precursor ever reported,” says Nakatani, who says he
For his research, Heki brought in a new method that used stopped believing in earthquake forecasting after the failures of
sophisticated GPS satellite networks, which can detect subtle the 1990s. But Heki has rekindled his faith, so much so that he
changes in atmospheric electrons when their radio signals bend now says the work could very well be “the most important dis-
across the atmosphere. Japan has a particularly dense GPS covery in the history of earthquake science.” nasa’s Song is less
receiver network, which allowed Heki to spot a subtle electron hyperbolic but agrees the electron clouds have been hard to
surge in the sky far above To–hoku’s epicenter, about 40 minutes explain away as errors and seem to signify a real event. Freund
before seismometers in the ground detected any movement. says To–hoku followed months of pressure buildup and changes
But the geophysicist says he was reluctant to present his in electron density. And although that pressure might have
findings. “I had to worry about how to publish it,” he says. found other outlets—such as invisible “silent” earthquakes—the
“Earthquake prediction is something special. Everybody be charged particle release is still a predictable phenomenon that,
comes very emotional.” in theory, could be detected in other quakes.
He did not, in fact, publish right away. After To–hoku, Heki Critics, however, insist Heki is seeing things in a computer that
looked back at two giant earthquakes where detailed GPS data do not exist in the real world. “He is trying to confirm his initial
were available. In each, he found a telltale rise in electron con- thought without providing a valid support,” says Fabrizio Masci of
NICOLAS ASFOURI Getty Images
centration more than 30 minutes beforehand. The larger the the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy. He
quake, the longer the advance time, it seemed. A magnitude has published papers refuting not just Heki but other earthquake
8.2 quake in 2014 in Chile had a 25-minute lead time, whereas prediction ideas and says Heki’s responses are “a skillful way to
9.0 To–hoku gave the 40 minutes. So the signals not only hinted distract the reader.” Many of the criticisms focus on Heki’s reading
that the faults were about to slip; they also indicated the relative of baseline electron levels. The tiny particles permeate our planet

and fluctuate as much as the weather. Heki says that just before an zones on the planet. After a devastating 1985 quake that killed
earthquake, electrons clump a little more than average. Critics as many as 10,000 people, the government took advantage of
say that the change is caused by the daily ebb and flow of elec- the fact that quake waves travel over unusually long distances in
trons. In other words, Heki may be chasing a statistical ghost. the region and built a monitoring system that can give a couple
Masci goes even further and says seismic precursors might of minutes warning if the waves are detected far enough away.
be impossible if earthquakes themselves are fundamentally Carlos Valdés, a geophysical engineer and director of Mexi-
chaotic. If the initial conditions of an event are not precisely co’s National Center for Prevention of Disasters, says a 40-min-
determined, it is impossible to know how the effects will play ute warning might sound good, but the reality is not so simple.
out. And with quakes, it is devilishly hard to nail down all the First, false alarms can ruin any emergency response. Some Mex-
initial conditions. ican quakes triggered warnings but were too weak or in the
Giovanni Occhipinti of the Institute of Earth Physics of Par- wrong position to actually shake the city, for instance. People
is is not so pessimistic, although he agrees it is a daunting prob- became annoyed and stopped responding to those alerts. But he
lem to understand all the factors at play—the rock type, the worries more about the opposite problem: panic. “Somebody is
pressure, the faults nearby—well enough that you can make a going to say, ‘I have 40 minutes, I’m going to leave the city,’” he
prediction. Occhipinti, like Heki, studies how earthquakes says. “It takes only one person to start screaming or start run-
affect atmospheric ions. He says that, given how chaotic ions ning, and everyone follows.” Roads clog, and no one gets to safe-
are in the atmosphere, you simply cannot pull a signal from all ty [see “This Way Out,” on page 74].
the noise. It is like trying to predict a hurricane based on a sin- Still, other emergency planners note that even short warning
times create the opportunity to shut down gas
lines or stop subways, reducing risks. And great-
er accuracy would solve the false alert problem.
“It’s pushing science forward,” but “you British and Russian scientists have proposed a
satellite that could better track atmospheric
have to be really, really, really precise. anomalies such as the ones Heki studies, and
China is moving forward with a space-based
You are playing with the lives of people.” prediction program that relies on electromag-
netic disturbances in the ionosphere. But given
—Giovanni Occhipinti Institute of Earth Physics of Paris the complex nature of the ionosphere, coupled
with the confusing nature of earthquakes, it
may be decades until atmospheric data become
actual earthquake warnings.
gle cloud a day beforehand. “The problem is there are tons of Geller does not think that day will ever come. “The precursor
clouds that are coming and moving around,” he says. “It’s not hunters throughout the past 130 years have a childlike belief
simple to deduce a way to discriminate that specific cloud that that, one, there must be precursors and that, two, the bigger the
you want to see as a precursor.” quake, the bigger the precursors must be. But there’s no particu-
Until recently, Occhipinti was on the side of skeptics and felt lar reason these beliefs should be correct,” he says.
that Heki’s discovery was merely a statistical hiccup. Heki’s latest Still, Heki is moving forward. He recently published a paper
work, however, which takes into account the complex 3-D space that analyzes the precursor of a 2015 Chilean quake in detailed
in which the effects happen, caught his interest. Rather than a 3-D, which he says may make his ideas harder to refute. He is
limited satellite snapshot, 3-D modeling shows multidimension- also trying to fill in some data gaps between the electrical charg-
al effects that point to a consistent physical process underlying es and the actual earthquake locations themselves. The goal is
the anomalies, making them hard to write off as ghosts. Occhi to better understand what it is in the crust that creates the
pinti wants to see more 3-D analyses, along with comparisons of effects high above. “There is something before an earthquake in
those results with other models to see how well they fit. So he is the ionosphere. I don’t know about a physical mechanism,”
not, as yet, a complete believer. But he calls the idea “intriguing” Heki says, “but the observation itself is so clear.”
and is now looking into it more closely. “It’s pushing science for-
ward,” Occhipinti says, but “you have to be really, really, really MORE TO EXPLORE
precise. You are playing with the lives of people.” Apparent Ionospheric Total Electron Content Variations Prior to Major Earthquakes
Due to Electric Fields Created by Tectonic Stresses. M ichael C. Kelley et al. in
SOUNDING ALARMS Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, V
ol. 22, No. 6; pages 6689–6695; June 2017.
The numbers of those lives c an reach into the hundreds of thou- Ionospheric Anomalies Immediately before MW 7.0–8.0 Earthquakes. Liming He
and Kosuke Heki in Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, V ol. 122, No. 8,
sands. The U.S. Geological Survey examined worldwide earth- pages 8659–8678; August 2017.
quake fatalities for a 16-year period beginning in 2000. The Three-Dimensional Tomography of Ionospheric Anomalies Immediately before
death counts fluctuate because there are not giant quakes every the 2015 Illapel Earthquake, Central Chile. L iming He and Kosuke Heki in Journal
year. But the toll is daunting. In seven of those years there were of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, V
ol. 123, No. 5, pages 4015–4025; May 2018.
more than 20,000 deaths, and for another two years the totals FROM OUR ARCHIVES
exceeded 200,000. In the countries hardest hit, people are des- Seconds before the Big One. Richard Allen; April 2011.
perate for any kind of warning, even just a few seconds. Take
Mexico City, one of the most lethal and well-studied earthquake

S T A T E
O F T H E
W O R L D ’ S
S C I E N C E
2018
HOW TO
FIX SCIENCE
Whether or not there is an actual “war on science” under way, a million
supporters of evidence-based thinking felt threatened enough to show up
to the global 2017 March for Science. President Donald Trump has called
global warming a “hoax,” and his administration has canceled, blocked and
defunded scientific efforts to protect the environment and public health.
Moreover, climate change denial is not restricted to the U.S., and dozens
of countries have banned the cultivation of GMO crops, despite evidence that
genetically modified foods are just as safe as traditionally bred varieties.
There are many ways to fight back, including improving education, outreach
and political reform. But science must also tackle its own problems, from how
we fund it to how we treat young scientists, ensure reproducible results, curb
sexual harassment and encourage interdisciplinarity. Some creative solutions
are already showing promise on these fronts, but science must fortify itself to
withstand the current assault.
IN BRIEF
To weather antiscience currents, scientists fall apart under scrutiny and fail the reproduc- unnecessary hurdles finding jobs and funding
must shore up their enterprise from the inside. ibility test. Sexual harassment is a crisis that and starting families on academic time lines.
The way research is funded is inefficient and threatens all of science. And too many scientists are isolated from
often leads to poor results. Too many findings Life is too hard for young scientists, who face like-minded colleagues in other disciplines.
Illustration by Neil Webb October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 51


S T A T E
O F T H E
W O R L D ’ S
S C I E N C E
2018
RETHINK
FUNDING
The way we pay for science does not

encourage the best results
By John P. A. Ioannidis

John P. A. Ioannidis is a professor of medicine, of health
research and policy, of biomedical data science and of statis-
tics at Stanford University. He is also co-director of the Meta-
Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS).
ith millions of scientific papers
W
published every year and more than
$2 trillion invested annually in research We Do Not
and development, scientists make Encourage Replication
Under continuous pressure to deliver
plenty of progress. But could we do new discoveries, researchers in many
better? There is increasing evidence fields have little incentive and plenty
that some of the ways we conduct, of counterincentives to try replicating
results of previous studies. Yet replica-
evaluate, report and disseminate research are miserably tion is an indispensable centerpiece
ineffective. A series of papers in 2014 in the L
ancet, f or of the scientific method. Without it,
instance, estimated that 85 percent of investment in we run the risk of flooding scientific
journals with false information that
biomedical research is wasted. Many other disciplines have never gets corrected.
similar problems. Here are some of the ways our reward
and incentives systems fail and some proposals for fixing Solutions:
the problems. — Funding agencies must pay for
replication studies.
— Scientists’ advancement should
We Fund We Do Not Reward be based not only on their discov
Too Few Scientists Transparency eries but also on their replication
Funding is largely concentrated in the Many scientific protocols, analysis track record.
hands of a few investigators. There are methods, computational processes and
many talented scientists, and major data are opaque. When researchers try We Do Not Fund
success is largely the result of luck, as to crack open these black boxes, they Young Investigators
well as hard work. The investigators often discover that many top findings The average age of biomedical scientists
currently enjoying huge funding are cannot be reproduced. That is the case receiving their first substantial grant is
not necessarily genuine superstars; for two out of three top psychology 46 and is increasing over time. The av-
they may simply be the best connected. papers, one out of three top papers erage age for a full professor in the U.S.
in experimental economics and more is 55 and growing. Only 1.6 percent of
Solutions: than 75 percent of top papers identify- funding in the nih’s Research Project
ing new cancer drug targets. Most Grant program went to principal inves-
— Use a lottery to decide which grant
important, scientists are not rewarded tigators younger than 36 in 2017, but
applications to fund (perhaps after
for sharing their techniques. These 13.2 percent went to those 66 and older.
they pass a basic review). This scheme
good scientific citizenship activities Similar aging is seen in other sciences,
would eliminate the arduous effort
take substantial effort. In competitive and it is not explained simply by life-
and expenditure that now goes into
environments, many scientists even expectancy improvement. Werner Hei
reviewing proposals and would give
think, Why offer ammunition to com- senberg, Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac
a chance to many more investigators.
petitors? Why share? and Wolfgang Pauli made their top con-
— A proposed cap to the maximum
tributions in their mid-20s. Imagine tell-
funding that any single investigator Solutions: ing them it would be another 25 years be-
can receive was fiercely shot down by
— Create better infrastructure for fore they could receive funding. Some of
the prestigious institutions that gain enabling transparency, openness the best minds may quit rather than wait.
the most from this overconcentration. and sharing.
Shifting the funds from senior people Solutions:
to younger researchers, perhaps even — Make transparency a prerequisite
in the same laboratory, however, for funding. — A larger proportion of funding should
would not affect these institutions — Universities and research institutes be earmarked for young investigators.
and would also make the cohort could preferentially hire, promote — Universities should try to shift the
of principal investigators more open or tenure those who are champions aging distribution of their faculty by
to innovation. of transparency. hiring more young investigators.

