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 Are we the only
species to have

FROM THE been through a

Stone Age?
–›p80

EDITOR CONTRIBUTORS

The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve come to know my body’s
DR KATIE MACK
immune system. In my twenties, a cold would hit me like a
The Sun will, inevitably, wipe
train. Fevers would burn like a furnace, I would sleep like the out all life on Earth and likely
dead and then, in a few days, it’d be over. consume the planet itself, but
These days everything’s drawn out. A cold can take weeks probably not in the way you
to clear and before it even starts I can spot the warning signs. expect. Astrophysicist Katie
First come the aches, then the hot, dry eyes, and finally an details Earth’s demise. –›p28
overwhelming weariness. These signals mean the bugs are winning and I’ve
got weeks of sore throats, chesty coughs and angry sinuses in my future.
This is when the advice I’ve learned during my time at BBC Science Focus DR MICHELLE GRIFFIN
comes in handy: I guzzle some vitamin C and zinc (studies have shown they Few people feel like they’re
can reduce the length of a cold) and try to sleep. Sleeping is probably the getting enough sleep, but
single, best thing you can do to give your immune system a helping hand. women are missing out on
more of it than men.
Chicken soup is good too, but that’s more for the soul.
Michelle, an expert on
My point is, the idea of turning back the clock and going back to the days women’s health, unravels
when my immune system functioned more like a freight train than a the reasons why. –›p30
donkey and carriage, is appealing. As it turns out, that might not just be
COVER: SAM FALCONER THIS PAGE: MARCO CERVI/BBC, ZACH LEVI-RODGERS/BBC, GETTY IMAGES, NATALIA KOKKINOS

wishful thinking. Head to p68 to find out what the latest science says about
sprucing up your body’s natural defences. MARCUS CHOWN
Also in this issue, we’ve sent a photographer to the opening of a new Marcus, an award-winning
mega-machine being built in China to hunt for neutrinos. The so-called science writer and former
‘ghost particles’ have been driving scientists mad for years. If we can astronomer, peeks inside the
capture them, these ghost particles would give us answers to some of the giant machine being built in
biggest questions we have about the origin of the Universe. As you’d guess China to detect neutrinos,
the Universe’s most elusive
by their nickname, they’re hard to catch, so it’s worth a look inside the
particles. –›p46
incredible facility being built to do it. Turn to p46 to see for yourself.

DR ANDREW STEELE
Physicist and computational
Daniel Bennett, Editor biologist Andrew, reports on
the cutting-edge research
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ON THE BBC THIS MONTH... Solar System system for lasting health and
In case you missed it, the full possibly a longer life. –›p68
series is now on BBC iPlayer. It’s
Buried: The Last Witness a breathtaking tour of our Solar
We can only apologise that System and the huge variety of
we’re a little late to this spacecraft we’ve sent up to go
and study it.
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CONTENTS 15
DISCOVERIES
32
REALITY CHECK

REGULARS

06 EYE OPENER 30 DR MICHELLE

The best science images
from around the world.
GRIFFIN
Why we need to recognise
gender-specific issues
13 FEEDBACK when it comes to sleep
Your thoughts on the quality and overall health.
articles in BBC Science Focus.
32 REALITY CHECK
15 DISCOVERIES The science behind the
CRISPR gene editing may hold
the secret to keeping brain cells
How human activity – from
construction projects to climate
All the month’s biggest headlines: How
youthful and energetic in old age. change – is altering Earth’s spin.
news, including: CRISPR human-made mega
helps brain stem cells regain structures are affecting
youth; Mathematicians have Earth’s rotation; Have
discovered a new shape; The
carbon footprints of the
super-rich are worse than
human lifespans reached
their peak? 80
we thought; Traces of
antimatter found lurking in
38 INNOVATIONS Q&A
A roundup of the latest
cosmic rays; Octopuses
tech releases.
punch fish to keep them in
line; And more…
76 THE BIG QUESTION
Evidence suggests that
26 PROF GILES YEO changing the clocks is bad
Not all processed foods are for us, so is it time to scrap
bad for you. In fact, they daylight savings?
were once critical to our
survival as a species.
80 Q&A
Our experts answer your
28 DR KATIE MACK questions. This month:
How the Sun will eventually What is the strongest acid
destroy all life on Earth. in the world? How can I tell
if I’ve got high cortisol?
What is a blue hole? Should
I be pouring castor oil into
my belly button? How can
44 I see Mars in retrograde? Is
it safe to run every day?
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 FE AT URE S WANT MORE ?

Don’t forget that BBC Science

Focus is available on all major
46 GHOST DETECTOR digital platforms. We have
See inside China’s giant versions for Android, as well as an
device being built to iOS app for the iPad and iPhone.
catch neutrinos –
nature’s ‘ghost particle’.

54 MUSIC FOR A
DISTRACTED
GENERATION
How AI-generated
sounds can help us relax
and sleep, or focus and
be more productive. Can’t wait until next month to get
your fix of science and tech?
Our website is packed with
62 THE INTERNET news, features and Q&As to
keep your brain satisfied.
OF ANIMALS sciencefocus.com
Meet the scientists
creating a high-tech
network of animals to
reveal the extent of the
biodiversity crisis.

68 THE IMMUNE INSTANT

SYSTEM REBOOT GENIUS
A healthy immune system Our bite-sized masterclass in
can ward off infections podcast form. Find it wherever
and even slow ageing. you listen to your podcasts.
We reveal the best ways
to boost your body’s
natural defences.
46
GHOST DETECTOR

38 28
INNOVATIONS DR KATIE MACK LUNCHTIME
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5
 EYE OPENER

EYE OPENER
A fresh
new look
AMBALANGODA, SRI LANKA

This may look like a predator

about to devour its prey, but
what appears to be two
insects is actually one. In fact,
this dragonfly is, in a way, just
undressing – shedding the
exterior of its former self as it
goes through metamorphosis.
Dragonflies are unusual in
the world of winged insects
in that they skip the pupal
stage of metamorphosis,
transforming from larvae to
adults in a single step.
“When it’s ready to change
into an adult, the larval stage
climbs out of the water, splits
its exoskeleton and, over the
course of a few hours, the
adult emerges,” says
entomologist Prof Adam
Hart. This process involves
the insect redistributing its
bodily fluids so that it can
push itself out of its larval
skin and then wait for its
legs to harden.
“It takes a while for the
adult to harden up and be
ready to fly, leaving the empty
larval ‘skin’ (or exuvia)
behind. If you look carefully
around the edges of ponds,
lakes and streams, you’ll often
see the remains of larvae on
stems and other vegetation.”
The image won this year’s
Royal Society of Biology
Photography Competition.

POLWATTA SIRIYALAGE
CHAMARA SULAKKHANA

VISIT US FOR MORE AMAZING IMAGES:

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6
 EYE OPENER

EYE OPENER
High-tech
chandeliers
EHNINGEN, GERMANY

Quantum computing may

sound complicated, but its
purpose is simple. It’s intended
to solve complex problems
faster and more efficiently
than traditional computers. It
could make it possible for us to
simulate molecular structures
at the atomic level, model
plant growth to optimise crop
yields and much more.
Unsurprisingly, something
as powerful as this requires a
lot of space. For IBM, that
meant building a dedicated
Quantum Data Center in
Ehningen, Germany.
The center opened in
October and holds the three
‘chandeliers’ you see here,
which contain the inner
workings of IBM’s latest
attempt at building a quantum
computer: System Two.
“System Two is IBM’s
next-generation, modular
quantum computing
architecture – the cornerstone
of IBM’s vision of quantum-
centric supercomputing,” says
Dr Rajeev Malik, programme
director of systems
engineering at IBM Quantum.
Malik claims this model is
capable of a 25-fold increase in
speed over IBM’s last quantum
processor, putting it leagues
ahead of the computers most
of us know and use.
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9
 EYE OPENER

EYE OPENER
Spilt milk
FRENCH POLYNESIA

Humans may cry over spilt

milk, but dropped dairy
products are a way of life for
whales. Take this humpback
calf, spotted in French
Polynesian waters, who’s
missed out on a meal provided
by an off-camera mother.
Like all young mammals,
milk is an integral part of a
developing whale’s diet. Sadly,
as this humpback whale calf
drifts through the waters, so
does a swirl of milk it has been
unable to gulp up in time.
Humpback mothers can’t
nurse their young in the same
way land mammals can.
Instead, they have to
voluntarily eject milk. But
sometimes the calf misses the
release and the cloud of milk
disperses into the water
before it can be consumed.
“Young humpback calves
must surface more frequently
than adults to breathe, which
may explain why this calf
missed the milk – it had to
rush to the surface for air,”
says marine biologist Dr Aline
da Silva Cerqueira.
You wouldn’t want a drink
of this though. Whale milk can
be up to 50-per-cent fat, so it
may be a little heavy for your
morning cup of tea.

KARIM ILIYA/SIENA PHOTO AWARDS

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 DISCOVERIES

NEITHER SQUARE NOR CIRCLE SUCKER PUNCH LIFE ON MARS

Mathematicians discover a new shape New research explains why Why humans won’t be moving
that nature’s known about forever p18 octopuses are hitting fish p22 to Mars any time soon p24

NEWS FROM
THE FRONTIERS
OF SCIENCE

GENETICS

Gene‒editing
discovery
could reverse
ageing
CRISPR is a way off being
used in human therapeutics,
but a new discovery could
unlock its potential

ene editing probably isn’t the

first method that comes to
mind for keeping your brain
young. However, recent
research suggests that the
DNA-modification technology
known as CRISPR has the
potential to rejuvenate our stem cells
and reverse ageing. Stem cells are
unspecialised cells that are capable of
dividing and renewing into specific,
differentiated cells.
While the technology is a long way
from being used in humans, fresh
breakthroughs could prove significant
in fundamental biology. Specifically,
scientists may have found a way to
boost the ability of old stem cells in
your brain to produce young new
cells, rejuvenating the organ.
“We think [this] could be part of
a resilience mechanism for an older
brain,” says the study’s principal
investigator, Prof Anne Brunet of
Stanford Medicine in the US.
But in humans, she says, “this is
extremely speculative.”
ALAMY

So far, the researchers in Brunet’s

lab have successfully boosted the ´

15
 DISCOVERIES

´ brain function of mice into old age.

They used CRISPR, a tool that works
like ‘molecular scissors’ to precisely
cut sections of DNA, to disrupt the
neural stem cells in the mice. This
reactivated the cells, prompting them
to generate new neurons.
While human stem cells don’t work
exactly the same way, the discovery
could still guide research towards
creating treatments for age-related
diseases, like dementia.

HOW DO GENES AFFECT AGEING?

As you age, your stem cells deteriorate.
Usually able to activate and produce
new ones, they instead stay dormant
(or, to scientists, ‘quiescent’). The same
is true for stem cells in mice.
In 2016, the Stanford scientists
first started investigating the ageing
process in mice, as well as ways to
boost their stem cells. They focused
on a part of the mouse brain known
as the subventricular zone, due to
its high density of neural stem cells.
They extracted cells from the brains
of old mice and infected this cluster
of cells (or ‘cell culture’) with viruses.
Rather than causing any damage, than young ones. “We were pretty between your key energy source and
these viruses acted as vessels to guide excited about this!” she says. “But vital organs? According to Brunet,
the CRISPR technology to the 23,000 we also thought, ‘Well, this is in a no – not in old neural stem cells, at
genes in the mice genome. culture outside the brain.’” least. She argues that it could actually
The aim? To find ‘knockouts’: genes help them.
that, when disabled, could improve or SUGAR’S ROLE IN AGEING In fact, when the researchers
even restore the ability of old neural One of the genes is particularly restricted glucose to the old neural
stem cells to reactivate. This process interesting to scientists and could stem cells, rather than having a
SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, GETTY IMAGES

is called functional screening. be targeted more closely in further negative effect, the cells were better
“What’s exciting is when you do the studies – it’s hoped that disabling it able to generate new, younger cells.
functional screen, you’re testing all the could stave off cognitive decline. It’s They discovered that as the mice
genes in the genome. It’s neat because (catchily) called Slc2a4 and makes one aged, their brain’s stem cells contained
it ranks the important genes. And of the proteins that transports glucose more glucose than those of younger
we found 300 of them,” says Brunet. (the simple sugar vital to energy in mice. So, Brunet thinks, this glucose
What was more fascinating was that living organisms) around your body. (which is usually so helpful) could
these 300 genes specifically boosted But is shutting off this transport be causing trouble in older brains,
old stem cells when activated, rather a good idea? Won’t it break the link explaining why removing it is a good
 DISCOVERIES

“It’s hoped that disabling [one of

the targeted genes] could stave
off cognitive decline”
GUIDE RNA

Cas9

MATCHING
GENOMIC SEQUENCE

DNA

INSERTING A GENE

GENE IS DISRUPTED GENE HAS A NEW SEQUENCE

thing when they start to get older. ABOVE LEFT complicated, comprising of 12.6 Don’t get too excited just yet, though.
Interestingly, when they removed Neurons that have million km (7 million miles) of neural Brunet says there’s still a long way to
been derived
glucose from the cell culture, connections (that’s almost 40 times go before we know for sure. “There
from stem cells,
something strange happened: the seen under a
greater than the distance between are so many steps between the
neural stem cells went through fluorescence light Earth and the Moon). A mouse brain, fundamental discoveries and their
the same rejuvenation as when the micrograph by comparison, has only 5,000km potential application,” she says.
glucose transporter gene was disabled (3,107 miles) of connections – the She adds that one of the biggest
by CRISPR. ABOVE RIGHT An distance between Boston and Lisbon. hurdles is the question of whether
When they next run the same illustration of how Nevertheless, the neural stem cells new cells, produced by rejuvenated
the CRISPR gene-
experiment on live mice, they hope the researchers were studying in the stem cells, could fit in without
editing tech works
to find out if giving them less sugar mice can be found in the human brain. “wreaking havoc” on the tightly
could have the same effect. Their exact function isn’t clear, but packed and spatially precise circuit
Brunet says there are indications that we’ve developed since childhood.
CRISPR IN HUMAN BRAINS they’re important for injury repair So, will we see CRISPR therapeutics
Could any of this apply to the human and reactivating these neural stem in humans in the future? “There is
brain? As you’d probably guess, the cells could help to make our brains hope,” Brunet says. “But it’s not going
organ between your ears is vastly more resilient. to be easy.”
 DISCOVERIES

MATHEMATICS

Mathematicians declare
a new class of shape
Not like your typical circle or square, the flexible ‘soft cell’ is seen throughout nature

GETTY IMAGES ILLUSTRATIONS: ACUTE GRAPHICS

18
 DISCOVERIES

“Simply, no one has done this before...

It’s really amazing how many basic things
there are to consider”
at hematici ans have what happens if you give this tile, In nature, the researchers think,
declared a new class of known as an ‘einstein’, rounded corners are points of structural
shape: the ‘soft cell’, which corners. Using algorithms to convert weakness. Bending around corners
can take different forms, geometric shapes into soft cells, they may also cost energy and build
so long as it has rounded discovered that in 3D, soft cells can tension at the edges. They say that the
edges and fits together in fill all the gaps without having any discovery could have applications
a tessellated grid – known corners at all. in architecture.
as ‘tiling’ in maths.
Tessellating fully rounded shapes
isn’t possible in 2D, unless there are
‘cusps’ – the sharp points between
curves (like the top of a teardrop).
An example of this in 2D is the cross- ‹– FAR LEFT, TOP
AND BOTTOM
section of an onion. The researchers found
But t he resea rchers behind the ‘softest’ shapes
that can be tiled in 2D
t he new study have discovered flare out at the
it’s possible to tessellate a fully sides, similar to a
horse’s saddle
rounded shape in 3D – such as the
chambers of a nautilus shell (the
spiralling marine mollusc). These
chambers look angular in 2D, but
the researchers were amazed to see
‹– LEFT, TOP
that, when modelled in 3D, there AND BOTTOM
were no edges at all. Examples of ‘soft’
shape patterns in
While these shapes have been nature can be found
known for centuries, no one has in muscle cells (top)
and the cross-sections
formalised the notion of soft cells of onions (bottom)
until now.
“Simply, no one has done this
before”, Prof Chaim Goodman-
Strauss, a mathematician at the
National Museum of Mathematics in
New York City, who wasn’t involved
in the work, told the journal Nature.
“It’s really amazing how many basic
things there are to consider.”
In 2023, Goodman-Strauss was
part of a team that discovered they
could create an irregular tiling
pattern using just a single shape:
in other words, tiles that are all
the same, but don’t line up in a
predictable and repeating grid.
The Hunga rian tea m behind
the newer paper, published in the  ABOVE The chambers of a nautilus shell look angular in 2D, but, when modelled
journal PNAS Nexus, considered in 3D, there are no edges at all and the shapes still fit together without any gaps

19
 DISCOVERIES

ENVIRONMENT

The carbon footprints of

the super-rich are much
bigger than we thought
It’s likely we’ve grossly underestimated the
super-rich’s share of responsibility for
the climate crisis

op quiz: how much larger

is the carbon footprint of
a person in the top one
SPACE per cent of earners in the
Largest ever black hole US compared to someone
in the bottom 50 per cent?
jet pair discovered in the The somewhat depressing
answer: on average, it’s 1,388
distant Universe times bigger.
This means that, despite being
The finding may help to shed light on the formation outnumbered by 167 million people,
of early galaxies the wealthy are still responsible for
30 times more emissions overall
(a total of 269 tonnes of carbon
dioxide equivalent).

n enormous pair of the discovery. “The Milky Way

black hole jets has would be a little dot in these two
been discovered by a giant eruptions.”
team of astronomers, Porphyrion is much larger than
who nicknamed the Alcyoneus, the previous largest
jets Porphyrion after a megajet structure observed, which
mythological Greek giant. spans 100 Milky Ways. Centaurus
That’s because the jets are the A, a galaxy containing the nearest
biggest ever observed, spanning major jet system to Earth, pales in
23 million light-years across. comparison, measuring ‘just’ 10
The jets are powerful streams Milky Ways across.

ILLUSTRATIONS: ADAM GALE

of energy and particles that shoot In a paper published in Nature, the
out from a black hole. (In fact, their astronomers described how the newly
total power output is equivalent spotted pair of jets date back to when
to trillions of Suns). As dust and the Universe was 6.8 billion years
gas surrounding a black hole are old (it’s currently around 13.8 billion
pulled towards it, some of it becomes years old). They discovered that the
superheated. Instead of falling pair formed when the filaments that
into the black hole, this super-hot link galaxies (known as the cosmic
material is blasted out across the web) were closer together. This means
cosmos at lightning-fast speeds. jets like Porphyrion reached across
“This pair is not just the size of a greater portion of the cosmic web
a solar system or the Milky Way; than the jets formed in the present-
we’re talking about 140 Milky Way day Universe.
diameters in total,” said Dr Martijn The findings suggest that giant
Oei, an ast rophysicist f rom the jet systems may have played a
California Institute of Technology bigger role in gala xy formation
and pa rt of the team that made than originally thought.
 DISCOVERIES

Don’t worry if this is news to you. PSYCHOLOGY yet we behave as if we have all
A new study says most people don’t t he r ig ht i n for mat ion to back
know the true size of this inequality.
In fact, as many as 93 per cent of
The hidden obstacle up our opinions, decisions and
judgements about other people.
us t hink t he ca rbon inequality sabotaging every “Taking shortcuts is how we
gap between the rich and poor is manage our complicated world,”
smaller than it really is. Most of us decision you make psychologist Dr Sandra Wheatley,
also think that the least wealthy are chartered member of the British
contributing more greenhouse gas
You may not realise it, but your brain Psychological Society who was
emissions than they actually are. assumes you know everything – and that not involved in the study, told
Your carbon footprint represents could be creating conflict in your life BBC Science Focus.
the total amount of greenhouse gases “When you need to ma ke a
you produce individually – eating snap decision, you ba se it on
red meat, heating your home and your experiences and you usually
air travel greatly impact its size. e’ve all been there: are correct. But every now and
The new study, published in the smugly thinking you’re again, you get pulled up short.
journal Nature Climate Change, right, only to feel like a A nd, u n for t u nately, at t he
surveyed 4,000 people across four fool when it turns out moment, there’s an awful lot of
countries, representing differences you missed something information that’s being shared
in wealth, lifestyle, culture and pretty important. For that isn’t accurate and needs to
example, you honk your be questioned.”
horn when the car in front of Published in the journal PLoS

“There’s a huge you comes to a sudden stop –

and then you see the pedestrian
crossing in front of them.
ONE, the study involved 1,261
pa r t icipa nt s . The scient ist s
presented them with a decision
contrast between Psychologists say this is a hidden
bias in you r brain t hat t hey’ve
to make: whether to merge two
schools or keep them separate.

private jets and termed the ‘illusion of information

adequacy’. They describe it as a
paradox: we know, in theory, that
While some of the participants
received all of the pros and cons
of merging, some only saw the

soggy paper straws” we don’t know everything – and pros and some only saw the cons.
But none of t he pa r t icipa nt s
knew that they were lacking any
information.
It may not come a s a huge
carbon emissions: Denmark, India, su r prise t hat t he people wit h
Nigeria and the US. t he pro-mer ge i n for mat ion
Half of the participants were in recommended the schools merge
the bottom 90 per cent of earners and vice versa. More unexpectedly,
in their country, while the other the participants assumed that the
half were in the top 10 per cent. But information they had was just as
most people, across all countries, good as everyone else’s and that
underestimated the personal carbon they were just as well-equipped to
footprints of ea rners in the top make the decision as anyone else.
10 per cent. In fact, those with only half of the
“These countries are very different, information felt more confident in
but we found the rich are pretty their decision compared to those
similar no matter where you go, who had access to both sides of
and their concerns are different to the argument.
the rest of society,” said one of the The phenomenon, t he
study’s authors, Dr Ramit Debnath researchers say, does more harm
from the University of Cambridge. than a little embarrassment when
“There’s a huge contrast between you ma ke a poorly-i n for med
billionaires travelling by private jets decision. They say that it makes
while the rest of us drink with soggy us assume our own subjective
paper straws: one of those activities truth is the objective truth and
has a big impact on an individual stops us f rom u ndersta nd i ng
carbon footprint and one doesn’t.” others’ perspectives.

