In the future, leaving your phone charger at home will mean only one thing: You forgot to put on pants.

Just as smartphones untethered users from their desktop computers, smart clothing is poised to bring personal electronics out of our pockets and onto our sleeves.

The current generation of wearable technology that includes smart glasses and watches is still more marginal than mainstream. Google Glass fizzled out, and nearly a third of the people who buy fitness trackers lose interest over time. But gadget-packed garments may have an edge when it comes to seamless integration into our lives.

“One conference, somebody stood up and [said], ‘I get that wearable technology is a thing, but I just don’t think I’m going to be willing to get up every single day and remember to put something on,’ ” recalls wearable technology researcher Lucy Dunne. “I looked at her and said, ‘You’re wearing clothes right now. I’m pretty sure you do that already.’ ”
Plus, technology-laden clothing is “right next to and against your body. It has a large surface area compared to personal devices, and it goes with us everywhere,” says Dunne, of the University of Minnesota campus in St. Paul. “That kind of access is … rich with opportunity.”

Some advanced apparel is already for sale, like gloves threaded with heat-conducting wires to warm fingers on extra cold days, or bathing suits equipped with UV sensors to alert suntanners when they are close to overbaked. But engineers have set their sights on a vast menu of souped-up clothes that could make daily life more convenient — or just better looking.
Job one, though, is to refashion conventional electronics. Typical battery packs and digital displays are too rigid and heavy for weaving into everyday duds. Engineers are getting creative to make lightweight, flexible devices that keep clothing comfortable and still perform as well as their clunky counterparts. Once researchers have built something that works well and is reasonably wearable, they still have to make sure their stuff is sturdy enough to withstand daily wear and tear, not to mention runs through the laundry.

Most next-gen clothing is years away from hitting retail racks. In fact, a lot of the tech hasn’t left the lab yet. But fashionistas and gearheads can look forward to a future where electronic clothes are in vogue. Here’s a sneak peek.

1. Change your fashion on the fly
   Clothing woven from color-changing yarns could give a whole new meaning to the phrase “goes with anything.”

Most existing color-changing textiles, like sun-activated T-shirts with designs that go from white to rainbow, are triggered by shifts in ambient lighting or body heat. Now, researchers have created clothes that change color with the tap of a smartphone screen.
These garments, presented April 4 in Phoenix at the Materials Research Society spring meeting, are made from yarns as thick as a few strands of human hair. Each yarn comprises a copper wire sheathed in a polymer sleeve. The polymer could be polyester, nylon or some other material, depending on how soft or sturdy you want your fabric, says optics and photonics researcher Joshua Kaufman, a codeveloper of the yarns at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

The polymer sleeves are laced with pigments that shift color in response to temperature changes too subtle for the wearer to feel. The wearer controls the clothing’s appearance by sending Wi-Fi signals from a smartphone to a battery attached to the garment. The battery feeds electric current into the yarn’s copper wire, heating the pigment to activate a color switch. These yarns could make clothes that rotate between solids, stripes, plaids and other patterns.

Fashion trendsetters and people who just can’t decide what to wear in the morning probably stand the most to gain from this technology.

But it could have benefits for the rest of us, too. Spilled food on your light-colored shirt at lunch? Hide the stain with a darker hue. Want to wear a lighter shade when you’re out in the sun or biking home in the dark? Tap an app. Need to sneak in a second-day wear after skipping laundry day? No problem.

This kind of fabric could also be used for bags, car upholstery, curtains and furniture, says optics and photonics researcher Ayman Abouraddy, also at Central Florida. “We don’t anticipate more than a year or two before you could buy something [made of these fabrics] from the mall,” he says.

2. Never forget your ID or keys
   Someday, you may be able to embellish your clothes with enough data to get you in the building.

Researchers have created passcode-storing clothes made with thread that contains silver or copper filings. Normally, the magnetic poles of atoms in those metallic threads are pointed in random directions. But holding a magnet close to the thread aligns all the poles in a single section of cloth to point either north or south. Those magnetic orientations encode a bit of data, a 1 or 0, which an instrument called a magnetometer can read.

This data-embedded fabric, presented last October in Quebec City at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, holds onto its magnetic information through washing, drying and ironing — at least for the short term. The strength of the data signal wanes by about 30 percent over the course of a week.

The material can be remagnetized with the same or a different pattern of 1s and 0s, but the researchers first have to build a device that can rewrite this data, similar to the tech used to reprogram hotel keycards, says Justin Chan, a computer scientist and engineer at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Chan and Washington colleague Shyam Gollakota have written magnetic codes into neckties, belts and wristbands, but the tech is still in the nascent stage. Right now, each 1 or 0 is about 2 centimeters across. The researchers are working on packing more data into smaller swatches, Chan says.

Once data-storing clothing is available, you could simply scan your sleeve to enter your office or apartment building. To some people, that may not seem like much of an advance. But the forgetful types who misplace their keys every other day might appreciate one less thing to scramble for on the way out the door.

3. Micromanage your moves
   Training yourself to drive a golf ball, play piano or just sit with better posture could get a whole lot easier, thanks to motion-sensing clothes that detect the slightest twitch.

“If you want to know exactly what somebody’s doing — whether or not they’re bending their knee in a healthy way, or what their heart rate and muscle activity is telling you about their emotional state — then you need sensors everywhere,” Dunne says.

