Mind Exposed Mind Exposed: New Brain Technology Sparks Privacy Concerns

Electric Eels Gang Up to Kill | Einstein’s Wild Universe
MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE s FEBRUARY 13, 2021
Mind Exposed New brain technology

sparks privacy concerns
cover.indd 1 1/27/21 12:43 PM

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VOL. 199 | NO. 3
Features
16 Our Wild Universe
In the last 100 years, researchers have established
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity as the
foundation of our understanding of the cosmos and
confirmed its most bizarre predictions, including black
holes, gravitational waves and universe expansion.
By Elizabeth Quill
24 Inside Your Head

COVER STORY Ethicists, scientists and our readers
grapple with the implications of new technologies that
let outsiders inside the mind. By Laura Sanders
16
News
6 The Parker Solar Probe 10 Astronomers spot 14 News in Brief
has company spying on a galaxy on the brink Drones may someday
the sun of a shutdown deliver the quantum
8 Many animals make A flaring magnetar is internet
themselves at home in traced to another galaxy A 350,000-year-old
monitor lizard burrows stone found in Israel is
12 Fossil fuels will likely
Brown tree snakes use remain a big part of the earliest known tool
for grinding or rubbing 32
their tails as lassos to Africa’s energy mix
climb large trees or poles
FROM TOP: CASEY REED/PENN STATE; ADHI AGUS OKTAVIANA; JOHN SULLIVAN/INATURALIST.ORG (CC BY-NC 4.0)
9 Mice share each other’s

13 Sea stars suffocate
when bacteria deplete
The International Space
Station finds the source Departments
pain and pain relief the water of oxygen of “blue jet” lightning 2 EDITOR’S NOTE
4 NOTEBOOK
Electric eels hunt in
groups; the oceans took
a lot of heat in 2020
29 REVIEWS & PREVIEWS

Scientists ponder
technological fixes
to save the planet
31 FEEDBACK
32 SCIENCE VISUALIZED
A warty pig is the subject
of one of the oldest cave
paintings ever found
COVER New technologies

aim to listen in on — and
maybe even change — your
8 brain activity. Julia Yellow
www.sciencenews.org | February 13, 2021 1
TOC.indd 1 1/27/21 12:26 PM

EDITOR’S NOTE
Should corporations get

PUBLISHER Maya Ajmera
EDITOR IN CHIEF Nancy Shute
EDITORIAL
access to our brains? EDITOR , SPECIAL PROJECTS Elizabeth Quill

NEWS DIRECTOR Macon Morehouse
DIGITAL DIRECTOR Kate Travis
FEATURES EDITOR Cori Vanchieri
When the news broke in April 2019 that scientists had MANAGING EDITOR , MAGAZINE Erin Wayman
DEPUTY NEWS EDITOR Emily DeMarco
restored neurological functions in the brains of dead pigs, ASSOCIATE NEWS EDITOR Ashley Yeager
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Cassie Martin
I was fascinated — and troubled. Though this ground- ASSOCIATE DIGITAL EDITOR Helen Thompson
AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Mike Denison
breaking work could lead to better treatments for stroke ASTRONOMY Lisa Grossman
and other brain injuries, it also opened an eerie gray zone BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES Bruce Bower
BIOMEDICAL Aimee Cunningham
between the living and the dead. EARTH AND CLIMATE Carolyn Gramling
LIFE SCIENCES Susan Milius
Scientists are wrestling with the ethical questions posed by the pig brain MOLECULAR BIOLOGY, SENIOR WRITER Tina Hesman Saey
NEUROSCIENCE Laura Sanders
experiment and other advances in brain science, as neuroscience writer Laura PHYSICS Emily Conover
SOCIAL SCIENCES Sujata Gupta
Sanders pointed out in her coverage of that breakthrough (SN: 5/11/19 & STAFF WRITERS Erin Garcia de Jesus, Jonathan Lambert,
Maria Temming
5/25/19, p. 6). But information on scientific advances typically flows from sci- EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Aina Abell
CONTRIBUTING CORRESPONDENTS
entists to journalists and then out to the public — there’s little opportunity for Laura Beil, Tom Siegfried, Alexandra Witze
the public to talk with scientists or voice concern about the implications of DESIGN
CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER Stephen Egts
research before the science happens. Could we help those conversations hap- DESIGN DIRECTOR Erin Otwell
ART DIRECTOR Tracee Tibbitts
pen? We decided to run an experiment to find out. ASSISTANT ART DIRECTOR Chang Won Chang
This issue includes the first step in our experiment. Last fall we surveyed SCIENCE NEWS FOR STUDENTS
Science News readers, asking what they thought about neurotechnology, EDITOR Janet Raloff
MANAGING EDITOR Sarah Zielinski
including brain implants and other devices that already have the ability to lis- STAFF WRITER Bethany Brookshire
WEB PRODUCER Lillian Steenblik Hwang
ten in and change how our brains work. Of three concerns — autonomy, fairness SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE
and privacy — privacy was the biggest worry among respondents. Sanders used PRESIDENT AND CEO Maya Ajmera
CHIEF OF STAFF Rachel Goldman Alper
that information to focus her reporting for this issue’s cover story (Page 24). CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER Kathlene Collins
CHIEF PROGRAM OFFICER Michele Glidden
“Asking readers what they thought directly was a great way to get perspective CHIEF, EVENTS AND OPERATIONS Cait Goldberg
CHIEF COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER Gayle Kansagor
and find out what they’re interested in,” she told me, “which is something we’re CHIEF ADVANCEMENT OFFICER Bruce B. Makous
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER James C. Moore
trying to do all the time.” CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER Dan Reznikov
Readers didn’t hold back. “I have no wish/desire to be a zombie or a clone,” BOARD OF TRUSTEES
CHAIR Mary Sue Coleman
one wrote. Others noted how giving scientists (and perhaps corporations and VICE CHAIR Martin Chalfie TREASURER Hayley Bay Barna
SECRETARY Paul J. Maddon AT LARGE Christine Burton
politicians) access to our brains could blur our sense of self. “It was so satisfy- MEMBERS Craig R. Barrett, Adam Bly, Tessa M. Hill,
Tom Leighton, Alan Leshner, W.E. Moerner, Dianne K. Newman,
ing and important to get the public’s perspective,” Sanders said. “They’re just Thomas F. Rosenbaum, Gideon Yu, Feng Zhang,
left out in so many of these conversations.” Maya Ajmera, ex officio
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MAR_068_20_F_pressReady.indd
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1/14/21 3:50
2:01 PM
NOTEBOOK
RETHINK thousands of smaller fish together to

shock and devour them, researchers
Electric eels shock with report online January 14 in Ecology and
swarm hunting tactics Evolution.
One Volta’s electric eel — able to subdue “This is hugely unexpected,” says
small fish with an 860-volt jolt — is Raimundo Nonato Mendes-Júnior, a
scary enough. Now imagine more than biologist at the Chico Mendes Institute
Excerpt from the 100 eels swirling about, unleashing for Biodiversity Conservation in
February 13, 1971 coordinated electric attacks. Brasilia, Brazil, who wasn’t involved
issue of Science News
Such a sight was assumed to be only in the study. “It goes to show how very,
the stuff of nightmares, at least for very little we know about how electric
50 YEARS AGO prey. Researchers had long thought eels behave in the wild.”
that these eels were solitary, nocturnal Group hunting is quite rare in fishes,
More about hunters that use their electric sense to says Carlos David de Santana, an evo-
partons find smaller fish as the fish sleep lutionary biologist at the Smithsonian
Experiments in which (SN: 1/10/15, p. 14). But in a remote National Museum of Natural History in
protons and neutrons were region of the Amazon, groups of over Washington, D.C. “I’d never even seen
bombarded with high- 100 Volta’s electric eels (Electrophorus more than 12 electric eels together in
energy electrons have given voltai) hunt together, corralling the field,” he says. That’s why he was
indications that protons
and neutrons are not amor-
phous masses but composed
of distinct subparticles.
The subparticles have been
named partons, and whether
or not they correspond to
the hypothetical quarks
remains a moot question.
UPDATE: The so-called

partons seen in experiments at
The oldest and most distant
the Stanford Linear Accelerator quasar known (illustrated)
Center were indeed quarks — a is prompting astronomers to re-
discovery that won three examine how black holes grow up.
researchers the 1990 Nobel
Prize in physics (SN: 10/27/90, THE –EST the Jan. 20 Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Quasars are thought to grow from
p. 263). Predicted by physicists
Murray Gell-Mann and George
Oldest known black hole smaller seed black holes that gobble up
Zweig in 1964, quarks are the mystifies scientists matter. Astronomer Feige Wang of the
building blocks of most of the The most ancient black hole ever discov- University of Arizona in Tucson and col-
universe’s ordinary matter. ered is so big it defies explanation. leagues calculated that even if J0313-1806’s
Quarks were originally thought This active supermassive black hole, seed formed right after the universe’s
to come in three varieties: called a quasar, lies at the heart of a galaxy first stars and grew as fast as possible, it
up, down and strange. But over 13 billion light-years from Earth and would have needed a starting mass of at
particle collider experiments boasts a mass of 1.6 billion suns. The qua- least 10,000 suns. Seed black holes typi-
have revealed three addi- sar, dubbed J0313-1806, dates to when the cally form through the collapse of massive
tional types: charm, bottom universe was just 670 million years old. stars — a process that can make black holes
NOIRLAB/NSF AND AURA, J. DA SILVA
That makes J0313-1806 two times heavier with starting masses of only up to a few
FROM TOP: L. SOUSA; T. TIBBITTS
and top (SN: 4/30/94, p. 276).

Quarks usually come in pairs and 20 million years older than the last thousand suns. A gargantuan seed black
or trios. Recently, physicists record holder. hole may have formed from the collapse of
have glimpsed more elaborate Finding such a huge quasar so early in primordial hydrogen gas, Wang suggests,
tetraquarks and pentaquarks the universe’s history challenges astrono- or perhaps J0313-1806’s seed started
(SN: 8/1/20, p. 14). mers’ understanding of how these cosmic small and black holes can grow faster than
beasts first formed, researchers report in scientists think. — Maria Temming
notebook.indd 4 1/27/21 12:22 PM

stunned in 2012 when his colleague Once thought of as lone predators,
Douglas Bastos, now a biologist at Volta’s electric eels (one shown)
have been spotted hunting
the National Institute of Amazonian in swarms of more than
Research in Manaus, Brazil, reported 100 individuals.
seeing more than 100 eels congregating observed in
and seemingly hunting together in a coordinated only one lake. But
small lake in northern Brazil. electric de Santana suspects
Two years later, de Santana’s team attacks that can that group hunting may be
returned to the lake to make more send shocked fish advantageous in other lakes and
detailed observations. The nearly flying from the water. The rivers with large shoals of small fish.
2-meter-long eels lethargically lay in researchers haven’t yet measured the Much of the eels’ range remains under-
deeper waters during much of the day, combined voltage of such attacks, but explored by scientists, so de Santana
the researchers found. But at dusk and 10 Volta’s electric eels firing together and colleagues are launching a citizen
dawn, these long dark streaks swirl could, in theory, power something like science project with Indigenous com-
together to form a writhing circle more 100 lightbulbs, de Santana says. The munities to identify more spots where
than 100 strong that herds thousands stunned, floating prey make easy pick- many eels live together, de Santana
of smaller fish into shallower waters. ings for the mass of eels. The whole says. “There is still so much we don’t
After corralling the prey, smaller event lasts about two hours. know about these organisms.”
groups of about 10 eels unleash So far, such aggregations have been — Jonathan Lambert
SCIENCE STATS TEASER
Earth’s oceans broke heat records in 2020 A new zinc-air battery