21
 DISCOVERIES

PHYSICS cientists have found Antimatter can be thought of as a

Strange space discovery evidence of antimatter in

cosmic rays that suggests
‘mirror image’ of normal matter. It
has the same mass, but its qualities,
could finally unlock the existence of a class
of never-before-observed
such as electric charge, are opposite.
A new study suggests that particles
the mystery of particles. These particles
could make up dark
of antihelium (t he a ntimatter
version of helium), detected by the
dark matter matter: the strange substance that
accounts for 85 per cent of the
International Space Station (ISS),
may have been created by a new
Surprising traces of antimatter may reopen Universe’s mass, but has never class of Weakly Interacting Massive
the search for WIMPs been observed directly. Particles (WIMPs) that are believed

NATURE Institute of Animal Behaviour in

Germany observed such behaviour,
Octopuses punch fish to filming 13 hunting groups consisting
of octopuses and several different
keep them in order species of fish (including goldfish,
gold-saddle goatfish and blacktip
The fisticuffs occur during cooperative hunting trips groupers) in the Red Sea.
The exper ts found t hat t he
different species in these ‘hunting
parties’ took on different roles. For
instance, goatfish acted as scouts,
deciding where the group patrolled,
while the octopuses led the charge
when it was time to attack.
This joint approach allows the
groups to catch more prey than if
they were to hunt individually. It’s
far from happy families when they
work together, however. Sometimes
when a fish was brave enough to get
between the octopus and its dinner
it was met with a stiff jab worthy
of any boxing ring.
The punches serve to push the
fish to the outer edges of the group
where they’re less likely to catch
the prey, or to exclude them from
the group entirely, the experts say.
Fish were also observed ramming
each other out of the way, but at no
point did a fish ram an octopus.
“It turns out that the punching is
directed to fish that try to exploit the
octopus and the group, particularly
the blacktip grouper species,” Dr
Eduardo Sampaio, the lead author
of the study that announced the
discovery, told BBC Science Focus.
t seems octopuses might be octopuses on cooperative hunting “Moreover, we found t hat
ILLUSTRATIONS: ADAM GALE

the unlikely Muhammad expeditions. punching is also associated with

Alis of the marine world. Though largely solitary animals, the group’s movement. That is, if
Biologists have filmed octopuses of ten tea m up wit h the group is too clustered around
combative cephalopods schools of fish to hunt prey such the octopus and doesn’t move, the
delivering blows to fish as molluscs and crustaceans. A team octopus punches fish in order to
who join forces with the of experts from the Max Planck show this negative feedback.”

22
 DISCOVERIES

to make up dark matter. when two WIMPs collide a nd medium, where you expected very
“WIMPs are particles that have annihilate. This could produce little, means something unusual
been theorised but never observed, matter, antimatter and energy, the is happening. That’s why t he
and they could be the ideal candidate scientists say. observation of antihelium was so
for dark matter,” said Dr Pedro De They believe that some antimatter exciting,” said De la Torre Luque.
la Torre Luque, the lead author of was formed during the Big Bang, He added: “Events observed by
the study announcing the findings. but more is constantly created by AMS-02 are orders of magnitude
Nuclei of antihelium observed in certain cosmic events, even though higher than the predictions based
cosmic ray surveys carried out by the it’s difficult to observe. on standard cosmic ray interactions.
ISS’s Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer “Seeing t he production of That’s why these antinuclei are a
(AMS-02) could have been created antiparticles in the interstellar plausible clue to WIMP annihilation.”

HEALTH
Drinking bottled water
is much worse for you
than water from a tap
Think bottled water is safer than tap water?
Think again

hen it comes to getting

your daily fill of water,
the safest option is
drinking it from a store-
bought bottle, right?
New research suggests
that isn’t true. In fact,
tap water could actually be the
much safer option of the two in
most areas of the world.
This is according to a commentary
published in the journal BMJ Global
Health. According to researchers
from Weill Cornell Medicine – Qatar,
bottled water in the US is often not
subject to the same rigorous quality
and safety checks as tap water,
“The long-term effects of
meaning it can carry more harmful
chemicals that have leached in from
the plastic bottles.
these contaminants remain
It’s estimated that between 10 and
78 per cent of bottled water samples
contain contaminants, including
largely unknown”
microplastics and other substances
like phthalates (chemicals used authors. “The reliance on bottled water that’s both nearby and free
to make plastics more durable). water incurs significant health, from contamination.
Microplastic conta mination is financial and environmental costs, Tap water in the US is tightly
associated with oxidative stress, calling for an urgent re-evaluation regulated, with 92 per cent of the
immune system dysregulation and of its widespread use.” population receiving water from
changes in fat levels. The research pertains to countries systems that meet health standards
“While there are short-term safety with clean, drinkable tap water. By at all times. Meanwhile, tap water
thresholds, the long-term effects of the World Health Organization’s in the UK is treated to some of the
these contaminants remain largely estimates, 73 per cent of the world’s strictest levels, coming third in the
unknown,” said the commentary’s population have access to drinking world after Italy and Singapore.

23
 DISCOVERIES

SPACE

When are we
moving to Mars?
With wars raging and environmental collapse on the horizon,
the idea of escaping to start again on another planet is
gaining appeal. Both NASA and the Chinese are working on
lunar bases. But how soon before the rest of us can take to
the stars? And what about the planet we’d leave behind?

he idea of a mass human to be safe for the mothers or for can extract and sell resources
migration to space, the the babies. from space without claiming
Moon or other planets is When you move out to a place sovereignty. But not all nations
exciting, but… well, a little NKMG/CTUYJGTG[QWQPN[JCXG agree with this.
overzealous. As the authors RGTEGPVQH'CTVJoUITCXKV[ 9GoXGƂIWTGFQWVJQYVQ
of A City on Mars say: “An and you’re completely exposed UQNXGRTQDNGOUNKMGVJKUKP
Earth with climate change to space radiation, everything Antarctica and the deep seabed,
and nuclear war and zombies gets harder. We’ve done a lot of so this could unfold peacefully.
and werewolves is still a better TGUGCTEJQPVJG+PVGTPCVKQPCN +YQWNFNKMGVQUGGOQTGENCTKV[
place than Mars.” 5RCEG5VCVKQP +55 YJKEJJCU KPKPVGTPCVKQPCNNCYVQƂIWTGQWV
6QƂPFQWVYJ[YGURQMG been within the protection who’s allowed to do what before
to one of its authors, Dr Kelly of the magnetosphere that things heat up too much. ILLUSTRATION: ZACH WIENERSMITH (PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE)

Weinersmith, who, after years of surrounds Earth and shuttles

research into space settlements, space radiation to the poles. WHAT OTHER ASPECTS OF
gave us the low-down on how Most of that radiation hasn’t DAY-TO-DAY LIFE DO WE NEED
long it’s reallyNKMGN[VQDGDGHQTG hit our astronauts, so we don’t TO FIGURE OUT?
humans can move beyond Earth. understand what it does to Closed-loop systems are going to
human bodies. be critical. They’re already an
WHY MIGHT IT NOT BE THE RIGHT 6JGTGoUCNUQCNCEMQHENCTKV[ KORQTVCPVRCTVQHNKHGQPVJG+55
TIME TO MOVE TO MARS? about what you’re allowed – astronauts regularly complain
There’s so much that we don’t to do with the resources in about what a pain in the rear it is
MPQY[GV+PRCTVKEWNCT URCEG+PVJG70RCUUGF just to maintain the bathroom.
settlements require that people the Outer Space Treaty, which Also, carbon dioxide (CO
can have babies and we don’t says that no one is allowed NGXGNUQPVJG+55CTGJKIJGT
have anywhere near enough VQENCKOUQXGTGKIPV[6JG75 than they are on Earth because
UEKGPEGVQMPQYKHVJCVoUIQKPI interpretation of this is that you KVoUFKHƂEWNVCPFGZRGPUKXGVQ

24
 DISCOVERIES

money on solving the climate

crisis?
Jeff Bezos argues that we need
to go to space to save Earth. The
KFGCKUKHYGVCMGCDWPEJQH
people off Earth, we can relieve
some of the population pressure.
+FQPoVƂPFVJCVCTIWOGPVXGT[
convincing. We put something
NKMGPGYRGQRNGQP'CTVJ
every day. So even just to tread
water, we would need to move
RGQRNGHTQO'CTVJKPVQ
space habitats that we don’t even
MPQYJQYVQOCMG[GV+LWUV
FQPoVVJKPMCP[QHVJGUGUQNWVKQPU
are going to come fast enough.
That said, there does seem to be
VJKUEQPƃKEVYJGTGRGQRNGVJKPM
there’s a trade-off between money
that goes into space and money
WATCH that goes into environmental
Mars-bound astronauts
prepare for the psychological problems. But exploring the Solar
demands of the System helps us understand Earth
three-year mission better, including ozone depletion
https://bit.ly/3YywANZ and climate change. Additionally,
a lot of the space budget goes
into satellites, which give us
information about weather and
climate change models.

DO YOU THINK PEOPLE WILL BE

maintain low carbon dioxide accessible water, as well as the DISAPPOINTED TO HEAR YOUR
and high oxygen levels. We don’t minerals and nutrients that we VERDICT ON SPACE SETTLEMENTS?
really have the complicated need to grow plants. +MPQYVJG[oTGFKUCRRQKPVGF
equations that we’re going to But Mars is pretty far away, so because they’ve reached out to tell
need to understand, for example, [QWECPQPN[ƃ[VQKVGXGT[VYQ OGVJCV$WV+CNUQVJKPMVJCVGXGP
how many wheat plants we’d years, when Mars is in the right on an Earth that was ravaged by
need to absorb the carbon dioxide position to be close enough to nuclear war and had been hit by an
for a group of people. 'CTVJ+VCNUQVCMGUUKZOQPVJUVQ asteroid, there would probably still
There’s some power research get there, so if something goes be places on the planet where you
that we need to do, too: solar wrong, you’re on your own. This could go outside and not die
panels will be great, but we’re OCMGUVJG/QQPCXGT[XCNWCDNG immediately. On Mars, you can’t
going to need portable nuclear place to learn things and test even go outside and, say, feel the
TGCEVQTUVQRTQXKFGCUWHƂEKGPV equipment before going all the YKPFQP[QWTUMKPYKVJQWVF[KPI
amount of power. We have some way to Mars. +VJKPMKH[QWTGCNN[YCPVVQ
research on those reactors, but There’s another argument that settle Mars, you need a plan for
they haven’t been tested in space rotating space settlements are the MGGRKPI'CTVJCNKXGQPGVJCV
yet, which is a great case for HWVWTGKFGCNsNKMGCDKE[ENGV[TG allows us to continue to advance
IQKPIDCEMVQVJG/QQPƂTUV spinning in space, generating technologically so that we can
UQOGVJKPINKMG'CTVJoUITCXKV[ support settlements on Mars.
WHAT ARE THE MOST VIABLE But technologically they’re far We have to be realistic to move
CURRENT OPTIONS FOR A more complicated to create and forward with this goal.
SPACE SETTLEMENT? are going to be very expensive.
+VJKPM/CTUKURTQDCDN[VJGDGUV by D R K E L LY W E I N E R S M I T H
place for us to settle in space, as it DO WE HAVE GOOD REASON TO WANT Kelly and Zach Weinersmith are the authors of A City on Mars,
has most of what humans need. TO SETTLE SPACE? winner of the 2024 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize
For example, it has a lot of fairly Shouldn’t we be spending the and a Hugo Award (2023, Particular Books).

25
 COLUMNISTS

ILLUSTRATION: GREGORI SAAVEDRA

 COLUMNISTS

COMMENT
milled f rom corn kernels t hat have first been
Food processing isn’t processed by soaking in lime – not the fruit, but
the mineral calcium hydroxide (in solution). This
necessarily a bad thing process, it turns out, was critical for the survival
of indigenous Mexicans.
Using chemicals to alter food doesn’t automatically make it The alkalinity of t he lime helps dissolve
hemicellulose, the major glue-like component of
bad for you. In some cases, it actually makes the food better the maize cell walls, loosening the hulls from
the kernels and softening the corn. The resulting
product is ground into a dough to create the fresh
rocessed foods, particularly of the ‘ultra- masa used to make tortillas and tamales.
processed’ variety, are one of the nutritional This process is called ‘nixtamalisation’, a word
hot topics of the moment. Most people, whether with roots in the Aztec language. The process plays a
or not they work in nutrition, have an opinion crucial role in unlocking the full nutritional potential
about processed foods, and it doesn’t tend to of corn. Corn is particularly rich in niacin, otherwise
be positive. known as vitamin B3. But without processing, this
This is, however, an overly simplistic view key nutrient is chemically unavailable to the human
of a nuanced topic. And you don’t need to look digestive system and passes right through us.
far to find evidence that processing can not only So if the grain you ate was primarily corn, you
be good, but that it may have been crucial to our could end up with niacin deficiency, resulting in a
survival as a species. disease called pellagra. It’s an illness characterised
Take, for instance, corn. From tortillas and tamales by diarrhoea, dementia, and rashes on the hands
to corn on the cob, it’s the foundation of Mexican and feet. If left untreated, it’s lethal.
cuisine. There’s a good historical reason for this Processing the corn by soaking it in an alkaline
and food processing has played a key role. solution liberates the niacin, making it available
Agriculture emerged independently in at least three to hu ma ns du ring digest ion. Over t he 10,000
geographical locations. Wheat was domesticated years since corn was domesticated, the indigenous
in the fertile crescent, an area along the River Mexicans developed the technique, which, probably
Nile in Egypt, and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers by happenstance, made this staple food far more
nutritious, and pellagra was never a problem.
“Processing the corn by soaking But an issue arose after the Europeans arrived in
the Americas and quickly added corn to their diets.

it in an alkaline solution liberates None of the newly arrived immigrants knew how
to process corn using nixtamalisation – or if they
did, they certainly didn’t grasp the significance of
the niacin, making it available to that process.
For most non-indigenous America ns, t he
humans during digestion” unavailability of niacin from corn wasn’t a problem,
as it was available from other food sources, such
as meat and other grains.
in Mesopotamia 10,000 to 12,500 years ago. Rice Corn was cheap and easy to grow, however, so
was domesticated in the Yangtze River Valley in it ended up being a primary staple to those in
China 9,000 years ago. And maize, or corn, was poverty, causing a sharp increase in the incidence
domesticated in Oaxaca, a region at the southern of pellagra among the poor. It wasn’t until the mid-
end of Mexico, around 10,000 years ago. Mexico is 1930s and early 1940s that pellagra was recognised
quite literally the birthplace of corn. as a disease resulting from niacin deficiency and
Corn is tremendously versatile and, depending on was eventually eradicated by the fortification of
how it’s processed, can be made into a huge variety grains and flour.
PROF of foods with different textures and tastes. If you This is an example of how food processing was

GILES YEO
Giles is a geneticist at
simply dry out the corn and grind it up finely, as
you would with wheat, you end up with cornflour,
critical to our ability as a species to survive and
thrive, ensuring that we had a predictable source of
the University of
which is often used as a thickening agent in gravies calories through seasonal changes in the availability
Cambridge, whose work or sauces. On the other hand, grinding the kernels of fresh food, and buffering against environmental
focuses on food intake, coarsely, results in cornmeal or polenta. crises such as drought.
genetics and obesity. The ubiquitous corn tortilla, however, isn’t made So while the term ‘processed food’ is associated
He’s also a presenter
on the BBC show Trust from cornflour, but from masa harina. While both with a whole host of negative connotations, the
Me, I’m a Doctor. are flours made from corn, masa harina is instead devil truly is in the detail.

27
COMMENT There are two main ways a star can go supernova.
One, called a core-collapse supernova, is when a
Here’s how the Sun will very massive star burns through all its fusion fuel
and collapses, rebounding into an extraordinarily
end all life on Earth intense explosion.
The other is when a stellar remnant, such as a
The Sun isn’t going to go supernova. But its demise will cause white dwarf, has some unfortunate interaction with
ripples of stellar devastation that’ll be deadly to nearby planets a companion star, which obliterates them both.
Our Sun isn’t massive enough for a core collapse
and it doesn’t have a stellar companion, so as far
as we know, it’s safe from either of those outcomes.
few years ago, I walked into my department’s weekly coffee That doesn’t mean it’s immortal, unfortunately.
club and had an existential crisis about Earth’s future. Today, the Sun is essentially a giant fusion reactor,
To be clear, the discussion wasn’t about the future of transforming hydrogen to helium in its core and
Earth, per se. We were talking about a newly published releasing a huge amount of energy in the process.
paper regarding some interesting features in the spectrum Some of that energy escapes into the Universe as
of light from a distant star – technically a ‘stellar remnant’, light, but some goes towards making the plasma
or dead star, called a white dwarf. inside the Sun bounce around at high speed.
This white dwarf couldn’t possibly have any effect on our planet This is what causes the pressure that keeps the
and nothing in its spectrum was particularly threatening. But Sun from collapsing under its own weight, in
what that paper did show us was a glimpse of the future of our the same way the air pressure inside a balloon
ILLUSTRATION: CHARLIE PADGETT

Sun and, in a particularly gruesome way, ourselves. stretches the rubber and keeps it round. For the
Let me start by reassuring you that the Sun isn’t going to explode. next five or so billion years, the Sun will carry
One of the most common misconceptions I encounter is the idea on like this, but, eventually, its hydrogen supply
that the Sun is fated to go supernova someday, ending its life in is going to start running out. At this point, things
a spectacular explosion that’ll incinerate the Solar System. But will start rapidly going wrong.
from what we know of stellar evolution, that’s not what the Sun’s With fusion slowing down, the pressure support
future looks like. drops and the core starts to compress. As a result,

28
 LISTEN
Dr Katie Mack
talks about how the
Universe will end
https://bit.ly/3YzDLFE

“At some point in the into space. (On the bright side, this is likely to make a very pretty
planetary nebula.) Meanwhile, the core compresses into an extremely

red-giant phase, the dense white dwarf star, which is held up not by fusion, but by a
strange feature of quantum mechanics that says if you try to pile
up too many electrons, some of them will start moving extremely
Sun’s puffy outer layers fast, increasing the pressure enough to stop the collapse. All stars
like the Sun seem fated to end their lives as dense white dwarfs,
slough off into space” slowly cooling and fading forever.
Which brings us back to that department coffee meeting. The
researchers behind the paper had been looking at white dwarf
a bit of the helium inside the core, now much hotter spectral lines (the pattern in the light that tells us which elements
and denser, begins to fuse into heavier elements, are present) and noticed a bit of pollution. Where they expected
releasing energy even faster. The Sun brightens and only a few light elements, they found calcium, potassium and
swells. By this time, the Sun will have long since sodium. These weren’t produced by the stars. They concluded they
become bright enough to boil off Earth’s oceans, were debris from rocky planets the stars had recently devoured, DR KATIE
probably ending all terrestrial life. But things get
even worse for Mercury and Venus. As the Sun
showing up as distinctly as blood on the jaws of a predator.
While still reeling from this existential horror, I discovered that
MACK
(@AstroKatie)
continues to evolve, it puffs up to hundreds of times astronomers have been studying polluted white dwarf stars for Katie is a
its current size, engulfing the orbits of the two inner decades and, as far as I know, maintaining emotional composure. theoretical
planets and vaporising them completely. And, sure, one could argue that a supernova would be worse. But astrophysicist.
She currently
What happens to Earth at this point in the process to me, there was something particularly visceral about looking holds the
is a bit unclear. Will it also be engulfed, meeting the at those spectral lines and wondering about the poor lost planet position of
same fiery doom? Will it get pushed farther out? that produced them. Hawking Chair
in Cosmology
Honestly, things don’t look great for Earth whichever Maybe, someday, billions of years from now, some alien and Science
way you look at it. astronomer on a far-off planet will look in our direction. Perhaps Communication
At some point in the red-giant phase, the Sun can they’ll see a smudge of dirt in the light of a lonely white dwarf at the Perimeter
no longer do fusion of any kind. Its core compresses star, surrounded by the glow of a nebula, and spare a thought for Institute for
Theoretical
even further and its puffy outer layers slough off the beautiful world we once were. Physics.