To that end, industrial engineer Joshua DeGraff and colleagues have built superthin motion detectors that can be embedded in anything from shoulder braces to shoe soles.

The key component of these sensors is a sheet of material called buckypaper — a dense mesh of carbon nanotubes about as thick as a red blood cell is wide. Normally, buckypaper conducts electricity with no problem (SN: 3/8/14, p. 18). But stretching the material creates gaps in the nanotube network that stymie the flow of electric charge. DeGraff’s team at Florida State University in Tallahassee is using that weakness as an advantage. Connecting a piece of buckypaper to a circuit and measuring changes in electrical resistance across the paper can reveal how much the bucky-paper has been stretched.
Sensors fashioned by DeGraff’s team register as little as a 0.005 percent change in material length. The sensors, described last November in Materials and Design, could be powered by watch-sized batteries, DeGraff says.

Buckypaper sensors could prove useful for people who need to micromanage their movements in the short term — like physical therapy patients whose rehab requires them to move in exactly the way their therapist prescribed.

4. Add light to your life
   Light-up clothes of the future will look and feel less like your uncle’s ugly Christmas sweater and more like the sleek suits in the movie Tron: Legacy.

Actress Claire Danes lit up the 2016 Met Gala in a gown laced with LEDs. But standard, semiconductor-based LEDs are too stiff and brittle to make comfortable daywear, says Seonil Kwon, an engineer at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea. Organic LEDs, or OLEDs, on the other hand, are razor-thin and superpliable.

An OLED display contains a layer cake of organic, or carbon-based, material films. The OLED lights up when a power source — like a battery — drives electric charge from one layer of organic material to another, where negative electrons pop into positive holes in the material. Whenever a positive hole and negative electron pair off, they release a brief flash of light. Many positive-negative meetups per second keep the OLED lit.
OLEDs are typically built on panes of plastic or glass, but Kwon and colleagues have created OLEDs on fabric. The researchers lay these OLEDs, just 200 nanometers thick, atop a polyester film that’s laminated onto fabric made of tightly woven, superfine polyester fibers. The setup is more flexible than the plastic platforms used to make bendy displays.

The new fabric-based OLEDs are bright enough to rival current display technology, Kwon and colleagues reported last July in Scientific Reports. Each OLED emits only a single color, but engineers could make fabric-based screens with many color-changing OLED pixels to display messages. Kwon’s group made OLED threads too, for lettering and patterns, reporting the work in the Jan. 10 Nano Letters.
Are there consumers who find the act of pulling a phone from their pocket so burdensome that they want to tote a smartphone screen on their sleeve? Who knows. But clothes sporting single-color OLEDs could light up pedestrians and bikers at night. Kwon also imagines creating OLED garments that glow white to provide light therapy. Some people who suffer from seasonal affective disorder find relief by sitting near a special lamp called a light therapy box, which gives off white light to mimic outdoor sunlight (SN: 4/23/05, p. 261). A shirt or underside of a hat brim that glows white could offer light therapy that goes where you go.

5. Power up with sun and your moves
   After a full day’s work, “no one wants to have to take off their shirt and plug it in,” says Rajan Kumar, a nanoengineer at the University of California, San Diego. Long battery life in smart clothing is key. So why not design wearables that continuously convert sunshine and motion energy into electricity?

Researchers debuted this kind of energy-harvesting fabric in 2016 in Nature Energy. Primarily made of synthetic polymers and wool fibers, the fabric is lightweight, flexible and breathable. A 4-by-5-centimeter piece worn for a run in the sun can charge up a cell phone, says Stanford University materials scientist and engineer Jun Chen, who did the work in the lab of Zhong Lin Wang at Georgia Tech.

The sunlight-catching patches of fabric are threaded with photovoltaic wires. When sunshine strikes a wire, light particles knock electrons out of atoms in one layer of material, leaving behind positively charged holes. Another electron-conducting layer of the wire collects those loose electrons, while a third layer gathers up the positively charged holes. That charge separation creates a voltage to produce electricity that can power devices.

Meanwhile, other patches of this fabric transform the energy of motion into electricity. These swatches contain strips of a polymer called PTFE — which hoards electrons — interlaced with copper wires — which easily give up electrons. Whenever the fabric is folded or compressed, some of the copper wires’ electrons rub off on the PTFE strips.
This process builds up static charge, just like combing your hair or peeling off a sweater in the winter. When the fabric relaxes, the negatively charged PTFE strips separate from the positive copper wires, creating voltage to power devices. Strips of this material could be sewn into sleeves to generate energy from the swing of your arms, or into the soles of shoes to get energy from footsteps, says Georgia Tech’s Wang, a materials scientist and engineer.

The energy this fabric gathers up when you’re moving around or sitting in the sun could also be stored in a capacitor or battery attached to the garment (SN: 11/26/16, p. 5). The storage device might be made of ink containing zinc-silver oxide printed directly onto clothing, as described in 2017 in Advanced Energy Materials. Or perhaps the energy could be stored in zinc-ion yarn batteries, like ones reported in the April 24 ACS Nano.

This energy-harvesting material could also be built into tents that, when bathed in sun or rustled by wind, could charge campers’ devices.

6. You as a walking generator
   If clothing were packed with thermoelectric generators, body heat could be turned into electricity.