The total amount of heat stored in the upper oceans in 2020 was higher keeps going and going
than in any other year on record dating back to the 1950s, researchers Zinc-air batteries are lightweight and
report online January 13 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. Climate compact, but they’re usually not recharge-
scientist Michael Mann of Penn State and colleagues analyzed water tem- able. By tweaking the building materials,
perature data from around the globe. The oceans’ upper 2,000 meters had researchers have created a prototype that
234 sextillion, or 1021, joules more heat energy in 2020 than the annual could be recharged hundreds of times. Such
average from 1981 to 2010 (see graph below). Heat energy storage was up long-lasting devices, described in the Jan. 1
t
d) about 20 sextillion joules from 2019 — suggesting that in 2020, the oceans Science, could one day power electric cars.
e- absorbed enough heat to boil 1.3 billion kettles of water. The two previous In a standard zinc-air battery, oxygen
p. record holders were 2019 and 2017. “What we’re seeing here is a variant on from the air enters the cathode and reacts
the movie Groundhog Day,” Mann says. Overall, based on average land and with water from a liquid called an electro-
sea temperature, 2020 tied with 2016 for Earth’s hottest year on record lyte to form hydroxide. Hydroxide travels
(SN Online: 1/14/21). — Maria Temming from the cathode to an anode, and then
reacts with zinc to release energy. But this
Change in annual average global ocean heat content, 1958–2020
250 reaction is not very reversible, making the
Ocean heat content anomaly (sextillion joules)
battery hard to recharge. The electrolyte

s 200 can also degrade the cathode and anode,
shortening the battery’s life span.
150
Materials scientist Wei Sun of the
100 University of Münster in Germany and col-
leagues built a zinc-air battery using a new
50 electrolyte. Water-repellent ions in the liq-
uid prevent hydroxide from forming at the
NOIRLAB/NSF AND AURA, J. DA SILVA
0
cathode surface. Zinc ions from the anode
FROM TOP: L. SOUSA; T. TIBBITTS
2020
−50 travel to the cathode and react directly with

oxygen. Running the reaction backward
−100 recharges the battery, and the electrolyte
is not corrosive. In lab tests, Sun’s team
−150 1959 Year recharged the prototype 320 times over
SOURCE: L. CHENG ET AL/ADVANCES IN ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES 2021 160 hours. — Maria Temming
notebook.indd 5 1/27/21 12:21 PM

News
The Parker Solar Probe can

taste the solar wind, shown in
this illustration as straight lines
streaming away from the sun.
ATOM & COSMOS
NASA’s Parker probe gets help from other telescopes

During a recent flyby, dozens of observatories watched the sun from every angle
BY LISA GROSSMAN “This is partially luck,” solar physicist Because Parker gets so close, its
The Parker Solar Probe is no stranger to Timothy Horbury of Imperial College cameras cannot take direct pictures of the
the sun. On January 17, the NASA space- London said December 10 at a news solar surface. Solar Orbiter, though, will
craft made its seventh close pass of our briefing at the virtual meeting of the get no closer than 42 million kilometers,
star, coming within 13.5 million kilo- American Geophysical Union. “Nobody letting it take the highest-resolution
meters of the sun’s scorching surface. planned to have Parker Solar Probe and images of the sun ever. The mission’s
And this time, Parker had plenty of Solar Orbiter operating together; it’s just official science phase won’t begin until
company. A lucky lineup meant that doz- come out that way.” November 2021, but Solar Orbiter has
ens of other spacecraft and Earth-based Working together, the sungazers will already snapped images revealing tiny
observatories were trained on the sun tackle long-standing puzzles: how the “campfire” flares that might help heat
at the same time. Together, all of these sun creates and controls the solar wind, the corona (SN: 8/15/20, p. 8).
telescopes are providing unprecedented why solar activity changes over time and During Parker’s seventh close encoun-
views of the sun that should help solve how to predict powerful solar outbursts. ter with the sun on January 12–23, Solar
some of the most enduring mysteries of Orbiter observed the sun from a vantage
our star. Teamwork point almost opposite to Parker’s view.
Parker’s recent orbit was “really an During its nearly seven-year mission, the About a dozen other observers in space
amazing one,” says mission project Parker Solar Probe, which launched in watched as well, including ESA and the
scientist Nour Raouafi of the Johns 2018, will circle the sun 24 times, even- Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s
Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in tually swinging within about 6 million BepiColombo spacecraft that is on its
Laurel, Md. kilometers of the sun — roughly one- way to Mercury and NASA’s veteran sun
Chief among the spacecraft that tenth the average distance between watcher STEREO-A. Both flanked Parker
joined the watch party was newcomer Mercury and the sun (SN: 7/21/18, p. 12). on either side of the sun. Telescopes on
Solar Orbiter, which the European Space All of those flybys will give Parker’s heav- Earth were watching from a vantage
Agency launched in February 2020. As ily shielded instruments the best taste point about 135 million kilo meters
Parker swung by the sun in January, Solar yet of the plasma and charged particles of behind Parker, making a straight line
JHU-APL
Orbiter was watching from the other side the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona from Earth to the spacecraft to the sun.
NASA
of the star. (SN: 9/15/18, p. 16). The situation was similar to Parker’s
solar probe.indd 6 1/27/21 11:58 AM

fourth flyby in January 2020, when of the solar wind may allow scientists to Solar Orbiter caught an outburst too.
nearly 50 observatories watched the sun trace the wind’s energetic particles back On April 19, a CME passed by the space-
in tandem with the probe, Raouafi says. to their birthplaces on the sun’s surface. craft about 20 hours before its effects
Those observations led to a special issue Campfire flares — the “nanoflares” spot- arrived at Earth. That’s a bigger heads-up
of Astronomy & Astrophysics. One of the ted by Solar Orbiter — might even explain than with previous spacecraft, which give
reported results confirmed that there the switchbacks, Horbury says. observers on Earth only about 40 minutes
is a region around the sun free of dust, “The goal is to connect tiny transient of warning before a CME arrives.
which was predicted in 1929. “That was events like nanoflares to changes in the “We can see how that CME evolves
amazing,” says Raouafi, who hoped the solar wind,” Horbury said in as it travels away from the
recent seventh campaign would turn out
to be “that good or even better.”
In the wind
the news briefing.
Waking up with the sun

Parker and Solar Orbiter
13.5 million
sun in a way we’ve never
been able to do before,” said
Horbury.
Strong CMEs can knock
At the AGU meeting, researchers pre- couldn’t have arrived at a bet- kilometers out satellites and power
sented new results from Parker’s second ter time. “The sun has been Closest the Parker grids, so having as much
year of observations. The results deepen very quiet, in a deep solar Solar Probe has gotten forewarning as possible is
to the sun so far
the mystery of magnetic kinks called minimum for the last several important. A future space-
“switchbacks” that Parker observed years,” Horbury said. “But the sun is just craft at Solar Orbiter’s distance from the
in the solar wind, a constant stream of beginning to wake up now.” sun could help give that warning.
charged particles flowing away from Both spacecraft have seen solar activ-
the sun (SN: 12/21/19 & 1/4/20, p. 6), ity building over the last year. During Looking forward
Raouafi says. its sleepy period, the sun displays fewer Parker’s recent orbit was the first time the
Some observations support the idea sunspots and outbursts such as flares probe and Solar Orbiter watched the sun
that the kinks originate at the base of and coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. in tandem, but not the last. “There will
the corona and are carried past Parker But as the sun wakes up, those signs of be plenty of opportunities like this one,”
and beyond, like a wave traveling along increasing magnetic activity become Raouafi says.
a jump rope. Other data suggest the more common and more energetic. He’s looking forward to one in particu-
switchbacks are created by turbulence On November 29, Parker observed lar: the solar eclipse of 2024. On April 8,
within the solar wind itself. the most powerful flare it had seen 2024, a total eclipse will cross North
Figuring out which idea is correct in the last three years, followed by a America from Mexico to Newfoundland.
could help pinpoint how the sun pro- CME that ripped past the spacecraft at Solar scientists plan to make observa-
duces the solar wind in the first place. 1,400 kilometers per second. tions from all along the path of totality,
“These [switchbacks] could be the key to “We got so much data from that,” similar to how they watched the total
explaining how the solar wind is heated Raouafi says. As the Parker Solar Probe eclipse of 2017 (SN Online: 8/11/17).
and accelerated,” Raouafi said in a talk gets even closer to the sun, more CMEs During the total eclipse, the Parker
recorded for AGU. should pass by the spacecraft, which Solar Probe will be on its second-closest
Meanwhile, Solar Orbiter’s zoomed-in will tell scientists about how the sun orbit, between 7 million and 8 million
images plus simultaneous measurements launches these outbursts. kilometers from the sun. Parker and
Solar Orbiter will be “almost on top of
Staring at the sun each other,” Raouafi says — both space-
When the Parker Solar STEREO-A craft will be together off to one side of
Earth
Probe flew past the the sun as seen from Earth. Whatever
sun in January, a host
of other spacecraft and prominences and other shapes in the
Earth-based telescopes corona are visible to observers on Earth
were trained on our will be headed right at the spacecraft.
star too. This diagram
shows Parker’s path “They will be flying through the
January 12–23 (black Parker structure we will see from Earth dur-
arc) and the relative Solar Mercury
Probe Sun
ing the solar eclipse,” Raouafi says. The
positions of three
other spacecraft: Solar combined observations will tell sci-
Orbiter, BepiColombo entists how features on the sun evolve
and STEREO-A. with time.
“I think it is a new era,” Horbury said.
BepiColombo
JHU-APL
Solar Orbiter “The next few years is going to be a step

NASA
Venus
change in the way we see the sun.” s
solar probe.indd 7 1/27/21 11:59 AM

NEWS
LIFE & EVOLUTION warrens consisting of dozens of twisting W
Monitor lizards engineer ecosystems burrows, each made by a single monitor

lizard and arranged in the soil like doz-
t
In Australia, the reptiles’ burrows shelter a variety of animals ens of cavatappi noodles set vertically. t
“We kept digging these things up, and C
BY JAKE BUEHLER burrows, which can have a great impact we started finding lots of animals in in
Meters below the copper, sun-broiled dirt on local biodiversity by providing shel- most of them,” Doody says. w
of northwestern Australia, an entire com- ter to a wide assortment of animals, The team found other lizards, snakes, m
munity hides in the dark. Geckos lay eggs researchers report. The findings, pub- toads and arthropods in the nests of d
as centipedes and scorpions scuttle by. A lished online December 18 in Ecology, yellow-spotted monitors and Gould’s a
snake glides deeper underground, away reveal the lizards to be “ecosystem monitor lizards (V. gouldii), which dig sim- t
from the light. This subterranean menag- engineers,” the researchers say, akin to ilar burrows. At first it was a few creatures b
erie capitalizes on an old burrow, gouged beavers that flood streams with dams. here and there, Doody says, but then the
into the earth by a massive lizard. Ecologist Sean Doody of the University team found 418 Uperoleia frogs in a sin- a
Two species of monitor lizard dig these of South Florida in St. Petersburg started gle warren. In all, the team found nearly t
monitoring the cat-sized lizards with 750 individuals of 28 different vertebrate m
A monitor lizard like the one shown excavated Australian colleagues to track how inva- species in 16 warrens made up of many w
this twisting tunnel for use as a nest. Burrows sive cane toads harm the reptiles. individual nesting burrows, plus about a t
do double duty as refuges for other species.
Until less than a decade ago, it wasn’t dozen separate foraging burrows, made
clear where these monitor lizards lay when monitors dig for prey. b
eggs. While excavating burrows of Some animals use the burrows for t
the yellow-spotted monitor (Varanus overwintering, Doody says. Others use in
panoptes), Doody’s team found eggs at them as refuges during the hot, dry sum- t
the very bottom of what turned out to mer. Still others catch prey in there, ia
be holes with a tight helical shape. These while “some are probably hiding from D
burrows plunge up to four meters into predators,” he says. “And some are even in
the soil — deeper than any other known laying their eggs in the burrow.” f
vertebrate nest. The nests were part of Very few mammals use the burrows. r
LIFE & EVOLUTION The discovery of the lasso climbing wrapping around a tree multiple times
Some snakes turn method, reported in the Jan. 11 Current

Biology, was somewhat serendipitous.
limits the width of a tree that a snake
can scale. Using a single, large, lasso-like
into lassos to climb Ecologist Julie Savidge of Colorado State
University in Ft. Collins and colleagues
grip allows the brown tree snake to climb
wider trees — or overcome baffles, says
The tactic allows for scaling were investigating ways to keep the tree- study coauthor Bruce Jayne, a biologist
wide tree trunks or poles climbing snakes away from Micronesian at the University of Cincinnati.
starlings (Aplonis opaca) — one of only In lab experiments, the researchers
BY MARIA TEMMING two native forest birds left on Guam. observed brown tree snakes using this
FROM LEFT: JOHN SULLIVAN/INATURALIST.ORG (CC BY-NC 4.0); S. DOODY