29
 COLUMNISTS

COMMENT
monitoring sleep patterns in women in their first
The real reasons trimester show increased waking and poorer sleep
quality compared to pre-pregnancy.
women are losing In the third trimester, the number of nocturnal
wakings increases typically to five per night. During

more sleep than men this time, women experience more disturbing dreams,
and the quality and quantity of sleep are so poor it
is consistent with a clinical diagnosis of insomnia.
Menopause, pregnancy and hormonal fluctuations during the
This then leads to a significant impact on daytime
monthly cycle can all have a huge effect on women’s sleep functionality, with decreased alertness and increased
need for catching up on the hours missed during the
day. Poor sleep during pregnancy puts women and
leep: there’s a fairly good chance you’re not their unborn babies at greater risk of poor health –
getting enough. Whether it’s due to the likes this includes an increased inflammatory state for
of stress, caffeine or late-night doom-scrolling, women and greater risk of foetal growth problems.
one in three people are reportedly not getting Then there’s menopause. As you’ll probably know,
enough sleep, according to US figures. this major hormonal transition – when the ovaries
Some of these people will have insomnia, reduce in function and ultimately periods stop
a clinical condition with an exact definition: altogether – has a significant impact on a woman’s
a sleep disorder that affects a person’s performance body. Although not spoken about much, these changes
the next day – for two to three nights every week, for include sleep disturbance. In fact, the prevalence of
more than three months. insomnia reported in studies was as high as 60 per
Anyone can get insomnia, but women are more at cent of women aged 40 years and older.
risk than men. According to one study, it’s 58-per-cent In this instance, sleep is affected by a multitude
more prevalent among women. of hormone-induced symptoms. The most common
Why? Alt hough studying sleep is a complex that are reported by women in perimenopause are
undertaking – and the causes of sleep disturbance night sweats due to the hypothalamic temperature
are multifactorial – hormonal fluctuations throughout control centre in the brain being affected by the
a woman’s life significantly impact the quality and fluctuating levels of oestrogen.
quantity of her sleep. These episodes a re ver y disruptive, of ten
Women who have a menstrual cycle experience accompanied by severe fear, as well as extreme
cyclical changes in a multitude of hormones. In the sweating through bedclothes and sheets, making
days leading up to their period, these changes appear it difficult to get back to sleep. On average, women
through a variety of symptoms, collectively known experience these for at least four or five years,
as pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS) or pre-menstrual throughout perimenopause.

DR MICHELLE dysphoric disorder (PMDD), due to the declining levels

of oestrogen and progesterone.
Changes in memory and mood are also prevalent
throughout the perimenopause phase, in part due to
GRIFFIN
Michelle is the director
This can cause disturbances such as difficulty getting
to sleep, frequent awakenings, non-restorative sleep
the fluctuating and decreasing levels of hormones,
notably oestrogen and progesterone. We now know
of MFG Health and nightmares. that the female brain is dense with oestrogen receptors
Consulting, as well as a
Poor sleep and pregnancy go hand in hand, and and that density changes during the menopausal
women’s health expert
and strategy advisor in reports of difficulty sleeping begin at the start of transition have an impact on memory and mood.
women’s health tech. pregnancy, with it worsening throughout. Studies In addition, the emotional and psychological
impact of menopause symptoms can, in turn, lead
to anxiety, which can make it difficult for people

“Hormonal fluctuations to fall and stay asleep, while also leading to early
morning waking. So, in fact, this particular hormonal
fluctuation that occurs throughout perimenopause,

throughout a woman’s due to its length of duration, and breadth and

intensity of symptoms, results in a double blow to
sleep quality and quantity for women.

life significantly impact

ILLUSTRATION: CATHAL DUANE

Although sleep issues affect everyone, women

face specific challenges throughout their lives that
significantly impact sleep quality and quantity.
the quality and quantity Recognising these gender-specific issues is crucial for
both women and healthcare providers in developing

of her sleep” effective strategies to improve sleep health and

overall wellbeing.

30
COLUMNISTS

31
RE ALIT Y CHECK

REALITY
THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE HEADLINES

CHECK

REVIEW

Mega-buildings are now slowing Earth’s spin.

Here’s what that means for the planet
A huge dam in China is changing how long our days are
 RE ALIT Y CHECK

For more fact-checking

ur ancient ancestors divided their lives

O
news, visit the BBC’s
into days, following the natural rhythm Verify website at
of the rising and setting Sun. This system bit.ly/BBCVerify
worked well for millennia but by the 20th
century, scientists made a big discovery: Earth
is actually a terrible timekeeper. Why? It turns out
that no two rotations – no two days – are ever exactly
the same length.
There are many factors that can affect Earth’s spin,
including earthquakes. The 2011 ’quake in Japan – the
one that triggered the Fukushima nuclear accident –
sped up Earth’s rotation by 1.8 millionths of a second.
The Moon’s gravity also contributes to all of this. It
tries to hold our oceans in place, but Earth continues
to turn beneath them regardless. This tidal friction
robs the Earth of a little rotational energy, meaning
the day is getting longer by about two-thousandths of
a second (2 milliseconds) per century.
Slowing may be the long-term trend, but there have
been short-term records in the other direction. For
instance, 29 June 2022 was the shortest day ever recorded,
at 1.59 milliseconds faster than average, beating the
previous record set in 2020. This has been put down
to changes deep within Earth’s core.
Scientists have also discovered that so-called
‘megastructures’ built by humans can also affect Earth’s
rotation. Take the 185m-tall (about 600ft) Three Gorges

60 billionths of a second. He also calculated that the ABOVE

“Three Gorges dam can move Earth’s poles by around 2cm (about 1in).
According to Prof Maik Thomas and Dr Robert Dill,
So much water has
been diverted from
the Aral Sea (once
Dam was made from the German Research Centre for Geosciences,
there’s also “a seasonal variation in Earth’s rotation” the world’s largest
freshwater lake)
to consider “due to cyclical changes in water levels.”
with enough that it has affected
Earth’s rotation
HOW BUILDINGS CAN CHANGE EARTH’S SPIN
steel to build But how can something we’ve made affect the rotation LEFT
of the entire planet? It all has to do with something China’s Three
63 copies of called the ‘moment of inertia’. This is essentially how
much an object resists changes in motion – the more
Gorges Dam can
hold 40 billion
the Eiffel Tower” mass an object has, and the further away the mass is
from the centre of rotation, the more it resists spinning.
cubic metres
of water
The Three Gorges Dam sits 185m (600ft) above sea
level at its highest point. And when the dam is full,
Dam. Spanning the Yangtze River in Hubei province, both the local mass and the distance of that mass from
Central China, it’s the largest dam in the world and our rotational line have increased. In other words,
over 2,300m (7,500ft) long. the moment of inertia goes up, creating a (very small)
Its vital statistics are dizzying. It was made using resistance to Earth’s spin.
28 million cubic metres of concrete and enough steel To see how this slows Earth down, next we need to
to build 63 copies of the Eiffel Tower. It took 40,000 talk about angular momentum. It’s basically the total
people 17 years to construct, at a total cost of $37bn ‘quantity’ of spin an object has, which depends on
(£28bn). The dam can hold 40 billion cubic metres of both the speed of rotation and how the object’s mass
water – about 16 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. is spread out.
In 2005, NASA scientist Dr Benjamin Fong Chao A key point about angular momentum is that it’s always
calculated that when this amount of mass is concentrated conserved. This means the total angular momentum
ALAMY, GETTY IMAGES

on one spot, it’s enough to affect Earth’s rotation. The in a system stays the same and can’t change.
claim has recently recirculated online, but exactly how Ice skaters are often used as a way to explain how
much of an effect does the dam have? this works. With their arms outstretched, they spin
Well, Chao calculated that, when full, the dam could relatively slowly. Draw their arms in, however, and they
increase the length of a day by 0.06 microseconds. That’s dramatically speed up. By becoming more compact ´

33
 RE ALIT Y CHECK

“To control satellites and navigate

space probes, we need to know the
orientation and rotation period of the
Earth to a high level of accuracy”
´ they decrease the distance of their mass to the axis BELOW same overall angular momentum, Earth’s rotation
of rotation. This means their speed must increase in More than three speed must go down. That’s why the dam slows Earth’s
order to maintain the same angular momentum. quarters of the rotation by 60 billionths of a second. “The effect of
water in the Aral
The same angular momentum conservation applies other megastructures might be even smaller,” say
sea has been
to the Earth-Moon system, but the effect is the reverse. Thomas and Dill.
diverted away to
We mentioned earlier how the interaction between the irrigation projects They also point out that other human activity has had
Moon and Earth is slowing Earth’s rotation down. In a bigger impact on Earth’s rotation than Three Gorges:
order to maintain the total ‘quantity of spin’, that also “The Aral Sea has lost more than three quarters of its
means that the system has to become less compact. water volume since 1960.”
That’s exactly what’s happening – experiments left Lying between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the
on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts show that the Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest freshwater lake
Moon is receding from the Earth by 3.8cm (approx 1.5in) in the world, until the Soviets diverted many of the
per year, which, incidentally, is about the same speed rivers that fed into it towards their irrigation projects
that your fingernails grow. It’s the cosmic equivalent instead. Thomas and Dill estimate that the resulting
of the ice skater spreading out their arms. slowdown in Earth’s rotational speed was over three
Angular momentum depends both on the moment times greater than the effect of building Three Gorges.
of inertia (that’s the resistance to spin, remember) and by COLIN STUART “The shift of the Earth’s rotational axis towards
rotation speed. In the case of the Three Gorges Dam, (@skyponderer) Canada due to ice mass losses in Greenland is also
we’ve seen that when it’s full, the dam increases the Colin is an astronomy significantly higher,” say Thomas and Dill. They
local moment of inertia. So, in order to maintain the author and speaker. estimate that the resulting changes to the length of
the day are around ten times greater than when Three
Gorges was first filled.

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES?

Given the minuteness of these changes, why does this
matter to us? Well, in order to control our satellites and
successfully navigate probes to other planets, space
agencies need to know the orientation and rotation
period of Earth to a high level of accuracy. The subtle
changes caused by megastructures like Three Gorges
and, to an even greater extent, the way we’re altering
the natural world, are significant enough to throw
the probes off course if not adequately accounted for.
Given these important effects – in addition to changes
wrought by the Moon, earthquakes and other rumblings
deep within Earth – it’s no wonder scientists struggle
to use Earth as a timepiece.
In fact, a second hasn’t officially been defined as
a fraction of Earth’s rotation period since the 1960s.
Instead, the world’s most accurate atomic clocks use
the time it takes for a caesium atom to oscillate a little
over nine billion times. Though this may sound like
an arbitrary number, the new second – the definition
now used in the International System of Units – is so
consistent that current atomic clocks won’t gain or lose
time for the next 300 million years.
The same can’t be said for Earth’s rotation. Our
ancestors may have used the planet as a giant clock,
but ultimately, it’s an unreliable one. And the more we
add to and take from it, the more unreliable it’ll be.
 A N A LY S I S of doing the same? It might seem logical to ask the ABOVE Jeanne
oldest living people for their secret to longevity, but Calment celebrates

Why you should never Dr Bradley Elliott, Senior Lecturer in Physiology at the
University of Westminster, explains that this approach
alone is unreliable due to a phenomenon known as
her 117th birthday
in 1992. She is
reported to have

take health advice survivorship bias (drawing conclusions from a group

that has survived, while ignoring those who didn’t).
lived to be 122.

from a 100-year-old
Take Jeanne Calment, for example, who holds the
Guinness World Record for the longest human lifespan
at 122 years and 164 days. She often attributed her
remarkable longevity to a relaxed and carefree lifestyle.
Living longer is a goal for many of us. But She married a rich husband and never had to work,
should we be following the lifestyles of loved cycling, and continued to drink wine and smoke
at a very old age.
those that live past 100? So, should we follow her example? “Some people
just get phenomenally lucky,” says Elliot. “Studying
entena rians – people who live to be 100 the oldest individuals can provide insights, but a more

C years old and over – were once a rare breed.

But they’ve became increasingly common
since the mid to late 20th century, thanks to
improvements in diet, healthcare and lifestyle.
However, a recent analysis by the Office for National
Statistics suggests that the number of centenarians in
reliable approach would be to study people in their
60s over the following decades to identify factors that
contribute to longevity.”
“Health recommendations, such as the NHS guideline
for 150 minutes of exercise a week, are based on decades
of research. It’s a process of gathering the best possible
England and Wales may have peaked. In 2023, there information from multiple angles to make informed
was a 0.5-per-cent decrease in centenarians compared health decisions.”
GETTY IMAGES, ALAMY

to 2022, with the total falling from 14,920 to 14,850.

This drop is thought to be tied to the decline of the DO ‘BLUE ZONES’ HOLD THE ANSWER?
post-WWI ‘baby boom’ generation. This survivorship bias is an important consideration
How did so many people make it to this ripe old age? in the context of ‘Blue Zones’ – regions where an
And can we learn from them to improve our chances unusually high number of people reportedly live ´

35
 RE ALIT Y CHECK

ABOVE Blue Zones

“Centenarians smoke, drink and researcher Dan
Beuttner (right)

generally do things that’ll put talks with

molecular biologist
Prof Marion Nestle
you in an early grave”
ABOVE RIGHT
A resident of
´ past 100. First identified by Dan Buettner in the Ig Nobel Prize – a satirical award that celebrates Okinawa plays the
sanshin at Ryukyu
early 2000s, these areas include Okinawa (Japan), unusual or trivial scientific discoveries.
Mura historial
Sardinia (Italy), Nicoya (Costa Rica), Ikaría (Greece) village
and Loma Linda (California, US). LIES AND STATISTICS
Buettner and his team spent years studying these Newman’s research reveals widespread misreporting
regions and outlined nine lifestyle habits, called the of ages in Blue Zone regions. For example, in
‘Power 9’, that they claimed were the key to living Sardinia, despite its reputation as a haven for
longer. These habits are: natural forms of exercise centenarians, European Union statistics place the
(like gardening and manual housework), having a island between 36th and 44th in terms of longevity
life’s purpose, ‘downshifting’ routines to reduce stress, in Europe. When Newman dug deeper, he found
stopping eating when 80-per-cent full, eating largely that many of these so-called centenarians had
plant-based diets, drinking one or two glasses of wine actually passed away, but their deaths weren’t
per day, belonging to a faith-based community, putting reported to authorities.
family first and living in positive social networks. A similar thing appeared to be happening in
“While Blue Zone findings provide useful lifestyle Nicoya and Ikaría. In 2015, an audit of Greece’s
advice, the recommendation of daily drinking is a pension system revealed that 72 per cent of the 9,000
perfect example of survivorship bias and how it can people over the age of 100 were either deceased or
result in misleading advice,” says Elliot. “In 2023, hadn’t reached their reported ages. Instead, relatives
the World Health Organization published a statement were just pocketing the money.
saying there’s no safe level of alcohol consumption.” “Virtually none of our old-age data makes sense,” says
Blue Zones have recently been subject to a whirlwind Newman. “Over and over again, ‘validated’ centenarians
of controversy following new research by Dr Saul have turned out to be fakes. For a century, Pierre Joubert
Newman of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. was believed to be the first validated 110-year-old, before
According to Newman, many of the claims about he was discovered to be his own son.” Some researchers
NETFLIX, ALAMY

exceptional longevity in these regions are based on believe Jeanne Calment was actually her daughter,
flawed data, administrative errors and, in some cases, Yvonne, posing as Jeanne to avoid inheritance taxes.
lies in order to commit pension fraud. For his work Newman also found that the average Okinawan
debunking Blue Zones, Newman was awarded the lifestyle doesn’t align with the reported ‘Power 9’
principles. For example, Buettner and his team based have been thoroughly validated and their exceptional
some of their longevity principles on reports that longevity is well-documented," he says.
the Okinawan diet largely consisted of vegetables, “His assertion that Blue Zones correspond to regions
particularly sweet potatoes. with high illiteracy, poverty and crime is misleading.
“According to the Japanese government, which While some Blue Zones experienced delays in economic
runs one of the largest nutritional surveys in the and social development, these factors have no influence
world, dating back to 1975 and covering 96 per cent on the calculation of longevity rates.”
of their citizens, Okinawa actually ranks dead last for
vegetable and sweet potato consumption in the country,” THE REAL SECRET TO LIVING LONGER
says Newman. Throughout history, people have tried to defy the
“They have also had the worst body mass index ageing process, from methods like drinking liquid
in Japa n ever y single yea r since records bega n. gold in ancient Egypt, to the modern practice of
Everything about this data is strikingly at odds with cosmetic injections. Ultimately, the key to a long life
independent measurements.” still comes down to a healthy lifestyle.
Casting further doubt, Newman claims that areas While most of the Blue Zone advice is still sound
with the highest number of centenarians are also in this regard, the suggestion of daily drinking could
associated with missing birth certificates, high crime be harmful. “Drinking two glasses of wine every
rates and poor health. day, as recommended by the Blue Zones, is a recipe
“Centenarians smoke, drink and generally do things for developing alcoholism and far exceeds the NHS
that’ll put you in an early grave. It all points to pension guidelines for heavy drinking,” says Newman.
fraud and poverty,” says Newman. For the best shot at a longer life, both Newman and
However, Prof Giovanni Mario Pes, of the University Elliot advise not to take health advice from centenarians.
of Sassari and one of the leading figures in Blue Zone They suggest instead sticking to the tried-and-tested by H O L LY
research, has criticised Newman’s findings. techniques we’ve known about for years: maintaining MCHUGH
“We object to Saul Newman’s academically misleading a balanced diet, exercising regularly, getting enough Holly is a freelance
and deeply flawed preprint papers, which have not sleep, managing stress and prioritising good mental science writer who
been peer-reviewed by any scientist. The ages of health, building strong social connections, avoiding specialises in the
individuals in the officially recognised Blue Zones smoking and limiting alcohol consumption. field of health.