Researchers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh work with a button-sized generator containing a grid of semiconductor rods sandwiched between two ceramic plates. When one side of the generator is hotter than the other — say, when that side is close to your skin while the other is exposed to air — electrons at the warm end of each semiconductor rod get jittery. These electrons diffuse toward the cold side of the device, creating a tiny voltage across the rod. Connecting the positive end of each rod to the negative end of the next adds up these voltages like stacking batteries in a flashlight.

Daryoosh Vashaee, an electrical engineer at NC State, and colleagues embedded these thermoelectric generators in a T-shirt. If someone wearing the shirt is just sitting around, the generator doesn’t produce much power because the temperature difference between skin and the surrounding air is so small. But if that person gets up and walks or jogs, a boost in body temperature will heat the side of the generator inside the T-shirt, while wind cools the exposed side of the generator. In one test, the generators pumped out six microwatts of power per square centimeter when the wearer was walking and 18 μW/cm2 during jogging, the researchers reported in 2016 in Applied Energy.

Unfortunately, that’s nowhere near enough to power a smartwatch or a phone. But generators a couple centimeters across could feed low-power sensors like heart monitors. And researchers are trying to boost the generators’ efficiency to support more power-hungry electronics. If researchers can make thermoelectric generators better powerhouses even when a wearer is seated, this tech would have one advantage over sunshine-motion harvesting clothing: You could power up your stuff while vegging out on the couch.

What felt like a miserable flu season this past year was, in fact, a miserable flu season.

The 2017–2018 influenza season was classified in the “high severity” category overall, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was only the third use of this designation since 2003.

To assess how the influenza virus has been affecting U.S. communities, the CDC applied a new method of evaluating severity to every annual outbreak back to the 2003–2004 season. The evaluation considers the percentage of flu-related visits to outpatient clinics, rates of hospitalizations and the percentage of deaths linked to flu or pneumonia.
The most recent flu season was among the worst for hospitalizations, the report finds, with the highest hospitalization rate for all ages combined since 2005–2006.

It was also a bad year for flu-related deaths among children, with 171 fatalities counted as of June 1, making it one of the deadliest in recent years. Only 22 percent of child victims who were eligible for the flu vaccine for the 2017–2018 season actually got vaccinated before becoming ill, researchers write in the June 8 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Last season’s flu vaccine was about 36 percent effective overall, but only 25 percent against the predominant viruses from the H3N2 subtype of influenza A. However, even in years of low effectiveness, the flu vaccine is still the best protection against the illness, the CDC says (SN: 10/28/17, p. 18). The agency has yet to release estimates on how many illnesses were avoided this season because of vaccine use, but says vaccination prevented an estimated 5.29 million illnesses during the 2016–2017 season.

American kids with food allergies are more than twice as likely to have autism spectrum disorder as kids without, a study of national health data finds. The population-based finding adds to experimental evidence that there may be a connection between false steps or overreactions by the immune system and the neurodevelopmental disorder.

Researchers looked only for an association between allergies and autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, among a total of 199,520 children ages 3 to 17 surveyed from 1997 to 2016 as part of the U.S. National Health Interview Survey. The study was not designed to discover what may be behind the link.
The team found that, out of 1,868 children with autism, 216 had a food allergy — or about 11 percent. By comparison, only about 4 percent of children without autism had a food allergy, the researchers report online June 8 in JAMA Network Open. Kids with autism were also more likely to have respiratory or skin allergies like eczema than kids without autism.

The number of children with autism has more than doubled since 2000, to a prevalence of 16.8 per 1,000 kids. Meanwhile, the number of kids with food allergies rose from 3.4 percent in 1997–1999 to 5.1 percent in 2009–2011.

It is unknown whether developing food allergies may contribute to the development of autism, or vice versa, or if something else is causing both, says study coauthor and epidemiologist Wei Bao of the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health in Iowa City. “The causes of ASD remain unclear,” he says.

Past work in mice and people has pointed to a possible connection between different immune system disorders and autism. There is a higher risk of autism for children with a family history of type 1 diabetes, or with a history on mom’s side of the family of rheumatoid arthritis or celiac disease. Mice that developed a food allergy displayed behaviors characteristic of autism, such as repetitive behaviors and less frequent social interaction, a 2014 study published in Behavioral Brain Research found.
The new finding supports the idea “that different manifestations of immune abnormalities occur in individuals with ASD,” says Christopher McDougle, director of the Lurie Center for Autism at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who wrote a commentary accompanying the study. Food, respiratory and skin allergies are common in the general population, he says, but having these allergies “doesn’t mean your child is going to develop ASD.”

With the aid of a particle accelerator, scientists are bringing back ghosts from the past, revealing portraits hidden underneath the tarnished surface of two roughly 150-year-old silver photographic plates.

Researchers used an accelerator called a synchrotron to produce strong, but nondamaging beams of X-rays to scan the damaged photographs, called daguerreotypes, and map their chemical composition. This allowed chemist Madalena Kozachuk of Western University in London, Canada, and colleagues to trace mercury deposits in the plates and create digital copies of the hidden images, the team reports June 22 in Scientific Reports. One image revealed a woman; the other, a man who had been completely obscured by tarnish.
An early form of photography, daguerreotypes were popular from the 1840s through the 1860s. Photographers crafted the images by making a silver-coated copper plate and treating it with iodine vapor to generate a light-sensitive surface. Subjects sat still for the several minutes required to expose the plate and create an image. Then photographers treated the plate with heated mercury vapor and a gold solution to develop the image, forming tiny silver-mercury-gold particles where light struck the plate during the exposure process. These particles make up the image, reflecting white light. Lighter parts of an image, such as the woman’s hands and collar, have a higher density of these particles.