Snakes do a lot more than slither. Some One approach tested whether a wide lasso-like posture when placed inside an T
r
swim, others sidewind across sand and pipe, or baffle, around a pole could pre- enclosure with a wide pole topped with a a
some even fly. But no one has ever seen vent snakes from reaching a starling nest dead mouse for bait. But the lasso climb- ta
a snake move the way that a brown tree box at the top. In reviewing hours of foot- ing method is not very efficient. Five
snake does. By wrapping its tail around age, the team saw a snake do something snakes, ranging from 1.1 to 1.7 meters m
a tree or pole in a lasso-like grip and unexpected: It lassoed itself around the long, climbed less than a millimeter per t
wriggling to propel itself, the snake can baffle and began scooting upward. second, on average. The snakes probably J. SAVIDGE ET AL/CURRENT BIOLOGY 2021 o
shimmy up structures that would other- Snakes typically climb trees that are save the technique for the rare occasions
wise be too wide to climb. too smooth to slither up by coiling around they encounter trees or poles too wide le
Better understanding how brown tree a trunk multiple times. A snake wraps and smooth to scale any other way. S
snakes (Boiga irregularis) get around the front of its body around the trunk Gregory Byrnes, a biologist at Siena e
could inform strategies to control their and then coils its back end around the College in Loudonville, N.Y, is not a
population on Guam, where the snakes tree in another loop to get a second grip. entirely surprised that brown tree la
are an invasive species and have wiped The snake then stretches its neck up and snakes have devised a way to deal with h
out almost all of the native forest birds. repeats the process to inch upward. But wide trees or baffles. “They have so s
8 SCIENCE NEWS | February 13, 2021 Watch a snake lasso itself up a pole at bit.ly/SN_SnakeLasso
snake-lizard-mice.indd 8 1/27/21 12:50 PM

With the “massive smell of reptile” in BODY & BRAIN inflammation, the animals’ touch sensi-
there, they may steer clear, Doody says.
The variety of nonmammals using Pain and relief are tivity didn’t change after time together.
To understand how mice pick up on
the burrows is “incredible,” says Sophie
Cross, an ecologist at Curtin University
‘catching’ in mice each other’s feelings, Smith and col-
leagues watched which brain regions
in Perth, Australia, who was not involved After mingling, a rodent can were active after the mice spent time
with the research. Monitors “will pretty mirror its companion’s feelings together. The team saw nerve cells, or
much eat anything they can catch or neurons, firing in the anterior cingulate
dig out from the ground,” she says. “I BY CAROLYN WILKE cortex, an area important in humans for
am surprised that so many animals use In pain and pain relief, mice may feel for empathy and part of the brain region
these burrows, given a lot of them would each other. responsible for memory and cognition.
be easy prey for a monitor lizard.” Research has shown that mice can The team found neurons connect-
If the smaller residents use the burrows “catch” the emotions of an injured or ing this area to other parts of the brain,
at a different time than the monitors, fearful fellow. When mice are injured, including the nucleus accumbens, which
the groups might avoid conflict. The healthy mice living alongside them deals with motivation and social behav-
monitors appear to lay eggs over a few behave as though in pain. Now, a study ior. When the scientists disrupted that
weeks and leave the eggs to incubate over suggests that pain relief is contagious too. neural connection, “the animals no lon-
the eight-month dry season, Doody says. In the last decade, researchers have ger were able to manifest empathy” for
Given the widespread use of the done a lot of work showing that animals pain or pain relief, says team member and
burrows, Doody has concerns about can pick up and share each other’s emo- Stanford neuroscientist Robert Malenka.
the ecological effects of the cane toad tions, particularly fear, says Monique The transfer of other emotions may
invasion. Monitor lizards — naïve to the Smith, a neuroscientist at Stanford rely on different brain connections. The
toads’ potent toxins — eat the amphib- University. She and colleagues published researchers also examined how mice feel
ians, and as a result, are rapidly dying, the new findings on pain each other’s fear when mice
Doody says. Warrens are filling in, leav- relief in the Jan. 8 Science. “Pain isn’t just saw other mice receive an
ing less refuge for other animals. “You go Investigating these build- a physical electric shock. Fear transfer
from hundreds of animals using a war- ing blocks of empathy in experience.” relied on connections from
ren system to zero.” s animals can help researchers the anterior cingulate cor-
MONIQUE SMITH
understand human empathy, tex to part of the amygdala,
Smith says, and may someday lead to a region known to respond to fear. That
treatments for disorders that affect the suggests that different processes in the
ability to feel empathy. “Pain isn’t just a brain are involved in different types of
physical experience,” Smith says. “It’s an empathy. But the differences may also be
emotional experience” as well. linked to how mice sense their fellows’
In experiments on pairs of mice, emotions, Mogil says. In the pain and
one mouse received an injection that pain relief experiments, mice spent time
caused arthritis-like inflammation in together sniffing each other, and odors
one hind paw while the other mouse can contain clues to mice’s feelings. But
was unharmed. The mice then hung out in the fear tests, visual or auditory cues
FROM LEFT: JOHN SULLIVAN/INATURALIST.ORG (CC BY-NC 4.0); S. DOODY
To climb a wide pole, a brown tree snake, together for an hour. Injected mice acted conveyed emotions.
recorded by an infrared camera, lassos itself
around the pole and wriggles the loop of its as though one paw was in pain, showing “Not surprisingly, the circuits that
tail to propel itself upward. extra sensitivity to being prodded there they’re looking at are remarkably
with a wire. Uninjured companions acted similar to some of these processes in
much control over their bodies that if as though they were in the same amount humans,” says Jules Panksepp, a social
they’re given a challenge … they figure of pain, but in both hind paws. “The neuroscientist at the University of
out a way to [overcome] it,” he says. behavior is astounding,” says neuroscien- Wisconsin–Madison. Research points to
J. SAVIDGE ET AL/CURRENT BIOLOGY 2021
Testing the limits of this agility could tist Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University in a shared evolutionary basis for empathy
lead to better protection of Guam’s birds, Montreal, who was not part of the work. in humans and mice.
Savidge says. Already, after the research- In other experiments, both mice If scientists can home in on the neuro-
ers placed bird boxes on utility poles that received the injection, but one also got chemicals that foster empathic processes,
are too wide for brown tree snakes to soothing morphine. For hours after the Panksepp says, researchers may be able to
lasso up, “the birds adopted these bird- mice mingled, the second mouse behaved design drugs to treat conditions, such as
houses and have done very, very well,” as though it also got the drug. In a control social personality disorders, that cause
she says. s group where both mice only experienced empathy to go awry. s
o www.sciencenews.org | February 13, 2021 9
snake-lizard-mice.indd 9 1/27/21 12:51 PM

NEWS
ATOM & COSMOS
A galaxy on the verge of a shutdown

CQ 4479 has both new stars forming and an active black hole
BY LISA GROSSMAN “When you see a black hole actively

A distant galaxy has been caught in the accreting material, you expect that
act of shutting down. star formation has already shut down,”
The galaxy is still forming plenty of says coauthor and astrophysicist Kevin
new stars. But it also has an actively Cooke, also of the University of Kansas.
feeding supermassive black hole at its “But cold quasars are in a weird time ATOM & COSMOS
center that will bring star formation to a when the black hole in the center has
halt within a few hundred million years, just begun to feed.” Astronomers spot
astronomers reported January 11 at the To investigate cold quasars in more
virtual meeting of the American Astro- detail, Kirkpatrick and Cooke used
a flaring magnetar
nomical Society. Studying this galaxy and SOFIA, an airplane with a telescope that The energetic outburst
others like it will help astronomers figure can see in a range of infrared wavelengths originated in another galaxy
out exactly how such shutdowns happen. that the original cold quasar observations
“How galaxies precisely die is an open didn’t cover. In 2019, SOFIA looked at a BY LISA GROSSMAN
question,” says astrophysicist Allison galaxy called CQ 4479, a cold quasar about For the first time, astronomers have
Kirkpatrick of the University of Kansas 5.25 billion light-years from Earth. definitively spotted a flaring magnetar
in Lawrence. “This could give us a lot of CQ 4479 has about 20 billion times the in another galaxy.
insight into that process.” mass of the sun in stars and These ultramagnetic stellar corpses
Astronomers think galax- “How galaxies is adding about 95 suns per were thought to be responsible for
ies typically start out making precisely die is year, the researchers found. some of the highest-energy explosions.
stars with a passion. The an open (That’s a furious rate com- But until this burst, no one could prove
stars form from pockets of pared with the Milky Way, it, astronomers reported January 13
cold gas that contract under
question.” which builds two or three at the virtual meeting of the American
ALLISON KIRKPATRICK
their own gravity and ignite solar masses of new stars Astronomical Society and in papers in
thermonuclear fusion in their centers. per year.) CQ 4479’s central black hole Nature and Nature Astronomy.
But at some point, something disrupts is 24 million times as massive as the sun, Astronomers have seen flaring mag-
the cold star-forming fuel and sends it growing at about 0.3 solar masses per netars in the Milky Way, but their
toward the supermassive black hole at the year. In terms of percentage of their total brightness makes it impossible to get a
galaxy’s core. That black hole gobbles the mass, the stars and black hole are growing good look at them. Flaring magnetars
gas, heating it white-hot. An actively feed- at the same rate, Kirkpatrick says. in other galaxies may have been spotted
ing black hole can be seen from billions of That “lockstep evolution” runs coun- before, but “the others were all a little
light-years away and is known as a quasar. ter to expectations. “You should have all circumstantial and not as rock solid,”
Radiation from the hot gas pumps extra your stars finish growing first, and then says astrophysicist Victoria Kaspi of the
energy into the rest of the galaxy, blowing your black hole grows,” Kirkpatrick says. McGill Space Institute in Montreal, who
away or heating the remaining gas until “This [galaxy] shows there’s a period was not involved in the new discovery.
NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER, CHRIS SMITH/GESTAR/USRA

the star-forming factory closes for good. that they actually do grow together.” These new findings are “so incontro-
That picture fits with the types of galax- Cooke and colleagues estimated vertible, it’s like, OK, this is it. There’s
ies astronomers typically see: either star that in half a billion years, all the cold no question anymore.”
formers or dormant galaxies. But while star-forming gas will have heated up or The first sign of the magnetar arrived
examining data from large surveys of the blown away. as a blast of X-rays and gamma rays
sky, Kirkpatrick and colleagues noticed Given that galaxies eventually switch on April 15. Five telescopes in space,
another type. The team found about two off star formation, it makes sense that including the Fermi Gamma-ray Space
dozen galaxies that emit energetic X-rays there should be a period of transition, Telescope, observed the blast, giving
characteristic of an actively feeding says astronomer Alexandra Pope of the scientists enough information to track
black hole, but also shine in low-energy University of Massachusetts Amherst, down the source: the galaxy NGC 253,
infrared light, a sign that cold gas is still who was not involved in the new work. also known as the Sculptor galaxy,
present. Kirkpatrick and colleagues The findings are a “confirmation of this 11.4 million light-years from Earth.
dubbed these galaxies “cold quasars” in important phase in the evolution of At first, astronomers thought the blast
the Sept. 1 Astrophysical Journal. galaxies,” she says. s was a type of cataclysmic explosion called
aas.indd 10 1/27/21 12:36 PM

galaxy do, when the bright spot where that three earlier events that astrono-
the flare was emitted comes in and out mers had flagged as possible magnetar
of view as the magnetar spins. flares probably were indeed such flares,
Also surprising, the Fermi telescope giving astronomers a population of mag-
caught gamma rays with energies higher netar flares to compare with each other.
The recent detection of a flare from a than a gigaelectron volt arriving four The findings could have implications
magnetar (illustrated) lends support to
the idea that these highly magnetized minutes after the initial blast. There is for fast radio bursts, another mysterious
stellar remnants are behind some of no way for the known sources of short cosmic signal that has had astronomers
the universe’s most powerful blasts. GRBs to do that. scratching their heads for over a decade.
“We’ve discovered a masquerading Several lines of evidence connect fast
a short gamma-ray burst, or GRB, which magnetar in a nearby galaxy, and we’ve radio bursts to magnetars, including
t is typically caused by colliding neutron

stars or other destructive cosmic events.
unmasked it,” astrophysicist Kevin
Hurley of the University of California,
a signal coming from within the Milky
Way that coincidentally also arrived in
r But the signal looked weird for a short
GRB: It rose to peak brightness quickly,
Berkeley said at the briefing.
The researchers think that the flare
April 2020 (SN: 7/4/20 & 7/18/20, p. 12).
“That [discovery] lent extra credence
within two milliseconds, dimmed for was triggered by a massive starquake to fast radio bursts being [from] magne-
another 50 milliseconds and appeared 1,000 trillion trillion, or 1027, times as tars,” Kaspi says.
to be over by about 140 milliseconds. As large as a magnitude 9.5 earthquake. The In light of the new findings, Kaspi
the signal faded, some of the telescopes starquake led the magnetar to release a compared the apparent frequency of
e detected fluctuations in the light that blob of plasma that sped away at nearly magnetar flares in other galaxies with
r changed faster than a millisecond. the speed of light, emitting gamma rays the frequency of fast radio bursts and
Typical short GRBs don’t change like and X-rays as it went. found the rates are similar. “That argues
s that, astrophysicist Oliver Roberts of the The discovery suggests that at least that actually most or all fast radio bursts
r Universities Space Research Association some signals that look like short GRBs are could be magnetars…. I don’t think yet
s. in Huntsville, Ala., said at a news brief- in fact from magnetar flares, as astrono- it’s the total solution,” but it’s a good
e ing. But flaring magnetars in our own mers have long suspected. It also means step, she says. s
3
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o
y.
NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER, CHRIS SMITH/GESTAR/USRA
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aas.indd 11 1/27/21 12:36 PM