37
 PREPARE YOURSELF FOR TOMORROW

I TRIED PROF DAVID NUTT’S HANGOVER-FREE

ALCOHOL ALTERNATIVE OF THE FUTURE
With the damaging effects of alcohol now so widely documented, is the
world ready for a new, all-natural alternative? Alex Hughes finds out
 INNOVATIONS

n a recent Wednesday night, I found myself sitting in a Nutt stressed that he didn’t want to end pub culture or the social

O
room full of journalists, neuroscientists, food experts elements to drinking, just make the whole experience safer.
and wellness practitioners. Unsurprisingly, it’s not how I “I want to save lives. As a doctor, every day I see someone
typically spend my midweek evenings, but I was there to whose life has been damaged by alcohol and I’ve spent a lot
investigate a rather big claim. of time researching how to minimise its harms,” Nutt told me.
I was at an event to promote Sentia’s GABA Gold, a drink After spending much of his career researching drugs and alcohol,
that’s said to give you that tipsy feeling of having had a few he became part of the UK government’s foresight programme,
drinks (it “elevates your mood” in Sentia’s words) without any tasked with giving evidence to policymakers to steer preventative
of the downsides of consuming alcohol (whether that’s a mild strategies. It was at this time that he realised there was no real
headache from a couple of glasses of red or a heavy hangover way to protect people from the damaging effects of alcohol.
from overindulging on IPAs). It has next to no calories, tastes So instead, why not replace alcohol with something safer? That
good and is made entirely of healthy natural ingredients. was Nutt’s initial plan. Since then, he and the Sentia team have
This all sounds too good to be true, right? In a way, it is. made multiple versions of their alcohol alternative (as well as
GABA Gold is part of a line of drinks created by Sentia, with the GABA Gold, there’s GABA Black and GABA Red).
help of Prof David Nutt (left), a leading expert on drugs, alcohol
and their effects. THE FUTURE OF ALCOHOL ALTERNATIVES
GABA Gold isn’t classed as an alcoholic drink – it’s a food Removing the alcohol from the drinking experience opens a lot
supplement. But while there’s no danger of it getting you drunk, of doors, but it doesn’t solve all the problems associated with
it will give you a bit of a buzz, that calm confidence you get after drinking alcohol. There’s concern from critics about the impact
a couple of alcoholic drinks. drinks like GABA Gold may have on alcoholics or those with
I went into all this unconvinced. And yet, as I sipped my previous dependencies, which Nutt is aware of.
second Sentia-based cocktail, handed to me by a bartender with “It does polarise people. There are concerns from people who see
a worrying number of feathers and dreamcatchers in his hat, I this product as being ethically wrong. Or they see non-alcoholic
did start to feel tipsy. drinks as a gateway back into drinking. We don’t expect
The feeling lasted for a good 40 minutes. Since everyone to be sympathetic, but it’s practical to give people
that night, I’ve tried Sentia a few more times, alternatives. If even a handful of people find benefit in
repeatedly achieving that same relaxed feeling. Sentia [drinks], I’m happy.”
While the experience is different for everyone, The Sentia team still sees its drinks as alcohol in
drinking more of it won’t get you any more tipsy some ways. You shouldn’t consume them if you’re on
or even drunk, unlike alcohol. medication, pregnant or breastfeeding, for example.
So how does a mix of berries, plants and a few They’re also marketed as adult drinks and should only
other ingredients give you that feeling? It’s all thanks be sold to over-18s. You also shouldn’t drink them before
to something called GABA. driving or consume more than 100ml (just over 3oz)
within 24 hours.
A SAFER SUBSTITUTE This puts Sentia in a strange spot. Its drinks have
GABA might sound like an ABBA cover band, more of an effect than non-alcoholic drinks, but
but it’s actually important for controlling a lower alcohol percentage (none, to be exact).
your body’s functions. They’re also pretty expensive, costing £32
Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) (around $40) a bottle – a problem Nutt and
acts as a neurotransmitter in the central the team say they want to improve on.
nervous system. It plays a key role in the Sentia also isn’t the only brand in this
experience of anxiety, stress and fear, space. Three Spirit Drinks sells “elixirs
and produces a calming effect in the designed to enhance your mood.” As does
brain. Sentia’s drinks are made mostly Kin Euphorics.
of GABA-boosting ingredients, such In fact, there are lots of companies in
as chamomile, ashwagandha and gotu the ‘synthetic alcohol’ market. Bad news
kola. By boosting your levels of GABA, for Sentia’s sales maybe, but not for its
consuming the drinks creates a feeling vision. As more people turn away from
akin to that alcohol-induced state of alcohol, a new drinks movement seems
calm and confidence. to be forming, and it’s completely free of
But why make drinks like this? Is the headaches, hangovers and the anxiety
ALAMY

plan to replace alcohol? At the launch, of morning afters.

39
 INNOVATIONS

CHEAP MARKETPLACE
The TikTok Shop sells tech at
unbeatably low prices. But does any
of it measure up to the more expensive
equivalents? Alex Hughes finds out

The TikTok Shop, the e-commerce branch of the social

media giant, is strange. The digital marketplace sells
everything. Outfits for cats and pillows with artificial
intelligence barely scratch the surface.
But it’s the tech section that particularly caught my
interest. Drones, tablets, smartwatches – just about every
type of gadget is on sale here, often at a fraction of the
price you’d expect. But are these cheaper options any
good? Only one way to find out. I filled my basket with
a selection of gadgets and braced myself to deal with
the good, the bad and the disastrous.

THE GOOD
My first purchase is a smartwatch that costs just £10.
While that is suspiciously cheap, budget smartwatches
have come a long way, with some well-known brands
selling solid devices in the region of £20 to £40.
Despite the worrying price, I’m pleasantly surprised.
The watch works and is quick and responsive; it even
tracks my steps fairly accurately. Does it turn off
unexpectedly and have a strange tendency to blare
music at random? Yes, but that’s just part of its charming
‘cheap and cheerful’ character.
Next, a pair of Bluetooth earbuds. I paid just £4.79 for
them, but they’re great. Sure, the quality isn’t brilliant and
they lack some fancier features (active noise cancellation
and touch controls, for example), but they cost less than
“SURE, THE QUALITY ISN’T BRILLIANT AND
a fiver! The charging case is covered in neon lights, the
earbuds have a good battery life and they even have a
set of microphones for phone calls that I’m told sound
THEY LACK SOME FANCIER FEATURES…
“not completely terrible.”
The good continues with a gaming controller for
smartphones. It’s cheap, well-built and works with my
BUT THEY COST LESS THAN A FIVER!”
phone (a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra). You simply attach
it, download a not-completely-confidence-inspiring app simple with just a screen, pen and a restart button. It can’t be
and map the buttons for a variety of games. Other than criticised for its abilities. For less than £5, it offers a fun drawing
possessing the worst instruction manual I’ve seen in pad experience. It can be critiqued for its flimsiness, however, and
my life, I’ve got no complaints on this one. somehow manages to break inside a bag of bubble wrap.
A pair of smart glasses meet a similar fate. The idea is that they
THE BAD play music via Bluetooth and can be controlled via buttons on the
So far, so… well, better than I was expecting. But things arms. The glasses work briefly before a crackling sound signals
soon take a turn. A drawing tablet I buy keeps things their refusal to work again.

40
 A projector will typically set you back at least £200, Next up is a £20 drone. Like the robot vacuum, I almost don’t
but I found one in the TikTop Shop for just £15. To my expect it to arrive, let alone work. A few days later, however, I’m
surprise, it works. It’s sturdy and projects a large, albeit ready to take the drone on its maiden flight around my living
low-quality, picture… for a short while. It soon starts to room. So I boot it up and the drone instantly crashes into a wall.
sound like a rocket ready to blast off and commits to its But that’s okay, I’m still learning to fly here.
impression by getting very warm. I’m worried to leave On the second attempt, it launches head-first into my blinds before
it running, as the sound and heat grow more intense. I even touch the controller. After a number of similar crashes, a
failed propeller repair and a roughed-up houseplant, it’s safe to say
THE DISASTROUS the drone has some control issues.
Next, I decide to find out what a £7 robot vacuum is On the whole, most of the products I bought feel cheap and fragile
like. For this price I barely expect it to show up. It’s 15 (unsurprisingly) and if they work (a big if), the performance is pretty
times cheaper than the most affordable robot vacuums poor. There are a few standouts, however – the headphones and
STEVE SAYERS/OUR MEDIA

anywhere else, but to my surprise, it arrives. gaming controller – but even those are only just passable.
It’s tiny, made of plastic and has just one big ‘start’ But can any of the TikTok Shop’s wares be critiqued when they’re
button to make it work. My hopes are low, but not low all so cheap? Absolutely, especially when other, more established
enough. It crawls around my house at a snail’s pace brands are venturing into the world of affordable tech. Ultimately,
picking up absolutely no dirt, but managing to head-butt for new tech on a budget, the TikTok Shop is probably not the best
every wall instead. It’s so bad I almost feel sorry for it. place to look.

41
 INNOVATIONS

IDEAS …A PERFECT BEGINNER DRONE

Drones are expensive. Flying them also means a steep
learning curve with lots of crashes. It’s a daunting
combination for newbies trying to get started. This

WE LIKE…
is where DJI’s new Neo comes in. It’s palm-sized,
lightweight (135g/4.5oz) and at £169 sits comfortably in
the budget end of the market. While it can be paired
with a DJI controller and flown like a traditional drone,
it’s intended to be piloted via an app on your phone or
programmed to track you via the buttons on its body.
Our pick of the month’s Start it up, show it what you want to film and it’ll follow
along shooting all the best angles.
smartest tech DJI NEO
STORE.DJI.COM, £169
 INNOVATIONS

IDEAS WE
DON’T LIKE...
…A FACE-SCANNING
DOOR LOCK
Lock and key technology has
been in use for centuries. It
worked for the ancient
Egyptians and continues to work
for everyone on your street. But
some people may want a more
high-tech option, such as
Lockly’s Visage Zeno. It uses
facial recognition to let you back
into your home. It scans your
…A UNIQUE FOLDING SMARTPHONE …A PAIR OF MIND-READING HEADPHONES face as you approach and, if it
Huawei has had a tough time in recent Sure, your headphones might sound great, recognises you, unlocks the door
years. The company has been banned from they might be stylish or they might have as you get near. Essentially, it’s a
selling its products in the US and a number a battery life that lasts for weeks at a $350 device that gives you the
of European countries due to security time, but can they read your mind? Didn’t luxury of going out without your
concerns. That hasn’t stopped the Chinese think so. Mind reading (well… brain keys (although it comes with
keys and a keyhole if you’re not
tech giant from making some truly unique monitoring, more accurately) is the unusual
quite ready to abandon the
products. The latest is a folding smartphone. function Neurable has built into its MW75 old-fashioned tech just yet).
Unlike those that have come before, this one headphones. Whether you’re listening to Lockly Visage Zeno Series
can fold into three, switching between an music or using them for a Zoom call, the $349 (approx £167), lockly.com
ultra-wide tablet or a slim smartphone. It’ll headphones will monitor signals from your
probably never find its way to the States or brain so that they can alert you, via an app,
Europe, but it’s an impressive glimpse into to when you’re at your most productive or
where smartphones could go. when you need to take a break.
Huawei Mate XT MW75 Neurable
£TBC, consumer.huawei.com $699 (approx £535), neurable.com

…A STEP FORWARD FOR SMART GLASSES …AN ULTRA-PORTABLE MONITOR

When Meta announced it had made a pair Remote working often requires you to
of smart glasses, a loud groan felt like the create desks in awkward places. Messy
obvious response. Many have tried to make dining tables, corners of cafés, even
such things and most have failed. But the benches in railway stations – all viable
Orion glasses seem different. They work options that force you to make do with just
more like a virtual-reality headset than a the space available on your laptop screen.
pair of glasses, overlaying your worldview That’s where Espresso and its 13 Touch
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scanning your surroundings to make home and taken anywhere. The size of a
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on the things in your fridge). They’re not non-touch varieties, and can be hooked up The creators of the SoundBed
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glasses could soon be a viable product. a second screen when on you’re the move. for your heart.” So, how does this
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£TBC, about.meta.com £419 (£199 for non-touch), uk.espres.so a workout? Vibrations. It uses
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reduce stress and induce
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methods to relax. But hey,
at least this way you get a
funky extra bed.
SoundBed Opus
$2,499 (approx £1,910),
feelopus.com

43
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 FE ATURE JUNO

46
 JUNO FE ATURE

Currently under construction, the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino

Observatory (JUNO) is set to unlock the secrets of nature’s most
elusive subatomic particle: the neutrino. It may ultimately provide
the missing pieces of the unified ‘Theory of Everything’
by M A RC U S C H OW N

n an enormous cavern, 700m the Chinese experiment. “It’s

(almost 2,300ft) beneath a scheduled to start operating in 2025
wooded hill in southern China, and we’re extremely excited.”
an extraordinary scientific Neutrinos are the second most
instrument is being built. common subatomic particles in the
The Jiangmen Underground Universe after photons of light.
Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), They’re abundant in the extreme, but
a 20,000-tonne (almost 19,700- practically refuse to interact with any
ton) sphere of a detector liquid type of physical matter, hence they’re
surrounded by 43,000 super-sensitive commonly referred to as ‘ghost
light detectors, is set to probe the particles’. Hold up your thumb. An
secrets of nature’s most elusive astonishing 100 billion or so neutrinos
subatomic particle: the neutrino. are passing through your thumbnail
“We’ve had to overcome many every second. They were created by
difficulties and challenges in building the nuclear reactions that generate
JUNO,” says Dr Yifang Wang, the sunlight. And eight and a half minutes
Director of the Chinese experiment, ago they were in the heart of the Sun.
who came up with the concept and Neutrinos only interact with the
design in 2008 after reading a paper by atoms of matter on exceptionally rare
Italian theorist Prof Serguey Petcov. occasions. Your thumbnail is not
“JUNO is a formidable feat of nearly enough to stop them in their
ENRICO SACCHETTI

engineering,” says Prof Jennifer tracks. As American novelist Michael

Thomas, a particle physicist at Chabon observed: “Eight solid light-
University College, London, who sits years of lead… is the thickness of that
on the international advisory panel of metal in which you would need to ´

47
 FE ATURE JUNO

2
´ encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being
touched by neutrinos.”
Faced with the elusiveness of their quarry, the
physicists’ strategy is to put a very large number of
atomic nuclei in the path of the neutrinos, boosting
the chance of stopping at least some of them. Hence
the 20,000-tonne ‘target’ of liquid in the $300 million
(approx £229 million) JUNO.
Although JUNO will be able to detect solar
neutrinos, its principal source of the particles will
be closer to home: vast throngs of them, streaming
out of two nearby nuclear plants. “We have more
knowledge about the human-made neutrinos than
the ones God made,” says Thomas. One of the
nuclear plants, at Yangjiang, consists of six reactors;
the other, at Taishan, has two. The neutrinos –
actually, they’re antineutrinos, the antimatter
counterpart of neutrinos – come from the
disintegration (beta decay) of unstable atomic nuclei
created in the splitting (fission) of the uranium and
plutonium fuel powering the reactors.

INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION
JUNO, not far from the town of Jiangmen in rural
Guangdong province, is a collaboration of about 700
scientists from 76 institutions in 18 countries. It was
specifically located 52.5km (32.6 miles) from each
nuclear plant. This maximises the chance of the
antineutrinos undergoing a personality change
during their journey to the underground
experiment. For there isn’t just one type of neutrino
and one type of antineutrino; there are three of
each. And, as they travel, they periodically morph
one into another.
No one suspected this bizarre, ‘oscillating’,
behaviour until the 1960s when an American
physicist called Dr Raymond Davis built a neutrino
detector consisting of 100,000 gallons of cleaning
fluid 1.5km (almost a mile) down a mine in Lead,
South Dakota. He was looking for chlorine atoms in
his detector that converted into argon when they
interacted with solar neutrinos. Other scientists
thought Davis was nuts. To everyone’s amazement,
however, he detected only a third of the neutrinos
1. The Jiangmen 3. Researchers on the project predicted to be coming from the sunlight-generating
Underground Neutrino testing Photomultiplier nuclear reactions. Davis’s result was explained by
Observatory's (JUNO) Tubes in the Surface physicists later at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
neutrino detector. Visible on Assembly Building. in Ontario, and one of them, Prof Arthur McDonald,
its exterior are the spherical
brown Photomultiplier 4. An aerial photograph
shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for it.
Tubes, 2,400 of which are showing the JUNO It turns out there are three ‘flavours’ of neutrino:
installed outside the construction site, located in the electron-neutrino,
stainless steel structure. Jiangmen in south China’s
Coiled around the sides of
the sphere are the Earth
Guangdong Province. “THERE ISN’T JUST ONE TYPE OF associated with the
electron; the muon-
Magnetic Field
compensation coils.
5. Construction workers
have to ride a special
funicular down the steep
NEUTRINO AND ONE TYPE OF neutrino, associated with
the heavier muon; and the

2. Liquid scintillator mixing

vats in the Surface Liquid
slope of a 1,200m (almost
4,000ft) tunnel to reach the
ANTINEUTRINO, THERE ARE THREE tau-neutrino, associated
with the even heavier tau
Scintillator Building.
Scintillator is a cocktail
44m-diameter (144ft)
experiment chamber to OF EACH. AS THEY TRAVEL, THEY particle. The weirdest
thing is that neutrinos
of a linear alkylbenzene
combined with a solvent.
finish building the JUNO
detector facility. MORPH ONE INTO ANOTHER” have three mass states –
m1, m2 and m3 – but ´

48
 ENRICO SACCHETTI X3, ALAMY

4
5
JUNO
FE ATURE

49
 FE ATURE JUNO

7
6. Miles of cables carry 7. There are over 17, 500
signals from the photomultiplier tubes in the
photomultiplier tubes to detector to pick up the light
the facility’s computer from a neutrino reaction in
farm for processing. the liquid scintillator.

´ they’re not the same as ‘flavour states’. Instead,

each flavour is a different mix, or ‘superposition’, of
the probability waves associated with each mass.
Crucially, the waves within the superposition
travel at different speeds. So, as neutrinos move, the
mix changes. An electron-neutrino morphs into a
muon-neutrino and then a tau-neutrino, before
repeating. Davis’s shortfall of solar neutrinos
therefore occurred because his detector was
sensitive only to electron-neutrinos and solar
neutrinos are electron-neutrinos for only a third
of the time!

LIGHTEST COMMON PARTICLE

Neutrinos have ridiculously tiny masses compared
with other subatomic particles – they’re about a
ENRICO SACCHETTI, ALAMY

million times more insubstantial than an electron,

the lightest common subatomic particle. No one
knows their exact masses or even whether a muon-
neutrino is less or more massive than a tau-neutrino.
This is where JUNO comes in.
The Chinese experiment is designed to measure
the ‘mass hierarchy’:
whether the masses of
the neutrinos go up in “TO DETERMINE THE MASS
step with the increasing
masses of the electron, HIERARCHY, JUNO INTENDS TO
muon and tau (a ‘normal
hierarchy’) or whether PIN DOWN THE MISSING JIGSAW
this isn’t the case and
there’s an ‘inverted PIECE: WHETHER M3 IS BIGGER
hierarchy’. Physicists
have already THAN M OR VICE VERSA”
1
6

50
 JUNO FE ATURE

determined that m2 is slightly heavier than m1 and

that there’s a greater mass difference between m3
and the other two mass states. To determine the
mass hierarchy, JUNO intends to pin down the
missing jigsaw piece: whether m3 is bigger than m1
or vice versa.
From the 500 million billion neutrinos per second
coming from the two nuclear plants, the JUNO
physicists expect to only detect about 40 to 60 anti-
neutrinos a day. And the signal they’re looking for is
so subtle that they estimate they’ll need to register
100,000 events to distinguish it from the background
signal, which will take about six years.
“JUNO will detect electron-antineutrinos coming
from the two nuclear reactors to determine what
fraction of the expected number is missing because
they have flipped into muon- or tau-neutrinos,” says
Thomas. The flipping probability is subtly related to
whether m3 is bigger than m1 and, therefore, whether
the mass-hierarchy is normal or inverted.
The signal JUNO detects is the light produced
when an antineutrino interacts with a proton in the
transparent detector liquid – known as a
‘scintillator’ – creating a positron and a neutron. The
positron quickly meets an electron, its antiparticle,
and annihilates into high-energy light known as
gamma rays. The neutron blunders around for about
200 microseconds before combining with an atomic
nucleus with the emission of gamma rays. These
rays cause the scintillator to produce light, which
is picked up by the light detectors (photomultiplier
tubes) around the sphere of scintillator, and allows
the trajectory and energy of the incident
antineutrino to be deduced.
The ‘double flicker’ signal, which has a 200-
microsecond gap, allows the JUNO scientists to rule
out confusing background events that can also
trigger the light detectors, such as those created by
muons (highly penetrating particles that arise when
high-energy particles from space slam into atoms at
the top of the atmosphere). This is why JUNO is
buried under 700m (almost 3,000ft) of rock – to
shield it from as many muons as possible.

NEW PHYSICS
If finding out whether the neutrino mass hierarchy
is normal or inverted seems esoteric, it turns out
that anything we can learn about neutrinos has
the potential to point to exciting new physics.
“Neutrinos were predicted in the 1930s and
discovered in the 1950s,” says Prof Patrick Huber,
a theoretical physicist at the Virginia Polytechnic
Institute and State University in the US. “Yet we
know less about neutrinos than we know about ´
 FE ATURE JUNO

8
8. A contractor working on 9. Construction of JUNO's
the construction of the sphere continues apace. The
detector moves one of the team has faced numerous
supporting bars into place. challenges, including limiting
These will hold the structure the amount of water leaking
steady. JUNO's acrylic sphere through the mountain into
is 35.4m (116ft) in diameter the experiment chamber.
and can hold 20,000 tonnes Despite the issues, this
of the liquid scintillator. The ambitious project has stayed
acrylic panels are having to close to its original schedule
deal with high levels of and has hit all of its key
internal stress. technological milestones.