The researchers used mercury to map the contours of the original images, because that metal remains fixed in place under years of cloudy tarnish. The scans revealed where the original particles were, letting researchers reconstruct the image.

Scanning the roughly 8-by-7-centimeter daguerreotypes, provided by the National Gallery of Canada, was time-consuming, taking about eight hours per square centimeter.
Synchrotrons had never been used to image daguerreotypes before, so Kozachuk didn’t know what to expect. “When the image became apparent, it was jaw-dropping,” she says. “I squealed when the first face popped up.”

The machines are expensive, and getting time to work on them can be difficult. But Kozachuk hopes her research will enable museums with damaged daguerreotypes to reveal more of these faded faces.

Mouse mothers can transmit stress signals to offspring, changing the way the pups’ bodies and brains develop. Some of these stress messages get delivered during birth, scientists suggest July 9 in Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers suspected that vaginal microbes from stressed-out moms could affect male pups in ways that leave them vulnerable to stress later in life (SN: 12/14/2013, p. 13). But earlier studies hadn’t demonstrated whether those microbes, picked up during birth, actually caused some of the changes seen in offspring, or if other aspects of life in utero were to blame.
Tracy Bale of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and colleagues subjected pregnant mice to stressful trials that included smelling the scent of a fox for an hour, listening to unusual sounds overnight and being restrained in a tube for 15 minutes. Other pregnant mice didn’t experience these stressors. Then, researchers delivered pups by cesarean section, so that the pups weren’t exposed to their mothers’ community of vaginal microorganisms, or microbiome. After delivery, researchers dosed the pups with vaginal fluid taken from stressed or unstressed mothers.

For male pups not exposed to stress in the womb, vaginal microbes from a stressed mother changed the amount of certain kinds of gut bacteria. (Just as in earlier studies, female pups didn’t show effects of their mothers’ stress.) When those male pups were older, being restrained led them to release more of the stress hormone corticosteroid than mice dosed with microbiota from unstressed moms. And in the brains of adult mice that had experienced chronic stress, genes involved in metabolism and the development of nerve cells behaved differently depending on whether early microbes came from stressed or unstressed mothers.

But some stress effects didn’t seem to depend on the mothers’ microbiomes, results that suggest those effects came from being stressed in utero. For example, compared with pups that weren’t stressed in utero, pups exposed to stress in the womb had higher levels of certain immune cells, as well as key gut genes behaving differently — both possible signs of inflammation.

America is built on lead. Networks of aging pipes made from the bluish-gray metal bring water into millions of U.S. homes. But when lead, a poison to the nervous system, gets into drinking water — as happened in Flint, Mich. — the heavy metal can cause irreparable harm (SN: 3/19/16, p. 8). In The Poisoned City, journalist Anna Clark provides a thorough, nuanced account of the public health disaster in Flint — one that, she argues, was magnified by government malfeasance and decades of systemic racism.
Trouble first began in April 2014. To save the cash-strapped city some money, Flint’s emergency manager switched the city’s source of water from Detroit’s water system, which drew from Lake Huron, to one that tapped the Flint River. But the city’s water treatment program didn’t include corrosion control, which the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality said wasn’t necessary — a violation of federal law. The result: Corroded pipes leached lead into drinking water.

Residents, forced to use the brown, smelly tap water, developed rashes and lost clumps of hair. Twelve people died from Legionella bacteria, which the corrosive water dislodged from pipes, and dozens more were sickened. Despite residents’ complaints, as well as an independent analysis that found higher-than-allowable lead levels, state officials insisted that the water was safe, even when their own internal records showed it was not. “Anyone who is concerned about lead in the drinking water in Flint can relax,” said one spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

That’s when one of the book’s heroes, pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha, enters Clark’s story. About 18 months after Flint switched to its new water source, the percentage of children under age 5 with high blood-lead levels nearly doubled from 2.1 to 4 percent, Hanna-Attisha discovered after taking a close look at Flint kids’ medical records. (Hanna-Attisha’s own account of her experiences, What the Eyes Don’t See, was published in June.)

Faced with mounting evidence that became hard to ignore, Gov. Rick Snyder negotiated a switch back to Detroit’s water system in October 2015, declaring a state of emergency a few months later. Meanwhile, taps in Flint were retrofitted with filters as the long, slow process of replacing pipes began. The Michigan National Guard trucked in bottled water.
Readers who followed this crisis as it unfolded will still learn plenty in The Poisoned City. Clark goes into exquisite detail explaining not only what happened, but also why it happened. A history of racist housing, education and hiring practices precipitated the city’s “debt, dysfunctional urban policy, disappearing investment, disintegrating infrastructure, and a compromised democratic process,” she writes. The evidence linking these factors to the water crisis is compelling. Anyone wanting to dig deeper can refer to the book’s exhaustive bibliography.