We Use Biased We Do Not Spend Enough We Do Not Fund
Funding Sources In many countries, public funding High-Risk Ideas
Most funding for research and develop has stagnated and is under increasing Review panels, even when they are made
ment in the U.S. comes not from the threat from contesting budget items. up of excellent scientists, are allergic to
government but from private, for-profit The budget for U.S. military spending risky ideas. The pressure that taxpayer
sources, raising unavoidable conflicts ($886 billon) is 24 times the budget money be “well spent” leads govern-
of interest and pressure to deliver results of the nih ($37 billion). The value ment funders to back projects most
favorable to the sponsor. Clinical trials of a single soccer team such as likely to pay off with a positive result,
funded by the pharmaceutical industry, Manchester United ($4.1 billion) even if riskier projects might lead to
for instance, have 27 percent higher is larger than the annual research more important, but less assured,
odds of reaching favorable results than budget of any university. Investment advances. Industry also avoids investing
publicly funded trials. Some of the in science benefits society at large, yet in high-risk projects, waiting for start-
sponsors are improbable champions attempts to convince the public often ups to try (and often fail with) out-of-
of scientific truth. For example, Philip make matters worse when otherwise the-box ideas. As a result, nine out of
Morris (the manufacturer of Marlboro well-intentioned science leaders the 10 largest pharmaceutical compa-
cigarettes) recently announced it promise the impossible, such as nies spend more on marketing than on
would contribute $960 million over promptly eliminating all cancer or R&D. Public funding agencies contend
12 years to establish the Foundation Alzheimer’s disease. When these that they cherish “innovation” when
for a Smoke Free World, a nonprofit promises do not deliver, support for they judge grant applications. This is
initiative that aims to eliminate science can flag. nonsense. Innovation is extremely diffi-
smoking. Disclosure of conflicts of cult, if not impossible, to predict in
interest has improved in many fields, Solutions: advance. Any idea that survives the scru-
but in-depth detective work suggests — We need to communicate how tiny of 20 people reviewing it (the typi-
that it is still far from complete. science funding is used by making cal nih study section) has little chance
the process of science clearer, of being truly disruptive or innovative.
Solutions: including the number of scientists It must be mainstream, if not plain
— Restrict or even ban funding that it takes to make major accom- mediocre, to be accepted by everyone.
has overt conflicts of interest. plishments. Universities, science
Journals should not accept research museums and science journalism
Solutions:
with such conflicts. can help get this message out. — Fund excellent scientists rather than
— For less conspicuous conflicts, at projects and give them freedom to
— We would also make a more
a minimum ensure transparent and pursue research avenues as they see
convincing case for science if
thorough disclosure. fit. Some institutions such as Howard
we could show that we do work
Hughes Medical Institute already use
hard on improving how we run it.
this model with success.
We Fund the Wrong Fields
Much like Mafia clans, some fields — Communicate to the public and policy
makers that science is a cumulative
and families of ideas have traditionally We Reward Big Spenders investment. Of 1,000 projects, 999 may
been more powerful. Well-funded Hiring, promotion and tenure deci-
fields attract more scientists to work fail, and we cannot know which one
sions primarily rest on a researcher’s
for them, which increases their lobby- will succeed ahead of time. We must
ability to secure high levels of funding.
ing reach, fueling a vicious circle. Some judge success on the total agenda,
But the expense of a project does not
entrenched fields absorb enormous not a single experiment or result.
necessarily correlate with its impor-
funding even though they have clearly tance. Such reward structures select
demonstrated limited yield or uncor- mostly for politically savvy managers
rectable flaws. Further investment in We Lack Good Data
who know how to absorb money. There is relatively limited evidence
them is futile.
about which scientific practices work
Solutions:
Solutions: best. We need more research on
— We should reward scientists for research (“meta-research”) to under
— Independent, impartial assessment high-quality work, reproducibility stand how to best perform, evaluate,
of output is necessary for lavishly and social value rather than for review, disseminate and reward science.
funded fields. securing funding.
— More funds should be earmarked — Excellent research can be done Solution:
for new fields and fields that are with little to no funding other than — We should invest in studying how
high risk. protected time. Institutions should to get the best science and how to
— Researchers should be encouraged to provide this time and respect choose and reward the best scientists.
switch fields, whereas currently they scientists who can do great work We should not trust opinion (includ
are incentivized to focus in one area. without wasting tons of money. ing my own) without evidence.

S T A T E
O F T H E
W O R L D ’ S
S C I E N C E
2018
MAKE
RESEARCH
REPRODUCIBLE
Better incentives could reduce the
alarming number of studies that
turn out to be wrong when repeated
By Shannon Palus
56 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustrations by Neil Webb


atie Corker wondered
K
what temperature the
coffee was supposed
to be. She was doing a
psychology experiment—
well, redoing an experi-
periments in 100 papers in the field as part of University of Virgin-
ment. The original find- ia psychologist Brian Nosek’s Reproducibility Project: Psychology.
ings, suggesting that In 2015 they declared that just 36 percent of the repeated experi-
ments showed significant results in line with the original findings.
holding something warm can make a person
Although the landmark reproducibility studies have been in
behave warmly, had been published in 2008 biomedicine and psychology, the issue is not confined to those
in the prestigious journal S
cience t o a flurry fields. Lorena A. Barba, an engineer at George Washington Uni-
versity, who works in computational fluid dynamics, spent a full
of media coverage. Yet as Corker tried to retrace
three years collaborating with a student to reconstruct a com-
each step in the study, there were so many plex simulation from her own lab on how flying snakes, which
unknowns: the temperature of the hot coffee leap off tree branches to glide through the air, wiggle as they
soar. The new results were consistent, but she learned that sift-
distributed to subjects, how quickly the mug
ing through other people’s code to piece together what they did
cooled in their hands. can be a nightmare. She essentially encountered the same prob-
lem that Corker did with the hot cups of coffee. Scientists are fo-
Corker, a psychologist at Grand Valley State University, was try- cused on publishing results, not necessarily on every mundane
ing what few scientists attempt: to carefully replicate research and step of how they arrived at them. “There’s just not a lot written
publish the results. The goal, in her case, was to find out whether down,” Corker says. She got lucky, though: the original first au-
she, working in another laboratory with a different group of sub- thor of the coffee study was “very willing to work with us.” She
jects, would find the same effect as the S cience study, which had also collaborated with a chemist to standardize how quickly the
been conducted by just one research group with only 94 partici- test apparatus changed temperature. “I found it more challeng-
pants clutching coffee or therapeutic pads of varying temperatures. ing than some of the original research I’ve done,” she says.
In theory, this is how science is supposed to work: as a self-correct- Long-ingrained scientific habits such as an aversion to shar-
ing process in which researchers build on the findings of others. ing techniques for fear of being scooped often work counter to
For decades it has been something of an open secret that a the goal of reproducibility. Barba’s own field was born in a veil of
chunk of the literature in some fields is plain wrong. In biomed- secrecy in Los Alamos, N.M., during the Manhattan Project, as re-
icine, the truth became clear in 2012. At the time, C. Glenn Beg- searchers designing the first nuclear weapons used early com-
ley was a vice president and global head of hematology and on- puters to calculate how blasts of air and energy would ripple off
cology research at the pharmaceutical company Amgen, over- exploding bombs. The Manhattan Project, of course, provided
seeing the development of cancer drugs based, in part, on fuel to large swaths of the hard sciences. Scientists at the time
promising breakthroughs from academia. After a decade in the actively tried to prevent outsiders from replicating their work.
gig, he wanted to know why some projects looking into promis- Furthermore, journals and tenure committees often prize new,
ing targets for drugs were being halted. He turned to the compa- flashy results instead of piecemeal advances that carefully build
ny’s files and found that, incredibly, often the problem lay with on the existing literature. “My training was about trying to find
the preclinical research, something that his teams double- the unexpected effect,” says Charlotte Tate, a social and personal-
checked before pouring money and resources into basing a ity psychologist at San Francisco State University. She jokes that
treatment on it. “To my horror, I discovered that 90 percent of members of her field “run around with this model that we have to
the time, we were unable to reproduce what was published,” get on the D aily Show.” This attitude is not just vanity: flashy re-
says Begley, who is now CEO of the Australian firm BioCurate. A sults are often how you secure a job. Those quietly fact-checking
study would later find that failures to replicate preclinical work the work of others or spending extra hours toiling to ensure that
in the field of biomedicine eat up $28.2 billion every year in the their code is easy for another researcher to understand do not
U.S. Begley even sent Amgen scientists to some labs to watch earn a name in lights—or even at the top of a stack of resumes.
them try to replicate their own results. They failed, too. Many emphasize the role that better training—on how to
Meanwhile the crisis was becoming apparent in psychology. write a bullet-proof “methods” section of a paper or carefully
Nearly 300 scientists were volunteering their time to repeat ex- document code so that it is legible to others—can play in helping

S T A T E O F T H E
W O R L D ’ S S C I E N C E 2 0 1 8
seeking grant money to improve the reproducibility of

their work. The nih now asks for more information
about how the study builds on previous work and a list
of variables that could impact the investigation, such
as the sex of rat subjects (a previously overlooked fac-
tor that led many studies to describe phenomena
found in male rats as universal).
And all the questions that a funder can ask up front
could also be asked by journals and reviewers. For
Nosek, a promising solution lies in what is known as
registered reports, a preregistration of studies in
which scientists submit research analysis and design
plans for publication before they actually do it. Peer re-
viewers then evaluate the methodology—if it is sound,
if it builds on past findings—and the journal promises
to print the results no matter what they are. The re-
ward of a paper comes for carefully thought-out exper-
iments, not flashy results. Some wonder if such a
change would simply produce boring science. Nosek
contends that is not the case. He is currently complet-
ing a pair of investigations to examine the impact and
quality of the early registered reports that have been
published; preliminary results suggest that they are
cited just as often as traditional papers. Still, he notes
that relying too heavily on preregistered studies could
encourage safer research, potentially overcorrecting
the problem. He sees the model operating in tandem
with the traditional results-focused model, one that is
friendly to haphazard discoveries, the “accidental ar-
rival of things,” he says.
A harder problem to solve is the pressure for re-
searchers to produce breakthroughs to make a living.
A larger cultural shift would need to take place, Nosek
the crisis. Barba is in this camp, noting that people who use code notes. Right now it is not necessarily enough to carefully trod
in their work would do well to take a software etiquette class so down intriguing paths that turn out to be empty, expanding the
that they can present well-documented code alongside their re- map of knowledge by illuminating the dead ends. We do not live
sults. She also uses a technology known as version control, which in a world where fact-checkers become famous.
records any changes made to a file, to make the evolution of her Yet the reproducibility problem does not necessarily mean
team’s code as legible as possible. The tool is standard in software that science is fundamentally broken. “Progress is dependent on
development but, bafflingly to Barba, not yet in science. “There’s failures,” says Richard M. Shiffrin, a psychologist at Indiana Uni-
this fundamental tension between doing an experiment and doc- versity Bloomington, who is skeptical of the attention being paid
umenting the experiment,” says Charles Fracchia, who is trying to the “crisis.” He argues that focus on irreproducibility stands
to increase the detail and depth of experiment logs in biomedi- to overshadow the advances that science has brought us. Those
cine through his company BioBright. One of his tools, Darwin- who do see the crisis as real do not always disagree with his as-
Sync, records data from every instrument possible, including sessment. Begley notes that the problem has real consequences:
seemingly unimportant things such as whether a computer was so many findings fail under scrutiny that drugs are arriving
plugged in or running on a battery or the amount of ambient slower and at higher costs than they would under a cleaner sys-
light in a room, in case those details are later revealing. In the tem. “We spend a lot of time chasing red herrings,” he says.
case of Corker’s replication attempt, if the original study had bet- The effects in the coffee study turned out to be one of them.
ter assessed the mugs’ temperatures, that would have set her up Corker’s work, which she completed with hot and cold pads, ul-
with more information to rerun the trial later. timately showed there was no evidence that holding something
But time-intensive solutions and expensive equipment are warm could make you act warmer. Although the original work
not enough. “There’s no reward for doing things right,” Barba appeared in a topflight journal, the replication effort can be
says. The trick, Nosek says, is to rework the incentives to ensure found in a comparatively smaller one. It was a breakthrough of
“what’s good for a scientist is what’s good for science.” For in a different kind, one met with less pizzazz.
stance, agencies that fund research could choose to finance only
projects that include a plan for making their work transparent. Shannon Palus is a freelance journalist and staff reporter at Wirecutter, which is
In 2016 the National Institutes of Health rolled out new applica- part of the New York Times Company. Her work has appeared in Slate, Popular Science,
tion instructions and review questions to encourage scientists the Atlantic, Discover, Audubon, Quartz, Smithsonian and Retraction Watch.