´ the Higgs particle, which was discovered as

recently as 2012.”
Currently, our best theory of physics is the
Standard Model. The highpoint of 350 years of
physics, it provides an extraordinarily successful
description of how the fundamental building blocks
of matter – quarks and leptons – interact via three
fundamental forces. But the Standard Model doesn’t
tell us why the fundamental particles have the
masses they have – why, for instance, the top-quark
is a million times heavier than the electron – or
why the forces have the strengths they have. And,
crucially, the Standard Model didn’t predict that
neutrinos would have a mass.
Neutrinos, in short, are a hairline fracture in the
edifice of the Standard Model. The hope is that
determining the mass-hierarchy will provide clues
to a deeper ‘Theory of Everything’, of which the
Standard Model is an approximation. Processes
involving neutrinos are also strongly suspected to
have played a role in creating a Universe that’s made
of matter with pretty much no antimatter, which is
“NEUTRINOS ARE A HAIRLINE FRACTURE IN THE
one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology. EDIFICE OF THE STANDARD MODEL. THE HOPE IS THAT
But determining the mass-hierarchy is important
for another reason. Neutrinos, as the second most DETERMINING THE MASS-HIERARCHY WILL PROVIDE
common subatomic particles in the Universe, would
have significantly affected the evolution of the CLUES TO A DEEPER 'THEORY OF EVERYTHING'”
Universe. The greater their masses, the greater their
gravity and so the slower the matter of the Universe because, once the 20,000 tonnes of liquid starts
flew apart in the aftermath of the Big Bang. pouring into the 35.4m-diameter (116ft) acrylic
Neutrinos with greater masses also disrupt galaxy sphere of the full-scale JUNO, there’ll be no going
formation, resulting in a Universe where galaxies back. The scintillator contains extremely low
and galaxy clusters tend to be smaller and less quantities of radioactive material, which can cause
massive than they are in a Universe with less a confusing background signal, and pumping it
massive neutrinos. out and back in again could seriously compromise
this ultra-purity.
UNDER CONSTRUCTION Wang says the JUNO team has faced numerous
Work continues apace on assembling JUNO. problems, including achieving a scintillator of
Construction workers in hard hats and overalls ride sufficient transparency and purity, fabricating the
a special funicular down the steep slope of a 1,200m vast number of photomultiplier tubes and limiting
(almost 4,000ft) tunnel to reach the 44m-diameter water leaking though the mountain into the
ALAMY, GETTY IMAGES

(144ft) experiment chamber. On 7 March, engineers experiment chamber. “A big surprise has been that
started pumping scintillator – a cocktail of a linear the panels of the acrylic sphere are experiencing
alkylbenzene and a solvent – into a miniature more internal stress than we expected,” says Wang.
version of the spherical container. They needed to “We think we’ve solved the problem for the 30-year
demonstrate that this can be done without a hitch lifetime of JUNO, but we’re not 100-per-cent sure.”

52
 JUNO FE ATURE

“At several levels JUNO has broken new ground: its life implodes to form a super-compact neutron
getting scintillator that’s transparent enough, star, and they drive the explosion of its outer layers.
building the very large acrylic inner vessel and If the neutrinos didn’t do this, the heavy elements
creating a factory for a new style of large such as carbon, calcium and iron, forged by nuclear
photomultiplier tubes,” says Huber. “The fact that reactions over the lives of massive stars, would stay
this ambitious project is staying close to its original locked inside them forever. In other words, there
schedule and has been hitting all key technological would be no heavy elements to make a star like the
milestones is impressive.” Sun, a rocky planet like Earth, or people such as
In 2025, when it starts operating, JUNO will not you and me.
only provide answers to some of the fundamental Within the next decade, when JUNO has
questions about neutrinos, it’ll also be able to spot determined the elusive neutrino mass-hierarchy,
‘geoneutrinos’ coming from the radioactive decay Wang intends to upgrade the experiment to look for
of uranium and thorium deep inside Earth. Since a process known as neutrino-less double beta decay.
such decays keep the interior of the planet molten, This will occur only if the neutrino is its own
4.55 billion years after its birth, the geo-neutrinos antiparticle, so that the two neutrinos involved in
will enable scientists to visualise the churning the two beta decays annihilate each other. “This
motion of the mantle deep inside Earth. Over the will tell us something else we don’t know about
course of one year, JUNO is expected to bag 400 neutrinos and help us zero in on the correct theory
geoneutrinos – that’s more than the total number that describes these fascinating and elusive
detected to date. particles,” says Wang.
JUNO will also be able to detect neutrinos from
the Sun and from massive stars exploding as
supernovae. And, if you think neutrinos have by M A RC U S C H OW N (@marcuschown)
nothing to do with you, it’s supernovae that connect Marcus is the author of A Crack in Everything:
the elusive particles directly to your existence. Vast How black holes came in from the cold and
quantities are unleashed when a star at the end of took cosmic centre stage (Bloomsbury, 2024).
 SOUNDSCAPES FE ATURE

M U S I C F O R A

D I S T R A C T E D

G E N E R A T I O N
The number of things competing for our attention is often
overwhelming. Can dreamy soundscapes created with
neuroscience help our bewildered brains to concentrate?

Wor d s I A N TAY L O R
I l l u s t r a t i on s SA M C H I V E R S

ou don’t need a scientific paper to tell you that deliveries and passersby. Never mind the beguiling

Y music can change your mood or behaviour. We all

know, instinctively, that it can. Your foot taps of
its own accord at a gig. A high-energy playlist
gets you moving at the gym. Tears flow when an old
heartbreaker catches you unprepared.
buzz of notifications on my phone, which I’ve had to
put in a drawer so I can concentrate on writing this
article. It’s no easier for you reading it. Chances are,
your attention will be interrupted, on average, five
times. More if you’re a multitasker or somebody
So it’s not a huge leap of the imagination to think who’s easily distracted.
that the right music can also help our beleaguered The human brain evolved for vigilance. Recent
brains perform better. Focus and productivity neuroscience suggests our grey matter performs a kind
playlists attract millions of streams on music of unconscious sweep for new information up to four
platforms. In labs, researchers are probing how sound times a second. It’s a mechanism that has kept us safe
can affect our ability to concentrate. and sociable for millennia, but evolution didn’t see
And a small number of companies are creating the internet coming, or the digital deluge that has
soundscapes and playlists, designed with insights arrived with it.
from neuroscientific research to lull us into a trance- I’m sure we agree: it’s too much information. We’re
like state of hyperfocus and productivity. Background overstimulated. Permanently distracted. Research
music with brains. from King’s College London suggests that the average
It sounds great to me, a man who has a mind that Brit checks their phone 80 times a day.
likes to wander and a to-do list that’s going nowhere. In the war of attention, companies like Endel and
I like to think it’s evolution’s fault that I’m so easily Brain.fm are banking that a solution to calm our
distracted. Almost anything can seduce my focus skittish minds lies somewhere in the background
from the task at hand: my inbox, my appetite, postal noise. They’re engineering ambient music with ´

55
 FE ATURE SOUNDSCAPES

´ great precision (and artificial

intelligence) to help us get stuff done.
“Music scientifically proven to increase
focus,” reads the Brain.fm website. Endel
claims that its soundscapes will help you
concentrate up to seven times better,
pointing to the results of a peer-reviewed
study it funded in 2022.

A FUNCTIONAL ODYSSEY
These companies produce what’s known as
functional music, available in apps as well
as playlists on streaming platforms. It
doesn’t sound like tracks we consciously
listen to, but it’s not white noise or birdsong
either. Fluid and tranquil, they’re usually
electronic compositions that sound almost
like auditory fog. It’s definitely there, but
it’s indistinct. It wouldn’t feel out of place
soundtracking a documentary about
NASA’s Voyager probes.
“Almost all the music in the world is
made to grab your attention,” says Dr Kevin
Woods, director of science at Brain.fm. “If
I’m a great music producer, my job is to
make things punchy, to make things bright.
And they use those words, because they
want to make you sit up and turn your
head, and request that song on the radio.
“So if you’re listening to music on
Spotify while you’re trying to work, it’s
active self-sabotage.”
Woods and his team flip normal
production techniques on their head. They
cut out the treble. There are no surprises,
no lyrics, no ‘drops’. Instead of three- something overly stimulating, says the company’s CEO Oleg
minute tracks, it’s slowly undulating Stavitsky. “Numerous studies show that a steady beat really puts
soundscapes that last 15 minutes or more. you in a state of flow,” he says. “But if you’re just going to listen to
“Every single trick that’s used to grab the same beat, there’s brain fatigue and you just start ignoring it.
people’s attention, we reverse,” Woods So the beat needs to change, but it needs to do that gradually over
says. That’s not to say it sounds like spa time so that you don’t notice it.
music or the stuff you hear piped down “It’s a constant fight internally [at Endel]. Is this way too
the line while you’re on hold to a call entertaining or is this just plain boring?”
centre. Modern functional music is
engineered according to data and YOUR OWN PERSONAL DJ
algorithms, scientific research, listener Endel’s soundscapes are AI-generated and personalised in real
preferences and even biometrics. time according to a range of inputs. The app asks you questions
At Endel, an important characteristic of about what you want to achieve and your ability to focus. If you
its focus-themed soundscapes is having a give it permission, it’ll track your heart rate, your movement and
regular beat. It also needs to hit a sweet the weather at your location. The algorithm gathers all this data,
spot between something boring and and then turns DJ for you. “The algorithm uses those data inputs to
determine which soundscape and which
intensity should be playing right now,”
Stavitsky says.
“ A S T E A D Y B E A T R E A L L Y “It uses stems, which are building
blocks of a composition, like a sound that
ranges from one- to roughly 10-seconds
P U T S Y O U I N A S T A T E long. The algorithm picks the stems that’ll
work for this particular situation and kind
of splices them together, overlays them
O F F L O W ” with some post-processing effects, and a

56
 SOUNDSCAPES FE ATURE

affecting the brain all the way to the frontal

cortex [and] the parietal cortex, and can
affect functional networks.”
Brain.fm’s soundscapes also feature
something called amplitude modulation.
Woods describes this as a thrumming
character in the music, a bit like muted
helicopter rotors. He says that, depending
on the listener, the level of amplitude
modulation can affect the extent and pace
at which brainwaves change.
“Different brains need different things,”
he says. “If you look at, say, brains with
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
[ADHD] versus neurotypical brains,
you’re going to find different brainwave
patterns, different functional networks
that are active. And so, with our music
designed for an ADHD audience, we have
very heavy amplitude modulation
embedded in it.”

BETTER TASK FOCUS

At the time of writing, Woods and his
colleagues had a preprint paper (one
that’s not yet peer-reviewed) in Nature
Communications Biology. The study found
that people with attentional difficulties
performed better on focus tasks when they
were listening to music with rapid
amplitude modulations, compared to
music with slower amplitude modulation,
or ‘pink noise’.
“What we showed is that behaviour is
affected, people’s ability to do sustained-
soundscape is born.” Some of these stems are created with well- attention tasks is affected positively,”
known artists such as James Blake or Grimes. Endel has also Woods says. “What we would like to think
agreed deals with Warner Music Group and Universal Music is – the simple story would be – ‘hey, we
Group to create new versions of old songs that work according to added these modulations to the music.
the company’s principles. They’re affecting brainwaves. The
“We train our model on our own data, first and foremost,” brainwaves are affecting functional
Stavitsky says. “And we realised that our model can now Endel-ify networks. Functional networks are
anything. You can give us any stems and we’ll just feed them into affecting people’s performance.’”
our algorithm and it’ll create a focused, relaxed or sleep “I can’t say that conclusively right now.
soundscape version of that initial material.” I believe it’s true, but so far the research has
At Brain.fm, the science sounds even wilder. The aim is to shown that these things happen together.
create soundscapes that alter your brainwaves so that patterns And to be perfectly honest, we’re now at
in the electrical activity in your brain becomes similar to those the cutting edge of neuroscience. I can’t
associated with relaxed or focused states of mind. really say any more because I don’t
It’s based on something called entrainment. This is the understand any more, because that’s what
phenomenon where biological functions synchronise with we’re doing research on.”
external stimuli, including sound. It might be your foot tapping to If it sounds far-fetched, remember that
the beat of a song, but it could also be your brainwaves changing functional music isn’t a new thing.
pattern. Using electroencephalogram (EEG) scans, researchers see Lullabies have long been used to help get
the rhythmic electrical activity in a listener’s brain shift in small children to sleep, while rhythmical
frequency in response to the rhythms in a piece of music. songs have, for centuries, encouraged
These changes begin in the auditory cortex, where your brain discipline, togetherness or productivity in
processes sound, but it quickly spreads throughout the brain, various types of workers. Sea shanties, for
Woods says, “in the same way that an epileptic seizure might example, helped sailors pull oars, sails or
spread from one locus to the whole brain. What you end up getting anchors to a specific rhythm. Even today,
are these brainwave patterns, driven by sound, that end up classical music is sometimes played in ´

57
 FE ATURE SOUNDSCAPES

“ O U R B O D I E S

A N D M I N D S
sleep and meditation aid, and even as a method of managing
chronic pain.
A R E J U S T N O T The methods tested and the results they produce vary, however.
One meta analysis in 2019 reported largely positive results from
22 studies. Another, in 2023, was far less consistent.
D E S I G N E D T O There’s no shortage of evidence that music can affect behaviour.
Research has shown that fast-paced songs can increase a person’s
athletic performance in some scenarios. Studies have also
C O P E W I T H T H E explored whether music can influence spending behaviour,
aggression or criminality.

A M O U N T O F DEEP FOCUS DIFFERENCES

Whether functional music created by the likes of Endel and
Brain.fm truly wrestles our minds into a daydream of deep focus
I N F O R M A T I O N is a matter of some debate. I approached a number of independent
researchers who expressed a mixture of optimism and caution
about the underlying science that powers these playlists.
T H A T W E ’ R E The point that everyone agrees on – Woods, Stavitsky and every
other scientist I spoke to – is that each brain is different.
Individual differences in the listener, and the context in which
C O N S U M I N G they’re listening, are huge.
“Our work has shown that it’s horses for courses,” says Dr Karina
Linnell, who studies music and attentional states at Goldsmiths,
E V E R Y D A Y ” University of London. “It depends upon what task you’re trying to

´ public places in the hope that its

calming melodies might work to deter
antisocial behaviour.
What has changed is the degree of
intention on the part of the listener. Back in
the mid-20th century, background music
would be played at you to elicit a certain
response. The music brand Muzak came to
prominence in the 1930s. It designed
playlists based on the theory of stimulus
progression, varying the tempo and style
of the music.
This supposedly increased the energy
and focus of the people listening to it. In its
marketing materials, Muzak promised an
increase in worker productivity and a fall
in typing errors, while critics described it
as a form of brainwashing.
Then came binaural beats in the 1970s.
This auditory illusion occurs when you
listen to two sounds, one in each ear, each
with a different frequency. Upon hearing
them, your brain perceives a third tone,
which is usually the difference in
frequency between the two sources.
It’s claimed that binaural beats affect the
listener’s brainwaves, just like Brain.fm
says its playlists do. Binaural beats have
been studied not just for focus, but as a

58
 SOUNDSCAPES FE ATURE

being creative or doing something boring and repetitive. “We

can’t condense the sum of human endeavour to the ability to
remain focused,” Linnell explains. “Although we know from
the cognitive literature that it’s very important for success in
classical academia.”
While there’s a lot of conflicting results in the scientific
literature on the effects of background music, Linnell’s work has
shown it can decrease mind wandering and increase focus time.
And linked to this is promising work that music can be helpful
for some ADHD brains.
“It’s been known for some time that mind wandering can be
more prevalent in people higher in ADHD traits or diagnosed,”
Linnell says, “particularly when performing boring tasks. It’s a
growing area in the literature suggesting that where non-ADHD
participants wouldn’t benefit from background music in a whole
range of different ways, ADHD participants actually do, and
sometimes even close the gap.”

SOUNDSCAPES AND WELLNESS

Independent researchers are also looking at whether manipulating
brainwaves with sound can have an effect on wellness. Earlier this
year, Dr Ines Violante, a psychological neuroscientist at the
University of Surrey, ran a study to find out if precise sound
stimulation could target alpha brainwaves in sleep. She hopes it’ll
lead to new therapies that will help people with dementia and
cognitive decline to sleep better.
She’s wary about whether or not brainwaves are able to help
do and what state you’re in to start with. LEFT Screenshots us to focus, though. “It’s not that there aren’t any studies that
It also depends upon the type of sound of Endel’s app, would support it,” she says. “I would just say that the evidence
stimulus that you’re using. All these which uses isn’t compelling.”
artificial
things interact.” intelligence to Part of the reason is the way we categorise different brainwaves
Some research suggests that personal compose into quite broad bands. “Alpha brainwaves are not just about
taste is a factor, as is personality. Introverts soundscapes to relaxation. You also see alpha frequencies increasing as you do a
and extroverts, for example, respond help you relax, more demanding task,” Violante says.
sleep or focus
differently to background sound and “So sometimes in the attempt to simplify these things, people
music. Receptivity is also key, says Prof forget that the human brain is complex.”
Susan Rogers, director of the Berklee Music Woods at Brain.fm and Stavitsky at Endel both acknowledge the
Perception and Cognition Laboratory, limits of what we know about sound and the brain. But they’re
which is based in Boston, in the US. also in permanent research mode themselves, their own growing
“If you’re really hungry, a cracker is databanks and customer feedback as useful as anything published
going to be the best-tasting food,” she says. in scientific journals.
“And if you’re totally full, your favourite User testimonials for both platforms are effusive. Some credit
meal is unappealing. The same is true of these soundscapes for getting them through university or even
auditory stimuli.” childbirth. Another user says that they’d have been homeless
Rogers, previously a music producer who had it not been for soundscapes helping them through a critical
worked with Prince and other artists, work deadline.
believes the task at hand is important, too. “I think what’s happening fundamentally is that our bodies
“It’s fine to have auditory stimulus music and minds are just not designed to cope with the amount of
when you’re at the gym and you’re just information that we’re consuming every day,” Stavitsky says.
physically working out,” she says. “But if “So, naturally, our brains are like, ‘What is going on?’”
your lexical circuits are working on “As a species, we’re just not
writing or reading, you best not have a thinking about this,” he adds.
distracting auditory stimulus.” “And that’s why we think that
by I A N TAY L O R
Part of the issue is that you need different sound, as a non-invasive way Ian is a freelance science writer
types of focus to accomplish different to deal with this challenge, and the former deputy editor
tasks. You might be problem-solving or is a unique opportunity.” of BBC Science Focus.

59
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 FE ATURE INTERNET OF ANIMALS

WATCH
David Attenborough
explores Earth’s
extraordinary animals in
Planet Earth III
https://bit.ly/4hk0q0e

62
 INTERNET OF ANIMALS FE ATURE

Project ICARUS is being used

to map the behaviours and
migrations of species around
the world, including the cheetah

SCIENTISTS ARE USING ELECTRONIC

TAGS AND SATELLITES TO TRACK WILD
ANIMALS AND CREATE A DATA
NETWORK THAT COULD HELP US
ADDRESS THE BIODIVERSITY CRISIS
by D R C L A I R E A S H E R

ildlife populations around the

world are in crisis. Recent analysis
by t he World Wide Fund For
Nature estimated that over the
past 50 years, wildlife populations
have reduced by 73 per cent. In
the face of these unprecedented
declines, it’s more important than
ever that scientists understand
the challenges animals face and
how t hey’re responding to a
changing planet. This requires
data collection on a scale never attempted before
– tracking the lives of animals at a global level –
and scientists are turning to technology to make
this mammoth task possible.
The development of radio-tracking technology
has already opened many new research avenues
for scientists interested in animal behaviour, but
these studies have been limited by the large size
of the tracking devices and the need to follow the
animals with receivers, or retrieve the tags later,
to access the data.
In industry, new technological advances such as
miniaturised sensors and communication devices
have enabled t he development of la rge-scale
wireless digital networks that track the location
and status of objects, from shipping containers
to factory equipment – known as the ‘Internet of
Things’ or IoT.
ICARUS – the International Cooperation for
SERGIO IZQUIERDO

Animal Research Using Space – aims to leverage

this technology to create a global animal observation
network to t rack and monitor wildlife on an
unparalleled scale. The system uses state-of-the-´ 

63
 FE ATURE INTERNET OF ANIMALS

´ art miniature transmitters to relay data about animals’

movements, activity and even health, to receiver antennae
in space, allowing scientists to tap into a wealth of research
data through their computers.
“We’re about to have an internet of animals and that’s
super exciting,” says Prof Martin Wikelski, Director of the
Department of Migration at the Max Planck Institute of
Animal Behavior and ICARUS Initiative founder.
ICARUS data is being used to answer long-standing
scientific questions about animal navigation, learning,
culture and communication, and to assist in real-time
conservation decision-making. They also hope to apply
the animal tracking data to real-world problems, by
tapping into the ‘sixth sense’ of animals to develop early
warning systems for wildlife disease outbreaks, and even
earthquakes and other natural disasters.
“We can now think differently and do experiments on
a global scale that we never did before,” Wikelski says.
The first ICARUS tags, which went into production in 2017,
weighed around 4g (a fraction of an ounce) and transmitted

CHRISTIAN ZIEGLER/MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE OF ANIMAL BEHAVIOR, ICARUS/JEZ ET AL/MAX PLANCK

64
 INTERNET OF ANIMALS FE ATURE

Those living in northern Europe migrate south to winter in

“THEY WANT TO Spain and southern France, where they join resident blackbirds
that stay in these warmer climates year-round. Data from 118
tagged blackbirds, received by antennas mounted on the ground
and on aircraft, showed that they prepare for long-distance

TAP INTO THE ‘SIXTH migration by decreasing their heart rate and body temperature
for around a month prior to their departure. This strategy means
that migrating blackbirds have a similar energy expenditure
to resident blackbirds, despite the huge energy requirements

SENSE’ OF ANIMALS of long-distance flight.