Overall, Clark does a masterful job weaving together history, science and rigorous reporting to tell Flint’s story, which served as a “wake-up call” for cities around the country. A 2016 investigation by the Natural Resources Defense Council found that more than 5,300 water systems across the United States were in violation of federal lead rules. And it’s not just cities that are affected, Clark notes. Rural America is vulnerable, too. But replacing America’s lead pipes is an expensive proposition. By some estimates, removing lead service lines alone would cost somewhere between $30 billion and $1 trillion.

Four years after Flint’s water crisis began, residents are still grappling with lingering effects: potentially lifelong health problems, ruined pipes that will take years to fix and zero trust in government. In April, Michigan declared Flint’s water safe. But people who live in the city are not convinced. And Hanna-Attisha has urged the state to continue Flint’s bottled water program until all of the lead service lines are replaced.

Buy The Poisoned City from Amazon.com. Science News is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. Please see our FAQ for more details.

Astronomers have found 12 more moons around Jupiter, and one is really weird. While 11 orbit in the same direction as their nearest neighbors, one doesn’t, potentially putting it on a fatal collision course.

“It’s driving down the highway on the wrong side of the road,” says planetary scientist Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

Sheppard and colleagues found the moons while looking for something else entirely: a putative planet that could exist beyond the orbit of Neptune, known colloquially as Planet Nine (SN: 7/23/16, p. 7). During a survey in 2017 of the most distant objects in the solar system using the Victor Blanco 4-meter telescope in Chile, Jupiter happened to be visible in the same area of sky that the team was searching during one of its observing runs. “Might as well kill two birds with one stone,” Sheppard thought.
The researchers found a dozen objects moving around the sun at the same rate as Jupiter. Follow-up observations confirmed the moons’ existence and orbits: two inner moons that orbit in the same direction that Jupiter spins, nine outer moons that orbit the planet in the opposite direction and one oddball traveler. The researchers announced two of the moons in 2017 and the remaining 10 on July 16.

The motions of all but the oddball are normal for Jovian moons, which now number a whopping 79. Scientists think that’s because the inner moons formed from a disk of gas and dust that orbited the giant planet in the solar system’s early days, similar to how the planets formed around the sun (SN: 5/12/18, p. 28). The outer moons were probably free-floating space rocks captured when they came too close, and their opposite orbit was set by the direction that they approached Jupiter from.

But one moon broke the mold. This rock, which the team calls Valetudo for the Roman goddess of health and hygiene, is tiny, only about a kilometer across. It orbits in the same direction as Jupiter’s spin, but alongside the farther-out retrograde moons. As a result, Valetudo is probably doomed to collide with one or more of the other moons someday. The researchers are still calculating when, but they expect it to occur sometime between 100 million and a billion years from now.
Valetudo may be the last remnant of a bigger object that has already withstood several collisions, or of a family of moons that has since been smashed to smithereens. “It’s probably the largest surviving member, if not the only one,” Sheppard says.

Such nonconformist satellites are not rare, notes planetary scientist David Jewitt of UCLA, who was not involved in the new work. “But they are very interesting, because we know that they have been captured by their host planets, but we don’t know how, or from where,” he says. Figuring out what oddballs like Valetudo are made of could help nail those details down.

There’s a new clique among quantum particles in a semiconductor.

Electrons and positively charged holes in the material’s atomic lattice band together to create a tight-knit posse dubbed a collexon, researchers report July 26 in Communications Physics. This new class of quasiparticle — a quantum clan that acts like a single subatomic particle — could help researchers better understand semiconductors, which are essential to most modern electronics.

The collexon is similar to a quasiparticle known as an exciton, a pairing of an electron and a hole (SN: 5/17/14, p. 5). While these pairs go it alone in excitons, electron-hole duos in collexons join forces with the surrounding sea of electrons, Christian Nenstiel, a physicist at the Technical University of Berlin, and colleagues report.
The researchers made this discovery when they inserted germanium atoms into a gallium nitride semiconductor, and zapped the material with a laser to see how it emits light. In similar experiments, emissions from excitons faded as the number of impurities, such as the germanium atoms, increased. But this time, at high concentrations of the introduced atoms, light shone at different wavelengths than seen with the excitons. The team deduced that large numbers of wandering electrons, introduced by the germanium, helped stabilize excitons to form the new type of quasiparticle.

It’s too early to predict applications, says study coauthor Gordon Callsen of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The discovery instead suggests that researchers underestimate interactions among ensembles of particles in semiconductors. “Lots of interesting physics is still waiting for us,” he says.

Scrolling through a news feed often feels like playing Two Truths and a Lie.

Some falsehoods are easy to spot. Like reports that First Lady Melania Trump wanted an exorcist to cleanse the White House of Obama-era demons, or that an Ohio school principal was arrested for defecating in front of a student assembly. In other cases, fiction blends a little too well with fact. Was CNN really raided by the Federal Communications Commission? Did cops actually uncover a meth lab inside an Alabama Walmart? No and no. But anyone scrolling through a slew of stories could easily be fooled.

We live in a golden age of misinformation. On Twitter, falsehoods spread further and faster than the truth (SN: 3/31/18, p. 14). In the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the most popular bogus articles got more Facebook shares, reactions and comments than the top real news, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis.