NEWS
EARTH & ENVIRONMENT Africa’s current and predicted

2030 energy mix
Fossil fuels will stay dominant in Africa 500
A transition to mostly renewable energy is unlikely by 2030 400
Capacity (gigawatts)
BY CAROLYN GRAMLING both successful and failed power plants, 300
Africa’s electricity capacity is expected as well as a variety of characteristics of
to double by 2030 — and with the rapidly the plants, such as how much energy a 200
dropping cost of renewable energy particular plant can produce, what type
technologies, the continent might seem of fuel it uses and how it’s financed. 100
poised to go green. But an analysis sug- The team used a machine learning
0
gests that fossil fuels will still dominate approach, creating a computer algorithm 2019 2030
Africa’s energy mix over the next decade. to identify the characteristics that best
Coal Gas Oil Other
Scientists used a machine learning predicted success in the past. Then, the
approach that analyzes what character- scientists analyzed the chances for suc- Hydro Wind Solar Other renewable energy
istics, such as fuel type and financing, cess of almost 2,500 projects now in the
Fixed fuels Africa’s total electricity
controlled past successes and failures of pipeline, based on those features, as well capacity, the maximum possible energy that all
power plants across Africa. The findings as on different country characteristics, of the power plants could generate if running
suggest that renewable energy sources such as population density, political sta- under ideal conditions, is predicted to double
by 2030. Fossil fuels are expected to account
such as wind and solar power will make bility and economic strength. for the bulk of the energy mix. SOURCE: G. ALOVA,
up less than 10 percent of Africa’s total Those country-level factors matter, P.A. TROTTER AND A. MONEY/NATURE ENERGY 2021
electrical power generation by 2030, the but they weren’t the biggest predictors
team reports January 11 in Nature Energy. of success, Trotter says. “We do see some “We are seeing this massive disrup-
In 2015, 195 nations pledged to limit truth to good governance, but project- tion [to the energy market], in terms of
global warming to “well below” 2 degrees level [factors have] been consistently costs of renewables. It’s just completely
Celsius by 2100. The world would have to more important.” changed the way that planning is done,”
reduce fossil fuel emissions by 2.7 per- Those factors include a power plant’s Kruger says. What he finds exciting is the
cent each year from 2020 to 2030, but size and whether the plant had public rise of small renewable energy projects in
current pledges are nowhere near enough or private financing. Smaller renew- conflict states that have struggled to get
to achieve that target. And the energy able energy plants tend to have a better anything done. “People are willing to put
demand from developing economies is chance of success than larger projects, as smaller amounts [of money] into [more
expected to increase dramatically by do plants with financing from large public modular] projects that spread the risks
2030 — possibly leading to even more funders, such as the World Bank, which out across a wide variety of countries.”
emissions over the next decades. are less likely to pull out in the face of One factor that could change the
However, the price of renewable roadblocks. And though there has been a renewable energy outlook, Alova says,
energy technologies has rapidly dropped recent uptick in the chances for success would be a large-scale cancellation of
over the last few years. So many scien- for solar energy, oil and gas projects still fossil fuel plants now in the pipeline.
tists and activists have said they hope have a much greater chance to succeed. That’s key because once these plants
African countries might be able to take What this adds up to, the team says, is enter production, they can stay in opera-
advantage of these technologies, leap- that by 2030, fossil fuels will still account tion for decades.
frogging past carbon-intensive coal or for two-thirds of all energy generation But changing the energy mix requires
oil-based energy growth and straight in Africa. Renewable energy such as more than just a drop in renewable
into building renewable energy plants. wind and solar will account for less than energy costs, Trotter says. “It’s some-
“We wanted to understand whether 10 percent, with the remainder coming thing that has to happen from the top,
Africa is actually heading in the direc- mostly from hydropower. from African governments and the
tion of making that decisive leap,” says The results were “both quite surpris- international development commu-
Galina Alova, a sustainability scientist at ing and unsurprising to me,” says Wikus nity.” Those governments face a tricky
the University of Oxford. Kruger, who researches the African balancing act between socioeconomic
Alova, along with Oxford sustainabil- power sector at the University of Cape development and sustainability.
ity scientists Philipp Trotter and Alex Town in South Africa. Finding that “It’s paramount for Africa to develop
Money, amassed data on nearly 3,000 project-level factors are very significant and lift people out of poverty,” he says.
energy projects — both fossil fuel and tracks with his own work. But, he says, “But what is clear from our dataset is
E. OTWELL
renewable — commissioned over the last he is less convinced that renewables’ that there is an urgency to discuss the
20 years across Africa. The team looked at decreasing cost won’t be a bigger factor. most sustainable way to do so.” s
africa-energy.indd 12 1/27/21 11:17 AM

LIFE & EVOLUTION using up oxygen from the surrounding
Bacteria blamed for sea star deaths water. In the lab, the sea stars began
wasting when the researchers added
When microbes deplete oxygen in water, the animals suffocate organic matter such as phytoplankton
or a common bacterial-growth ingredi-
BY ERIN GARCIA DE JESUS wild-caught sea stars brought to the lab. ent to the tubs of water those microbes
The mysterious culprit behind a deadly These included things like differences and sea stars were living in.
sea star disease is not an infection, as in water temperature and exposing the Experimentally depleting oxygen
scientists once thought. animals to bacteria. But nothing reliably from the water had a similar effect,
Instead, multiple types of bacteria liv- triggered wasting. causing lesions in 75 percent of sea
ing near sea stars deplete oxygen from Then the researchers examined the stars, while none succumbed in a tub
the water and effectively suffocate the types of bacteria living with healthy sea where oxygen levels remained steady.
animals, researchers report January 6 in stars compared with those living among Sea stars take in oxygen through small
Frontiers in Microbiology. Such microbes animals that developed wasting disease external projections called skin gills. The
thrive when there are high levels of while in the lab. “That was when we had lack of oxygen in the wake of flourishing
organic matter in warm water and create our aha moment,” Hewson says. copiotrophs leaves sea stars struggling
a low-oxygen environment that can make Bacteria known as copiotrophs, which for air, the data suggest. It’s unclear how
sea stars melt into a puddle of slime. thrive in environments with a lot of the animals degrade in low-oxygen con-
Sea star wasting disease, which causes organic matter, were present around ditions, but it could be due to massive
tissue decay and loss of limbs, first the sea stars at higher levels than normal cell death.
gained notoriety in 2013 when sea stars either shortly before the animals devel- Although the disease isn’t caused by a
off the U.S. Pacific Coast died in massive oped lesions or as they did so, Hewson contagious pathogen, it is transmissible
numbers. Outbreaks of the disease had and colleagues found. Bacterial species in the sense that dying sea stars generate
occurred before 2013, but never at such that survive only in environments with more organic matter that spur bacteria
a large scale. little to no oxygen were also thriving, to grow on healthy sea stars nearby. “It’s
Scientists suspected that a virus or suggesting that some copiotrophs were a bit of a snowball effect,” Hewson says.
bacterium might be making sea stars The team also analyzed tissues from
sick. That hypothesis was supported in sea stars that had succumbed in the
a 2014 study that found unhealthy ani- 2013–2014 mass die-off — which fol-
mals may have been infected by a virus. lowed a large algal bloom — to see if
But subsequent studies found no rela- such environmental conditions might
tionship between the virus and dying explain that outbreak. In sea stars that
sea stars, leaving researchers perplexed. perished, their fast-growing appendages
Finding that a boom of nutrient- had high amounts of a form of nitrogen
loving bacteria can drain oxygen from found in low-oxygen conditions — a sign
the water and cause the wasting dis- that those animals may have died from a
ease “challenges us to think that there lack of oxygen.
might not always be a single pathogen or The problem may get worse with cli-
a smoking gun,” says Melissa Pespeni, a mate change, Hewson says. “Warmer
biologist at the University of Vermont in waters can’t have as much oxygen [com-
Burlington who wasn’t involved in the pared with colder water] just by physics
new research. Such a complex environ- alone.” Bacteria, including copiotrophs,
mental scenario “is a new kind of idea for also flourish in warm water.
[disease] transmission.” But pinpointing the disease’s likely
There were many red herrings dur- cause could help experts better treat
ing the hunt for why sea stars were sick sea stars in the lab, Hewson says.
melting into goo, says Ian Hewson, a Some techniques include increasing a
marine biologist at Cornell University. water tank’s oxygen levels or getting rid
In addition to the original hypothesis of extra organic matter with ultraviolet
of a viral cause — which Hewson’s team light or water exchange.
reported in 2014 in the Proceedings of the “There’s still a lot to figure out with
BOTH: I. HEWSON
National Academy of Sciences but later Sea star wasting disease can turn a healthy this disease, but I think [this new study]
sea star, such as this leather star (top), into a
disproved — he and colleagues analyzed puddle of goo, as happened to this ochre sea gets us a long way to understanding how
a range of other explanations in healthy, star (bottom) in California. it comes about,” Pespeni says. s
seastar.indd 13 1/27/21 11:20 AM

