For Wisconsin’s snowshoe hares, climate change now ranks as an even bigger menace than the bulldozing, paving and other destructive things people have done to northern forests.

Habitat loss as humans reshape landscapes has loomed for decades as the main conservation problem for a lot of wildlife. It’s still important, says climate change ecologist Benjamin Zuckerberg of the University of Wisconsin‒Madison. But along the southern boundary of the snowshoe hares’ range, climate change bringing skimpy snow covers has surpassed direct habitat loss as a threat, Zuckerberg and his colleagues say March 30 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
North America’s Lepus americanus hares may be especially sensitive to climate change. “Almost everything about them screams adaptation to seasons of extensive snow cover,” says study coauthor Jonathan Pauli, also at Wisconsin‒Madison. The hares have outsized snowshoe feet, thick fur and an annual molt from brown to snow-white. Getting out of sync with the snow turns camouflage into a come-on for predators (SN Online: 1/26/16). In bad years, “there’s a lot of white hares on brown backgrounds,” Pauli says.

To see how the hares have fared, the researchers looked for signs of the animals at 199 sites during the winters of 2012‒2013 and 2013‒2014. Many of these locations were mentioned in a rather anecdotal 1945 study and in a more systematic one in 1979 to 1980. Satellite images showed not much change in the overall amount of hare-suitable forest since the 1980s, but snow cover averages have declined. When researchers put all their information into a computer simulation, the climate-related changes — particularly the length of the snow-cover season — did a better job of explaining the ups and downs of hare populations than just the forest changes did.
Snow cover has powerful effects on hares. For each 7.41 days that snow blankets the landscape, snowshoe hare populations become four times as likely to survive, the researchers found.

If the hares dwindle from a place, the loss may ripple through the ecosystem. “Snowshoe hares are central, really central, to prey species,” Pauli says. Lynx, great horned owls, coyotes and many more species dine on them. And regardless of any ecosystem role, hares are remarkable creatures in their own right. “It’s hard for me, a person living in Wisconsin, to imagine these northern conifer forests without snowshoe hares,” Pauli says.
To prevent such a loss, reducing greenhouse gases is important, but so is creating “climate-resilient landscapes,” Zuckerberg says. For snowshoe hares, that landscape might bristle and tangle with abundant, thick young growth, full of hiding places for too conspicuous, out-of-season-sync hares, he suggests.

White furry animals may not be the only ones that will have to cope with a shift in the balance of threats. “In a number of cold-associated butterflies, and also birds, it is becoming clear that climate change is beginning to surpass land use as the primary driver of extinction at the trailing edges of the species’ range,” says ecologist Tom Oliver of the University of Reading in England. And the threats of climate change and land-use upsets can intensify each other. “We appear to be entering a worrying time,” Oliver says.

A mushroom whose genes have been edited with molecular scissors known as CRISPR/Cas9 doesn’t need to be regulated like other genetically modified crops, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said April 13 in a letter to the mushroom’s creator. The edible fungus is the first CRISPR-edited crop to clear USDA regulation.

Yinong Yang, a plant pathologist at Penn State University, used CRISPR/Cas9 to snip out a tiny bit of one gene from the mushroom Agaricus bisporus. The edit reduces browning when the mushroom is sliced.

Because the gene editing left no foreign DNA behind, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service determined that the mushroom poses no risk to other plants and is not likely to become a weed.

Yang says he plans to submit data about the mushroom to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. FDA clearance isn’t required but, says Yang, “we’re not just going to start marketing these mushrooms without FDA approval.”

Below most volcanoes, Earth packs some serious deep heat. Mount St. Helens is a standout exception, suggests a new study. Cold rock lurks under this active Washington volcano.

Using data from a seismic survey (that included setting off 23 explosions around the volcano), Steven Hansen, a geophysicist at the University of New Mexico, peeked 40 kilometers under Mount St. Helens. That’s where the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate releases fluids due to intense heat and pressure as it descends beneath the North American plate. Those fluids rise and trigger melting in the rock above, fueling an arc of volcanoes that line up like lights on a runway. All except for Mount St. Helens, which stands apart about 50 kilometers to the west. Still, Hansen and colleagues expected to see a heat source under Mount St. Helens, as seen at other volcanoes.
Instead, thermal modeling revealed a wedge of a rock called serpentinite that’s too cool to be a volcano’s source of heat, the researchers report November 1 in Nature Communications. “This hasn’t really been seen below any active arc volcanoes before,” Hansen says.