Before the internet, “you could not have a person sitting in an attic and generating conspiracy theories at a mass scale,” says Luca de Alfaro, a computer scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. But with today’s social media, peddling lies is all too easy — whether those lies come from outfits like Disinfomedia, a company that has owned several false news websites, or a scrum of teenagers in Macedonia who raked in the cash by writing popular fake news during the 2016 election.
Most internet users probably aren’t intentionally broadcasting bunk. Information overload and the average Web surfer’s limited attention span aren’t exactly conducive to fact-checking vigilance. Confirmation bias feeds in as well. “When you’re dealing with unfiltered information, it’s likely that people will choose something that conforms to their own thinking, even if that information is false,” says Fabiana Zollo, a computer scientist at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Italy who studies how information circulates on social networks.

Intentional or not, sharing misinformation can have serious consequences. Fake news doesn’t just threaten the integrity of elections and erode public trust in real news. It threatens lives. False rumors that spread on WhatsApp, a smartphone messaging system, for instance, incited lynchings in India this year that left more than a dozen people dead.

To help sort fake news from truth, programmers are building automated systems that judge the veracity of online stories. A computer program might consider certain characteristics of an article or the reception an article gets on social media. Computers that recognize certain warning signs could alert human fact-checkers, who would do the final verification.

Automatic lie-finding tools are “still in their infancy,” says computer scientist Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia of Indiana University Bloomington. Researchers are exploring which factors most reliably peg fake news. Unfortunately, they have no agreed-upon set of true and false stories to use for testing their tactics. Some programmers rely on established media outlets or state press agencies to determine which stories are true or not, while others draw from lists of reported fake news on social media. So research in this area is something of a free-for-all.

But teams around the world are forging ahead because the internet is a fire hose of information, and asking human fact-checkers to keep up is like aiming that hose at a Brita filter. “It’s sort of mind-numbing,” says Alex Kasprak, a science writer at Snopes, the oldest and largest online fact-checking site, “just the volume of really shoddy stuff that’s out there.”
Substance and style
When it comes to inspecting news content directly, there are two major ways to tell if a story fits the bill for fraudulence: what the author is saying and how the author is saying it.

Ciampaglia and colleagues automated this tedious task with a program that checks how closely related a statement’s subject and object are. To do this, the program uses a vast network of nouns built from facts found in the infobox on the right side of every Wikipedia page — although similar networks have been built from other reservoirs of knowledge, like research databases.
In the Ciampaglia group’s noun network, two nouns are connected if one noun appeared in the infobox of another. The fewer degrees of separation between a statement’s subject and object in this network, and the more specific the intermediate words connecting subject and object, the more likely the computer program is to label a statement as true.

Take the false assertion “Barack Obama is a Muslim.” There are seven degrees of separation between “Obama” and “Islam” in the noun network, including very general nouns, such as “Canada,” that connect to many other words. Given this long, meandering route, the automated fact-checker, described in 2015 in PLOS ONE, deemed Obama unlikely to be Muslim.

But estimating the veracity of statements based on this kind of subject-object separation has limits. For instance, the system deemed it likely that former President George W. Bush is married to Laura Bush. Great. It also decided George W. Bush is probably married to Barbara Bush, his mother. Less great. Ciampaglia and colleagues have been working to give their program a more nuanced view of the relationships between nouns in the network.

Verifying every statement in an article isn’t the only way to see if a story passes the smell test. Writing style may be another giveaway. Benjamin Horne and Sibel Adali, computer scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., analyzed 75 true articles from media outlets deemed most trustworthy by Business Insider, as well as 75 false stories from sites on a blacklist of misleading websites. Compared with real news, false articles tended to be shorter and more repetitive with more adverbs. Fake stories also had fewer quotes, technical words and nouns.

Based on these results, the researchers created a computer program that used the four strongest distinguishing factors of fake news — number of nouns and number of quotes, redundancy and word counts — to judge article veracity. The program, presented at last year’s International Conference on Web and Social Media in Montreal, correctly sorted fake news from true 71 percent of the time (a program that sorted fake news from true at random would show about 50 percent accuracy). Horne and Adali are looking for additional features to boost accuracy.

Verónica Pérez-Rosas, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues compared 240 genuine and 240 made-up articles. Like Horne and Adali, Pérez-Rosas’ team found more adverbs in fake news articles than in real ones. The fake news in this analysis, reported at arXiv.org on August 23, 2017, also tended to use more positive language and express more certainty.
Computers don’t necessarily need humans to tell them which aspects of fake articles give these stories away. Computer scientist and engineer Vagelis Papalexakis of the University of California, Riverside and colleagues built a fake news detector that started by sorting a cache of articles into groups based on how similar the stories were. The researchers didn’t provide explicit instructions on how to assess similarity. Once the program bunched articles according to likeness, the researchers labeled 5 percent of all the articles as factual or false. From this information, the algorithm, described April 24 at arXiv.org, predicted labels for the rest of the unmarked articles. Papalexakis’ team tested this system on almost 32,000 real and 32,000 fake articles shared on Twitter. Fed that little kernel of truth, the program correctly predicted labels for about 69 percent of the other stories.

Adult supervision
Getting it right about 70 percent of the time isn’t nearly accurate enough to trust news-vetting programs on their own. But fake news detectors could offer a proceed-with-caution alert when a user opens a suspicious story in a Web browser, similar to the alert that appears when you’re about to visit a site with no security certificate.