and respectful environment. Another is really changing the
S T A T E power dynamics in adviser-trainee relationships. We need to
O F T H E make them less singular, to consider group mentoring, and to
think about ways you might uncouple the mentoring relation-
W O R L D ’ S ship from financial dependence on the mentor. The third is
supporting the targets of harassment, providing alternative
S C I E N C E ways to access services, whether or not they decide to report.
2018 There are also certain structural aspects of the way we handle
cases now that really work against what we’re trying to achieve.
For example, we made a recommendation that confidentiality
agreements with perpetrators be prohibited. They prevent
END
institutions from being transparent and inhibit them from
being able to provide information that could be important to
other institutions.
HARASSMENT You also found that only a minority of people who experience
harassment report it. How can we change that?
There are some novel approaches for reporting experiences of
harassment that provide more control to the target. One is a pro-
gram called Callisto that’s now being adopted by a growing num-
ber of colleges and universities. It allows people to go in and
record if an experience of harassment occurred and time-stamp
A leader of a major it, without actually formally reporting it. People can see if others
have recorded experiences with the same accused harasser. It
report on sexual allows people to share data in an anonymous way. It’s a very
misconduct explains hopeful, interesting tool.
how to make science Did the report address how harassment affects women
of color and other minority groups differently?
accessible to everyone We found women of color experience more harassment than
do white women, white men and men of color. And that wom-
By Clara Moskowitz en of color also experience racial and ethnic harassment.
We crafted our recommendations with this finding in mind.
Creating a more diverse, inclusive, respectful environment—
that will help address this issue.
Your background is in medicine, which is the field within

science where harassment is most prevalent. Why do you
sexual harassment is more prevalent in academia than in any think that is?
sector of society except the military. According to a ground- The qualitative interview research commissioned by the com-
breaking June report by the National Academies of Sciences, mittee provided some insight. It showed that with some of the
Engineering, and Medicine, harassment hurts individuals, expectations of grueling conditions in [medical] training, sev-
diminishes the pool of scientific talent and ultimately damages eral respondents viewed sexual harassment as just part of the
the integrity of science itself. To understand the problem and continuum of what they were expected to endure. Targets
how best to tackle it, a committee of 21 experts spent two years might say, “This is a really tough experience, and the condi-
surveying existing data and commissioning new research. tions are pretty difficult, and [harassment] is part of that.”
During that time, the #MeToo movement awoke the world to
the prevalence of sexual harassment and the devastation it Are you optimistic that the changes you call for
causes. Now Paula Johnson, president of Wellesley College will take place?
and co-chair of the committee behind the report, hopes its rec- I am. We all know that culture change is not easy and that it
ommendations will fall on ears ready and willing to heed its doesn’t happen overnight. But neither did this problem arise
advice. Scientific American spoke to Johnson about how to overnight. We’ve seen leaders, myself included and many others,
move forward. An edited transcript of the conversation follows. who are already taking the initiative to pursue some of the
changes that we’ve suggested. Obviously, the fact that harass-
What do we need to do to change the situation? ment is so prevalent is alarming. But we are providing a road
We found the policies and procedures that are in place are not map for a way forward, and I find that hopeful. And we’re in a
preventing sexual harassment. We know that you have to go particular moment where I think we’ve got the will.
on a path of culture change. We’ve identified some major areas
that have to be addressed. One is creating a diverse, inclusive Clara Moskowitz is a senior editor at Scientific American.

Life is hard for early-career researchers,
HELP YOUNG who must contend with uncertain
futures, compete for funding and
SCIENTISTS balance family life, with the frequent
need to move for jobs By Rebecca Boyle
MOVING
Ashley Juavinett, 2 8,
Jennifer Harding was
postdoctoral researcher in
in her fourth year as
neuroscience at Cold Spring
a doctoral student at the
Harbor Laboratory
University of Texas at
Austin when the 2018 fed- “So few people within academia
eral budget was finalized. talk about it because it’s so ex
A marine geophysicist, she pected: ‘Of course, you’ll move
had spent years training across the country for a postdoc
to use a National Science because that’s what everybody
Foundation–funded research vessel to image sub- does.’ The move definitely took a
duction zones underneath the seafloor. Then she toll on my relationship. My partner
learned the nsf planned to sell the vessel, cutting is in the Bay Area. There was, for
off her access to new data. At 26 and in her final a long time, this question of wheth
year of graduate school, Harding is trying to decide er she should move to New York
what to do next and expects she may have to find instead. It’s a hard call, especially
in a same-sex couple. We don’t
a job in the oil and gas industry. “The rug is being
know whose career comes first.”
pulled out from under me,” Harding says.
Young scientists such as Harding run a gauntlet
that begins as soon as they don their undergradu- MONEY
ate commencement caps. They cope with moving
across countries, continents or oceans for Ph.D. Save Kumwenda, 4 1,
programs, postdoctoral appointments or professor- h.D. student in epidemiology
P
ships. They contend with long-distance relation- at the University of Malawi
ships and family stresses, including agonizing over “The biggest challenge is to get
when or whether to have children despite their funding, let alone enough funding.
uncertain future. They compete for scarce funding. Most grants assume that the
Some leave academia for industry careers, which institutions where you are apply
present their own set of challenges and, some ing from have some basic infra
argue, have a negative reputation among academics. structure, especially related to
And these are all problems that face those fortunate research involving the lab. But
enough to be accepted into graduate research when you get the funding, it is
programs in the first place. not enough, because most of
Early-career research is in dire need of reforms, the equipment is not available
asserts an April report by the National Academies and if it is available, it is outdated.
of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. According Alexis Weinnig, 2 8, third-year Using it makes your results ques
to the report, in 2016 the average researcher was Ph.D. student in biology tionable and difficult to publish
43 years old before securing his or her first indepen- at Temple University in high-impact journals.”
dent grant from the National Institutes of Health, “We work probably between 60 and
compared with an average age of 36 in 1980. 80 hours a week, and we get paid
Several scientists shared with us their most com at a salary of probably 25 hours a
mon frustrations, struggles, challenges—and joys. week. The system has just not kept
up with the cost of living. I love what
Rebecca Boyle is an award-winning freelance journalist. She is I’m doing, but I would also like to be
a contributing writer for the Atlantic, and her work regularly appears compensated for the level of work
in New Scientist, Wired, Popular Science and other publications. that I’m doing.”
62 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustrations by Lara Tomlin

S T A T E O F T H E
W O R L D ’ S S C I E N C E 2 0 1 8
CULTURE INDUSTRY VS. ACADEMIA GETTING JOBS, FELLOWSHIPS

OR INTO SCHOOL
Maryam Zaringhalam, 3 0,
molecular biologist and AAAS
Science & Technology Policy Fellow
“I knew pretty early on that I didn’t want
an academic career and learned to deal
with a sense of shame about that. As an
Iranian woman in science, I felt an obli
gation to continue down the pipeline
because I know it’s a leaky one. But I
kind of resent the idea of a leaky pipeline
at all because it privileges academic tra
jectories. There is a lot of space for peo
ple who have an academic background
to go into careers in policy, advocacy,
Skylar Bayer, 3 2, marine ecologist
communication or industry, but those
and 2018 John A. Knauss Marine
are looked down on as alternative.”
Policy Fellow
Sophia Nasr, s econd-year Ph.D.
“A lot of the way science is set up is still student in cosmology at the University
very feudal. As a student, the person in of California, Irvine
charge of you is your adviser. If you don’t
“The most devastating experience
have a good relationship with your ad
I ever had was applying for an nsf fel
viser, you’re screwed. There’s not a lot
lowship. I put my whole heart into it.
of accountability. You are not a paid
I think my application was solid, and
employee, so you don’t have the same
it just took one reviewer to flush it all
rights. You kind of need champions who
down the drain. I found out right in
can throw their weight around for you.”
the middle of my qualifying exams, so
it was just crushing to my confidence.
FAMILY I’ve bounced back from that, but as
a theorist, it’s kind of hard to look for
Daniel Gonzales, 27, n sf Graduate other places that will even offer me
Research Fellow in Applied Physics at funding. For me, the nsf was where
Rice University it was at, so it was heartbreaking.”
“To be competitive on the academic job
market one day, I need to continue on a
path of ultraexcellence. I already have a
publication in a high-impact journal, but
I better get one more out before I gradu
ate. I better choose a prestigious postdoc
toral research position, not [here] in Texas.
I better receive awards as a postdoc. I bet
ter continue to publish flashy science in top
journals as a postdoc. But I have a family;
I have two kids (one and three years old).
Jacque Pak Kan Ip, 35, p ostdoctoral Moving is hard, and working on a postdoc
researcher in neuroscience at the salary is hard. I know I have what it takes,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology but what will be the toll on my family?”
“We are planning to have kids. I cannot
ask my wife to sacrifice her career again.
But it has taken me a lot of time to do my Sneha Dharwadkar, 3 0, w
ildlife
research already. When she is pregnant biologist in Maneri, India
and might need help, I might need to dial “Right now I am applying for Ph.D. pro
it back to help her. So we hesitate. A grams in the U.S., and I am getting re
tenure-track position would be much jections. Most of the professors are tell
more stable. Maybe at that time, we ing me, ‘You need to have publications
could plan to have a child. But then, I am before getting into a Ph.D. program.’
35; she is 34. The time window is getting But I am not in academia yet, so it is
narrower for us to have children.” very hard to get a proper publication.”

REPRESENTATION AND INEQUALITY
S T A T E
O F T H E
W O R L D ’ S
S C I E N C E
2018
Carina Fish, 26, second-year Ph.D. student in marine

biogeochemistry at the University of California, Davis
BREAK
DOWN
“As someone who studies climate and the ocean, I used to
get worked up that I wasn’t doing enough to relieve some
of the systemic and institutional racism my community faces.
I was able to reconcile that by looking for the intersection
SILOS
of the two. I see my calling to be an advocate for environ-
mental justice, especially given that climate change is exacer-
bating lots of social inequities.”
Solving today’s complex,

global problems will take
interdisciplinary science
Angel Adames- Jack Nicoludis, 28,
Corraliza, 29, assistant postdoctoral fellow in bio-
professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University
By Graham A. J. Worthy and
sciences at the University of California, San Francisco Cherie L. Yestrebsky
of Michigan “As a postdoc, I’m likely going
“I am Puerto Rican, and to apply to faculty positions.
there are so few of us in As a queer scientist, that’s
the science community something I am a little unsure
that I feel like I have to rep- about. The mantra is that you
resent my people. I want to apply to as many as you can.
pave the way for future gen- But these might be in states
erations of Latinos and that don’t recognize sexual
Puerto Ricans and other orientation as a protected
underrepresented minori- identity. I will have to decide
ties. If I am faculty, I am at whether I can see myself liv-
a certain position of power, ing in a place that might not
so I can advocate for diversi- be tolerant of my sexual ori-
ty in science and women entation, because it might be
in science.” the only place I can get a job.”
64 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Neil Webb