This odd discovery helps show what the local crust-mantle boundary looks like, but raises another burning question: Where is Mount St. Helens’ heat source? Somewhere to the east, suggests Hansen. Exactly where, or how it reaches the volcano, remains a cold case.

Editor’s Note: this article was revised on January 4, 2017, to note how the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate fuels the chain of volcanoes.

Astronomers have caught a star exploding just hours after light from the eruption first reached Earth. Measurements of the blast’s light suggest that the star rapidly belched gas in the run-up to its demise. That would be surprising — most scientists think the first outward sign of a supernova is the explosion itself.

“Several years ago, to catch a supernova early would mean to detect it at several days, a week, or maybe more, after the explosion,” says astrophysicist Ofer Yaron of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Now, he says, “we talk about day one.” Although previous supernovas have been seen this early, the new observation is the earliest one with a spectrum — an accounting of the emitted light broken up by wavelength — taken six hours after the explosion, Yaron and colleagues report online February 13 in Nature Physics.
Astronomers observed the explosion — a type 2 supernova, triggered by the collapse of a dying star (SN: 2/18/17, p.24) — with the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory, which surveys the sky on a regular basis using a telescope at the Palomar Observatory, near San Diego. The supernova appeared on October 6, 2013, in the galaxy NGC7610, 166 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus.

Spectra taken at several intervals after the explosion painted a picture of the aftermath. A shock wave from the supernova plowed through gas surrounding the star, stripping electrons from atoms, which later recombined, emitting certain wavelengths of light in the process. Those wavelengths showed up in the spectra, allowing scientists to deduce what had occurred. The gas had been emitted just before the explosion — within the previous year or so — they concluded.

“This is actually very exciting if you ask me,” says astrophysicist Matteo Cantiello of the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City, who was not involved with the research. For typical stars on the brink of collapse, he says, “this is the first clear evidence that … the last period of their lives is not quiet.” Instead, dying stars may become unstable, rapidly spurting out material.

“That’s very, very odd,” says astrophysicist Peter Garnavich of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Scientists typically assume that the outer layers of such stars are detached from the internal processes which trigger the collapse, Garnavich says. How an oncoming collapse could provoke eruptions preceding the explosion is unknown.

Certain stealthy spacetime curiosities might be less hidden than thought, potentially exposing themselves to observers in some curved universes.

These oddities, known as singularities, are points in space where the standard laws of physics break down. Found at the centers of black holes, singularities are generally expected to be hidden from view, shielding the universe from their problematic properties. Now, scientists report in the May 5 Physical Review Letters that a singularity could be revealed in a hypothetical, saddle-shaped universe.
Previously, scientists found that singularities might not be concealed in hypothetical universes with more than three spatial dimensions. The new result marks the first time the possibility of such a “naked” singularity has been demonstrated in a three-dimensional universe. “That’s extremely important,” says physicist Gary Horowitz of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Horowitz, who was not involved with the new study, has conducted previous research that implied that a naked singularity could probably appear in such saddle-shaped universes.

In Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, spacetime itself can be curved (SN: 10/17/15, p. 16). Massive objects such as stars bend the fabric of space, causing planets to orbit around them. A singularity occurs when the warping is so extreme that the equations of general relativity become nonsensical — as occurs in the center of a black hole. But black holes’ singularities are hidden by an event horizon, which encompasses a region around the singularity from which light can’t escape. The cosmic censorship conjecture, put forth in 1969 by mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, proposes that all singularities will be similarly cloaked.

According to general relativity, hypothetical universes can take on various shapes. The known universe is nearly flat on large scales, meaning that the rules of standard textbook geometry apply and light travels in a straight line. But in universes that are curved, those rules go out the window. To demonstrate the violation of cosmic censorship, the researchers started with a curved geometry known as anti-de Sitter space, which is warped such that a light beam sent out into space will eventually return to the spot it came from. The researchers deformed the boundaries of this curved spacetime and observed that a region formed in which the curvature increased over time to arbitrarily large values, producing a naked singularity.