NEWS IN BRIEF
MATTER & ENERGY say researchers who recently scruti- back about 300,000 years — made the
Drones could help create nized the 350,000-year-old find. Tabun tool, Shimelmitz says.
a quantum internet The specimen marks a technological — Bruce Bower
The quantum internet may be coming to turn to manipulating objects using wide,
you via drone. flat stone surfaces, say Ron Shimelmitz, EARTH & ENVIRONMENT
Scientists have used drones to trans- an archaeologist at the University Space station detectors find
mit particles of light, or photons, that of Haifa in Israel, and colleagues. Up the source of ‘blue jet’ lightning
share the quantum linkage called entan- to that time, stone implements had Scientists have finally gotten a clear view
glement. The photons were sent to two featured thin points or sharp edges. of the spark that sets off an exotic type
locations a kilometer apart, researchers Microscopic wear and polish on a worn of lightning called a blue jet.
at Nanjing University in China report in section of the Tabun stone resulted Blue jets zip upward from thunder-
the Jan. 15 Physical Review Letters. from it having been ground or rubbed clouds into the stratosphere. Whereas
Entangled quantum particles can against relatively soft material, such as ordinary lightning excites a medley of
retain their interconnected properties animal hides or plants, the scientists gases in the lower atmosphere to glow
even when separated by long distances. conclude in the January Journal of white, blue jets excite mostly stratospher-
Such counterintuitive behavior can be Human Evolution. ic nitrogen to create a signature blue hue.
harnessed to allow new types of com- Similar stones bearing signs of These jets had been observed from the
munication. Eventually, scientists aim abrasion date to no more than around ground and aircraft, but it was hard to tell
to build a global quantum internet that 200,000 years ago. Specific ways in how they form without getting high above
relies on transmitting quantum particles. which the Tabun stone was used remain the clouds. Now, instruments on the
That would enable ultrasecure commu- a mystery. By around 50,000 years ago, International Space Station have spotted
nications by using the particles to create though, human groups were using grind- a blue jet emerging from a brief burst of
secret codes to encrypt messages. A ing stones to prepare plants and other electricity near the top of a thundercloud,
quantum internet could also allow distant foods, Shimelmitz says. researchers report in the Jan. 21 Nature.
quantum computers to work together, or The team compared microscopic Cameras and light-sensing instru-
perform experiments that test the limits damage on the Tabun stone with that ments on the space station observed
of quantum physics. produced in experiments with nine simi- the blue jet in a storm over the Pacific
Quantum networks made with fiber- lar stones collected not far from the cave Ocean in 2019. “The whole thing starts
optic cables are already beginning to be site. Archaeology students forcefully ran with what I think of as a blue bang,”
used. And a quantum satellite can trans- each of the nine stones back and forth says Torsten Neubert, an atmospheric
mit photons across China (SN: 8/5/17, for 20 minutes over different surfaces: physicist at the Technical University of
p. 14). Drones could serve as another hard basalt rock, wood of medium hard- Denmark in Kongens Lyngby. From that
technology for such networks, with the ness or a soft deer hide. Stones applied “blue bang” — a flash of bright blue light
advantages of being easily movable as to deer hide displayed much in common near the top of a cloud about 16 kilo-
well as relatively quick and cheap to with the business end of the ancient meters high — a blue jet shot up into the
deploy. stone tool, including a wavy surface and stratosphere, climbing as high as about
The researchers used two drones to clusters of shallow grooves. 52 kilometers and lasting hundreds of
transmit the photons. One drone created It’s unclear which evolutionary rela- milliseconds.
pairs of entangled particles, sending one tives of Homo sapiens — whose origins go The spark that generated the blue
particle to a station on the ground while jet may have been a special kind of
relaying the other to the second drone. short-range electric discharge inside the
That machine transmitted the particle thundercloud, Neubert says. Normal
it received to a second ground station lightning forms from discharges between
a kilometer away from the first. Future oppositely charged regions of a cloud — or
fleets of drones could work together to a cloud and the ground — many kilometers
send entangled particles to recipients in a apart. But turbulent mixing high in a cloud
variety of locations. — Emily Conover may bring oppositely charged regions
within about a kilometer of each other,
IRIS GROMAN-YAROSLAVSKI
HUMANS & SOCIETY 5 cm creating very short but powerful bursts of

The oldest known abrading tool electric current, Neubert says. Scientists
dates to 350,000 years ago A flat surface at the top of a round stone, have seen evidence of such high-energy,
A round stone excavated at Israel’s shown from two angles and originally found in short-range discharges in pulses of radio
three pieces at Israel’s Tabun Cave, may have
Tabun Cave in the 1960s represents the been used to grind or rub hides or other rela- waves from thunderstorms detected by
oldest known grinding or rubbing tool, tively soft material around 350,000 years ago. ground-based antennas. — Maria Temming
briefs.indd 14 1/27/21 11:21 AM

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FEATURE
Our
Wild
Universe
Einstein’s general theory of relativity unveiled
a dynamic and bizarre cosmos By Elizabeth Quill
A
lbert Einstein’s mind reinvented space and time, distort spacetime nearby enough to bend light from its
foretelling a universe so bizarre and grand that it straight-line course. Distant stars would thus appear not
has challenged the limits of human imagination. exactly where expected. Photographs taken during the
An idea born in a Swiss patent office that evolved eclipse verified that the position shift matched Einstein’s
into a mature theory in Berlin set forth a radical new pic- prediction. “Lights all askew in the heavens; men of science
ture of the cosmos, rooted in a new, deeper understanding more or less agog,” declared a New York Times headline.
of gravity. Out was Newton’s idea, which had reigned for Even a decade later, a story in Science News Letter, the
nearly two centuries, of masses that appeared to tug on one predecessor of Science News, wrote of “Riots to understand
another. Instead, Einstein presented space and time as a Einstein theory” (SN: 2/1/30, p. 79). Apparently extra police
unified fabric distorted by mass and energy. Objects warp had to be called in to control a crowd of 4,500 who “broke
the fabric of spacetime like a weight resting on a trampo- down iron gates and mauled each other” at the American
line, and the fabric’s curvature guides their movements. Museum of Natural History in New York City to hear an
With this insight, gravity was explained. explanation of general relativity.
CASEY REED/PENN STATE
Einstein presented his general theory of relativity at the By 1931, physicist Albert A. Michelson, the first
end of 1915 in a series of lectures in Berlin. But it wasn’t American to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences, called the
until a solar eclipse in 1919 that everyone took notice. His theory “a revolution in scientific thought unprecedented
theory predicted that a massive object — say, the sun — could in the history of science.”
universe.indd 16 1/27/21 9:37 AM

To celebrate our upcoming 100th anniversary, we’ve launched
a series that highlights some of the biggest advances in science
over the last century. For more on our changing view of the
universe, and to see the rest of the series as it appears, visit the
Century of Science site at www.sciencenews.org/century
CASEY REED/PENN STATE
Neutron stars (one illustrated)

squash the mass equivalent of the
sun into the size of a city.

FEATURE | OUR WILD UNIVERSE
But for all the powers of divination we credit magnify features of the cosmos.
to Einstein today, he was a reluctant soothsayer. Today’s scientists continue to poke and prod at
We now know that general relativity offered much general relativity to find clues to what they might
more than Einstein was willing or able to see. “It be missing. General relativity is now being tested
was a profoundly different way of looking at the to a level of precision previously impossible, says
universe,” says astrophysicist David Spergel of astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale
the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute in University. “General relativity expanded our
New York City, “and it had some wild implica- cosmic view, then gave us sharper focus on the
tions that Einstein himself didn’t want to accept.” cosmos, and then turned the tables on it and said,
What’s more, says Spergel (a member of the ‘now we can test it much more strongly.’ ” It’s this
Honorary Board of the Society for Science, pub- testing that will perhaps uncover problems with the
lisher of Science News), “the wildest aspects of theory that might point the way to a fuller picture.
general relativity have all turned out to be true.” And so, more than a century after general rela-
What had been masquerading as a quiet, static, tivity debuted, there’s plenty left to foretell. The
finite place is instead a dynamic, ever-expanding universe may turn out to be even wilder yet.
arena filled with its own riot of space-bending
beasts. Galaxies congregate in superclusters on Ravenous beasts
scales vastly greater than anything experts had Just over a century after Einstein unveiled general
considered before the 20th century. Within those relativity, scientists obtained visual confirmation of
galaxies reside not only stars and planets, but also one of its most impressive beasts. In 2019, a global
a zoo of exotic objects illustrating general relativ- network of telescopes revealed a mass warping
ity’s propensity for weirdness, including neutron spacetime with such fervor that nothing, not even
stars, which pack a fat star’s worth of mass into the light, could escape its snare. The Event Horizon
size of a city, and black holes, which pervert space- Telescope released the first image of a black hole,
“The wildest time so strongly that no light can escape. And at the center of galaxy M87 (SN: 4/27/19, p. 6).
aspects of when these behemoths collide, they shake space- “The power of an image is strong,” says
general time, blasting out ginormous amounts of energy. Kazunori Akiyama, an astrophysicist at the MIT
relativity have Our cosmos is violent, evolving and filled with Haystack Observatory in Westford, Mass., who
science fiction–like possibilities that actually led one of the teams that created the image. “I
all turned out come straight out of general relativity. somewhat expected that we might see something
to be true.” “General relativity opened up a huge stage exotic,” Akiyama says. But after looking at the
DAVID SPERGEL of stuff for us to look at and try out and play first image, “Oh my God,” he recalls thinking, “it’s
with,” says astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter of the just perfectly matching with our expectation of
University of California, Berkeley. He points to general relativity.”
the idea that the universe changes dramatically For a long time, black holes were mere math-
over its lifetime — “the idea of a lifetime of a uni- ematical curiosities. Evidence that they actually
verse at all is a bizarre concept” — and the idea reside out in space didn’t start coming in until
that the cosmos is expanding, plus the thought the second half of the 20th century. It’s a com-
that it could collapse and come to an end, and even mon story in the annals of physics. An oddity in
that there might be other universes. “You get to some theorist’s equation points to a previously
realize that the world could be much more inter- unknown phenomenon, which kicks off a search
esting even than we already ever imagined it could for evidence. Once the data are attainable, and if
possibly be.” physicists get a little lucky, the search gives way
General relativity has become the foundation to discovery.
for today’s understanding of the cosmos. But the In the case of black holes, German physicist
current picture is far from complete. Plenty of Karl Schwarzschild came up with a solution to EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE COLLABORATION
questions remain about mysterious matter and Einstein’s equations near a single spherical mass,
forces, about the beginnings and the end of the such as a planet or a star, in 1916, shortly after
universe, about how the science of the big meshes Einstein proposed general relativity. Schwarzschild’s
with quantum mechanics, the science of the very math revealed how the curvature of spacetime
small. Some astronomers believe a promising would differ around stars of the same mass but
route to answering some of those unknowns is increasingly smaller sizes — in other words, stars
another of general relativity’s initially underap- that were more and more compact. Out of the math
preciated features — the power of bent light to came a limit to how small a mass could be squeezed.
universe.indd 18 1/27/21 12:13 PM

Then in the 1930s, J. Robert Oppenheimer and needed to provide such energy. The use of X-ray In 2019, the Event
Hartland Snyder described what would happen if astronomy in the 1960s revealed new features of Horizon Telescope
Collaboration released
a massive star collapsing under the weight of its the cosmos, including bright beacons that could this first-ever image of a
own gravity shrank past that critical size — today come from a black hole scarfing down a compan- black hole, at the heart
known as the “Schwarzschild radius” — reaching ion star. And the motions of stars and gas clouds of galaxy M87. The im-
age shows the shadow of
a point from which its light could never reach us. near the centers of galaxies pointed to something the monster surrounded
Still, Einstein — and most others — doubted that exceedingly dense lurking within. by a bright disk of gas.
what we now call black holes were plausible in Black holes stand out among other cosmic
reality. beasts for how extreme they are. The largest are
The term “black hole” first appeared in print in many billion times the mass of the sun, and when
Science News Letter. It was in a 1964 story by Ann they rip a star apart, they can spit out particles
Ewing, who was covering a meeting in Cleveland with 200 trillion electron volts of energy. That’s
of the American Association for the Advancement some 30 times the energy of the protons that race
of Science (SN: 1/18/64, p. 39). That’s also about around the world’s largest and most powerful
EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE COLLABORATION
the time that hints in favor of the reality of black particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.
holes started coming in. As evidence built into the 1990s and up to
Just a few months later, Ewing reported today, scientists realized these great beasts not
the discovery of quasars — describing them in only exist, but also help shape the cosmos. “These
Science News Letter as “the most distant, bright- objects that general relativity predicted, that were
est, most violent, heaviest and most puzzling mathematical curiosities, became real, then they
sources of light and radio waves” (SN: 8/15/64, were marginal. Now they’ve become central,”
p. 106). Though not linked to black holes at the says Natarajan.
time, quasars hinted at some cosmic powerhouses We now know supermassive black holes reside

at the centers of most if not all galaxies, where Spacetime waves

they generate outflows of energy that affect how When general relativity’s behemoths collide, they
and where stars form. “At the center of the galaxy, disrupt the cosmic fabric. Ripples in spacetime
they define everything,” she says. called gravitational waves emanate outward, a call-
Though visual confirmation is recent, it feels as ing card of a tumultuous and most energetic tango.
though black holes have long been familiar. They Einstein’s math predicted such waves could be
are a go-to metaphor for any unknowable space, created, not only by gigantic collisions but also by
any deep abyss, any endeavor that consumes all explosions and other accelerating bodies. But for
our efforts while giving little in return. a long time, spotting any kind of spacetime rip-
Real black holes, of course, have given plenty ple was a dream beyond measure. Only the most
back: answers about our cosmos plus new ques- dramatic cosmic doings would create signals that
tions to ponder, wonder and entertainment for were large enough for direct detection. Einstein,
space fanatics, a lost album from Weezer, numer- who called the waves gravitationswellen, was
ous episodes of Doctor Who, the Hollywood unaware that any such big events existed in the
blockbuster Interstellar. cosmos.
Quasars (one illustrated) For physicist Nicolas Yunes of the University Beginning in the 1950s, when others were still
are so bright that they
can outshine their home of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, black holes and arguing whether gravitational waves existed in
galaxies. Though baffling other cosmic behemoths continue to amaze. “Just reality, physicist Joseph Weber sunk his career
when first discovered, thinking about the dimensions of these objects, into trying to detect them. After a decade-plus
these outbursts are
powered by massive, how large they are, how heavy they are, how dense effort, he claimed detection in 1969, identifying
feeding black holes. they are,” he says, “it’s really breathtaking.” an apparent signal perhaps from a supernova or
NASA/COBE SCIENCE TEAM; AIP EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES/RUBIN COLLECTION