Graham A.J. Worthy is founder and director of the National
Center for Integrated Coastal Research at the University
of Central Florida (UCF Coastal) and chairs the department
of biology. His research focuses on how marine ecosystems
respond to natural and anthropogenic perturbations.
he Indian River Lagoon,
T
Cherie L. Yestrebsky is associate director
a shallow estuary that of UCF Coastal and chairs the department
stretches for 156 miles of chemistry. Her research expertise is
environmental chemistry and remediation
along Florida’s eastern of pollutants in the environment.
coast, is suffering from
the activities of human
society. Poor water
quality and toxic algal blooms have resulted
in fish kills, manatee and dolphin die-offs
and takeovers by invasive species. But the
humans who live here have needs, too:
the eastern side of the lagoon is buffered
by a stretch of barrier islands that are critical tend to train our students in our own image, inadvertently pro-
to Florida’s economy, tourism and agriculture, ducing specialists who have difficulty communicating with the
as well as for launching nasa missions scientist in the next building—let alone with the broader public.
This makes research silos ineffective at responding to develop-
into space. ing issues in policy and planning, such as how coastal communi-
ties and ecosystems worldwide will adapt to rising seas.
As in Florida, many of the world’s coastlines are in serious
trouble as a result of population growth and the pollution it pro- SCIENCE FOR THE BIGGER PICTURE
duces. Moreover, the effects of climate change are accelerating As scientists who live a nd work in Florida, we realized that we
both environmental and economic decline. Given what is at risk, needed to play a bigger role in helping our state—and country—
scientists like us—a biologist and a chemist at the University of make evidence-based choices when it comes to vulnerable
Central Florida—feel an urgent need to do research that can coastlines. We wanted to make a more comprehensive assess-
inform policy that will increase the resiliency and sustainability ment of both natural and human-related impacts to the health,
of coastal communities. How can our research best help balance restoration and sustainability of our coastal systems and to con-
environmental and social needs within the confines of our polit- duct long-term, integrated research.
ical and economic systems? This is the level of complexity that At first, we focused on expanding research capacity in our
scientists must enter into instead of shying away from. biology, chemistry and engineering programs because each
Although new technologies will surely play a role in tackling already had a strong coastal research presence. Then, our univer-
issues such as climate change, rising seas and coastal flooding, sity announced a Faculty Cluster Initiative, with a goal of devel-
we cannot rely on innovation alone. Technology generally does oping interdisciplinary academic teams focused on solving
not take into consideration the complex interactions between tomorrow’s most challenging societal problems. While putting
people and the environment. That is why coming up with solu- together our proposal, we discovered that there were already 35
tions will require scientists to engage in an interdisciplinary faculty members on the Orlando campus who studied coastal
team approach—something that is common in the business issues. They belonged to 12 departments in seven colleges, and
world but is relatively rare in universities. many of them had never even met. It became clear that simply
Universities are a tremendous source of intellectual power, of working on the same campus was insufficient for collaboration.
course. But students and faculty are typically organized within So we set out to build a team of people from a wide mix of
departments, or academic silos. Scientists are trained in the tools backgrounds who would work in close proximity to one another
and language of their respective disciplines and learn to commu- on a daily basis. These core members would also serve as a link to
nicate their findings to one another using specific jargon. the disciplinary strengths of their tenure home departments. Ini-
When the goal of research is a fundamental understanding of tially, finding experts who truly wanted to embrace the team
a physical or biological system within a niche community, this aspect was more difficult than we thought. Although the notion
setup makes a lot of sense. But when the problem the research is of interdisciplinary research is not new, it has not always been
trying to solve extends beyond a closed system and includes its encouraged in academia. Some faculty who go in that direction
effects on society, silos create a variety of barriers. They can lim- still worry about whether it will threaten their recognition when
it creativity, flexibility and nimbleness and actually discourage applying for grants, seeking promotions or submitting papers to
scientists from working across disciplines. As professors, we high-impact journals. We are not suggesting that traditional aca-

demic departments should be disbanded. On the contrary, they challenges we are facing. That is why we are melding pure aca-
give the required depth to the research, whereas the interdisci- demic research with applied research to focus on issues that are
plinary team gives breadth to the overall effort. immediate—helping a town or business recovering from Hurri-
Our cluster proposal was a success, and this past January the cane Irma, for example—as well as long term, such as directly
National Center for Integrated Coastal Research (UCF Coastal) advising a community how to build resiliency as flooding be
was born. Our goal is to guide more effective economic develop- comes more frequent.
ment, environmental stewardship, hazard-mitigation planning As scientists, we cannot expect to explain the implications of
and public policy for coastal communities. To better integrate sci- our research to the wider public if we cannot first understand
ence with societal needs, we have brought together biologists, one another. A benefit of regularly working side by side is that
chemists, engineers and biomedical researchers with anthropol- we are crafting a common language, reconciling the radically
ogists, sociologists, political scientists, planners, emergency different meanings that the same words can have to a variety of
managers and economists. It seems that the most creative per- specialists. Finally, we are learning to speak to one another with
spectives on old problems have arisen when people with differ- more clarity and understand more explicitly how our niches fit
into the bigger picture. We are also more
aware of culture and industry as driving
forces in shaping consensus and policy.
“Interdisciplinary” must mean Rather than handing city planners a stack
of research papers and walking away,
more than just different flavors UCF Coastal sees itself as a collaborator
that listens instead of just lecturing.
of STEM. In academia, tackling This style of academic mission is not
only relevant to issues around climate
the effects of climate change change. It relates to every aspect of mod-
ern society, including genetic engineering,
demands more rigorous inclusion automation, artificial intelligence, and so
of the social sciences.

on. The launch of UCF Coastal has gar-
nered positive attention from industry,
government agencies, local communities
and academics. We think that is because
people do want to come together to solve
ent training and life experiences are talking through issues over problems, but they need a better mechanism for doing so. We
cups of coffee. After all, “interdisciplinary” must mean more than hope to be that conduit while inspiring other academic institu-
just different flavors of STEM. In academia, tackling the effects of tions to do the same.
climate change demands more rigorous inclusion of the social After all, we have heard for years to “think globally, act local-
sciences—an area that has been frequently overlooked. ly,” and that “all politics is local.” Florida’s Indian River Lagoon
The National Science Foundation, as well as other groups, will be restored only if there is engagement among residents,
has recently required that all research proposals incorporate a local industries, academics, government agencies and nonprof-
social sciences component, as an attempt to assess the broader it organizations. As scientists, it is our responsibility to help
implications of projects. Unfortunately, in many cases, simply everyone involved understand that problems that took decades
adding a social scientist to a proposal is done only to check a to create will take decades to fix. We need to present the most
box rather than to make a true commitment to allowing the dis- helpful solutions while explaining the intricacies of the trade-
cipline to inform a project. Instead social, economic and policy offs for each one. Doing so is only possible if we see ourselves as
needs must be considered at the outset of research design, not part of an interdisciplinary, whole-community approach. By lis-
as an afterthought. Otherwise our work might fail at the imple- tening and responding to fears and concerns, we can make a
mentation stage, which means we are not being as effective as stronger case for why scientifically driven decisions will be
we could be in solving real-world problems. As a result, the pub- more effective in the long run.
lic might become skeptical of how much scientists can contrib-
ute toward solutions.
MORE TO EXPLORE
CONNECTING WITH THE PUBLIC Assessing Scientists for Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure. D avid Moher et al. in P LOS
The reality i s that communicating research findings to the pub- Biology, V
ol. 16, No. 3, Article No. e2004089; March 29, 2018.
Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic
lic is an increasingly critical responsibility of scientists. Doing Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. N ational Academies of Sciences, Engineering,
so has a measurable effect on how politicians prioritize policy, and Medicine; 2018.
funding and regulations. UCF Coastal is being born into a world Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS): http://metrics.stanford.edu
where science is not always respected—sometimes it is even FROM OUR ARCHIVES
portrayed as the enemy. There has been a significant erosion of The Roots of Science Denial. Katharine Hayhoe, as told to Jen Schwartz; State of the
trust in science over recent years, and we must work more World’s Science, October 2017.
deliberately to regain it. The public, we have found, wants to
see quality academic research that is grounded in the societal

R
SPIKY PROTEIN COAT of the
rabies virus (shown magnified
roughly a million times) enables
it to pass from neuron to neuron.

R NEUROSCIENCE
RABIES
ON THE
BRAIN
Using
engineered
forms of the
rabies virus,
neuroscientists
can map
brain circuits with
unprecedented
precision
By Andrew J. Murray

L ate one moonlit night,
three fictional revel-
ers on an English moor were transfixed by a
horrific sight: “a foul thing, a great, black beast,
shaped like a hound, yet larger than any
hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon.
And even as they looked the thing tore the
throat out of Hugo Baskerville, on which, as
it turned its blazing eyes and dripping jaws
upon them, the three shrieked with fear and
rode for dear life.” Historians of medicine have
traced the terror that the T he Hound of the
Andrew J. Murray is a neuroscientist at the
Sainsbury Wellcome Center for Neural Circuits
and Behavior in London. His group studies how
brain circuits generate movement.
Rabies still kills more than 59,000 people annually. Thanks to

vaccinations and the quarantine of infected animals, however, it
no longer evokes terror in the developed world. Rather neuroscien-
tists are turning the malign germ to the advantage of humankind.
The rabies virus is adept at making its way from the site of the bite
to the brain by jumping stealthily from neuron to neuron—thereby
evading detection by the immune system. A number of researchers,
including those in my group at the Sainsbury Wellcome Center for
Neural Circuits and Behavior in London, have now harnessed and
refined this ability to visualize the connections between neurons.
The human brain consists of billions of neurons, each connect-
ed to thousands of others; mapping this tangled web of wires is
essential for understanding how it generates our emotions and
behaviors. Using engineered varieties of the rabies virus, we can
now observe what kinds of inputs a particular type of neuron
receives, how electrical signals move from the eye to the brain and
what types of neurons control posture to keep us from falling over.
Although the field is still in its infancy, in the future such informa-
tion could help us understand, and perhaps find remedies for,
neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.
Baskervilles evoked in Arthur Conan Doyle’s F ROM BITE TO BRAIN

fans to the profound impact of rabies on con- To begin with, the bite injects virions, or virus particles, into mus-
temporary British consciousness. With an abil- cle tissue. A bullet-shaped capsule containing a single strand of
RNA and proteins, the rabies virion is coated with a spiky protein,
ity to turn the most placid of pets into frothing, called a glycoprotein. This coat tricks motor neurons that send
raging beasts and an almost 100 percent mor- projections to the assault site into bringing the virus inside. Motor
tality rate, the rabies virus was one of the most neurons emit chemicals that cause muscles to contract, and they
are linked by a long chain of other neurons to the victim’s brain—
feared scourges in human history. the virus’s ultimate destination.
To be precise, the glycoprotein binds to a receptor on a synaptic
As early as 1804 experiments by German physician Georg terminal of the neuron: a point where it transmits signals to a
Gottfried Zinke indicated that the virus occurs in high concentra- neighboring neuron. Like a door through which one only exits the
tions in the saliva of an infected animal. The germ also acts to secure area of an airport—but not enters—the synaptic terminal
enhance the production of saliva while increasing the amount of guards a one-way passage—a synapse—between the neurons. By
it present in the mouth—explaining why rabid dogs drool. Louis convention, the “downstream” direction of the synapse is the flow
Pasteur went on to demonstrate in the 1880s that the brain, too, is of signals from one neuron to the next, all the way from the brain
infested with the virus. None of this is an accident. Two centuries to the muscles. The rabies virus travels upstream, however,
of research have now established that the rabies virus combines a because it has to get to the brain. As such, it fools the receptor to
propensity to be transferred from the saliva-soaked jaws of an enter a motor neuron through the exit gate.
infected animal with a diabolical ability to drive it into a frenzy of Viruses are adept at using their host’s cells for their own purpos-
aggressive biting. By a feat of evolution, the virus manipulates the es, but few can beat rabies at the task. Once inside, the intruder
host’s brain to ensure its own efficient transmission. throws off its glycoprotein disguise, and its RNA gets to work,
PAGE 68: CHRIS BJORNBERG S cience Source
IN BRIEF
The rabies virus is adapted to jumping from one Virologists and neuroscientists h ave harnessed The technology involves e ngineering the rabies
neuron to another as it makes its way from the site this capability to identify the neurons that send virus so that it glows, infects only the neurons of
of a bite to an animal’s brain. signals to the particular neurons they are studying. interest and can jump once across a connection.