“I was very surprised,” says physicist Jorge Santos of the University of Cambridge, a coauthor of the study. “I always thought that gravity would somehow find a way” to maintain cosmic censorship.

Scientists have previously shown that cosmic censorship could be violated if a universe’s conditions were precisely arranged to conspire to produce a naked singularity. But the researchers’ new result is more general. “There’s nothing finely tuned or unnatural about their starting point,” says physicist Ruth Gregory of Durham University in England. That, she says, is “really interesting.”
But, Horowitz notes, there is a caveat. Because the violation occurs in a curved universe, not a flat one, the result “is not yet a completely convincing counterexample to the original idea.”

Despite the reliance on a curved universe, the result does have broader implications. That’s because gravity in anti-de Sitter space is thought to have connections to other theories. The physics of gravity in anti-de Sitter space seems to parallel that of some types of particle physics theories, set in fewer dimensions. So cosmic censorship violation in this realm could have consequences for seemingly unrelated ideas.

For the first time in the United States, researchers have used gene editing to repair a mutation in human embryos.

Molecular scissors known as CRISPR/Cas9 corrected a gene defect that can lead to heart failure. The gene editor fixed the mutation in about 72 percent of tested embryos, researchers report August 2 in Nature. That repair rate is much higher than expected. Work with skin cells reprogrammed to mimic embryos had suggested the mutation would be repaired in fewer than 30 percent of cells.
In addition, the researchers discovered a technical advance that may limit the production of patchwork embryos that aren’t fully edited. That’s important if CRISPR/Cas9 will ever be used to prevent genetic diseases, says study coauthor Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a reproductive and developmental biologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. If even one cell in an early embryo is unedited, “that’s going to screw up the whole process,” says Mitalipov. He worked with colleagues in Oregon, California, Korea and China to develop the embryo-editing methods.

Researchers in other countries have edited human embryos to learn more about early human development or to answer other basic research questions (SN: 4/15/17, p. 16). But Mitalipov and colleagues explicitly conducted the experiments to improve the safety and efficiency of gene editing for eventual clinical trials, which would involve implanting edited embryos into women’s uteruses to establish pregnancy.
In the United States, such clinical trials are effectively banned by a rule that prevents the Food and Drug Administration from reviewing applications for any procedure that would introduce heritable changes in human embryos. Such tinkering with embryo DNA, called germline editing, is controversial because of fears that the technology will be used to create so-called designer babies.

“This paper is not announcing the dawn of the designer baby era,” says R. Alta Charo, a lawyer and bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison. The researchers have not attempted to add any new genes or change traits, only to correct a disease-causing version of a gene.

In the study, sperm from a man who carries a mutation in the MYBPC3 gene was injected into eggs from women with healthy copies of that gene. Carrying just one mutant copy of the gene causes an inherited heart problem called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (SN: 9/17/16, p. 8). That condition, which strikes about one in every 500 people worldwide, can cause sudden heart failure. Mutations in the MYBPC3 gene are responsible for about 40 percent of cases. Doctors can treat symptoms of the condition, but there is no cure.

Along with the man’s sperm, researchers injected into the egg the DNA-cutting enzyme Cas9 and a piece of RNA to direct the enzyme to snip the mutant copy of the gene. Another piece of DNA was also injected into the egg. That hunk of DNA was supposed to be a template that the fertilized egg could use to repair the breach made by Cas9. Instead, embryos used the mother’s healthy copy of the gene to repair the cut.

Embryos’ self-healing DNA came as a surprise, because gene editing in other types of cells usually requires an external template, Mitalipov says. The discovery could mean that it will be difficult for researchers to fix mutations in embryos if neither parent has a healthy copy of the gene. But the finding could be good news for those concerned about designer babies, because embryos may reject attempts to add new traits.

Timing the addition of CRISPR/Cas9 is important, the researchers also discovered. In their first experiments, the team added the gene editor a day after fertilizing the eggs. Of 54 injected embryos, 13 were patchwork, or mosaic, embryos with some repaired and some unrepaired cells. Such mosaic embryos probably arise when the fertilized egg copies its DNA before researchers add Cas9, Mitalipov says.

Injecting Cas9 along with the sperm — before an egg had a chance to replicate its DNA — produced only one patchwork embryo. That embryo had repaired the mutation in all its cells, but some cells used the mother’s DNA for repair while others used the template supplied by the researchers.