The ICARUS tags are available in a variety of designs,
including ear tags for mammals like rhinos, cheetahs and
giraffes; leg bands for birds; and backpack-style tags for bats

TO DEVELOP EARLY and large insects. The latter allowed researchers to perform
the longest continuous tracking of migrating insects. They
attached tags to 14 migrating death’s-head hawkmoths and
used antennae mounted on light aircraft to track their flight

WARNING SYSTEMS” for 80km (approx 50 miles) on their way towards their winter
breeding grounds in the Mediterranean. They found that the
insects can maintain straight flight paths over long distances
– even in high winds, offering scientists a window into the
species’s sophisticated internal compass.
a GPS location and whether the animal was
alive or dead, along with environmental SETTING UP A GLOBAL NETWORK
data such as temperature and humidity. Since its inception in 2012, the ICARUS project has experienced
Since then, the tags have been improved, several setbacks, from technical and logistical to geopolitical.
making them even smaller, adding new The ICARUS antenna was installed on the International Space
sensing capabilities and integrating new Station (ISS) in August 2018, and testing of the system was due
technology such as on-board artificial to begin the following summer. A defect in the power supply
intelligence to streamline data processing. on board the ISS delayed this step, however, and the ICARUS
It’s also made them cheaper; now, the observation system wasn’t switched on until March 2020. The
tags cost around €50–100 each (about first research projects using the system began in September of
£40–85), making large-scale tagging more that year, with ICARUS tags deployed on 15 species worldwide.
affordable. The team is currently working Then, after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the
on the next generation of tags, which ICARUS collaboration paused operations. Fortuitously, the
will weigh about 1g and be able to relay team had already started developing a satellite-based receiver
detailed information about the animals’ system that will eventually take over from the ISS antenna.
movements within their habitat. CubeSats are tiny satellites made up of custom-built 10cm
(4in) cubes that perform a variety of experiments in orbit.
BLACKBIRD MIGRATION ICARUS is currently preparing to launch its first CubeSat in
The first animals to be equipped with the autumn of 2025. This will allow it to send and receive
ICARUS tags were blackbirds, as part of data from ICARUS tags around the globe.
a research project to understand songbird This is just the beginning, though – the team hopes to add
migration. Researchers have now tagged more CubeSats to its arsenal, ultimately forming a constellation
nearly 700 blackbirds across Europe, from of satellites that can collect near real-time data around the globe.
Finland to Spain, and are tracking their LEFT Global map In the meantime, the researchers have been making use of
of tracked animals,
movements at the continent-wide level. as captured from a network of ground-based antennas to communicate with
To be able to “follow individual animals 11 March 2021 to ICARUS tags that have already been deployed. This system
of different populations continent-wide, 3 November 2021 allows Partecke to track the movements of songbirds across
t hat’s a ver y excit ing a nd ext remely by ICARUS Europe. “We get instant messages from our blackbirds sent
positive adventure,” says Dr Jesko Partecke, ABOVE LEFT
to our computers, and we know what they’re doing [and]
also of t he Ma x Pla nck Inst itute of Blackbirds were how they’re doing on a European scale,” he says. “For us,
Animal Behavior. the first animals it’s just spectacular.”
This project is already providing new to be fitted with Tracking songbirds at the continental level is already offering
insights into blackbird behaviou r in ICARUS tags. The answers to long-standing questions about their behaviour,
project is now
Europe. For example, across their European tracking almost life history and conservation, but with the launch of the
range, blackbirds have different wintering 700 of these birds ICARUS CubeSat next year, Partecke hopes to answer even
strategies depending on where they live. across Europe bigger questions about bird migration. “We have to become ´

65
 “THE ICARUS
´ global,” he says. The ICARUS team wants the data collected
by its tags to be available to scientists, conservation managers,
park rangers and citizen scientists everywhere.
Data from tagged animals across the globe is recorded in a
freely accessible database called Movebank, which Wikelski

TEAM HOPES TO describes as a “permanent digital museum” of animal data.

Moveba n k now contains data on t he movements a nd
behaviour of over 260,000 animals from more than 1,400

USE WILDLIFE stored and simplifying the process of data analysis.

FILLING THE KNOWLEDGE GAPS

MOVEMENT DATA
In 2021, the team launched MoveApps – a free platform of
analytical tools to help scientists make sense of all that data.

that scientists can apply to the animal-tracking data stored in

the Movebank database.

TO PREDICT “We want to democratise information gain, so that a farmer

in Niger or a fisherman in the Galapagos can have the
same information that a scientist has in Europe,” says
Wikelski.

EARTHQUAKES”
This data could help researchers address major scientific
and conservation knowledge gaps, from how animals
orchestrate their mass migrations, to what is driving
population declines. This detailed understanding of

66
 INTERNET OF ANIMALS FE ATURE

will also foster a deeper connection to the with the sea turtles’ lost years is really the biggest data gap”, in sea turtle
natural world, Wikelski says. “Emotional biology, she explains.
connectivity allows conservation.” In recent years, satellite tracking technology has allowed Mansfield to begin
Tracking turtles in the open ocean is studying this vital life stage in more detail. The initial tracking studies have
one way it’s being used to do this. An already revealed that young sea turtles don’t just passively drift on ocean
enduring mystery in conservation biology currents – as was long assumed – but sometimes they actively swim. This
is what happens to sea turtles in the period data is proving vital in helping conservationists seek legal protection for
between emerging as tiny hatchlings on critical sea turtle habitats.
beaches around the world, to returning But this research is still limited by technical challenges. For example,
to coastal waters as dinner-plate-sized currently available tags are still too large and heavy to be attached to
juveniles. These so-called ‘lost years’ hatchlings. “When you’re satellite tagging an animal, you want to have a
that young sea turtles spend in the open tag that’s not going to bother them, and you want a tag that’s as small as
ocean have proved extremely difficult possible, that doesn’t alter their behaviour or cause the animals to spend
for researchers to study. more energy moving through their environment,” Mansfield says.
“Those early life stages are the foundation In addition, most available tags don’t provide reliable and precise global-
of the rest of their lives,” says Dr Kate poistioning system (GPS) locations, or fine-grained information about the
Mansfield, a professor of conservation turtles’ movements within their habitat – data that could be game-changing
biology at the University of Central Florida, for researchers like Mansfield. The conservation community needs “smaller
who is collaborating with ICARUS on a tags, more reliable tags, [and] tags that have sensors that allow us to really
project that will track the movements of get at the finer-scale movements of what these animals are doing,” she says.
sea turtles in the open ocean. ICARUS’s next generation of small, lightweight and sensor-rich satellite tags
“If you’re working with protected species promises to address these challenges, revealing more details about the lost
or animals that are of conservation concern, years of sea turtles.
you really wa nt to k now ever y t hing
you can about them at every single life MONITORING THE EARTH THROUGH ANIMALS
stage,” Mansfield says. Currently, “that But the potential applications of ICARUS don’t end there. Animals sense and
early dispersal stage that’s associated respond to the environment around them, so the ‘internet of animals’ could
offer new insights into non-living components of the natural world. “Animals
give us unbiased information about the environment,” says Wikelski, which
can be leveraged alongside more traditional Earth-monitoring systems, such
as satellite imagery.
ABOVE LEFT For example, the ICARUS team hopes to use wildlife movement data to
A macaw being predict earthquakes. Folk tales have long told of animals acting strangely
fitted with a tag
as part of the in the hours before an earthquake hits, whereas current technology gives
ICARUS project us just a few seconds or minutes warning of impending disaster. Wikelski
believes that large-scale animal tracking data could be the key to improving
LEFT Prof Kate this, and preliminary data suggests he might be right.
Mansfield of the
SERGIO IZQUIERDO, UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA – NMFS PERMIT 19508

University of
Researchers attached movement sensors to cows, sheep and dogs in
Central Florida is an earthquake-prone region in Northern Italy. Several months later, they
tracking sea returned to remove the tags and collect the data on board. They found that
turtles in the animals were unusually restless in the hours prior to an earthquake,
collaboration providing the first empirical evidence that animals really can sense these
with ICARUS
natural disasters in advance.
“We are now starting to understand the ‘sixth sense’ of animals,” Wikelski
says. Far from being a supernatural ability, it’s born out of natural, physical
principles, he says: “If you have interacting, intelligent sensors, you have
emergent, novel properties – that’s the ‘sixth sense’ of animals.” By tracking
wild animals at scale, scientists can tap into this emergent sense to better
understand and make predictions about the world.
ICARUS is the most ambitious wildlife-tracking project that’s ever been
attempted and for the researchers involved in it, who’ve spent over a decade
ma k ing t he project a reality, t he possible
applications are almost endless. With a global,
interconnected network of animals, scientists and by D R C L A I R E A S H E R
conservation workers everywhere will have access (@claireasher)
to the lives of wildlife in unprecedented detail. Claire is a freelance science
What secrets they’ll be able to uncover about the journalist, interested in
natural world, only time will tell. ecology and conservation.

67
68
 FE ATURE

SYSTEM
REBOOT by D R A N D R E W S T E E L E

IGNORE THE PSEUDO-SCIENCE

SUPPLEMENTS PROMISING TO
CRUSH INFLAMMATION AND
s you read this, your WARD OFF ILLNESS. HERE’S THE Should we be seeking

A TRUTH ABOUT RECALIBRATING

body is playing host ways to increase t he
to countless battles. power of our immune
If you’re currently
YOUR BODY’S DEFENCES systems, or searching for
fighting off an FOR LONG-TERM HEALTH things that will turn it
infection, this might AND LONGEVITY down to help keep us in
feel obvious. But, even optimal health?
if you’re well, the two Biology is many things,
trillion cells that make up your But what’s the best way to do this? but it’s never straightforward.
immune system, with a combined Claims in supplement adverts Hence the somewhat frustrating
weight of over a kilogram (a little or made by influencers online answer to that question is ‘it
over two pounds), are battling can be confusing: some will tell depends’. But we’re increasingly
against incoming germs, as well you that a given food or pill is understanding how our immune
as keeping your own cells in ‘immune boosting’, while others systems function, in sickness and
ILLUSTRATION: SAM FALCONER

check if they misbehave. suggest that you need to ‘reduce in health, and how everything
Your immune system is critical KPƃCOOCVKQPo from lifestyle changes to cutting-
for preventing everything from There’s just one problem – edge medical treatments could
infections to cancer, and can even nKPƃCOOCVKQPoKUVJGUEKGPVKƂE improve our immunity as we age.
help slow the ageing process. As term for what happens when So, what are the key lessons
such, reinforcing your internal your immune system springs we can learn to keep our cellular
army is key to your overall health. into action. So which is it, then? ƂIJVKPIHQTEGKPIQQFUJCRG!´

69
 FE ATURE IMMUNE SYSTEM REBOOT

AN IMMUNE SYSTEM THAT FIGHTS ONLY WHEN NEEDED IS GREAT. BUT AN IMMUNE SYSTEM
THAT’S STUCK WAGING A CONSTANT WAR COULD BE DOING MORE HARM THAN GOOD

Inf lammation is usually good when NORMAL near them that are the causal factor LEFT Normal
it’s ‘acute’: the kind that ramps both FIBROBLAST here – but, either way, trying to fibroblast cells (top)
up and down rapidly when we get an maintain a healthy weight can be help form connective
infection or injury. Immune cells rush good for your long-term health by tissue. Senescent
to the site of the problem, clean things dialling down this process. fibroblasts (below)
up and then disperse as soon as things Similarly, active muscles seem to become less effective
are back to normal. UGETGVGCPVKKPƃCOOCVQT[OQNGEWNGU and accumulate
2TQDNGOCVKEKPƃCOOCVKQPKUWUWCNN[ YJKNGUVCVKEQPGUFTKXGKPƃCOOCVKQP as we age
‘chronic’ – a low-level thrum of immune CELL SENESCENCE which means moving is a powerful
activity, whose chorus often builds to IN AGING immune optimiser. So exercise BELOW Accute
a crescendo with advancing age. This is good, but trying to avoid being inflammation in
perpetual paranoia on the part of the sedentary throughout the day is also connective tissue
immune system doesn’t serve a useful DGPGƂEKCN;QWECPVT[VQFQVJKUD[
protective function. In fact, it can drive ƂPFKPIQRRQTVWPKVKGUVQUVCPFWR RIGHT An
a range of issues as we get older, from and take a few steps every hour, illustration of an
cancer to heart disease and dementia. rather than sitting at your desk all immune system
This is because our immune systems do Senescence-associated day and only going for a walk or responding to an
far more than simply ward off bacteria -galactiosidase swim before or after work. antigen (purple)
and viruses. Immune cells also patrol
our bodies on the lookout for suspicious
cells that might be on the verge of turning
into cancer, or damaged ‘senescent’
cells that accumulate as we get older.
#UEJTQPKEKPƃCOOCVKQPFKUVTCEVUQWT
immune systems, they get less effective
at ferreting out the ‘cells gone rogue’ in
our bodies. Even worse, senescent cells
can secrete a variety of chemicals that
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reducing the effectiveness with which
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That means what we really want to
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zone of immune activity: not too much;
not too little; but just right, depending
on the situation. Frustratingly, all that
means is it’s hard to create a silver bullet.
All is not lost, however: straightforward
healt h advice can help keep your
immune system optimally tuned. For
example, fat tissue seems to drive chronic
inflammation. Scientists aren’t sure
whether it’s the fat cells themselves,
or the immune cells that hang around

70
 IMMUNE SYSTEM REBOOT FE ATURE

SECURE YOUR PERIMETER

SOME ENEMIES WILL ALWAYS FIND A WAY
IN, BUT THERE ARE SIMPLE STEPS YOU CAN
TAKE TO FORTIFY YOUR DEFENCES

While t he acute inf lammation t hat times of stress or reduced immunity. infections could help slow down the
accompanies an infection is incredibly 9JKNGƃCTGWRURTQDCDN[YQPoVECWUGCP[ ageing process, as well as helping avoid
important, there is evidence that being symptoms (it’s very unlikely to be serious the immediate misery of being ill: get
ill exerts a cumulative cost on our long- unless you’re immunosuppressed) there’s XCEEKPCVGF CPCPPWCNƃWXCEEKPGCPF
term health. One paper found that adults evidence that low-level persistence of up-to-date coronavirus vaccines are the
who grew up in an era of high childhood CMV can accelerate the ageing of the most likely regular ones); wash your
mortality (suggesting that they were immune system. hands regularly; cook food thoroughly;
exposed to a high burden of infectious Because it never quite gets eradicated, and consider wearing a mask if you’re
disease, but were fortunate enough our immune system becomes increasingly going to be somewhere with a particularly
to survive) also had higher mortality obsessed with CMV, dedicating more high risk of airborne infection.
at older ages. This implies that the CPFOQTGKOOWPGEGNNUVQƂIJVKPIKV If you do all the above and still get
inflammation caused by fighting off crowding out the immune system’s other ill, it’s public-spirited to stay at home
infections could increase our risk of functions. A study in California found when you’re feeling unwell. Not only
SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY X2 ILLUSTRATION: ACUTE GRAPHICS

diseases as we get older. that people with the highest levels of should your colleagues thank you for
One infection t hat has a antibodies against CMV in their blood JGNRKPIVJGOCXQKFVJGUPKHƃGUDWVCNUQ
particular association with ageing is (implying that their bodies are actively for slowing down their rate of ageing.
cytomegalovirus, otherwise (and more ƂIJVKPIKV YGTGRGTEGPVOQTGNKMGN[ The other, perhaps more surprising,
pronounceably) known as CMV. Most to die over the next decade than those RKGEGQHCFXKEGKUVQDTWUJCPFƃQUU[QWT
of us will get CMV at some point in with lower levels. VGGVJTGIWNCTN[)QQFQTCNJ[IKGPGMGGRU
our lives – it’s transmitted through Sadly, dodging CMV is a big ask. the unfriendly bacteria in your mouth at
VJGGZEJCPIGQHDQFKN[ƃWKFUUQQHVGP ;GVVCMKPIIGPGTCNUVGRUVQCXQKFQVJGT bay, and there’s evidence that this can
transferred between dribbling toddlers reduce the risk of heart disease and even,
or kissing teenagers. The infection itself maybe, dementia. It’s another piece of
is harmless, perhaps even unnoticeable the puzzle suggesting that infections –
for most people, but the virus sticks CPFVJGKPƃCOOCVKQPVJCVEQOGUCNQPI
around in our bodies for the rest of our with them – might accelerate the ageing
NKXGUQEECUKQPCNN[ƃCTKPIWRCICKPKP process more broadly.

71
GETTY IMAGES X2
 IMMUNE SYSTEM REBOOT FE ATURE

Our immune systems decline gradually sex hormones are partly responsible
with age, but most of you reading this for thymic involution in part from lab
will have already lost most of one major experiments: the thymuses of mice who
component of it: the thymus. Located have been castrated are maintained until
just behind your breastbone and in later in life than those of mice left intact.
front of your heart, this organ is the There’s also tantalising data showing that
military academy for T cells – a type eunuchs (boys castrated before puberty)
of immune cell critical to our ability to live substantially longer than intact men.
adaptively respond to different threats, But alas, detailed genealogical records
from infection to cancer. of the medieval Korean eunuchs used to
The thymus peaks early: it produces ascertain this don’t make note of thymus
OQTG6EGNNUKP[QWTƂTUV[GCTQHNKHGVJCP size. (Data in female mice and women
in any subsequent year, and sex hormones is harder to come by because removing
produced during puberty accelerate a the ovaries is far more complex than
process known as ‘involution’, where removing the testes.)
productive thymus tissue turns to fat. By If that doesn’t appeal, there are other
the time you’re 30, 75 per cent of your ideas at various stages of development. In
thymus is gone. the lab, scientists are working on either
Why this happens isn’t fully understood, gene therapy or drugs to reactivate a gene
but it seems to be an evolutionary adaptation. that’s critical for thymic development
Perhaps, by living in relatively small called FOXN1, or using stem cells to grow
groups and only meeting other humans new thymuses (outside the body for later
and animals within walking distances, transplant or by injecting the cells into
prehistoric people had seen most diseases the body). And one approach in early
THE GENERAL CONSENSUS IS by their teens. This meant they could rely stage human trials uses a combination
THAT YOUR THYMUS IS ‘OVER on immune ‘memory’ cells, rather than of hormones and the diabetes drug
THE HILL’ BY THE TIME YOU TURN needing to produce new ones throughout metformin to encourage thymuses to
30. BUT THERE ARE TREATMENTS their lives. In today’s highly connected regrow in men aged 51–65.
IN DEVELOPMENT THAT MIGHT world, however, entirely new diseases Though these therapies are exciting
GIVE THIS KEY PART OF THE can emerge and spread globally in weeks and could be with us soon, those of us
IMMUNE SYSTEM A NEW or months – and it could save millions of looking to maintain our thymuses in the
LEASE OF LIFE lives if our aged immune systems remained meantime should consider exercising.
flexible enough. Consider one study of a group of 55 to
Scientists are therefore working on 80-year-olds who cycled regularly: they
ways to either slow the thymus’s decline were found to have more T cells fresh
or, ideally, rejuvenate it as we grow from the thymus than sedentary people of
older. One option probably best not tried the same age, but they also had a similar
at home is sterilisation. We know that number to healthy 20 to 36-year-olds.

TOP LEFT
The thymus sits
1 The Hubble Space
under your chest
Telescope above Earth
and, along with
the spleen

“SCIENTISTS ARE THEREFORE WORKING

2 Precise details of the
cosmic background
(towards
radiation arethe
observed by
bottom
the Planckof the seen
satellite,
herecage),
rib in the Netherlands
before its launch

ON WAYS TO EITHER SLOW THE

monitors the
blood, checking
3 A dark matter map for a
patch of sky based on
for anything that
gravitational lensing
the immune

THYMUS'S DECLINE OR, IDEALLY,

system may
need to address

LEFT
An illustration of
T cells attacking
a cancer cell REJUVENATE IT AS WE GROW OLDER"
73
 TURN IT OFF AND ON AGAIN
WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, HIT ‘RESTORE TO FACTORY
SETTINGS’. IF IT WORKS FOR SMARTPHONES,
COULD IT WORK FOR YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM?