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO;
MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE SOURCE

An expanding picture Clockwise from left: Astronomer Vera Rubin’s
Einstein’s equations of general relativity were a wellspring from which our current measurements suggested the existence of dark
matter in the 1970s. In the 1920s, astrono-
view of the cosmos has flowed. That the theory continues to supply so many rich mer Edwin Hubble offered evidence that the
questions is part of what makes it “just incredible,” says David Spergel, an astrophysi- universe is expanding. In 1990, the Cosmic
cist at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute in New York City. Over the last Background Explorer, or COBE (illustrated),
team reported measurements of the oldest
century, we’ve detected cosmic beasts that defy the imagination. We’ve also learned light in the universe, remnants of the Big Bang.
some crucial facts about our cosmos: The universe is expanding, and at an accelerat-
ing rate. The universe began with a bang 13.8 billion years ago. And mysterious forms
of matter and energy are shaping the cosmos in unexpected and largely unknown
ways. Here are some of the milestones in our expanding picture. — Elizabeth Quill
1929 Edwin Hubble reports that distant 1986 Margaret Geller, John Huchra
galaxies appear to be flying away from and Valérie de Lapparent map a section
us faster than nearby galaxies, crucial of the observable universe, revealing a 1993 Astronomers report evidence of
COBE SCIENCE TEAM/NASA; RUBIN COLLECTION/AIP EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES
evidence that the universe is expanding. structure that encompasses large walls Massive Compact Halo Objects at the
and giant voids. outskirts of the Milky Way (SN: 9/25/93,
1933 Fritz Zwicky examines galaxies in p. 199). These MACHOs account for
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO;
the Coma cluster and determines that 1990 Based on just nine minutes of data, some but not all of galactic dark matter.
there is unseen mass, what scientists the Cosmic Background Explorer, or
now call “dark matter.” COBE, reveals that the cosmic micro- 1998 Astronomers uncover data indicat-
wave background radiation aligns with ing that the expansion of the universe is
1964 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson what is expected from blackbody radia- picking up speed (SN: 3/21/98, p. 185).
discover the cosmic microwave back- tion, good evidence that it is an afterglow
ground radiation, the relic radiation left of the Big Bang (SN: 1/20/90, p. 36). 2002 Astronomers put the age range of
MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE SOURCE
over from the Big Bang (SN: 6/15/68, the universe at between 13 billion and
p. 575). 1992 Cosmologists detect temperature 14 billion years (SN: 5/4/02, p. 277).
fluctuations in the cosmic microwave
1978 Vera Rubin, Kent Ford and Norbert background, variations that correspond 2006 By studying an intergalactic
Thonnard measure the rotation rates of to ripples in the density of matter shortly collision, researchers report compelling
stars in outer parts of galaxies, strongly after the Big Bang, as expected from the evidence of dark matter’s presence in
implying the existence of dark matter. theory of inflation (SN: 5/2/92, p. 292). space (SN: 8/26/06, p. 31).
universe.indd 21 1/27/21 12:43 PM

Gravitational waves ripple away

from two black holes that orbit
each other before merging (shown
in this simulation). The merging
black holes created a new black
hole that’s much larger than those
found in previous collisions.
from a newly discovered type of rapidly spinning It was a different detection strategy, decades
star called a pulsar. In the few years after report- in the making, that would provide the needed
ing the initial find, Science News published more sensitivity. The Advanced Laser Interferometry
than a dozen stories on what it began calling the Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, which
“Weber problem” (SN: 6/21/69, p. 593). Study reported the first confirmed gravitational waves
after study could not confirm the results. What’s in 2016, relies on two detectors, one in Hanford,
more, no sources of the waves could be found. A Wash., and one in Livingston, La. Each detector
1973 headline read, “The deepening doubt about splits the beam of a powerful laser in two, with
Weber’s waves” (SN: 5/26/73, p. 338). each beam traveling down one of the detector’s
Weber stuck by his claim until his death in two arms. In the absence of gravitational waves,
2000, but his waves were never verified. Nonethe- the two beams recombine and cancel each other
less, scientists increasingly believed gravitational out. But if gravitational waves stretch one arm of DEBORAH FERGUSON, KARAN JANI, DEIRDRE SHOEMAKER AND
waves would be found. In 1974, radio astronomers the detector while squeezing the other, the laser
PABLO LAGUNA/GEORGIA TECH, MAYA COLLABORATION
Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor spotted a neu- light no longer matches up.
tron star orbiting a dense companion. Over the The machines are an incredible feat of engi-
following years, the neutron star and its com- neering. Even spacetime ripples detected from
panion appeared to be getting closer together colliding black holes might stretch an arm of the
by the distance that would be expected if they LIGO detector by as little as one ten-thousandth
THE VIRGO COLLABORATION
were losing energy to gravitational waves. Scien- of the width of a proton.

tists soon spoke not of the Weber problem, but of When the first detection, from two colliding
what equipment could possibly pick up the waves. black holes, was announced, the discovery was
“Now, although they have not yet seen, physicists heralded as the beginning of a new era in astron-
believe,” Dietrick E. Thomsen wrote in Science omy. It was Science News’ story of the year in
News in 1984 (SN: 8/4/84, p. 76). 2016, and such a big hit that the pioneers of the

LIGO detector won the Nobel Prize in physics the but exciting signals,” he said (SN: 8/29/20, p. 12). Researchers at two
following year. Gravitational wave astronomy is truly only at gravitational wave ob-
servatories, LIGO in the
Scientists with LIGO and another gravi- its beginnings. Improved sensitivity at existing United States and Virgo
tational wave detector, Virgo, based in Italy, Earth-based detectors will turn up the volume on in Italy (shown above),
have by now logged dozens more detections gravitational waves, allowing detections from less have reported dozens of
detections of black hole
(SN: 1/30/21, p. 30). Most of the waves have ema- energetic and more distant sources. Future detec- smashups, as well as
nated from mergers of black holes, though a few tors, including the space-based LISA, planned for neutron star mergers, in
events have featured neutron stars. Smashups so launch in the 2030s, will get around the trouble- the last five years.
far have revealed the previously unknown birth- some noise that interferes when Earth’s surface
places of some heavy elements and pointed to a shakes.
bright jet of charged subatomic particles that “Perhaps the most exciting thing would be to
DEBORAH FERGUSON, KARAN JANI, DEIRDRE SHOEMAKER AND
could offer clues to mysterious flashes of high- observe a small black hole falling into a big black
energy light known as gamma-ray bursts. The hole, an extreme mass ratio inspiraling,” Yunes
PABLO LAGUNA/GEORGIA TECH, MAYA COLLABORATION
waves also have revealed that midsize black holes, says. In such an event, the small black hole would
between 100 and 100,000 times the sun’s mass, zoom back and forth, back and forth, swirling in
do in fact exist — along with reconfirming that different directions as it followed wildly eccen-
Einstein was right, at least so far. tric orbits, perhaps for years. That could offer the
Just five years in, some scientists are already ultimate test of Einstein’s equations, revealing
THE VIRGO COLLABORATION
eager for something even more exotic. In a Science whether we truly understand how spacetime is
News article about detecting black holes orbit- warped in the extreme. s
ing wormholes via gravitational waves, physicist
Vítor Cardoso of Instituto Superior Técnico in Explore more
Lisbon, Portugal, suggested a coming shift to more s Clifford M. Will and Nicolas Yunes. Is Einstein
unusual phenomena: “We need to look for strange Still Right? Oxford University Press, 2020.

FEATURE
Inside Your Head Privacy questions swirl around new brain technology
By Laura Sanders
G
ertrude the pig rooted around a straw- even reshape thinking. Imagine being able to
filled pen, oblivious to the cameras and beckon our Teslas with our minds, Jedi-style.
onlookers — and the 1,024 electrodes Some scientists called Gertrude’s introduction
eavesdropping on her brain signals. a slick publicity stunt, full of unachievable prom-
Each time the pig ’s snout found a treat in a ises. But Musk has surprised people before. “You
researcher’s hand, a musical jingle sounded, indi- can’t argue with a guy who built his own electric
cating activity in her snout-controlling nerve cells. car and sent it to orbit around Mars,” says Christof
Those beeps were part of the big reveal on Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for
August 28 by Elon Musk’s company Neuralink. Brain Science in Seattle.
“In a lot of ways, it’s kind of like a Fitbit in your Whether Neuralink will eventually merge brains
skull with tiny wires,” said Musk, founder of Tesla and Teslas is beside the point. Musk isn’t the only
and SpaceX, of the new technology. dreamer chasing neurotechnology. Advances are
Neuroscientists have been recording nerve coming quickly and span a variety of approaches,
cell activity from animals for decades. But the including external headsets that may be able to dis-
ambitions of Musk and others to link humans tinguish between hunger and boredom; implanted
JULIA YELLOW
with computers are shocking in their reach. electrodes that translate intentions to speak into
NEURALINK
Future-minded entrepreneurs and research- real words; and bracelets that use nerve impulses
ers aim to listen in on our brains and perhaps for typing without a keyboard.
brain-implants.indd 24 1/27/21 9:41 AM

Today, paralyzed people are already testing
brain-computer interfaces, a technology that
connects brains to the digital world (SN: 11/16/13,
p. 22). With brain signals alone, users have been
able to shop online, communicate and even use a
prosthetic arm to sip from a cup (SN: 6/16/12, p. 5).
The ability to hear neural chatter, understand
it and perhaps even modify it could change and
improve people’s lives in ways that go well beyond
medical treatments. But these abilities also raise
questions about who gets access to our brains and
for what purposes.
Because of neurotechnology’s potential for
both good and bad, we all have a stake in shaping
how it’s created and, ultimately, how it is used.
But most people don’t have the chance to weigh
Whenever Gertrude’s snout touched something, nerve cells in her brain fired electrical
in, and only find out about these advances after signals detected by an implanted device (signals shown as wavy lines on black). Similar
they’re a fait accompli. So we asked Science News technology may one day help people with paralysis or brain disorders.
readers their views about recent neurotechnol-
ogy advances. We described three main ethical the seat of our pants here,” says Rafael Yuste, a
issues — fairness, autonomy and privacy. Far and neurobiologist at Columbia University.
away, readers were most concerned about privacy. For now, ethics questions are being taken up in
The idea of allowing companies, or govern- a piecemeal way. Academic researchers, bioethi-
ments, or even health care workers access to the cists and scientists at private companies, such as
brain’s inner workings spooked many respon- IBM and Facebook, are discussing these ques-
dents. Such an intrusion would be the most tions among themselves. Large brain-research
d
important breach in a world where privacy is consortiums, such as the U.S. BRAIN Initiative
already rare. “My brain is the only place I know is (SN: 2/22/14, p. 16), include funding for projects
truly my own,” one reader wrote. that address privacy concerns. Some governments,
Technology that can change your brain — nudge including Chile’s national legislature, are starting
it to think or behave in certain ways — is especially to address concerns raised by neurotechnology.
worrisome to many of our readers. A nightmare With such disjointed efforts, it’s no surprise that
scenario raised by several respondents: We turn no consensus has surfaced. The few answers that
into zombies controlled by others. exist are as varied as the people doing the asking.
When these types of brain manipulations get
discussed, several sci-fi scenarios come to mind, Reading thoughts
such as memories being wiped clean in the poi- The ability to pull information directly from the
gnant 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless brain — without relying on speaking, writing or
Mind; ideas implanted into a person’s mind, as in typing — has long been a goal for researchers and
the 2010 movie Inception; or people being tricked doctors intent on helping people whose bodies
into thinking a virtual world is the real thing, as in can no longer move or speak. Already, implanted Readers’ thoughts
the mind-bending 1999 thriller The Matrix. electrodes can record signals from the movement We asked members of
the public for their take
Today’s tech capabilities are nowhere near any areas of the brain, allowing people to control on the ethics of new brain
of those fantasies. Still, “the here and now is just robotic prostheses. technology. A sampling
as interesting … and just as morally problematic,” of their quotes are on the
following pages.
says neuroethicist Timothy Brown of the Univer-
sity of Washington in Seattle. “We don’t need
The Matrix to get our dystopia.” “The thoughts of
Today, codes of ethics and laws govern someone accessing a person’s
research, medical treatments and certain
aspects of our privacy. But we have no brain is absolutely terrifying.” “I have
no wish/desire to be a
JULIA YELLOW
comprehensive way to handle the privacy