using the cell’s materials and metabolism to produce copies of move between neurons, it turned out: the one that coded for gly-
itself, as well as of all its characteristic proteins. These compo- coprotein. A rabies virus that had the glycoprotein gene removed
nents then reassemble to create daughter virions. Whereas many from its genome could infect a cell, but once inside it was stuck
virus species replicate so rapidly that they force the infected cell there. This would be the discovery that thrust the virus into
to burst open, releasing the virions into the space between the mainstream neuroscience.
cells, the rabies virus strictly regulates its reproduction—produc- In 2007 a collaboration between neuroscientists Ian Wicker
ing just enough daughters to keep moving on. That way, it sham and Edward Callaway, both then at the Salk Institute for
refrains from causing so much damage that it alerts the immune Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., and virologists Conzelmann
system. Instead it leaves the host cell intact and crosses a synapse and Stefan Finke of the Friedrich Loeffler Institute in Germany
to a new upstream neuron. That sneakiness is one reason the dis- resulted in an ingenious system to map neuronal circuits. The
ease has such a long, symptomless incubation period, typically first step in their scheme was to swap the glycoprotein gene in the
one to three months in humans. rabies genome with one that coded for a fluorescent protein. The
Having thus jumped to a new neuron, the virion starts the engineered virion could not manufacture glycoproteins; instead
entire process again: undressing and copying itself and reassem- its RNA made copies of the fluorescent protein (along with all the
bling daughters that move into the next upstream neuron. In this other rabies proteins)—so the infected cell shone with a bright
way, the rabies virus picks a path through the nervous system, color of the experimenters’ choosing.
creeping from the motor neuron it first encountered in the mus- The second step was to provide glycoprotein in the targeted
cle tissue, through the spinal cord and into the brain. neuron via some other genetic mechanism. That way, the daugh-
By the early 2000s several research groups, including those of ter virions could don glycoprotein coats and jump once—but no
Gabriella Ugolini, now at the Paris-Saclay Institute of Neurosci- more. To that end, the scientists harnessed a very simple type of
ence, and Peter Strick, now at the University of Pittsburgh, were virus, called an adeno-associated virus (AAV) because it is often
pursuing the use of rabies as a tracer for neuronal circuits. Deci- found along with much larger viruses called adenoviruses. AAVs
phering the route that the virus took from the muscle to the brain contain a tiny amount of DNA. The Salk researchers inserted a
was a challenge, however. As a neuroscientist looking at a snap- gene for making the rabies glycoprotein into that DNA. The rabies
shot of neurons that had been infected with the virus, how could virion could harness the glycoprotein the gene manufactured to
you distinguish between the first jump of the invader from one jump across a single synapse. It could not, however, take the glyco-
neuron to the next, the second jump, and so on? protein gene with it because it was a segment of DNA, not of RNA.
The researchers initially solved this problem by euthanizing So when the virion had jumped into the next cell, it was stuck
laboratory animals shortly after infection, thereby allowing the again. At that point, a glance at the infected animal’s brain revealed
virus to spread across only one or two synapses. This approach populations of glowing cells across the nervous system that were
uncovered some of the major pathways in the brain that contrib- directly connected to any neuron researchers wanted to target.
ute to motor control. But it had its drawbacks. Not all connections There remained one problem, however. Injection of the rabies
between neurons are equal. A synapse may be strong (or weak), virus into the brain resulted in the direct infection of any neuron
making it more (or less) likely that a signal moving across it will that sent a projection into the injection site. Without a way to
prompt the target neuron to fire in response. Another might be restrict the initial infection of the rabies virus to particular neurons,
located close to the cell body instead of far away at the end of a scientists could not differentiate between neurons that were infect-
projection. And some neurons make a single link with a down- ed directly by the injected virus and those that were infected after
stream neuron, whereas others may make hundreds. This hetero- the virus had moved across a synapse. The solution would come
geneity means that the virus takes varying lengths of time to trav- from another area of virology: viruses that specifically affect birds.
el from one neuron to the next, adding a layer of uncertainty. In the wild, entire classes of viruses can be found that infect
What if the virus moves through two or three strong synapses only certain groups of animals. For example, the avian sarcoma
before it passes through a weak one? leukosis virus (ASLV) usually leads to cancer in chickens but can-
not normally infect mammalian cells. Like rabies, this virus has a
V IRAL ENGINEERING glycoprotein envelope, which comes in a variety of configurations.
To get around this problem, scientists needed to rejigger the Different ASLV glycoproteins are known as Env (for envelope), fol-
rabies virus. Molecular biologists have developed the amazing lowed by a label for the particular form. Each subtype binds to a
ability to manipulate DNA: swapping out genes has become as specific receptor. So, for example, EnvA binds to a receptor called
routine for them as making coffee in the lab kitchen. The wild TVA (for avian tumor receptor virus A). If a cell does not possess
rabies virus has no DNA to manipulate, however, only RNA. The the TVA receptor, it cannot be infected with an EnvA-coated virus.
advent of reverse genetics, which flips the normal genetic cycle by This selective interaction enables researchers to restrict the initial
making RNA from DNA, got around that hurdle. In 1994 Matthias infection of rabies virus to one type of neuron.
Schnell and Karl-Klaus Conzelmann, both then at the Federal By introducing the gene for EnvA glycoprotein in a rabies-infest-
Research Center for Virus Diseases of Animals in Tübingen, Ger- ed cell culture (a process known as pseudotyping), Wickersham,
many, produced a functional rabies virus in the lab from cloned Callaway and their colleagues replaced the native glycoprotein coat
DNA alone. They even altered the rabies genome: the RNA string on the rabies virus with the EnvA glycoprotein from the avian
that encodes its characteristic properties. virus. Thus altered, the rabies virus could not deceive any mam-
The ability to manipulate the genome swiftly led to a greater malian cells into letting it in. By endowing the neuron of interest,
understanding of how the different rabies genes contribute to the typically in a mouse brain, with the TVA receptor, neuroscientists
virus’s diverse skills. Only one gene was essential to its ability to could be assured that the rabies virus would infect only this cell.

Using Rabies to Track HACK 2: ALTERING THE GLYCOPROTEIN COAT
To restrict the rabies infection to the neurons of interest, experi
menters used the fact that glycoprotein comes in various types.
Brain Circuits The glycoprotein coats worn by certain viruses that target birds can
not normally enter mammalian cells. So by replacing the usual glyco
The rabies virus makes its way from the bite to the brain protein covering of the rabies virus with that possessed by an avian
by jumping from one neuron to the next. Virologists and virus, the scientists ensured that it could not infect mice, for example.
neuroscientists have harnessed and modified this ability Now they endowed only the neurons of interest in the laboratory
to see how neurons connect into complex circuits. mice with gates that let in avian glyco
proteins. The altered virus marked
6 In the brain,
only the neurons of interest,
virions spread from
NORMAL RABIES PATHOLOGY as well as those from which
neuron to neuron
The rabies virion, or virus particle, has a coat made they received signals.
of glycoprotein (a type of protein) that deceives a
nearby motor neuron into letting it in ● 1 . The virus
enters at a synaptic terminal, or gate, that is normally
used to send information to other neurons. Once inside,
the virus sheds its coat to release its genome, which
Hack 2
is made of RNA rather than DNA ● 2 . The RNA
target:
uses the neuron’s metabolic machinery to make
neuron of
multiple copies of itself and of the virus’s essen
interest
tial proteins ●3 . The proteins and RNA strands
reassemble into daughter virions ● 4 that “Upstream”
Rabies virion direction
move upstream into connected neurons ● 5 .
In this manner, the virus moves from neuron of rabies
to neuron on its way to the brain, where infection,
it continues to propagate ● 6 . toward brain
Neuron
Glycoprotein
Glycoprotein 5 Infection of
Initial infection point neighboring
1 Binding Motor neuron neuron
and entry
HACK 1: ENGINEERING RABIES RNA
Glycoprotein
To ensure that they could follow the exact route of the virus, sci
receptor
entists replaced the glycoprotein gene in its RNA with one for a
fluorescent protein. The modified RNA manufactured the glow
ing protein, so that the infected neuron glowed, but it could not Hack 1 target: 4 Assembly
make the glycoprotein. Thus, the virus could not move into the next RNA glycoprotein of daughter
neuron. Next, the researchers added into the target neuron a harm virion
less virus (called an adeno-associated virus, or AAV) that had a gene
for rabies glycoprotein added to its DNA. That gene made the glyco
protein, which the virions could harness to jump once—but only once. 2 Uncoating
3 Production of virion
components
The target neuron (in practice, a class of neurons) was also
supplied with an AAV containing the gene for rabies glycopro-
tein. Once inside, the rabies virus shed its chicken costume, system to understand the neural circuits that guided motor com-
picked up its normal cloak and jumped into upstream neurons. mands. Finding relatively low numbers of connections to motor
By engineering the rabies virus to infect—and hop only once neurons in the spinal cord or the brain, we suspected we were get-
from—a well-defined group of “starter” neurons, researchers ting an incomplete picture of the circuitry. Another issue was neu-
could now get a clear image of how the brain was wired. rotoxicity. Once the virus was in a cell, it would start to break
down and die within a couple of weeks. If the virus itself was caus-
TUNING RABIES ing individual neurons to alter their behavior, interpreting any
The simplicity and elegance of the delta-G rabies system (as its observations could be problematic.
inventors called it because of the altered glycoprotein) took the Schnell and Christoph Wirblich, both at Thomas Jefferson Uni-
neuroscience community by storm. Using it, researchers could versity, had done pioneering work on rabies virus biology, so we
see right away what kinds of neurons send signals to the neurons went to them for help. They knew right away that our problems
of interest. Like all new technologies, however, the scheme had its stemmed from the strain of virus that we were using. It had origi-
imperfections. Sometimes the number of connections labeled nally been developed for use in a rabies vaccine. Vaccines incorpo-
were rather small—on the order of 10 per starter neuron. rate special strains of the germ that humans have selected to
Around 2015 Thomas Reardon, Thomas Jessell, Attila Loson reproduce unusually rapidly so that the multitudinous daughter
czy and I, all then at Columbia University, were using the delta-G virions explode out of the infected cells and alert the immune sys-
72 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Kelly Murphy