In a similar kind of first step, social media platforms could use misinformation watchdogs to prowl news feeds for questionable stories to then send to human fact-checkers. Today, Facebook considers feedback from users — like those who post disbelieving comments or report that an article is false — when choosing which stories to fact-check. The company then sends these stories to the professional skeptics at FactCheck.org, PolitiFact or Snopes for verification. But Facebook is open to using other signals to find hoaxes more efficiently, says Facebook spokesperson Lauren Svensson.

No matter how good computers get at finding fake news, these systems shouldn’t totally replace human fact-checkers, Horne says. The final call on whether a story is false may require a more nuanced understanding than a computer can provide.

“There’s a huge gray scale” of misinformation, says Julio Amador Diaz Lopez, a computer scientist and economist at Imperial College London. That spectrum — which includes truth taken out of context, propaganda and statements that are virtually impossible to verify, such as religious convictions — may be tough for computers to navigate.

Snopes science writer Kasprak imagines that the future of fact-checking will be like computer-assisted audio transcription. First, the automated system hammers out a rough draft of the transcription. But a human still has to review that text for overlooked details like spelling and punctuation errors, or words that the program just got wrong. Similarly, computers could compile lists of suspect articles for people to check, Kasprak says, emphasizing that humans should still get the final say on what’s labeled as true.

Eyes on the audience
Even as algorithms get more astute at flagging bogus articles, there’s no guarantee that fake news creators won’t step up their game to elude detection. If computer programs are designed to be skeptical of stories that are overly positive or express lots of certainty, then con authors could refine their writing styles accordingly.

“Fake news, like a virus, can evolve and update itself,” says Daqing Li, a network scientist at Beihang University in Beijing who has studied fake news on Twitter. Fortunately, online news stories can be judged on more than the content of their narratives. And other telltale signs of false news might be much harder to manipulate — namely, the kinds of audience engagement these stories attract on social media.
Juan Cao, a computer scientist at the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, found that on China’s version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, the specific tweets about a certain piece of news are good indicators for whether a particular story is true. Cao’s team built a system that could round up the tweets discussing a particular news event, then sort those posts into two groups: those that expressed support for the story and those that opposed it. The system considered several factors to gauge the credibility of those posts. If, for example, the story centered on a local event that a user was geographically close to, the user’s input was seen as more credible than the input of a user farther away. If a user had been dormant for a long time and started posting about a single story, that abnormal behavior counted against the user’s credibility. By weighing the ethos of the supporting and the skeptical tweets, the program decided whether a particular story was likely to be fake.

Cao’s group tested this technique on 73 real and 73 fake stories, labeled as such by organizations like China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency. The algorithm examined about 50,000 tweets about these stories on Sina Weibo, and recognized fake news correctly about 84 percent of the time. Cao’s team described the findings in 2016 in Phoenix at an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference. UC Santa Cruz’s de Alfaro and colleagues similarly reported in Macedonia at last year’s European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practices of Knowledge Discovery in Databases that hoaxes can be distinguished from real news circulating on Facebook based on which users like these stories.

Rather than looking at who’s reacting to an article, a computer could look at how the story is getting passed around on social media. Li and colleagues studied the shapes of repost networks that branched out from news stories on social media. The researchers analyzed repost networks of about 1,700 fake and 500 true news stories on Weibo, as well as about 30 fake and 30 true news networks on Twitter. On both social media sites, Li’s team found, most people tended to repost real news straight from a single source, whereas fake news tended to spread more through people reposting from other reposters.

A typical network of real news reposts “looks much more like a star, but the fake news spreads more like a tree,” Li says. This held true even when Li’s team ignored news originally posted by well-known, official sources, like news outlets themselves. Reported March 9 at arXiv.org, these findings suggest that computers could use social media engagement as a litmus test for truthfulness, even without putting individual posts under the microscope.Juan Cao, a computer scientist at the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, found that on China’s version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, the specific tweets about a certain piece of news are good indicators for whether a particular story is true. Cao’s team built a system that could round up the tweets discussing a particular news event, then sort those posts into two groups: those that expressed support for the story and those that opposed it. The system considered several factors to gauge the credibility of those posts. If, for example, the story centered on a local event that a user was geographically close to, the user’s input was seen as more credible than the input of a user farther away. If a user had been dormant for a long time and started posting about a single story, that abnormal behavior counted against the user’s credibility. By weighing the ethos of the supporting and the skeptical tweets, the program decided whether a particular story was likely to be fake.

Cao’s group tested this technique on 73 real and 73 fake stories, labeled as such by organizations like China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency. The algorithm examined about 50,000 tweets about these stories on Sina Weibo, and recognized fake news correctly about 84 percent of the time. Cao’s team described the findings in 2016 in Phoenix at an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference. UC Santa Cruz’s de Alfaro and colleagues similarly reported in Macedonia at last year’s European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practices of Knowledge Discovery in Databases that hoaxes can be distinguished from real news circulating on Facebook based on which users like these stories.

Rather than looking at who’s reacting to an article, a computer could look at how the story is getting passed around on social media. Li and colleagues studied the shapes of repost networks that branched out from news stories on social media. The researchers analyzed repost networks of about 1,700 fake and 500 true news stories on Weibo, as well as about 30 fake and 30 true news networks on Twitter. On both social media sites, Li’s team found, most people tended to repost real news straight from a single source, whereas fake news tended to spread more through people reposting from other reposters.