So, if you’ve got an aged immune system that’s 5QIKXGPVJCVCDQPGOCTTQYVTCPURNCPV ABOVE

TKFFNGFYKVJ%/8CPFEJTQPKECNN[KPƃCOGFCHVGT ECPCEVCUCPKOOWPGTGDQQVRQVGPVKCNN[ Bone marrow
a lifetime of infections, is there anything you can ridding the immune system of chronic stem cells grown
FQ!6JGƂTUVVJKPIVQUC[KUVJCVCNNVJGDCUKEJGCNVJ KPHGEVKQPUQTOKUEQPƂIWTCVKQPUEQWNF in a lab ahead
CFXKEG[QWoXGJGCTFCOKNNKQPVKOGUDGHQTGUVKNN we use the procedure to give all of us a of possible
works – it’s never too late to start exercising or second chance at a fresh, new immune transplant into a
improving your diet. U[UVGO!2QUUKDN[6GUVUQPOKEGCTG cancer patient
But if you’re hoping science might have something RTQFWEKPIVCPVCNKUKPITGUWNVUVJGQPGU
WRKVUUNGGXG[QWEQWNFDGKPNWEMVJGTGoUCOGFKECN VJCVTGEGKXGFHTGUJDNQQFUVGOEGNNUHTQO ABOVE RIGHT
approach on the horizon that could allow us to [QWPIDQPGOCTTQYNKXGNQPIGTCPFCTG A therapeutic
wipe the slate clean and start again from scratch. KPDGVVGTJGCNVJ antibody (blue)
+VoUCEVWCNN[CVTGCVOGPVVJCVOGFKEUJCXGDGGP #DQPGOCTTQYVTCPURNCPVKUCOCLQT blocking
WUKPIHQTFGECFGUCDQPGOCTTQYVTCPURNCPV6JG procedure, however, and doctors would interleukin-11
VTCFKVKQPCNTGCUQPVQRGTHQTOQPGQHVJGUGKUCDNQQF DGWPFGTUVCPFCDN[JGUKVCPVVQVT[KV (orange), a
cancer, such as leukaemia. In this instance, your on healthy people who are merely old cytokine that
KOOWPGEGNNUDGIKPVQFKXKFGWPEQPVTQNNCDN[CPF GPQWIJVQRQVGPVKCNN[DGPGƂVHTQOCP promotes
QHVGPVJGQPN[QRVKQPKUVQGPVKTGN[TGOQXGDQVJVJG immune reset. The good news is that inflammation
KOOWPGU[UVGOCPFVJGUVGOEGNNUKP[QWTDQPG most experiments in mice didn’t involve
marrow that produce your immune cells. The usual the riskiest part of this treatment, the
approach is to use chemotherapy or radiotherapy EJGOQQTTCFKQVJGTCR[WUGFVQENGCTQWV
to kill the stem cells, and then provide a donation VJGCIGFDQPGOCTTQYDGHQTGVTGCVOGPV
of someone else’s stem cells that end up in your This means there’s a chance that this
DQPGOCTTQYUGVVNGFQYPCPFUVCTVRTQFWEKPICP much less risky version could work in
entirely new immune system for you. humans too.

74
 IMMUNE SYSTEM REBOOT FE ATURE

RALLY THE TROOPS

TO WIN ANY BATTLE YOU NEED TO CALIBRATE YOUR FORCES
TO THE PARTICULAR ADVERSARY YOU FACE AND ENSURE
THEY’RE ALL AIMING FOR THE CORRECT TARGET

“MYELOID CELLS, BY CONTRAST, ARE

RAPIDLY MOVING INFANTRY. THEY'RE
ABLE TO TARGET ANY THREAT, BUT WITH
FAR LESS SPECIFICITY – THEY'RE A
GREAT FIRST LINE OF DEFENCE"
biased’ – they form the wrong ratio
of cells, resulting in too many of the
ƂTUVTGURQPFGTMKPFCPFPQVGPQWIJQH
the more thoughtful, adaptive immune
cells. It’s a ‘shoot first, ask questions
later’ approach.
6JWUTGUGCTEJGTUKFGPVKƂGFCPVKDQFKGU
that would stick to aged, myeloid-biased
stem cells in the bone marrow, clearing
them out of the system and restoring
balance to immunity. When t hey
gave these antibodies to aged mice,
it improved their ailing immunity,
If a total immune reboot sounds a bit too adventurous for KPENWFKPIVJGKTCDKNKV[VQƂIJVQHHVJG
now, there may be an alternative. A paper published in (pretty poorly named) Friend virus (FV)
March 2024 found that bone marrow’s youthfulness could after being given a vaccine.
be restored by selectively removing stem cells damaged with Anot her paper f rom 2024 used
age using one of the immune system’s own tools: antibodies. CPVKDQFKGUVQENGCTQWVCPKPƃCOOCVQT[
#PVKDQFKGUCTGOQNGEWNGUVJCVDKPFVQCXGT[URGEKƂEVCTIGV molecule called interleukin-11 (IL-11),
Some just gum up the workings of their foe, while others act and mice given it in middle age lived
CUƃCIUVGNNKPIVJGKOOWPGU[UVGOVQEQOGCPFTGOQXGKV 25-per-cent longer than their peers –
So how can we use the immune system’s own tricks to keep that puts these antibodies up there with
us biologically younger? By rebalancing our immune cells. the best anti-ageing drugs we’ve tried
Bone marrow stem cells (see ‘Turn it off and on again’, in mice. And, even better, early-stage
opposite) make immune cells split into broad families: trials already indicate that they seem
myeloid and lymphoid. Cells in the lymphoid family make to be safe in humans.
WRQWTnCFCRVKXGoKOOWPGU[UVGOYJKEJECPCFCRVVQURGEKƂE All of this hopefully signals a future
threats – think of them as precision-striking special forces. where it won’t just be the ‘old favourites’
Their ranks include B cells (the ones that make antibodies), of diet, exercise and avoiding infections
and T cells (see ‘Thymus last words’). that keep our immune systems healthy
Myeloid cells, by contrast, are rapidly moving infantry. as we get older.
6JG[oTGCDNGVQVCTIGVCP[VJTGCVDWVYKVJHCTNGUUURGEKƂEKV[
SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY X2

sVJG[oTGCITGCVƂTUVNKPGQHFGHGPEGDGECWUGVJG[oTGOWEJ
faster acting than adaptive immunity, which takes a few days
to get into gear. As we get older, however, an over-abundance by D R A N D R E W S T E E L E
QHVJGUGO[GNQKFEGNNUECPFTKXGEJTQPKEKPƃCOOCVKQP Andrew is a Berlin-based scientist, writer and presenter.
The reason we have more myeloid cells as we get older is He is the author of Ageless: The New Science of Getting
because the stem cells in our bone marrow become ‘myeloid- Older Without Getting Old (Bloomsbury, 2020).

75
 THE BIG QUESTION DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME

THE BIG QUESTION

Should we
scrap daylight
saving time?
Most of us look forward to the extra hour we get in bed every October,
but researchers argue that changing the clocks twice a year harms our health
by I A N TAY L O R

H
uman beings don’t like 25-per-cent uptick in the number of heart
change. As a species, “There’s not a strong attacks reported. It’s thought disruption
we’re a conservative to our circadian clocks raises our blood
bunch – very adaptable, of enough argument pressure and the amount of cortisol, a
course, but ultimately stress hormone, in our systems, increasing
fond of safe, predictable stasis. So it’s odd for putting people the overall risk of a heart attack.
VJCVVYKEGC[GCTGXGT[[GCTYGKPƃKEVC Other research suggests that circadian
big, fundamental change upon ourselves through the stress disruption interferes with our immune
when we turn our clocks back in autumn response, with the number of natural
and forward in spring. of advancing and killer cells a person has falling when
On paper, this biannual gear shift their body clock is knocked out of sync.
FQGUPoVUGGOVJCVUKIPKƂECPVsKVoUQPN[CP delaying the When we gain an hour in October,
hour after all. But our bodies really don’t the sudden onset of darkness also takes
like change. The negative effects on our circadian clock” a toll. “Particularly among people of
wellbeing are such that many health European ancestry, there are those
researchers believe the Sun needs to set VYKEGC[GCTJCUCUKIPKƂECPVKORCEVQP individuals who suffer from seasonal
on daylight saving time (DST) altogether. our circadian health, interrupting the affective disorder,” says Dr John O’Neill,
Their reasoning? The clocks inside our rhythm of the internal body clocks that who studies circadian rhythms at the
bodies aren’t as easy to change as the keep many of our bodily functions Medical Research Council Laboratory of
ones on our walls. Mounting research ticking. When the clocks spring forward Molecular Biology. “That’s thought to be
UJQYUVJCVCTVKƂEKCNN[CNVGTKPIVJGVKOG in March, for example, there’s usually a due to the times you see light. When you

76
 The switch back to Greenwich Mean Time occurs at 2am on the last Sunday in October and could have a disruptive affect on your circadian rhythm

perceive that the day length is shorter, it scientists is to abolish putting the clocks of the 20th century. Germany was the
signals you to be less active and this forward and back,” he says. “There’s not ƂTUVEQWPVT[VQHQTOCNN[CFQRVKVKP
tends to lead to a lower mood.” a strong enough argument for putting with Britain and several other European
6JGTGoUCNUQCPKPETGCUGKPTQCFVTCHƂE people through the stress of advancing nations following soon after.
accidents. In 2019, the Royal Society for and delaying the circadian clock.” Productivity and energy conservation
the Prevention of Accidents called for the for the war effort were the two principal
UK government to abolish DST to reduce Backwards thinking reasons behind daylight saving. By
road fatalities and injuries. Lost sleep and So why does the UK, and around 70 other changing the clocks to maximise evening
dark driving conditions don’t help, but countries around the world, do it? light, Willett and others argued that the
our circadian health is, again, a factor. Daylight saving time, as the name GEQPQO[YQWNFDGPGƂVHTQOOQTGRGQRNG
“The circadian clock regulates how able suggests, is designed to make the most of working for longer during the daylight
we are to maintain concentration and the daylight hours as the seasons change. hours, while energy and money would
vigilance,” O’Neill says. “When the Sometimes erroneously credited to the also be saved on street lighting.
clocks go back, for a few days before the American inventor and statesman Of course, the way we use energy has
circadian clock has adjusted, people are Benjamin Franklin, a form of daylight changed dramatically in a century, and
going to be doing the same thing that they saving can be traced back to Roman times. a 2017 meta-analysis in The Energy
would have been doing previously, but an It was the New Zealand entomologist Journal found that DST generates
hour earlier. They’ll be that little bit more George Hudson and the English builder electricity savings of just 0.3 per cent
sleepy on the road.” William Willett who independently in today’s world.
ALAMY

For O’Neill, DST isn’t worth it. “The proposed that there should be state-level There are other reasons to enjoy British
consensus among circadian and sleep changes to timekeeping around the turn Summer Time though. Proponents ´

77
 THE BIG QUESTION DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME

´ point to the extended evening which time zone should we adjust to?
sunshine, which allows people to engage “The majority of That’s where we don’t have agreement.
in hobbies, socialise and exercise later in
the day, which also helps to keep the researchers prefer There is, for example, a big north-south
divide in Europe.”
economy moving – or does it?
Research published this year by health
a permanent shift Similar debates exist within the UK.
The majority of researchers prefer a
economists at the London School of
Economics says that, overall, we’re worse
to British Summer permanent shift to British Summer Time,
making the most of those lighter
off because of DST, both in terms of Time, making the evenings. But that would come with
wealth and wellness. darker winter mornings, especially across
When the clocks change in spring, as most of those the north of the country, and some
well as the increased risk of a heart attack
and hospitalisation, researchers found lighter evenings” question the safety implications for
morning commutes and school runs
wide-ranging detrimental effects. The during those months of the year.
Monday after the clocks change, people “Controlling the time is always
work an average of 40 minutes longer. As political,” according to Costa-i-Font.
well as lost sleep, their time stress rises “Politicians and decision-makers don’t
and their leisure time falls. Overall life want to be blamed or step up and set
satisfaction drops by 1.44 per cent. one particular time because they know
If that doesn’t sound like much, that they will antagonise 30 per cent
the effect costs an estimated €750 per of the population.”
capita, according to the analysis. That’s Even so, he hopes that there’s now
around £625 per person, and if you just enough political momentum that the
take the working population of the UK lights will soon go out on daylight saving.
(and a back-of-the-envelope calculation), So you might want to make the most of
that amounts to a cost of roughly £20.6bn by I A N TAY L O R
that extra hour in bed you’ll get at the
to the British economy. Ian is a freelance science writer and the former end of this month. It could be the last
deputy editor of BBC Science Focus. time it happens.
Time for change
Joan Costa-i-Font, professor of health
economics at the London School of
Economics, led the research. It’s
GUUGPVKCNN[CJWIGEQUVDGPGƂVCPCN[UKU
he says, and even though there are some
DGPGƂVUKPVJGCWVWOPYJGPYGJCXG
that extra hour – such as a fall in the
reported number of heart attacks,
compared with the rise in the spring –
his conclusions are clear. DST costs us,
both as individuals and as a society.
“We’re losing out,” he says. “There are
slight positive effects in October when
people get an hour more sleep, but the
net effect is detrimental.”
Globally, there’s a dawning realisation
that changing the clocks twice a year
does more harm than good. The US
Senate has proposed a law that would
signal a shift to a permanent standard
time. The European Parliament has also
proposed ending daylight saving. In the
UK, the Daylight Saving Bill of 2010-2012
failed to pass the House of Commons,
but researchers and other advocates are
still campaigning for it.
ALAMY

So why do the clocks still change?

“There’s consensus that changing the
time isn’t great,” Costa-i-Font says. “But William Willett was an early

78
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 Q&A

YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED

JUANITA ANDRADE, VIA EMAIL

ARE WE THE
ONLY SPECIES
TO HAVE BEEN
THROUGH A
STONE AGE?
The Stone Age might conjure up images of
early humans, sitting around a campfire or
hunting prehistoric beasts, but evidence
shows that we’re not the only species that
has learned how to work with stone tools.
Wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) use
stone tools to crack open nuts. They place
the nut on a flattened rock (known as an
anvil) and strike it with a second stone
(known as a hammer). Evidence from Côte
d’Ivoire in Africa shows that chimpanzees
have been using this technique for more than
4,000 years. This suggests that stone tool use in Thailand. In the case of capuchins, the and New Caledonian crows drop hard nuts
might be a trait that both humans and stone hammers can weigh up to 1kg (2.2lbs) onto ‘anvil’ rocks from a great height to
chimpanzees inherited from their last – one-quarter of their body weight – and it break them open.
common ancestor. Although, it’s also possible can take them up to eight years to master the Using stone tools was once thought to be
that both species learned this skill skill. Archaeological evidence shows that unique to Homo sapiens, but archaeologists
independently of each other. capuchins have been using nut-cracking have discovered stone artefacts from earlier
The hammer-anvil technique is also used stones for at least 3,000 years. hominin species, such as Homo habilis.
by several species of primate, including It’s not just primates that use stone tools Nevertheless, manufacturing stone tools
capuchins (Sapajus libidinosus) in Brazil and though. Otters use stones to crack open remains a cornerstone of human evolution,
long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) shellfish and pry sea snails from rocks, and archaeologists have used stone-tool

80
 Q&A

PETE DR HELEN DR HELEN DR EMMA HAYLEY DR CLAIRE LUIS AMY DR NISH

LAWRENCE PILCHER SCALES DAVIES BENNETT ASHER VILLAZON ARTHUR MANEK
Astronomy Nature Marine biology Nutrition Climate change Evolution Planet Earth Health & wellness Health

“50,000-YEAR-OLD SELMA RIDDLE, VIA EMAIL

WHAT’S THE STRONGEST ACID IN THE WORLD?

STONE TOOLS IN BRAZIL
MAY HAVE BEEN CREATED In movies, a strong acid is something
that’ll quickly eat through a body in
a bathtub, or the deck of a spaceship.

BY CAPUCHIN MONKEYS, But chemists measure acidity more

precisely – as the ability to donate
protons to a chemical reaction – and

NOT HUMANS” they normally measure it on the

pH scale from 7 (neutral water)
to 0 (sulphuric acid).
artefacts to piece together the behaviour But fluoroantimonic acid blows right
and movements of ancient humans. So the past this and is 10 quadrillion times
discovery that other primates also use stone more acidic than sulphuric acid. It’s so
tools has called some of the oldest reactive that it explodes on contact
archaeological sites into question. with water and even eats through glass.
In 2022, archaeologists in Argentina So it has to be dissolved in hydrofluoric
concluded that 50,000-year-old stone tools acid (itself a very strong acid) and
in Brazil may have been created by capuchin stored in a PTFE (Teflon) container. LV
monkeys, not humans. The quartz tools
look remarkably similar to tools crafted by
present-day capuchins. If these ancient tools
were indeed left behind by monkeys, it
would extend the record of their stone-tool
use by thousands of years and cast doubt
ARIANNA C ARPENTER, VIA EMAIL
on the timing of Homo sapiens’ arrival in
South America. WHY DOES MY ARM AND LEG HAIR HAVE GROWTH
Archaeologists have also highlighted striking
similarities between stone tools crafted by LIMITS, BUT MY HEAD HAIR DOESN’T?
early humans and shards of stone created by
mistake when long-tailed macaques using the Human hair growth is regulated by cycles. Each hair follicle goes through a growth
hammer-anvil technique miss and accidentally (anagen), transition (catagen) and rest (telogen) phase. The hair on your scalp has an
hit the two stones together. The monkeys anagen phase that’s quite long, ranging from two to seven years, which allows it to
seemingly have no use for these sharp-edged grow to a decent length if left (though this varies between people). But for your arm
GETTY IMAGES X2 ILLUSTRATION: NATALIA KOKKINOS

shards. But the discovery highlights a plausible and leg hair, this anagen phase only lasts a few months.
chain of events that our ancestors might have After this, it enters the catagen and then the telogen
followed three million years ago. Perhaps early phases, where the hair eventually falls out and is
humans were inspired to create their own replaced with new growth. How long a
cutting tools after accidentally creating shards particular hair can grow is simply the
in a similar way. length it can reach in the
The similarity between the monkeys’ anagen phase. So, with
accidental shards and humans’ deliberate such a short anagen
cutting tools makes interpreting archaeological phase, body hair can never
remains more challenging and reopens the reach the length of scalp
debate over the origins of some of the world’s hair – which is probably
oldest stone-tool artefacts. CA just as well! NM

81
 Q&A

NATURE’S WEIRDEST CREATURES

THE LUNGFISH
In 1836, European scientists discovered a (Protopterus annectens) will drown. Their age, there’s still much that’s mysterious
peculiar animal from the River Amazon that withered gills are too small to provide about the creature, including the link
they struggled to identify. Its eel-like body enough oxygen. But lungfish have another between its lungs and another fishy
was a few feet long and its air-filled lungs unusual ability to help them survive in their feature: the swim bladder, which most fish
persuaded anatomists it must be a reptile. natural environment of swamps and rivers, use to help them float underwater, as well
A year later, another specimen was found in which seasonally dry up. Lungfish chew a as to hear and make noises.
Africa, and based on the structure of its burrow in the mud and build a chamber Several varieties of fish have lungs,
heart, it was declared an amphibian. Three filled with mucus in which they curl up in a including bichirs and bowfins, but none has
decades of debate later, scientific consensus state of dormancy, not eating or moving both lungs and a swim bladder. One organ
settled on the idea that these are fish – only until the rains return. In the wild, this can could be a version of the other, but which
instead of breathing water through gills, last seven or eight months. Some lungfish came first? This is proving a difficult
they have lungs. Enter the lungfish. have been known to slumber for four years. question to answer. In fish embryos, both
If they don’t have access to the water’s Lungfish first evolved more than 400 the swim bladder and lungs develop from a
surface to suck in air, West African lungfish million years ago. But despite the species’ pocket in the gut. Scans showing the way

82
 Q&A

STEPHEN DONNELLY, VIA EMAIL

HOW CAN I TELL IF I’VE GOT

HIGH CORTISOL LEVELS?
Cortisol is a hormone produced by glands often experience difficulty sleeping,
in our bodies called the adrenal glands, which can lead to chronic fatigue. Cortisol
which sit above the kidneys. It plays a follows a diurnal rhythm, peaking in
critical role in various bodily functions, the morning and gradually declining
including regulating metabolism, throughout the day. When this rhythm
reducing inflammation and helping the is disrupted, sleep patterns can suffer.
body respond to stress. While essential
for our health, chronic elevation of 3. HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE AND SUGAR
cortisol levels can lead to several issues. LEVELS Cortisol helps regulate blood
Elevated cortisol can occur for a pressure and blood sugar. Elevated
number of reasons. One is a rare levels over time can cause these to
condition called Cushing’s rise, leading to the risk of
syndrome, which developing hypertension
“AN AUSTRALIAN LUNGFISH, affects people who
have been taking
and diabetes.

CALLED GRANDAD, DIED IN steroid

medicines that
4. MOOD CHANGES
Cortisol is often
contain a referred to as
AN AQUARIUM IN CHICAGO synthetic
version of
the stress
hormone.