tem before it is too late. That indicated a way to refine our research We found that the LVN of mice contains two anatomically dis-
tool. Because we were using mice in our studies, our virologist col- tinct types of neurons, each having different downstream connec-
laborators suggested that we instead try a strain that had been tions to parts of the nervous system. One group switches on very
tuned over many years to infect mouse neurons. quickly after your brain senses your body is unstable; these neu-
The parent virus of this strain had originally been isolated in rons act to extend the limbs to widen the base of support. Later, a
the wild and then “fixed” in the lab by being repeatedly passed second set of LVN neurons become active. These serve to strength-
through the brains of mice or through cell lines. It had thereby en and stabilize the joints in the same limb, enabling the body to
evolved to be a specialist at targeting the mouse nervous system. be pushed back to its original position. We could activate these
After assembling a neuronal tracing mechanism based on this neurons simply by switching on a blue light, delivered to the LVN
mouse-specific strain, we found that it labeled many more con- by a fiber-optic cable. When the light came on, the mice adjusted
nections than we had previously seen. Moreover, being an expert the positions of their limbs, as if to stop themselves from falling
at evading the mouse immune system, it made relatively small over—even when they were not off-balance.
amounts of each protein. As such, it placed less strain on the host Nao Uchida’s lab at Harvard University investigated a third
cell’s machinery and allowed neurons to remain relatively healthy. significant question: What are the functions of neurons that
We further altered our tracing system to replace the gene for release dopamine? Such “dopaminergic” neurons in two regions
the fluorescent protein in the rabies virus with one for a light-sen- of the brain, the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) and the
sitive protein, called channelrhodopsin (ChR), originally found in ventral tegmental area (VTA), have long been known to respond
green algae. When activated by blue light, this remarkable mole- to rewards. They would become very excited when a test animal
cule opened a channel that allowed positively charged ions to flow got a treat or when a sensory stimulus predicted that it was about
into the target neuron, prompting it to emit an electrical signal. to come. (Think of eating a candy bar, compared with hearing the
(The infected cell continued to glow, however, because we used a rustling of its wrapper.) To understand what types of information
version of ChR that included a fluorescent protein.) With this fine- the neurons were receiving, scientists needed to know how they
tuned rabies virus system, we could watch entire neuronal cir- were connected to other brain circuits. Using the delta-G system,
cuits fire during certain actions of the mouse or switch them on or the Harvard team found that dopaminergic neurons in the SNc
off—for up to a month after the virus had infected a neuron. That received information about the relevance of a stimulus: Is this
gave us ample time to conduct many of the tests we needed to sound of a candy wrapper going to get me a piece of chocolate? In
understand how specific circuits generate behavior. contrast, the VTA received information on the quality of the
reward: How good is this candy?
W IRING DIAGRAM As it happens, dopaminergic neurons in the SNc degenerate
Using different versions of the delta-G rabies system, neuroscien- in Parkinson’s. Intriguingly, Uchida and his colleagues also dis-
tists have probed many different circuits in the nervous system to covered that major inputs into such neurons in the SNc come
understand how they contribute to the perceptions and behaviors from the subthalamic nucleus, a small, lens-shaped region of the
of animals. Take, for instance, the visual system. When light enters brain that, along with similar nuclei, is involved in controlling
the eye, neurons at the back of the retina, called retinal ganglion movement. Exciting the subthalamic nucleus by means of an
cells, transmit signals to the brain. Neuroscientists traditionally inserted electrode, in a technique known as deep-brain stimula-
believed that this information travels to intermediate locations in tion, is often effective at relieving symptoms of Parkinson’s. Sur-
the brain, ultimately ending up in the cerebral cortex—the cele- mising that the inputs they had discovered explained why such
brated gray matter—where it is processed. Botond Roska’s group at stimulation works, the neuroscientists reasoned that targeting
the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Swit- other brain regions, which they had identified as also sending
zerland used the rabies system to trace the inputs from the retinal inputs to the SNc, might aid some Parkinson’s patients.
ganglion cells to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), an area of The combination of natural evolution and targeted engineer-
the brain that was regarded as just another relay to the cortex. ing has thus given neuroscientists a remarkably powerful tool.
The researchers demonstrated that the LGN contained three There is still much room for improvement. For example, will it be
different types of neurons, each likely processing visual informa- possible to engineer viruses that move downstream, labeling a
tion differently. Indeed, less than a third of the neurons served as neuron’s outputs instead of its inputs? Can we make a virus that
a relay, providing a direct line from the retina to the cortex. But labels only active connections between neurons, lighting up the
roughly another third received combinations of different inputs circuits that are involved in distinct behaviors? The time has
from one eye; the remaining neurons (about 40 percent) got sig- come for a virus that has manipulated and terrorized humans for
nals from both eyes. Thus, although the LGN lies at an early stage millennia to be manipulated to serve us.
of the visual circuit, most of its neurons integrate information
from multiple sources. The finding will likely illuminate the pro-
MORE TO EXPLORE
cess by which the brain interprets information from the eyes.
Monosynaptic Restriction of Transsynaptic Tracing from Single, Genetically Targeted
At Columbia, my co-workers and I investigated the neurons in Neurons. I an R. Wickersham et al. in N
euron, V
ol. 53, No. 5, pages 639–647; March 1, 2007.
the lateral vestibular nucleus (LVN), a brain region that tries to Whole-Brain Mapping of Direct Inputs to Midbrain Dopamine Neurons.
prevent us from falling over. Imagine being on a moving subway Mitsuko Watabe-Uchida et al. in N
euron, Vol. 74, No. 5, pages 858–873; June 7, 2012.
train that stops unexpectedly. Before you have had time to think, FROM OUR ARCHIVES
you shift your feet to compensate, stiffen your legs and perhaps The Other Half of the Brain. R . Douglas Fields; April 2004.
grab the nearest pole. How does the brain activate the right
groups of muscles so swiftly in a variety of similar situations?

THIS
N AT U R A L D I S A S T E R S
WAY
OUTEvacuating an entire city
ahead of a threatening storm
is all but impossible.
New risk maps highlight
who really needs to leave
By Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio,
Devika Subramanian and Robert M. Stein
STORM STRUGGLES: W hen Hurricane Harvey aimed at Houston

in 2017, officials had to weigh the dangers of inundation against
the perils of mass exodus.


Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio is a civil and
W
environmental engineer at Rice University.
Devika Subramanian is

a computer scientist at Rice.
Robert M. Stein is

a political scientist at Rice.
e did not intend to hurt anyone. Our goal had been to help
our neighbors in the Houston area get out of danger. Yet
in 2015 the phone started ringing, and Internet messages
started piling up, saying we were making safety worse. “You
are doing a disservice,” said one public official from a district
on Houston’s northern edge. A meteorologist chastised us:
“How come you are telling people they are at low risk for
flooding when there is flooding all around them?”
The messages were about our Web-based map, the Storm killing 23 onboard. So when Hurricane Harvey bore down on
Risk Calculator (SRC), which we developed and operated for the Houston last August, Mayor Sylvester Turner refused to evacu-
city. We had designed it to tell residents which of them should ate. “You literally cannot put 6.5 million people on the road,” he
flee in the face of an oncoming hurricane because their homes said at the time. “If you think the situation right now is bad, you
could be destroyed and who could stay because their house was give an order to evacuate, you are creating a nightmare.”
likely to remain safe. The dangers were real: this region had In the years after Rita and Ike, the three of us—an engineer,
been pummeled by Hurricanes Rita and Ike several years earli- a computer scientist and a political scientist focused on public
er. But clearly something about our map had gone wrong. safety—decided to help Houston fix this nightmarish situation.
When cities near the coast like Houston face severe storms, We built our interactive SRC map to show safe and unsafe
evacuations seem the obvious way to protect people. But mov- regions in the face of hurricane-force winds and storm surge.
ing millions of people carries its own dangers. When Rita took But we learned, after the complaints started piling up, that our
aim at our area in 2005, officials told everyone to leave. Giant map was focused on the wrong things. Houstonians and people
traffic jams turned Interstates 45 and 10 and U.S. Route 59 into in the surrounding area, Harris County, worry about major
parking lots as people at low risk fled, blocking escape routes floods from heavy rainstorms, not just hurricanes, because the
for individuals who needed them most—residents directly in region gets a lot more of the former. People also wanted risk
the path of high winds, heavy rain and storm surge. A few died information on a much finer scale than our map provided.
on the road in the tremendous heat. A bus evacuating residents This situation pushed us into a major research project to
PRECEDING PAGES: MARCUS YAM Getty Images
from a nursing home caught fire, igniting an oxygen tank and understand people’s views of risk and to develop new sources
IN BRIEF
In big cities, getting out of a storm path has pro- The trouble h as been that warnings are too gener- A new type o f risk map, being tested in flood-prone
voked mass panic and clogged escape routes, with al, lumping together people at high and low risk for Houston, uses fine-scale data to pinpoint high-risk
deadly results. things like hurricane damage and flooding. homes and reassure those who can safely stay.

NOT JUST A RAINSTORM: I n Houston, it does not take
of data. As a result, we have rebuilt our risk map from the a hurricane to flood neighborhoods. Heavy downpours
ground up, using more refined data about the dangers that tru- frequently imperil people and homes, as this storm did in 2016.
ly affect homes and residents in our area. The new risk map,
which will start live testing next year, integrates better data
about more types of storms with cutting-edge artificial-intelli- Hurricane Ike, the accuracy level in a typical square was better
gence technology, all to show people the risks to individual city than 70 percent. Previous evacuation maps would give only a
blocks, as well as the best routes out. If the model works as we prediction based on things such as storm surges across an
hope it will, it can be used by emergency planners to deploy entire zip code, which can cover hundreds of square kilometers.
resources in ways that have never before been available and to So the new chart was a big improvement.
save more lives. To picture the SRC in operation, imagine a hurricane in the
Gulf of Mexico destined to hit Houston in a couple of days. One
CALCULATED RISKS resident, Alice, simply needed to type in her address, and she
When we started the SRC project, we wanted to provide esti- would see a map. A color-coded, low-medium-high scale would
mates of the main risks from hurricanes, including damage indicate damage chances from wind, storm surge, bayou flood-
from storm surge, wind, rising water in bayous and power out- ing and power outages. Her risks for wind damage would be
ages. We used data on real-time wind fields from the National fairly high. Alice’s two-story home, built in the 1960s, faced an
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with rainfall open park in front of a bayou, and winds do not slow down in
levels reported by the Harris County’s Flood Warning System open areas. And the bayou would fill with wind-driven rain and
and home characteristics from the Harris County Appraisal raise her chances of flooding.
District, such as the date of construction—which can reveal how Another user, Bob, with a house about two kilometers away,
DAVID J. PHILLIP AP Photo
strongly the roof is fastened to the walls. The resulting model would have a lower risk. Bob’s home, built in the 1990s, is just
predicted risk of house damage or power outage in different one story high and surrounded by trees. The lower house would
areas, in one-kilometer squares. When we tested it against vari- catch less wind. The trees also would slow the winds, reducing
ous simulated hurricanes, as well as the actual damage from their impact, and his more modern roof-to-wall connections

Unfortunately, the map was not providing
them the right information. It was designed to
predict the effects of Gulf water driven inland by
a hurricane and damage from 120-kilometer-per-
hour-plus winds. Several dozen centimeters of
precipitation dropping straight from the sky had
different effects. Inland areas could get a lot of
water, for example, but our map would not high-
light that as a risk. That is when we started
to get the complaining phone calls.
The last straw came in 2016, when
the cloud server that held our SRC
program was hacked. Hackers cut
off our access and demanded mon-
ey to give it back. It was a classic
ransomware move. We had had
enough. The more often the site
appeared to give out misinforma-
tion, the greater the chance that peo-
ple would lose trust in the program. It
was time to shut the map down. We would
pay no blackmail. But we would rebuild a risk
calculator based on the actual needs of the Hous-
ton population, not on hurricane season alone.
R EDRAWING THE MAP

We started by reaching out to a close colleague,
Rick Wilson, a behavioral social scientist at Rice
University, who studies decision making. Togeth-
er we designed a series of online experiments,
using risk maps, in which hundreds of Housto-
DANGER ZONES: This map of a two-square-kilometer swath of Houston, from nians were randomly assigned to various levels
the computer program HARVEY, predicts effects of a 20-centimeter rainstorm. of data resolution and risk type. We focused on
One resident, Alice, would be flooded while another, Bob, would be at less risk. the time spent searching a map: more time indi-
cated citizens’ interest in storm risks and their
willingness to take action to prepare. Although
would make his structure stronger. (Snapping tree branches, big hurricanes—say, category four—got the most notice, atten-
however, could come down on power lines and make electrical tion disappeared if the geographical data on storm effects were
outages very likely.) Bob was also farther away from the bayou, not local. People were not interested in maps divided into areas
lowering chances of flood damage. Better informed of their that were a kilometer wide or partitioned by zip code. But when
risks, Alice could decide to leave, while Bob could choose to stay, the map showed data on almost every block, hundreds of users
even though they were facing exactly the same storm. sought more information. We also learned that, particularly in
The calculator was popular right after the city announced it inland areas, projected rain amounts got more interest than
was up and running in June 2012. About 40,000 people used it in projected storm surge levels. Serious rain events affect people’s
the days immediately after the launch. Usage soon leveled off to mobility, productivity and safety.
approximately 1,000 viewers a month and stayed that way for These behavioral experiments showed that individuals pay
the next several years. But there was something odd. Houston the most attention to risks they perceive as most relevant to
HESAM TALEBIYAN, JAYANT PATIL AND KYLE SHEPHERD Rice University
did not have any hurricanes from the time we launched through their own situation. This is obvious to us in hindsight, but
2016, yet map traffic spiked during large rainfall events. A heavy think of how it contrasts with the way most storm information
downpour can cause big problems. The city sprawls, and rapid is handed out today—official blanket statements for rare events
urban and suburban growth has replaced water-absorbing covering areas of many hundreds of square kilometers, such as
meadows and stream channels with miles of concrete, which entire counties and zip codes.
shunts water into neighborhoods and floods houses. In 2015 we With our new focus on local events, we began to build a sys-
had the Memorial Day flood and the Halloween flood. In 2016 we tem around rainfall runoff and accumulation. We call it the Hur-
had the Tax Day flood. Twenty to 30 centimeters of rain—eight to ricane and Rain Vectorized Exposure Yielder, conveniently
12 inches—fell during events like these; some bayous could not abbreviated to HARVEY. Our computer model HARVEY has a
channel away all the water and topped their banks, and homes much finer geographical terrain grid than our earlier map, using
were ruined. When local forecasters started talking about sever- cells that are only several square meters, instead of square kilo-
al hours of heavy rain, people turned to our map. meters. A single street can have many of these new squares, and