A typical network of real news reposts “looks much more like a star, but the fake news spreads more like a tree,” Li says. This held true even when Li’s team ignored news originally posted by well-known, official sources, like news outlets themselves. Reported March 9 at arXiv.org, these findings suggest that computers could use social media engagement as a litmus test for truthfulness, even without putting individual posts under the microscope.
Truth to the people
When misinformation is caught circulating on social networks, how best to deal with it is still an open question. Simply scrubbing bogus articles from news feeds is probably not the way to go. Social media platforms exerting that level of control over what visitors can see “would be like a totalitarian state,” says Murphy Choy, a data analyst at SSON Analytics in Singapore. “It’s going to become very uncomfortable for all parties involved.”

Platforms could put warning signs on misinformation. But labeling stories that have been verified as false may have an unfortunate “implied truth effect.” People might put more trust in any stories that aren’t explicitly flagged as false, whether they’ve been checked or not, according to research posted last September on the Social Science Research Network by human behavior researchers Gordon Pennycook, of the University of Regina in Canada, and David Rand at Yale University.

Rather than remove stories, Facebook shows debunked stories lower in users’ news feeds, which can cut a false article’s future views by 80 percent, company spokesperson Svensson says. Facebook also displays articles that debunk false stories whenever users encounter the related stories — though that technique may backfire. In a study of Facebook users who like and share conspiracy news, Zollo and colleague Walter Quattrociocchi found that after conspiracists interacted with debunking articles, these users actually increased their activity on Facebook conspiracy pages. The researchers reported this finding in June in Complex Spreading Phenomena in Social Systems.

There’s still a lot of work to be done in teaching computers — and people — to recognize fake news. As the old saying goes: A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has put on its shoes. But keen-eyed computer algorithms may at least slow down fake stories with some new ankle weights.

Humans’ gift of gab probably wasn’t the evolutionary boon that scientists once thought.

There’s no evidence that FOXP2, sometimes called “the language gene,” gave humans such a big evolutionary advantage that it was quickly adopted across the species, what scientists call a selective sweep. That finding, reported online August 2 in Cell, follows years of debate about the role of FOXP2 in human evolution.

In 2002, the gene became famous when researchers thought they had found evidence that a tweak in FOXP2 spread quickly to all humans — and only humans — about 200,000 years ago. That tweak swapped two amino acids in the human version of the gene for ones different than in other animals’ versions of the gene. FOXP2 is involved in vocal learning in songbirds, and people with mutations in the gene have speech and language problems. Many researchers initially thought that the amino acid swap was what enabled humans to speak. Speech would have given humans a leg up on competition from Neandertals and other ancient hominids.
That view helped make FOXP2 a textbook example of selective sweeps. Some researchers even suggested that FOXP2 was the gene that defines humans, until it became clear that the gene did not allow humans to settle the world and replace other hominids, says archeaogeneticist Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who was not involved in the study. “It was not the one gene to rule them all.”

The FOXP2 sweep theory first ran into trouble in 2008, when researchers discovered that Neandertals also had the two amino acid tweaks (SN Online: 11/14/08). That meant the change happened at least 700,000 years ago, before humans and Neandertal became separate branches of the hominid family tree. Then in 2009, some members of the 2002 team that originally reported the sweep presented new evidence showing that the two amino acid change wasn’t what swept to evolutionary prominence after all.

“That was sad, but that’s how it is,” says Wolfgang Enard, an evolutionary geneticist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, who was involved in both the 2002 and 2009 studies. Still, there were hints that other genetic variants in and around FOXP2 might have been involved in a sweep, so the debate continued.
Evolutionary and population geneticist Elizabeth Atkinson of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and colleagues decided to revisit the gene’s evolution “to see if FOXP2 ’s story held up using modern techniques,” she says. The researchers conducted a similar statistical analysis of patterns of genetic variation in FOXP2 as was done in the 2002 study. But this time the team studied more people, especially more people of African descent, and used data from the entire genome.
In a selective sweep, one pattern of genetic variants around a gene becomes much more common than other versions of the gene until nearly everyone has the popular version. When considering all the people in their study together, the researchers picked up the same statistical signal for a selective sweep as Enard’s group had. But when Atkinson’s team examined Africans separately from Europeans and Asians, the signs of a sweep were erased.

That result reflects what happened in human history, Krause says.

When humans migrated out of Africa, certain versions of genes were carried with the migrants and other forms were left behind in Africa. The version of FOXP2 that left with the migrants became more common as the migrant population grew. Atkinson’s team identified the statistical signal as being from population growth, rather than a selective sweep, by looking at changes elsewhere in the genome. If FOXP2 were getting swept, it would be the only gene sending the statistical signal. Instead, other parts of the genome scored similarly to FOXP2 on the statistical test.

The finding doesn’t mean that changes in FOXP2 weren’t important for language evolution, says Kirk Lohmueller, a population geneticist at UCLA. But geneticists may have to rethink some assumptions about how the evolution of species works. Selective sweeps were thought to be a major way that natural selection — the process that drives evolution — altered species. But these and other results suggest that selective sweeps were not very common in human evolution.

Many of the traits associated with being human, including speech and language, are controlled by multiple genes, so no one gene may have given a sweep-worthy boost. Or perhaps a speech and language sweep happened, but so long ago that its signal is too weak to pick up now, Lohmueller says.