NEURALINK
violations that might arise with future zombie or a clone.”

advances in brain science. “We are all flying by
E-mail your thoughts on this story (with “brain ethics” in the subject line) to feedback@sciencenews.org www.sciencenews.org | February 13, 2021 25

FEATURE | INSIDE YOUR HEAD
What’s more, Rommelfanger says, “I don’t

believe that any neuroscientist knows what a
mind is or what a thought is,” she says. “I am not
concerned about mind reading, from the existing
terrain of technologies.”
But that terrain may change quickly. “We are
getting very, very close” to having the ability to
pull private information from people’s brains,
Yuste says, pointing to studies that have decoded
what a person is looking at and what words they
hear. Scientists from Kernel, a neurotech com-
pany near Los Angeles, have invented a helmet,
just now hitting the market, that is essentially a
portable brain scanner that can pick up activity in
Robert “Buz” Chmielewski, who has had quadriplegia since his teens, uses brain
signals to feed himself some cake. Via electrodes implanted in both sides of his brain, certain brain areas (see Tech in action, Page 28).
he controls two robotic arms: One manipulates the knife and the other holds the fork. For now, companies have only our behavior —
our likes, our clicks, our purchase histories — to
In January 2019, researchers at Johns Hopkins build eerily accurate profiles of us and estimate
University implanted electrodes in the brain of what we’ll do next. And we let them. Predictive
Robert “Buz” Chmielewski, who was left quad- algorithms make good guesses, but guesses all the
riplegic after a surfing accident. With signals same. “With this neural data gleaned from neuro-
from both sides of his brain, Chmielewski con- technology, it may not be a guess anymore,” Yuste
trolled two prosthetic arms to use a fork and a says. Companies will have the real thing, straight
knife simultaneously to feed himself, research- from the source.
ers announced in a press release on December 10. Even subconscious thoughts might be revealed
Other research has decoded speech from the with further technological improvements, Yuste
brain signals of a paralyzed man who is unable to says. “That is the ultimate privacy fear, because
speak. When the man saw the question, “Would what else is left?”
you like some water?” on a computer screen, he
responded with the text message, “No, I am not Rewrite, revise
thirsty,” using only signals in his brain. This feat, Technology that can change the brain’s activ-
described November 19 at a symposium hosted by ity already exists today, as medical treatments.
Columbia University, is another example of the These tools can detect and stave off a seizure
tremendous progress under way in linking brains in a person with epilepsy, for instance, or stop a
to computers. tremor before it takes hold.
“Never before have we been able to get that Researchers are testing systems for obsessive-
kind of information without interacting with the compulsive disorder, addiction and depression
periphery of your body, that you had to voluntarily (SN: 2/16/19, p. 22). But the power to precisely
activate,” says Karen Rommelfanger, a neuroethi- change a functioning brain directly — and as a
cist at Emory University in Atlanta. Speaking, sign result, a person’s behavior — raises worrisome
language and writing, for instance, “all require questions.
several steps of your decision mak- The desire to persuade, to change a person’s
ing,” she says. mind, is not new, says Marcello Ienca, a bioethi-
“Imagine Today, efforts to extract cist at ETH Zurich. Winning hearts and minds is
information from the at the core of advertising and politics. Technology
walking into brain generally require capable of changing your brain’s activity with just
McDonald’s and suddenly you bulky equipment, a subtle nudge, however, “brings current manipu-
have an irresistible urge for a intense computing lation risks to the next level,” Ienca says.
cheeseburger (or 10).” power and, most impor- What happens if such influence finds a place
tantly, a willing participant, outside the medical arena? A doctor might use
Rommelfanger says. For now, precise brain-modifying technology to ease
JULIA YELLOW
an attempt to break into your mind anorexia’s grip on a young person, but the same
might be used for money-making purposes:
JHU-APL
could easily be thwarted by closing your

eyes, or wiggling fingers, or even getting drowsy. “Imagine walking into McDonald’s and suddenly

you have an irresistible urge for a cheeseburger We allow our smartphones to monitor where
(or 10),” one of our readers wrote. we go, what time we fall asleep and
Is the craving caused by real hunger? Or is it the even whether we’ve washed our
result of a tiny neural nudge just as you drove near hands for a full 20 seconds. “How would we
the golden arches? That neural intrusion could Couple that with the digi- know that what we thought
spark uncertainty over where that urge came tal breadcrumbs we actively
from, or perhaps even escape notice altogether. share about the diets we try,
or felt came from our own brains,
“This is super dangerous,” Yuste says. “The min- the shows we binge and the or whether it was put there by
ute you start stimulating the brain, you are going tweets we love, and our lives someone else?”
to be changing people’s minds, and they will never are an open book.
know about it, because they will interpret it as Those details are more powerful
‘that’s me.’ ” than brain data, says Anna Wexler, an ethi-
Precise brain control of people is not possible cist at the University of Pennsylvania. “My e-mail
with existing technology. But in a hint of what address, my notes app and my search engine his-
may be possible, scientists have already created tory are more reflective of who I am as a per-
visions inside mouse brains (SN: 8/17/19, p. 10). son — my identity — than our neural data may ever
Using a technique called optogenetics to stimulate be,” she says.
small groups of nerve cells, researchers made mice It’s too early to worry about privacy invasions
“see” lines that weren’t there. Those mice behaved from neurotechnology, Wexler argues, a position
exactly as if their eyes had actually seen the lines, that makes her an outlier. “Most of my colleagues
says Yuste, whose research group performed some would tell me I’m crazy.”
of these experiments. “Puppets,” he calls them. At the other end of the spectrum, some
researchers, including Yuste, have proposed strict
What to do? regulations around privacy that would treat a per-
As neurotechnology marches ahead, scientists, son’s neural data like their organs. Much like a
ethicists, companies and governments are looking liver can’t be taken out of a body without approval
for answers on how, or even whether, to regulate for medical purposes, neural data shouldn’t be
brain technology. For now, those answers depend removed either. That viewpoint has found pur-
JULIA YELLOW
entirely on who is asked. And they come against a chase in Chile, which is now considering whether
JHU-APL
backdrop of increasingly invasive technology that to classify neural data with new protections that
we’ve become surprisingly comfortable with. would not allow companies to get at it.

FEATURE | INSIDE YOUR HEAD
Other experts fall somewhere in the middle.

Tech in action Ienca, for example, doesn’t want to see restric-
tions on personal freedom. People ought to have
Laser helmets the choice to sell or give away their brain data for
A helmet sends laser beams through the a product they like, or even for straight up cash.
skull and into the brain. After bouncing off “The human brain is becoming a new asset,”
tissue and blood, the particles of light re- Ienca says, something that can generate profit for
turn to detectors that measure oxygen companies eager to mine the data. He calls it
levels. Those levels indicate where in “neurocapitalism.”
the brain nerve cells are active, thus And Ienca is fine with that. If a person is ade-
giving clues about mental processes. quately informed — granted, a questionable
This technology, called functional near- if — then they are within their rights to sell their
infrared spectroscopy, is the same that data, or exchange it for a service or product, he
allows pulse oximeters to measure says. People ought to have the freedom to do what
oxygen levels in the blood. In early they like with their information.
2021, the neurotechnology company General rules, checklists and regulations are not
Kernel, based near Los Angeles, began likely to be a good path forward, Rommelfanger
selling Kernel Flow helmets (shown) to says. “Right now, there are over 20 frameworks,
researchers who are using the tools to study guidelines, principles that have been developed
concussions, language and even dreaming. since 2014 on how to handle neuroscience,” she
says. Those often cover “mental privacy” and
“cognitive liberty,” the freedom to control your
Electrode bracelet own mental life.
A bracelet studded with electrodes can detect tiny nerve impulses on the Those guidelines are thoughtful, she says, but the
wrist. The bracelet (shown) uses electromyography, which picks technologies differ in what they’re capable of, and
up the behavior of nerve cells that control muscles, in their possible ethical repurcussions. One-size-
to eavesdrop on signals that move from fits-all solutions don’t exist, Rommelfanger says.
the brain to hand muscles. Developed Instead, each company or research group may
by New York City–based CTRL-Labs, need to work through ethical issues throughout
a neural interface company acquired the development process. She and colleagues have
by Facebook Reality Labs in 2019, recently proposed five questions that researchers
the bracelet allows users to play can ask themselves to begin thinking about these
chess in a virtual room, control ethical issues, including privacy and autonomy. The
a hand avatar and type with tiny questions ask people to consider how new technol-
movements from inside a pocket, for ogy might be used outside of a lab, for instance.
instance, without a keyboard, mouse Moving forward on the technology to help peo-
or touch screen. The technology is ple with mental illness and paralysis is an ethical
still in development. imperative, Rommelfanger says. “More than my
fear of a privacy violation, my fear is about dimin-
ished public trust that could undermine all of the
Under-skull implants good this technology could do.”
Thin tendrils laced with hundreds or thousands of electrodes will spread A lack of ethical clarity is unlikely to slow the
out in the brain to listen in on — and perhaps even stimulate — nerve cells. pace of the coming neurotech rush. But thought-
So far, Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, based in Fremont, Calif., has ful consideration of the ethics could help shape
tried the method on rats and pigs in the lab. Other labs the trajectory of what’s to come, and help protect
FROM TOP: KERNEL; CTRL-LABS; NEURALINK
are testing implanted electrodes in people with what makes us most human. s
paralysis. To make the surgery less risky and
more efficient, Neuralink is building a robot Explore more
that can quickly sew the electrode threads s Rafael Yuste et al. “Four ethical priorities
(shown attached to a charging disk) for neurotechnologies and AI.” Nature.
into the brain, ultimately linking November 9, 2017.
people with computers.
— Laura Sanders This project on ethics and science was supported
by the Kavli Foundation.