the total for the city is more than 100 million of them. This con- With the erratic rainfall patterns across the city for any single
figuration provides much more precise estimates of overland event, users like Alice and Bob may find very different estimates
water flows and their depths when it rains intensely. of street flooding around their homes, their workplaces and the
We used a variety of sources to derive these estimates. We routes in between. Our HARVEY system will show users like
had the history of National Weather Service forecasts and data, them the dangers that affect route choices, the possibility of get-
of course, but our model also incorporates the locations of calls ting trapped at their locations and the likely levels of flooding
to Houston’s 311 city information service to report local flood- for homes during rainfall events. It will help the city govern-
ing. We can also draw on emergency calls to fire and police ment allocate emergency and planning resources in advance,
departments asking for help. Repeated calls from a particular allowing first responders, such as the fire department, to get to
location indicate recurring trouble spots. Harris County has a people in trouble faster. Storm-mitigation projects can be locat-
network of rain gauges, and we pull data from them. (We are ed in areas that need them most.
also testing a wireless network of street-level flood sensors.) Our plan right now is to publically launch a beta version of
Our prediction models also include radar data that show how HARVEY in 2019, designed specifically for residents of the hard-
hit Brays Bayou watershed. This waterway
crisscrosses a neighborhood called Meyer-
Our HARVEY system will show land, where homeowners have been sur-
prised by flooding multiple times during
users the dangers that affect the past five years. Their residences have
been wrecked, rebuilt and wrecked again.
route choices, the possibility On many occasions people have been stuck
in these houses, watching the water rise.
of getting trapped and the likely We hope to give them better and earlier
warnings. Our next step will be to expand
levels of flooding for homes. the system to reach the rest of the city. Our
team is entering into a collaborative agree-
ment with the city of Houston, the Kinder
Institute for Urban Research, and the
much water is held in the clouds heading for the city and how Severe Storm Prediction, Education, & Evacuation from Disas-
fast the wind is moving them. Slower winds give the clouds ters (SSPEED) Center to test and deploy HARVEY in stages
time to dump a great deal of water. That scenario produces a lot toward future city-wide coverage. And if the model works for
of nonhurricane flooding and was behind the inundation creat- Houston, it could be adapted to other cities across the world that
ed by slow-moving Hurricane Harvey last year. face similar problems from severe weather.
All these data are superimposed on a high-resolution terrain A changing global climate is going to make rainfall worse in
map, derived from the Houston-Galveston Area Council’s laser- our region, according to conclusions reached by a 2018 Houston
driven remote-sensing system, which captures minute differ- severe storm conference organized by the SSPEED center. Storms
ences in ground height. The entire thing is integrated by AI pro- will stagnate more frequently, dumping more rain as a conse-
grams that use fancy-termed techniques such as ensemble quence. Tools such as HARVEY will provide flood estimates at a
regression models, deep-learning algorithms and high-dimen- scale that public officials and private citizens seek as they try to
sional vector spaces. But the basic point is they are much more plan for this intensifying chronic rainfall and runoff. Most impor-
capable of combining different types of data sets than were the tant, these tools will give people who must live under these
engineering models and mathematics we used for our original clouds the ability to answer, for their own safety and that of oth-
storm calculator. ers, one urgent question: Should I stay, or should I go?
We have tested HARVEY by giving it several sets of initial
conditions seen prior to storms since 2015 and have asked the
program to produce flood estimates for multiple places across MORE TO EXPLORE
the city. The predictions HARVEY has churned out have Engineering-Based Hurricane Risk Estimates and Comparison to Perceived Risks
matched actual field observations of these storms well. The pro- in Storm-Prone Areas. L eonardo Dueñas-Osorio et al. in Natural Hazards Review,
gram does best with heavy downpours, more than five centime- Vol. 13, No. 1, pages 45– 56; February 2012.
How Risk Perceptions Influence Evacuations from Hurricanes and Compliance with
ters—two inches—per hour that last several hours, and in spots Government Directives. R obert Stein et al. in P olicy Studies Journal, V
ol. 41, No. 2,
with poor drainage because of bayou overflows and bay tides. pages 319–342; May 2013.
For smaller events, we will be calibrating HARVEY one water- Building and Validating Geographically Refined Hurricane Wind Risk Models for
shed at a time over multiyear periods, to capture local factors Residential Structures. D evika Subramanian et al. in N atural Hazards Review, V ol. 15,
No. 3, Article No. 04014002; August 2014.
and longer-term effects of climate change. Efficient Resilience Assessment Framework for Electric Power Systems Affected
What would this mean for our worried Houstonians Bob and by Hurricane Events. A kwasi F. Mensah and Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio in Journal
Alice? Our new map would provide them different levels of risk, of Structural Engineering, Vol. 142, No. 8, Article No. C4015013; August 2016.
with more attention paid to the history of flooding near Alice’s FROM OUR ARCHIVES
house and the height of the land around Bob’s. The key differ- After the Deluge. J ohn A. Carey; December 2011.
ence is that even if Bob and Alice lived two blocks apart, rather
than two kilometers, they would be given different risk levels.

RECOMMENDED
By Andrea Gawrylewski
CHARRED REMAINS of an African elephant poached

Poached: for bushmeat in Chobe National Park, Botswana.
Inside the
Dark World of
Wildlife Trafficking
by Rachel Love Nuwer.
Da Capo Press,
2018 ($28)
From the swampy wilderness o f southern Vietnam, where hunters pursue threatened pangolins, to a bustling wholesale traditional medicine market
in Guangzhou, China, where the pinecone-resembling mammal’s scales are sold, journalist Nuwer brings the reader along on her globe-trotting
mission to understand the complex, thriving world of the illegal wildlife trade. She interviews hunters who capture endangered species, practitioners
of Chinese traditional medicine who ingest rhino horn powder for unproved benefits and the conservationists trying to stem the slaughter of dozens
of dwindling species. Forces such as entrenched poverty and corruption prevent easy solutions to the wildlife trafficking, especially given the limited
resources of local governments and existing reserves. While the accounts can be gut-wrenching, Nuwer finds rays of hope in the park rangers and
other conservation experts who are dedicating their lives to saving some of the earth’s most majestic creatures. —Andrea Thompson
On the Future: Prospects for Humanity The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Laika’s Window:
by Martin Rees. Princeton University Press, Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety T he Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog
2018 ($18.95) at the Turn of the Twentieth Century by Kurt Caswell. Trinity University Press,
by Deborah Blum. Penguin Press, 2018 ($28) 2018 ($24.95)
Powerful new technologies—
from gene editing to geoengi- Milk whitened with chalk. In 1957 t he Soviet Union sent
neering—are poised to remake P eas made greener with its second satellite into orbit
life as we know it. These inno- copper. Chemicals added to around Earth, this one carrying
vations could prove fruitful or meat to prolong a pinkish, a dog named Laika. Sputnik 2
damaging, depending on how we deploy them. fresh hue. In the late 1800s made 2,570 revolutions over
Astrophysicist Rees neatly packages his sprawling U.S. food manufacturers took these liberties, five months before its fiery reentry in our planet’s
subject matter into a guidebook for the responsi- along with dozens more, to trim costs. Journalist atmosphere. Laika did not survive her journey—
ble use of science to build a healthy and equitable Blum chronicles the efforts of one chemist to an outcome the space agency anticipated. Writer
future for humanity. He ponders the prospects of fight back against these dangerous practices. Caswell profiles the program that trained dozens
long-term palliative care: Should doctors use tech- Her subject, Harvey Washington Wiley, was of such “space dogs” as test subjects for early mis-
nology to keep vegetative patients alive indefinite- an outspoken political actor, who sparred with sions. Plucked from the streets of Moscow, Laika
ly? And should “objective” artificially intelligent the likes of Theodore Roosevelt in an effort to endured extreme gravitational forces, vibration
JASON EDWARDS Getty Images
computers recommend surgeries or launch bombs regulate the industry. Blum draws from her and long periods of isolation. She was the first ani-
instead of biased humans? Such questions consti- meticulous research to re-create the battle mal to orbit Earth. The program was a “tipping
tute Rees’s spirited assessment of technology’s between regulation in the name of consumer point” for space exploration, Caswell writes, but
role in shaping our future—whether constructive protection and production in the name of profits. Laika’s treatment was undeniably cruel. The book
or catastrophic. —Daniel Ackerman —Maya Miller is meant as a testament to her experience.

Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine SKEPTIC
(www.skeptic.com) and a Presidential Fellow at V IE W IN G T H E WO R L D
Chapman University. His new book is Heavens on Earth: W IT H A R ATI O N A L E Y E
The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia.
Follow him on Twitter @michaelshermer
A Mysterious In Bering’s case, it first came as a closeted gay teenager “in an

intolerant small Midwestern town” and later with unemploy
Change of Mind
ment at a status apex in his academic career (success can lead to
unreasonably high standards for happiness, later crushed by the
vicissitudes of life). Yet most oppressed gays and fallen academ
ics don’t want to kill themselves. “In the vast majority of cases,
Why do people die by suicide? people kill themselves because of other people,” Bering adduc
By Michael Shermer es. “Social problems—especially a hypervigilant concern with
what others think or will think of us if only they knew what we
Anthony Bourdain (age 61). Kate Spade (55). Robin Williams (63). perceive to be some unpalatable truth—stoke a deadly fire.”
Aaron Swartz (26). Junior Seau (43). Alexander McQueen (40). Like most human behavior, suicide is a multicausal act. Teas
Hunter S. Thompson (67). Kurt Cobain (27). Sylvia Plath (30). ing out the strongest predictive variables is difficult, particular
Ernest Hemingway (61). Alan Turing (41). Virginia Woolf (59). ly because such internal cognitive states may not be accessible
Vincent van Gogh (37). By the time you finish reading this list even to the person experiencing them. We cannot perceive the
of notable people who died by suicide, somewhere in the world neurochemical workings of our brain, so internal processes are
another person will have done the same, about one every 40 typically attributed to external sources. Even those who experi
seconds (around 800,000 a year), making suicide the 10th lead ence suicidal ideation may not understand why or even if and
ing cause of death in the U.S. Why? when ideation might turn into action.
According to the prominent psychologist Jesse Bering of the This observation is reinforced by Ralph Lewis, a psychiatrist
University of Otago in New Zealand, in his authoritative book at the University of Toronto, who works with cancer patients
Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, and others facing death, whom I interviewed for my Science
2018), “the specific issues leading any given person to become Salon podcast about his book Finding Purpose in a Godless
suicidal are as different, of course, as their DNA—involving World ( Prometheus Books, 2018). “A lot of people who are clini
chains of events that one expert calls ‘dizzying in their variety.’ ” cally depressed will think that the reason they’re feeling that
Indeed, my short list above includes people with a diversity of way is because of an existential crisis about the meaning of life
ages, professions, personality and gender. Depression is com or that it’s because of such and such a relational event that hap
pened,” Lewis says. “But that’s people’s own subjective
attribution when in fact they may be depressed for rea
sons they don’t understand.” In his clinical practice, for
example, he notes, “I’ve seen many cases where these exis
tential crises practically evaporated under the influence of
an antidepressant.”
This attributional error, Lewis says, is common: “At a
basic level, we all misattribute the causes of our mental
states, for example, attributing our irritability to some
thing someone said, when in fact it’s because we’re hungry,
tired.” In consulting suicide attempt survivors, Lewis re
marks, “They say, ‘I don’t know what came over me. I don’t
know what I was thinking.’ This is why suicide prevention
is so important: because people can be very persuasive in
arguing why they believe life—their life—is not worth liv
ing. And yet the situation looks radically different months
later, sometimes because of an antidepressant, sometimes
because of a change in circumstances, sometimes just a
mysterious change of mind.”
monly fingered in many suicide cases, yet most people suffering If you have suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Pre
from depression do not kill themselves (only about 5 percent vention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or phone a family member or
Bering says), and not all suicide victims were depressed. “Around friend. And wait it out, knowing that in time you will most like
43 percent of the variability in suicidal behavior among the gen ly experience one of these mysterious changes of mind and once
eral population can be explained by genetics,” Bering reports, again yearn for life.
“while the remaining 57 percent is attributable to environmen
tal factors.” Having a genetic predisposition for suicidality, cou
pled with a particular sequence of environmental assaults on Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
one’s will to live, leads some people to try to make the pain stop. or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]
Illustration by Izhar Cohen October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 81