AT THE AGE OF 109” cortisol for a

long time.
Anxiety,
depression
Even more and irritability
rarely, it can be are common
lungs and swim bladders are connected to caused by the in people with
the blood system in various fish support the body producing high cortisol,
theory that lungs are a more ancient organ. too much cortisol as it can affect
They also hint that swim bladders came due to a tumour in the the brain’s
along later and are, in fact, modified lungs. brain or adrenal glands. neurotransmitters, such
Another question that has long puzzled Several signs suggest as serotonin and dopamine.
scientists is whether lungfish are the closest significantly elevated cortisol levels:
living relatives to all the land-dwelling, 5. BONE WEAKNESS Chronic high levels of
four-legged animals – that is, all the 1. WEIGHT GAIN One indicator of high cortisol can lead to muscle atrophy and
mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. cortisol is weight gain, particularly reduce bone density, increasing the risk
It’s either lungfish or another group of around the abdomen. Cortisol influences of osteoporosis – especially in
mysterious fish, the coelacanths, and recent where fat is stored and higher levels can postmenopausal women.
studies are edging towards it being lungfish. lead to more fat being deposited in that
They’re certainly more distantly related to area. This is true for both women and 6. OTHER SYMPTOMS Skin that bruises
bony fish, such as tuna and herring, than men, although hormonal differences may easily, large purple stretch marks,
they are to terrestrial vertebrates – influence the extent and distribution. reduced sex drive and fertility problems.
including us humans. But while elevated cortisol does
There are six known species of lungfish contribute to increased abdominal fat, So, do you need a cortisol test? A genuine
alive today, including four from Africa. A it’s not the sole factor. Diet, lifestyle, excess of cortisol, as seen in Cushing’s
female Australian lungfish, known as genetics and other hormonal imbalances syndrome, is very rare. Testing for
ALAMY, NATUREPL.COM, GETTY IMAGES

Methuselah, holds the title of the oldest (such as insulin resistance) also play random cortisol (hydrocortisone) levels
fish alive in captivity. She arrived at an significant roles. A build-up of fat on the has limited use due to the episodic nature
aquarium in San Francisco in 1938 and, from back of your neck and shoulders, often of cortisol secretion. If you want to
studies of her DNA, scientists think she’s at referred to as a ‘buffalo hump’, as well as reduce cortisol levels caused by stress,
least 93 years old. If she carries on, she may a puffy, rounded face are also signs. rather than Cushing’s syndrome, talking
outlive another Australian lungfish, called therapies like cognitive behavioural
Grandad, who died in an aquarium in 2. FATIGUE AND INSOMNIA Despite feeling therapy (CBT) can help ease unhelpful
Chicago at the age of 109, give or take a tired, people with high cortisol levels thought patterns and behaviours. NM
couple of years. HS

83
 Q&A

PRESTON LE V Y, NORWICH The world’s deepest blue hole (marine depth. Using an echo sounder to bounce
sinkhole) lies off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatán sound waves off the bottom of the hole, they

WHAT IS Peninsula. It’s at least 420m (1,378ft) deep, but

explorers still haven’t found its bottom.
estimated Taam Ja’ was 275m (902ft) deep.
But another expedition in 2023 used a device

MEXICO’S Known as Taam Ja’, or ‘deep water’ in the

Mayan language, it was discovered more than
called a conductivity, temperature and depth
(CTD) profiler, with sensors that measure water
20 years ago by a local diver, but it wasn’t until pressure, to estimate its depth. This returned a
BLUE HOLE? 2021 that scientists attempted to measure its reading of 420m (1,378ft), but they’re not sure it
reached the bottom.
Blue holes are naturally occurring caverns
on the sea floor, with vertical walls. They’re
usually found in coastal regions where the
bedrock is made of soft, soluble rock, such as
limestone. This is gradually eroded, causing the
rock above to collapse. Although usually only a
few tens of metres deep, blue holes sometimes
connect to underwater cave systems.
With poor water circulation, blue holes are
low in oxygen deep down. This makes it hard
for organisms to survive, but some microbes
thrive there, consuming sulphur-based
compounds, such as hydrogen sulphide. Other
small creatures – including shelled single-
celled organisms called foraminifera and tiny
worm-like creatures called nematodes – have
also been found living in blue holes. Scientists
are keen to explore Taam Ja’ to find out what
creatures live in its dark blue waters. CA

LEN BYRD, VIA EMAIL disease across different populations. The diet is that it’s rich in key nutrients. These
study followed 12,763 middle-aged men include omega-3 fatty acids, potassium and
WHAT MAKES THE from 1958 to 1964 in Finland, Greece, Italy, antioxidants, such as vitamins C and E, but
Japan, the Netherlands, the US and former the inclusion of red wine in the diet is
MEDITERRANEAN DIET Yugoslavia for over two decades to track controversial. Alcohol generally has adverse
SO GOOD FOR US? heart disease and mortality rates. health effects, but red wine is rich in

GETTY IMAGES, ALAMY ILLUSTRATIONS: PETE LAWRENCE, NATALIA KOKKINOS

The study revealed significant regional polyphenols, which protect against oxidative
The Mediterranean diet may help you live differences, with men living in countries such stress and inflammation. Moderation is the
longer, especially if you also adopt the as Italy and Greece having lower coronary key to getting those benefits, however.
lifestyle of people living near the Med heart disease rates, especially compared In recent years, Mediterranean
during the 1950s. with Finland and the US. The healthiest were populations have shifted away from the
Characterised by a high intake of from Crete, in Greece. This highlighted the traditional eating model, with a higher intake
plant-based foods and moderate to low heart-protective effects of a diet high in of saturated fats and animal protein in place
amounts of fish, meat and dairy, the unsaturated fats, emphasising the role of of plant protein and fat, wholegrain cereals
Mediterranean diet also includes the cholesterol levels in heart disease. and dietary fibre. Studies also suggest a shift
occasional glass of wine, ideally enjoyed with A Spanish study called PREDIMED towards increased alcohol consumption, a
others during meals. Physical activity and an (PREvención con DIeta MEDiterránea) in 2011 more sedentary lifestyle and higher levels of
active social life are also important aspects. appeared to confirm that a Mediterranean obesity. Thus, even these populations need
American physiologist Ancel Keys first diet may improve cardiovascular and to revert to the traditional diets of their
identified the Mediterranean diet in the cognitive health for those at high risk of parents and grandparents. ED
1950s after noting higher rates of heart cardiovascular disease.
disease in Americans, compared with Additional studies suggest
southern Europeans. His interest grew when the diet may also help
he found that southern Italy had a high to prevent obesity,
number of centenarians. type 2 diabetes
Keys initiated the Seven Countries Study, and certain
the first to examine the relationship cancers. The
between diet, lifestyle and coronary heart secret to the

84
 Q&A

ASTRONOMY FOR BEGINNERS

SAM FERRELL, STOKE-ON-TRENT

YOU CAN BE
DECLARED DEAD, MARS

BUT CAN YOU

BE DECLARED
ALIVE?
Most people are declared alive by their birth
certificate and this status is presumed to hold
until revoked by a death certificate. But can
you undo a death certificate?
In 1975, 20-year-old Lal Bihari Mritak from
India found that he had been wrongly
declared dead. This wasn’t an administrative
error; his uncle had bribed officials so that he
could inherit a small plot of farmland. It took
19 years of campaigning for Bihari to reassert
his living status.
In the UK, thankfully, the process is a little
faster. Liverpool resident 65-year-old Ann
Smith was incorrectly listed as dead by the
Department of Work and Pensions in 2022,
HOW TO SEE: MARS AND THE BEEHIVE
but the error was corrected within a week. LV WHEN: NOVEMBER/EARLY WINTER
After a fairly poor showing of planets be quite noticeable. Around opposition,
early in 2024, fortunes reverse as we there’s another phenomenon caused by
enter the latter part of the year. Jupiter is the difference in orbital speeds of Earth
now dominant in the night sky, a bright and Mars. After initially appearing to
object nestled against the stars of move eastward against the background
Taurus, the Bull, near the Pleiades and stars, Mars slows to a halt, reverses
Hyades open clusters. Mars follows on direction and then heads west for a
later in the night, its salmon-pink colour period. It eventually slows to a halt
a useful way to confirm its identity. Also again, reversing direction to head east
referred to as the Red Planet due to this once more. Eastward motion is called
colour (something that arises from the prograde, and westward is retrograde.
fact that Mars is essentially rusty, its This apparent motion of Mars is known
surface containing a lot of iron oxide), as a retrograde loop.
Mars’s orbital period means it’s well- As Mars makes its first directional
presented for telescope viewing change on 6 December, it’ll be close to
approximately every 2.1 years. the Beehive Cluster (M44) in Cancer, but
The next optimal period is in the doesn’t cross it. The second directional
months centred around 16 January change occurs on 24 February 2025, the
2025, the date when Mars reaches planet then making a second run at the
opposition and is nearest Earth for the Beehive, but this time it passes across
current period of visibility. When Mars the cluster in early May 2025. PL
reaches this position, it brightens
significantly compared to when it’s
away from opposition. by P E T E L AW R E N C E
Being relatively close to Earth, Mars (@Avertedvision)
also appears to move quite fast against Pete is an astronomy expert and
the background stars, an effect that can presenter on The Sky at Night.

WATCH THE SKY AT NIGHT ON BBC FOUR AND BBC IPLAYER

85
 Q&A

FRED JACOBSON, VIA EMAIL CHLOE DICK SON, VIA EMAIL

SHOULD I BE IS IT SAFE TO RUN EVERY DAY, OR

POURING SHOULD I DITCH MY RUN STREAK
CASTOR OIL TO SAVE MY KNEES?
INTO MY BELLY A running streak, where you run every
day without taking rest days, can be
running techniques, wearing appropriate
footwear and gradually increasing the

BUTTON? highly motivating and beneficial for

overall fitness. Running is great
distance can help reduce the risk of injury.
Additionally, adding in some strength
cardiovascular exercise and isn’t to be training exercises to support the muscles
People pouring castor oil into their belly discouraged (and finding a routine with around the knees and other joints can
buttons on TikTok say the practice has cured some consistency is great). Getting a bit of provide added stability and protection.
their endometriosis, helped them lose weight, exercise as often as possible is also hugely Most fitness experts do suggest that
improved their complexion and given them beneficial for your mental health. rest days are essential for muscle
luscious flowing locks. But you’re right to But running every day without a rest recovery and repair, and should be built
question whether there’s any science behind could lead to injuries related to overuse. into your workout programme. Taking
the viral navel-oiling trend. Issues such as shin splints, tendonitis and a break allows your body to heal minor
Castor oil does have known impacts on stress fractures can potentially occur injuries and adapt to the physical
the body. Due to its stimulating and laxative because of the repetitive impact and demands of running.
effects, drinking it can help treat constipation stress placed on the same muscles and For avid runners who are keen to
or even induce labour, though there are better joints without allowing sufficient time maintain their streak, active rest days
and more commonly used drugs available for recovery. The knees, in particular, involving low-impact activities, such
for both of these things. The oil is also used are vulnerable because they bear a as swimming, cycling or yoga, can be
in the manufacture of cosmetics, namely significant proportion of your body’s beneficial and might reduce the strain
lip balms and moisturisers, thanks to its weight during running. on your joints. Or you could try just
hydrating and anti-bacterial properties. The key thing is to listen to your body. doing a very short run or walking instead
As for the claims that putting castor oil in Persistent pain or discomfort shouldn’t – you would still maintain your streak.
your belly button is good for you, however, be ignored, as it can be an early sign of Remember, even superheroes need a bit
there’s not a single study that supports or, an overuse injury. Implementing proper of downtime! NM
admittedly, rejects them. But that’s probably
because the theory behind the idea makes
no sense. It’d be like investigating whether
people could meet their daily fibre needs by
wearing a straw hat.
Your belly button once connected your
growing body to another human being, via
the umbilical cord. It connected to a placenta
that supplied you with oxygenated blood and
got rid of your waste. But that connection
was severed in the minutes after your birth.
Oil can’t get into your body via that route.
Filling your belly button with castor oil
might make the area softer for a time, but
that’s about all. The oil – taken orally or
topically – can’t help with weight loss or
provide pain relief.
The act of massaging the castor oil into
your skin may help to alleviate some of
the pain associated with periods, though
aromatherapy research suggests that
massage with essential oils is more effective
than with an unscented oil, such as castor.
Abdominal massage may also help to ease
the symptoms of constipation if you’d rather
not drink the laxative (and you probably
wouldn’t want to, given that being forced to
drink castor oil was used as a punishment
during the Spanish Civil War). AA

86
 Q&A

QUESTION OF
THE MONTH
NICK Y MOSCROP, VIA EMAIL

HOW DO WE KNOW
WHEN A SPECIES IS
GENUINELY NEW?
We know because of three little
letters… DNA. The genetic material can
be extracted from lots of different
sources, including fur, feathers and
faeces, and it’s the definitive way to tell
similar-looking species apart.
For example, until 2020, many
presumed that red pandas living in the
Himalayas and China belonged to the
same species. They were almost
identical looking, after all. Then
researchers studied DNA extracted
from the faeces of 65 wild red pandas
from across Asia and found that there
were significant genetic differences.

BE THANY SHEPHERD, DERBYSHIRE

COULD MARINE CLOUD BRIGHTENING

HELP US FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE?
The theory behind marine cloud brightening results in terms of reflecting sunlight. And
is that brighter or whiter clouds reflect more what if there are unforeseen effects on
sunlight back into space. This reduces the clouds or the climate?
heat absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere and Current research efforts involve mostly
provides respite from the effects of increased small-scale experiments and computer
carbon emissions while we work on lowering simulations, although some real-world
them. It’s thought that clouds over the marine studies have proven controversial. In May,
environment have the most to gain from such city officials put a stop to a cloud brightening
brightening efforts. But how do you brighten experiment in Alameda, California, after being
a cloud, and does it work as well in practice as alerted to it via media reports.
the theory suggests? Meanwhile, experts have also recently
NASA, GETTY IMAGES ILLUSTRATION: NATALIA KOKKINOS

The main way that scientists are proposing suggested it’s possible to glean useful
to brighten clouds is by spraying them with information from ‘natural’ experiments.
aerosols containing fine particles of sea salt. Researchers studying clouds near Kilauea
Aerosols act as ‘condensation nuclei’ in volcano in Hawaii showed that the aerosols
clouds, encouraging water vapour to coalesce produced naturally during eruptions W IN NE R
The winne
r of next is
and increase the concentration of droplets, increased cloud cover by 50 per cent. Question of
the
sue’s
leading to thicker, brighter clouds. The same Ultimately, the decision about whether a pair of po Month wins
pular scienc
books: Wha e
effect occurs with pollution particles. to deploy marine cloud brightening on a t the
Knows and Body
Working out which are the right-sized large scale lies with policymakers, who The
Inner Clock
particles to deliver to the right types of cloud haven’t seen enough evidence thus far worth £40!
at the right times is a tricky business, to convince them of its benefits. But that
however. They would also have to be seeded may change as the science and the climate EMAIL YOUR QUESTIONS TO
on a large enough scale to see the desired crisis progress. HB
[email protected]

87
Use the code: GALAXY24 for a 15% discount
 NEXT ISSUE

LINES IN THE SAND

CROSSWORD How artificial intelligence is shedding light on
PENCILS AT THE READY! the biggest mystery in archaeology

ACROSS DOWN
 Sufficient to have beer with
politician (5)
 Hug rated badly, but it’s
relative (8)
PLUS


Sheep with role in defence (7)
Ray rang about grain store (7)


See plane design as Asian (8)
Addresses deity in audible
THE WEIGHT OF WORRY
 Readjust layout of trees (5) commendation (5) Is your waistline expanding despite diet and
 Singer heard producing a note  Ruler in the mirror (4) exercise? Stress could be to blame
(6)  Service staged and made on an
 Heavy food in celebrity church industrial scale (4-8)
(6)  Let it stand a new test (4)
 Replacement brings consolation
(6)
 Unattractive dress for a police
officer? (5,7)
BREAKING THE BARRIER
 Hooligan lad reversed vehicle  Intermission finds bear What would travelling faster than
first (6) wandering in wood (3,5) the speed of light be like?
 Accommodation gets stolen by  Not much of an expression for
the Spanish (5) a school break (4-4)
 Chariot transported a bean (7)  Woman accepts a peerage
 Examination of restraint at - top form (5)
university (7)  Pawn some wine (4)
 New deal, right for a tree (5)  Enjoy being equal (4)

ON SALE 10 DECEMBER
GETTY IMAGES

ANSWERS For the answers, visit bit.ly/BBCFocusCW

Please be aware the website address is case-sensitive.

89
 BETTER
LIVING
THROUGH
SCIENCE

I
doubt the readers of BBC Science cooking oil (usually coconut, sesame of the oils creating an antibiotic-like
Focus need to hear this, but TikTok or olive oil) around your mouth. It’s effect, or the oils’ fat content being
isn’t the best source of medical a remedy that’s usually traced back turned into a kind of soap as it reacts
advice. Videos on the social media to traditional Ayurvedic medicine with your saliva.
platform have as many eyebrow-raising in India. Proponents suggest taking “That’s sometimes known as the
health claims as dance trends – some a tablespoon of oil and swishing it emulsion theory,” says Dr Paul
entirely spurious, others with a grain of through and around your teeth for Woodhouse, principal dentist at Grange
truth, very few presented with much in anywhere between 5–20 minutes. Dental Practice and a board member of
the way of scrutiny or reliable sources. Some of the dental health claims the British Dental Association. “I sort
When a health trend goes viral there made for oil pulling include teeth of like it, because it’s potentially a way
are always a few red flags to watch out whitening, prevention of cavities of getting rid of the sludgy build-up
for. Anything that’s said to be a “quick and gum disease, plus improving bad of oral biofilm (plaque) on your teeth.
fix” is instantly suspicious. People will breath. But the claims don’t stop there. “But I’m not really convinced by
talk about “studies” without citing If you don’t mind the increasingly it because of that sludgy nature.
them or explaining that they haven’t vague language, oil pulling will also This biofilm is more mechanically
been replicated. They won’t mention improve your digestion, reduce pain, vulnerable than it is chemically
that the sample size was small or the support your immune system and vulnerable. What that means is boring,
control group was non-existent. detoxify the body. repetitive, unsexy toothbrushing, twice
Another red flag is when multiple It certainly sounds like snake oil, but a day and especially with a dry brush,
claims appear for the same thing. If a there have been numerous studies and is going to be much more effective
single health trend supposedly lowers meta-analyses looking into the dental than coconut oil ever is.”
your inflammation and helps with claims around oil pulling. Some of It’s telling, perhaps, that in most of the
depression, while also treating acne, the larger reviews have even found research done to date, oil pulling has
start making your way to the door. If evidence that it can improve your oral been trialled alongside mouthwashes,
somebody claims it’ll improve your health and hygiene. not good, old-fashioned toothbrushing.
by I A N
energy levels, don’t walk there – run. A 2023 review by researchers Woodhouse describes it as sweeping
TAY L O R Oil pulling is one of the latest trends in Malaysia analysed 25 studies the yard. “With 95 per cent of our
Ian is a
freelance to catch TikTokers’ attention, with comparing the effects of oil pulling patients who have gum problems,
science videos generating millions of views. with traditional mouthwash. It reported the first thing we get them doing is
writer and Some are explainers, some are tutorials. a probable benefit to gum health among accurate teeth brushing. Within six
the former A few are from dentists, scrutinising people who practised oil pulling, but weeks it’s usually fixed the issue.”
deputy
editor of
the claims in the other videos. with a caveat: “The overall quality When you’re looking out for bogus
BBC Science If you haven’t heard of it, oil of the body of evidence was very health trends, there are a couple more
Focus. pulling is the practice of swilling low,” it said. points that are worth remembering.
ILLUSTRATION: SAM BREWSTER

Another review, from 2022 in the First, a lack of evidence doesn’t

journal Healthcare, found that oil necessarily mean that something isn’t
“SOME OF THE HEALTH CLAIMS INCLUDE pulling significantly reduces the
“salivary bacterial colony” of the person
true. But if a health trend comes along
that claims to improve on something
TEETH WHITENING AND PREVENTION swilling. The authors also discuss
some of the potential mechanisms,
that’s well-established and proven,
give it a swill by all means – but you’ll
OF CAVITIES AND GUM DISEASE” including the antioxidant properties probably just spit it out.

90
 Despite its 10.95mm height, the Trident C60 Pro 300 ‘Lumiére’ leaps from your
wrist. (Just like it jumped off this page.) Its brightness results from proudly
protruding indices and the logo they encircle. Featuring facets finely machined
to tolerances of 0.03mm, these mini-monoliths are super-legible in daylight. But
it’s the Globolight®, the unique luminous ceramic from which they’re hewn, that
produces their astounding, super-brilliance at night. And inspired this timepiece’s
name. The light show doesn’t end there. Carved from titanium, the 41mm case
incorporates a second sapphire crystal displaying its super-accurate movement.
But it’s not the back of this beautiful tool watch you’re buying into. Is it?

Do your research

christopherward.com