REVIEWS & PREVIEWS
BOOKSHELF
Human ingenuity can

ruin and repair nature
In 1900, the city of Chicago completed
a 45-kilometer-long canal that altered
the hydrology of two-thirds of the
United States.
That wasn’t the intention, of course.
Under a White Sky The plan was to reverse the flow of the
Devils Hole pupfish (left) live in a single water-filled cavern in Nevada
Elizabeth Kolbert Chicago River to divert waste away (right). To ensure the species’ survival, scientists maintain a captive
CROWN, $28 from the city’s source of drinking water: population in a replica of the pool.
Lake Michigan. The engineering feat worked, but it also con-
nected the Great Lakes and Mississippi River basins, two of $4.5 million replica of the pool to house a backup population.
the world’s largest — and until then, isolated — freshwater The simulacrum — which mimics the smallest details of the
ecosystems, allowing invasive species to pour through the actual pool, including a shallow shelf reconstructed from laser
opening and wreak ecological havoc. images of the real thing — requires round-the-clock caretak-
Elizabeth Kolbert opens Under a White Sky: The Nature of ing. As Kolbert watches staff use tweezers to remove beetles
the Future with this parable of humans’ hubristic attempts that have developed a taste for young pupfish, she notes how
to control nature. We’ve put our minds toward damming or much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.
diverting most of the planet’s rivers, replacing vast tracts of Saving larger ecosystems may require more powerful tools.
natural ecosystems with crops, and burning so much fossil In Australia, we meet researchers trying to genetically engi-
fuel that 1 in 3 molecules of atmospheric carbon dioxide neer less toxic cane toads, an invasive species that’s poisoning
came from human action, she writes. We’ve warmed the untold numbers of native animals. Gene drive technology,
atmosphere, raised sea levels, erased countless species and which loads the dice of inheritance to propel certain muta-
forged an uncertain future for humankind and the planet. tions through a population (SN: 12/12/15, p. 16), could make all
Our collective ingenuity got us into this mess, and Kolbert cane toads safer to eat within generations. Other scientists are
explores whether that same ingenuity can get us out. This considering the possibility of using gene drives to eliminate
is “a book about people trying to solve problems created by invasive rodents from islands like New Zealand.
people trying to solve problems,” she writes. A fitting follow- Such power could prove difficult to wield, and many worry
up to her Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sixth Extinction it would backfire. Mouse-eliminating gene drives might
(SN: 2/22/14, p. 28), the book will satisfy readers keen on a escape an island and spread across the globe.
skeptical survey of how innovation could save coral reefs or Kolbert does not explicitly argue for or against these
turn climate-warming carbon into stone. measures, but frankly acknowledges the stakes. “What’s the
Kolbert takes a firsthand look at many of these interven- alternative?” she writes. “Rejecting such technologies as
tions. She begins on a boat, traveling up the Chicago canal to unnatural isn’t going to bring nature back. The choice is not
FROM LEFT: OLIN FEUERBACHER, USFWS PACIFIC SOUTHWEST REGION/FLICKR (CC BY 2.0);
inspect electric barriers meant to keep invasive Asian carp between what was and what is, but between what is and what
from forever altering the Great Lakes. Asian carp were will be, which, often enough, is nothing.”
introduced to the Mississippi River basin in the 1960s as a Humankind’s most audacious idea to rein in the collateral
biological Weedwacker to control invasive plants. But the carp damage of modernization is geoengineering. By stuffing the
have swum amok throughout the basin and are now knocking stratosphere with reflective particles, Kolbert explains, we
at the door of Lake Michigan. Simply closing the canal would could almost immediately start to reverse global warming. But
protect the lakes, but that’s largely dismissed as being too it would also turn the sky white, scramble weather patterns
USFWS PACIFIC SOUTHWEST REGION/FLICKR (CC BY 2.0)
disruptive to the city. Instead, humans innovate. “First you and who knows what else. The fundamental resource of all
reverse a river,” Kolbert writes. “Then you electrify it.” life — sunlight — would be dimmed, intentionally, by us.
Each chapter builds on this theme of increasingly elaborate Had we acted decades ago to curb greenhouse gas emissions
(or desperate?) interventions intended to limit the fallout of or limit habitat destruction, such schemes would remain
previous problem solving. The scale of the problems widens science fiction. But we’ve kicked the can down the road for
too, which could leave a reader’s head spinning, but Kolbert too long. Gene editing species or geoengineering may be
keeps her globe-trotting grounded in immersive reporting and entirely crazy and disconcerting, Kolbert writes, but if they
recurring nods to the tragic, and often comic, absurdity of it all. can pull us from the hole we’ve dug for ourselves, don’t we
To save the endangered Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon have to at least consider them? Whether such technologies
diabolis), a couple-centimeters-long streak of sapphire can save us and the planet, or only further muck it up,
found in a single desert pool in Nevada, researchers built a Kolbert cannot say. — Jonathan Lambert
reviews.indd 29 1/27/21 10:29 AM

SOCIETY UPDATE
Sustaining research
outside classrooms
During the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, the Society for Science has found ways
to continue supporting STEM education.
In a year of educational disruption, the Society for Science

pivoted its programming in 2020 to provide STEM research
kits to educators that would encourage scientific inquiry
in all settings, regardless of whether the teachers were
guiding their students remotely, in person or through
a hybrid model. Participants in the Society’s Advocate
Program, STEM Research Grants program and research
teachers conferences chose from a selection of 13
high-quality kits, which included Foldscope instruments,
PocketLab weather sensors and Neuron SpikerBox Bundles.
By providing teachers with this equipment, the Society
wanted to ensure hands-on research and project-based
learning could carry on, despite the circumstances.
In 2020, the Society gave

• 7,844 kits valued at more than $415,000
• To 373 teachers from over 270 schools
• In all 50 states and Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C.,
and American Samoa
• Impacting over 15,500 students
The kits were funded by
Educator Sharon Taylor (pictured at bottom left) prepared foldable microscopes

(bottom right) this past December to be shared with her students.
SN_003_21_C.indd 30 1/27/21 10:31 AM

FEEDBACK
Toad talk 17 billion light-years from Earth if the

Guttural toads on islands in the Indian Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago.
Ocean have shrunken limbs and bodies that “Distance is actually quite compli-
may be evidence that “island dwarfism” cated to define for a universe that is
can evolve quickly, Jake Buehler reported expanding and in which spacetime is
in “Toads on two islands are shrinking fast” not static,” says Science News physics
(SN: 12/19/20 & 1/2/21, p. 13). writer Emily Conover. “The gravita-
“I thought that island dwarfism usually tional waves produced by the merger
happens to quite large animals … and took 7 billion years to reach us. That’s
that small animals … tend to evolve what’s called ‘lookback time,’ ” she
to larger sizes on islands,” reader says. “But that’s not the same thing
Tim Cliffe wrote. “If small animals as the distance of the source from us.
do tend to grow larger, do the authors Because the universe has expanded in
talk about why these small toads would the time it took those waves to reach
instead be taking the dwarfism route?” us, the source is indeed 17 billion light-
DECEMBER 19, 2020 & JANUARY 2, 2021
Generally speaking, yes, large years away, according to one standard
animals become smaller when they method of defining distance. That’s also
colonize islands, and small animals why that distance doesn’t conflict with
get bigger, Buehler says. “This ‘island the age of the universe,” she says.
rule’ isn’t absolute, and whether or not
an animal moves toward dwarfism or Room to improve
gigantism may depend on the benefits A compound in hallucinogenic mushrooms
normally afforded to them by their eased depression symptoms in 13 people
body size, and food constraints on the in a small study, but larger studies are
island,” he says. The researchers noted needed, Laura Sanders reported in
that a relatively large body size may “Psilocybin may help treat depression”
protect guttural toads against preda- (SN: 12/19/20 & 1/2/21, p. 6).
tors. On the islands, the toads may “The article spoke of concern that most
have become smaller since there are participants were white and that a
fewer hungry predators to dissuade, broader diversity would be more help-
Buehler says. ful” to determine how effective the
Or perhaps the island toads have a compound is, reader Robert Walty
spread-out mating schedule, which wrote. “This is quite true and as a
could explain why the amphibians are 75-year-old man, I am also concerned
shrinking. “On the mainland, guttural about depression in the elderly,”
toads mate once a year, and females that he wrote, noting that depression is
grow to large sizes very quickly produce common among older adults. “I look
a lot of eggs,” Buehler says. But the forward to larger studies with a truly
island toads may be mating year-round, broad diversity of participants.”
which would deflate the importance
of getting large and producing a ton of
eggs. “Figuring out exactly why island
life is making these toads smaller is the
next step in this project,” he says.
Join the conversation
Defining distance
E-MAIL feedback@sciencenews.org
A collision of two black holes 17 billion
MAIL Attn: Feedback
1719 N St., NW light-years from Earth snagged records
Washington, DC 20036 for the farthest, most energetic and
most massive black hole merger, Erika
Connect with us Engelhaupt wrote in “Superlative science”
(SN: 12/19/20 & 1/2/21, p. 34).
Some readers wondered how the black
hole merger could have occurred
feedback.indd 31 1/27/21 10:11 AM

SCIENCE VISUALIZED
A painted pig takes cave art back in time

Inside a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists other in a scene of some sort, says archaeologist Iain Davidson
have found one of the oldest known artistic depictions of a of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia. Sim-
real-world object or life-form. It’s a painting of a warty pig ilarly positioned, painted animals dating to roughly 30,000
(shown above), an animal still found on Sulawesi, that was years ago or more appear in scenes in France’s Chauvet Cave,
rendered on the cave’s back wall at least 45,500 years ago, says Davidson, who did not participate in the new study.
researchers report January 13 in Science Advances. Like a painted hunting scene from at least 43,900 years
The discovery adds to evidence that “the first modern ago that was previously found in a separate Sulawesi cave
human cave art traditions did not emerge in Ice Age Europe, (SN: 1/18/20, p. 9), minimum age estimates for the pig paint-
as long supposed, but perhaps earlier in Asia or even in Africa, ings are based on measures of radioactive uranium’s decay in
where our species evolved,” says study author Adam Brumm, cauliflower-like mineral growths that formed in thin layers
an archaeologist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. over and underneath parts of the depictions.
At least two other partially preserved pig paintings appear The team considers it likely that Homo sapiens, rather than
on the cave wall near the newly dated figure, all executed in a closely related species that lived in the region such as Homo
red or dark red and purple mineral pigments (an enhanced floresiensis (SN: 7/9/16, p. 6), painted on the Sulawesi cave
image shown below). The pigs appear to be confronting each walls. — Bruce Bower
FROM TOP: MAXIME AUBERT; ADHI AGUS OKTAVIANA
Pig 3
Pig 1
Pig 2
scivis.indd 32 1/27/21 9:45 AM

IS SCIENCE IN YOUR DNA?
Become a Member of the Society
F
or 100 years, the Society for Science’s flagship magazine,
Science News, has been a trusted and comprehensive source
for journalism on the latest scientific research and discoveries.
For 80 years, the Society has inspired the next generation of scientists
and engineers through our world-class STEM research competitions.
Those competitions have helped launch the careers of more than
70,000 young people and empowered them to address the world’s
most intractable problems.
MEMBERS HELP MAKE ALL THIS POSSIBLE

Today, we face global challenges including the pandemic and climate
change. Evidence-based science journalism and new generations
of innovative scientists and engineers are essential to meeting these
and other challenges of the next century, securing a sustainable
future for humankind and for our planet.
Your support will ensure that our mission will continue.
Please join us. societyforscience.org/JoinMember
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Electric Eels Gang Up to Kill | Einstein’s Wild Universe

MAGAZINE OF THE SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE s FEBRUARY 13, 2021

Mind Exposed New brain technology

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24 Inside Your Head

9 Mice share each other’s

29 REVIEWS & PREVIEWS

COVER New technologies

www.sciencenews.org | February 13, 2021 1

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Should corporations get

access to our brains? EDITOR , SPECIAL PROJECTS Elizabeth Quill

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2 SCIENCE NEWS | February 13, 2021

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A decision to make a legacy gift to the Society for Science, publisher

Leave your legacy. Change the world.

RETHINK thousands of smaller fish together to

UPDATE: The so-called

and top (SN: 4/30/94, p. 276).

4 SCIENCE NEWS | February 13, 2021

notebook.indd 4 1/27/21 12:22 PM

SCIENCE STATS TEASER

Earth’s oceans broke heat records in 2020 A new zinc-air battery

battery hard to recharge. The electrolyte

−50 travel to the cathode and react directly with

www.sciencenews.org | February 13, 2021 5

notebook.indd 5 1/27/21 12:21 PM

The Parker Solar Probe can

ATOM & COSMOS

NASA’s Parker probe gets help from other telescopes

6 SCIENCE NEWS | February 13, 2021

solar probe.indd 6 1/27/21 11:58 AM

Waking up with the sun

Solar Orbiter “The next few years is going to be a step

www.sciencenews.org | February 13, 2021 7

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LIFE & EVOLUTION warrens consisting of dozens of twisting W

Monitor lizards engineer ecosystems burrows, each made by a single monitor

Some snakes turn method, reported in the Jan. 11 Current

FROM LEFT: JOHN SULLIVAN/INATURALIST.ORG (CC BY-NC 4.0); S. DOODY

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o www.sciencenews.org | February 13, 2021 9

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ATOM & COSMOS

A galaxy on the verge of a shutdown

BY LISA GROSSMAN “When you see a black hole actively

NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER, CHRIS SMITH/GESTAR/USRA

10 SCIENCE NEWS | February 13, 2021

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t is typically caused by colliding neutron

www.sciencenews.org | February 13, 2021 11

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