ANTI GRAVITY
T H E O N G O IN G S E A R C H F O R Steve Mirsky h as been writing the Anti Gravity column since
FU N DA M E N TA L FA R C E S a typical tectonic plate was about 36 inches from its current location.
He also hosts the S cientific American podcast Science Talk.
at “a record low in the Arctic (around the North

Pole) right now and near record low in the Antarc-
tic (around the South Pole).” The Trump claim and
the response were both published by the Pulitzer
Prize–winning organization PolitiFact. But I don’t
know anyone there.
I was reading a book. The book is called T he
Death of Truth. The writer’s name is Michiko Kaku-
tani. She wrote that the Trump administration
ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Preven-
tion to avoid using the terms “science-based” and
“evidence-based.” She says that in another book
called 1 984 t here’s a society that does not even have
the word “science” because, as she quoted from that
other book, “ ‘the empirical method of thought, on
which all the scientific achievements of the past
were founded,’ represents an objective reality that
threatens the power of Big Brother to determine
what truth is.” Is what she wrote true? I don’t know.
And why can’t two plus two be five? Or three. Or
both at the same time. That’s true freedom.
Kakutani also wrote that a man named Rush
Limbaugh was on the radio and said that “The Four
Corners of Deceit are government, academia, sci-
ence and the media.” In my country, we’re sup-
posed to have government “by the people.” So I
think I might be in the government. And I have
been in academia. And I have a job in media cover-
True Story
ing science. I feel shame.
Maria Konnikova is a science journalist. She also has a doc-
torate in psychology. So she should feel shame, too. She wrote
an article for a place called Politico entitled “Trump’s Lies vs.
Look, I know what I know. I think Your Brain.” She wrote, “If he has a particular untruth he wants
By Steve Mirsky to propagate ... he simply states it, over and over. As it turns out,
sheer repetition of the same lie can eventually mark it as true in
I distinctly remember t he moment when I started to feel my mind our heads.” She also wrote that because of how our brains work,
go. It was Tuesday, July 31. Or what happened was that day, and I “Repetition of any kind—even to refute the statement in ques-
heard about it the next day. Or I saw it live as it happened. Those tion—only serves to solidify it.”
details are not important. The only important thing is that I Anyway, groceries. I was sure that I had bought groceries at
remember it distinctly. President Donald J. Trump was at a rally in some point during the week before the president said that I
Florida, explaining the need for strong voter-identification laws. would have needed to show a picture ID to buy those groceries.
“You know, if you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need And I did not remember showing or even being asked to show a
a picture on a card, you need ID,” he said. “You go out and you picture ID to buy those groceries. The cashiers usually only want-
want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture.” ed pictures of Alexander Hamilton or Andrew Jackson against a
I had, of course, heard the president say many, many things green background—these pictures are money. Or my credit card,
over the years that were true ... I mean, not true. The Washing- which does not have my picture on it. I’d need to look at it again
ton Post tallied 4,229 “false or misleading claims” by Trump in to say for sure whether it has my picture on it.
his first 558 days in office. Can you believe that? I could. Before And so I started to remember showing my photo ID to buy
my mind went. groceries. Everything was all right. The struggle was finished. I
Here’s an example of my conundrum. Early this year, Trump had won the victory over myself. I loved Big Lying.
refuted the idea of climate change: “The ice caps were going to
melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting
records, so okay, they’re at a record level.” But a researcher at Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter
the National Snow and Ice Data Center said that polar ice was or send a letter to the editor: [email protected]
82 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Matt Collins

S cienti f ic A m erican O N L I N E
FIND ORIGINAL ARTICLES AND IMAGES IN
50, 100 & 150 YEARS AGO
THE Scientific American ARCHIVES AT IN N OVATI O N A N D D I S C OV E RY A S C H R O NI C L E D IN S c ientific A meric an
scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa Compiled by Daniel C. Schlenoff
OCTOBER
1968 Astronomy
Radio-Wave
“Almost exactly a year ago a small

place a sufficient quantity of it
in the masks. But as the chemist
made more of a specialty of the
than the fall in price, and the busi-
ness is profitable, while here the
cost of production and manufac-
group of workers operating a new poison-gas field, and introduced ture is now more than it was in
radio telescope at the University more variety into his attack, an 1830, as negroes have nearly tri-
of Cambridge were surprised equally inclusive defense became pled in value. I do not think there
to find that weak and spasmodic necessary. After exhaustive tests, is an estate on the island that pays
radio signals coming from a point the chemists find that first rank 1968 current expenses. The amount
among the stars were, on closer must be given to charcoal proof depreciation of lands, buildings,
inspection, a succession of pulses duced from peach stones, the pits etc., leaves but about $150 per
as regularly spaced as a broadcast of apricots, olives and cherries, year for each negro; a sum not
time service. With skepticism and the shells of brazil nuts and sufficient to cover the interest
bordering on incredulity, the walnuts. Every mask requires sev- on their cost, deaths, and yearly
Cambridge group began systemat- en pounds of seeds and shells.” depreciation, and yet the cry is,
ic observations intended to reveal more hands.’ ”
the nature of these strange signals.
After all, seasoned radio astrono-
mers do not make the mistake
1868 Sugar and
Slavery
“From a correspondent in Havana,
1918
Slavery was not completely abolished
in Cuba until 1886.
of supposing that every queer sig- Cuba, Ezra K. Dod, we have re Taking a Stand
nal on their records is truly celes- ceived a communication relating on Darwin
tial; in 99 cases out of 100, pecu- his experiences on sugar estates “Dr. J. D. Hooker, in his recent
liar ‘variable radio sources’ turn on the ‘ever faithful Isle,’ and ask- address to the British association
out to be some kind of electrical ing for improvement in our sugar at Norwich, says: ‘Ten years have
interference—from a badly sup- interests. ‘It is well known that elapsed since the publication of
pressed automobile ignition cir- in France the cost of manufacture “The Origin of Species by Natural
cuit, for example, or a faulty con- has been reduced in greater ratio 1868 Selection,” and it is hence not too
nection in a nearby refrigerator. early now to ask what progress
We finally concluded that the only that bold theory has made in sci-
plausible explanation for these entific estimation. The scientific
mystifying radio sources was that writers who have publicly rejected
they were caused in some way the theories of continuous revolu-
by the vibrations of a collapsed tion or of natural selection take
star, such as a white dwarf or a their stand on physical grounds,
neutron star. —Antony Hewish” or metaphysical, or both. Of those
Hewish shared the 1974 Nobel who rely on the metaphysical, their
Prize in Physics for his research arguments are usually strongly
in radio astrophysics. imbued with prejudice, and even
odium, and, as such, are beyond
1918 Poison
Defense against
Gas
“There is no place in trench war-
the pale of scientific criticism.
Having myself been a student of
moral philosophy in a northern
fare for individual oxygen tanks. university, I entered on my scien-
Accordingly, the gas mask is not tific career full of hopes that meta-
a respirator providing an artificial physics would prove a useful Men-
atmosphere for the wearer to tor, if not quite a science. I soon,
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, VOL. CXIX, NO. 15; OCTOBER 12, 1918
breathe; it is a sieve making the however, found that it availed me

poisoned air about him fit for his nothing, and I long ago arrived
use. In the beginning it was sim- at the conclusion, so well put by
ple enough to design a mask that Louis Agassiz, where he says, ‘We
would do this. The Germans were trust that the time is not distant
using only chlorine gas, and this is when it will be universally under-
a very active chemical; it will com- stood that the battle of the evi-
bine with almost anything in the 1918: An American dispatch rider steers his motorcycle dences will have to be fought on
world. It was easy to find a compe- through a “gas soaked” village near the front lines in Europe. the field of physical science and
tent reagent for such a gas, and to He wears an early protective hood against poison gas. not on that of the metaphysical.’ ”

GRAPHIC SCIENCE
Text by Mark Fischetti | Graphic by Lucy Reading-Ikkanda
Honey, I Shrunk the Mammals

Where humans migrate, mammals become smaller
A Mammals got bigger for 65 million years Mammals got smaller in the past 125,000 years
Mean Body Mass (kilograms)

1,000
Sudden plunge corresponds with the advent

of throwable and launchable weapons.
Global Global mean 1 million years ago

South America
100
North America
Eurasia
Africa
Australia
Global mean today
10
Downturns correspond with

hominin spread across a continent.
1
65 60 55 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 Today 125 100 75 50 25 Today
Millions of Years Ago Thousands of Years Ago Projected (+200 years)
For millions of years the extinction rates among B Cows Rule the Future
large, medium and small land mammals were simi- In 200 years, elephants could be gone, and cattle could be the
lar. Yet the large species started dying off much fast- biggest beasts remaining on land—if humans continue aggressive
er, about 100,000 years ago in Eurasia, 50,000 years hunting and habitat destruction.
ago in Australia, and 15,000 years ago in North and
Number of Land Mammal Species Projected in 200 Years
South America ● A . These shifts, it turns out, corre- SOURCE: “BODY SIZE DOWNGRADING OF MAMMALS OVER THE LATE QUATERNARY,”
400
spond with when a hominin species—Homo erectus, Extinct Mammoth
Homo neanderthalensis and especially Homo sapi- Projected to exist (10,000 kg)
ens—spreads across a continent. “There is an as-
300 House cat
BY FELISA A. SMITH ET AL., IN S CIENCE, VOL. 360; APRIL 20, 2018
toundingly tight fit” among the data sets, says Feli- (6.5 kilograms)
sa A. Smith, a paleoecologist at the University of New
Mexico, who led the research. Hefty animals suffered Cattle
200
from being hunted, as well as habitat change and (800 kg)
fires caused by human activities. The imbalance
continues today, leaving far fewer massive animals,
100
even though small ones go extinct, too. Two centu-
ries from now, cows may top the size chart ● B . “We
have changed the entire Earth,” Smith says. “Now
0
we have to be nature’s stewards.” 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Body Mass (grams, log scale)

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How did Dr. J. D. Hooker view the theory of natural selection?

How did Dr. J. D. Hooker view the theory of natural selection?

What impact have humans had on mammal body size over time?

What impact have humans had on mammal body size over time?

SPECIAL

REPORT WHAT’S WRONG WITH SCIENCE—AND HOW TO FIX IT PAGE

EARTHQUAKES IN THE SKY

THE UPSIDE OF RABIES

50 How to Fix Science

68 Rabies on the Brain

conclusion, the researchers investigated the computer

October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 1

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Proof of the Moskowitz, we are looking at the challenges of research today. In

4 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Nick Higgins

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“It may not be have conscious experiences; (2) my tooth-

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EDITOR IN CHIEF AND SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT

physicists think that dark matter is a hith- EDITORIAL

are concerned. Gravitation is a universal NEWS

Regarding Eason’s question: If space- COPY AND PRODUC TION

and gaseous phases. M ARKE TING AND BUSINE SS DE VELOPMENT

8 Scientific American, October 2018

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birth control that a woman might take contraceptives, ranging

Illustration by Samantha Mash October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 9

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10 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Jori Bolton

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Glacier emptying into Antarctica’s Pine Island Bay

12 Scientific American, October 2018

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• A blind woman’s unusual condition

the near-freezing water. By measuring how

J O I N T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N O N L I N E Visit Scientific American on Facebook and Twitter

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14 Scientific American, October 2018 Illustration by Thomas Fuchs

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Hits the Trump administration to halt the lawsuit, filed

October 2018, ScientificAmerican.com 15

ABI WARNER G etty Images

B I O LO G Y Díez and his team Developing mouse fetus

16 Scientific American, October 2018

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A Conversation with the

Only Physicist in Congress

18 Scientific American, October 2018

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moves it, leaving less cerium behind to be

Untitled-222 1 23/08/2018 16:23

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sibilities. Women may

books.scientificamerican.com suffer stronger whip­

Scientific American is a registered

20 Scientific American, October 2018

books.scientificamerican.com suffer stronger whip