None of the tested embryos showed any signs that Cas9 was cutting where it shouldn’t be. “Off-target” cutting has been a safety concern with the gene editor because of the possibility of creating new DNA errors.

The study makes progress toward using gene editing to prevent genetic diseases, but there’s still has a long way to go before clinical testing can begin, says Janet Rossant, a developmental biologist at the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto. “We need to be sure this can be done reproducibly and effectively.”

Famously sneaky particles have been caught behaving in a new way.

For the first time, scientists have detected neutrinos scattering off the nucleus of an atom. The process, predicted more than four decades ago, provides a new way to test fundamental physics. It will also help scientists to better characterize the neutrino, a misfit particle that has a tiny mass and interacts so feebly with matter that it can easily sail through the entire Earth.
The detection, reported online August 3 in Science, “has really big implications,” says physicist Janet Conrad of MIT, who was not involved with the research. It fills in a missing piece of the standard model, the theory that explains how particles behave: The model predicts that neutrinos interact with nuclei. And, says Conrad, the discovery “opens up a whole new area of measurements” to further test the standard model’s predictions.

Scientists typically spot neutrinos when they interact with a single proton or neutron. But the new study measures “coherent” scattering, in which a low-energy neutrino interacts with an entire atomic nucleus at once, ricocheting away and causing the nucleus to recoil slightly in response.

“It’s exciting to measure it for the first time,” says physicist Kate Scholberg of Duke University, spokesperson for the collaboration — named COHERENT — that made the new finding.

In the past, neutrino hunters have built enormous detectors to boost their chances of catching a glimpse of the particles — a necessity because the aloof particles interact so rarely. While still rare, coherent neutrino scattering occurs more often than previously detected types of neutrino interactions. That means detectors can be smaller and still catch enough interactions to detect the process. COHERENT’s detector, a crystal of cesium and iodine, weighs only about 15 kilograms. “It’s the first handheld neutrino detector; you can just carry it around,” says physicist Juan Collar of the University of Chicago.

Collar, Scholberg and colleagues installed their detector at the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The facility generates bursts of neutrons and, as a by-product, produces neutrinos at energies that COHERENT’s detector can spot. When a nucleus in the crystal recoils due to a scattering neutrino, a flash of light appears and is captured by a light sensor. The signal of the recoiling nucleus is incredibly subtle — like detecting the motion of a bowling ball when hit by a ping-pong ball — which is why the effect remained undetected until now.
The amount of scattering the researchers saw agreed with the standard model. But such tests are still in their early stages, says physicist Leo Stodolsky of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, who was not involved with the research. “We’re looking forward to more detailed studies to see if it really is accurately in agreement with the expectations.” Physicists hope to find a place where the standard model breaks down, which could reveal new secrets of the universe. More precise tests may reveal discrepancies, he says. “That would be extremely interesting.”

Measuring coherent neutrino scattering could help scientists understand the processes that occur within exploding stars, or supernovas, which emit huge numbers of neutrinos (SN: 02/18/17, p. 24). The process could be used to detect supernovas as well — if a supernova explodes nearby, scientists could spot its neutrinos scattering off nuclei in their detectors.

Similar scattering might also help scientists detect dark matter, an invisible source of mass that pervades the universe. Dark matter particles could scatter off atomic nuclei just as neutrinos do, causing a recoil. The study indicates that such recoils are detectable — good news since several dark matter experiments are currently attempting to measure recoils of nuclei (SN: 11/12/16, p. 14). But it also suggests a looming problem: As dark matter detectors become more sensitive, neutrinos bouncing off the nuclei will swamp any signs of dark matter.

Coherent neutrino scattering detectors could lead to practical applications as well: Small-scale neutrino detectors could eventually detect neutrinos produced in nuclear reactors to monitor for attempts to develop nuclear weapons, for example.

Physicist Daniel Freedman of MIT, who predicted in 1974 that neutrinos would scatter off nuclei, is pleased that his prediction has finally been confirmed. “It’s a thrill.”

I heard it for the first time a few days ago: “She’s copying me!” my 4-year-old wailed in a righteous complaint about her little sister. And she most certainly was copying, repeating the same nonsense word over and over. While it was distressing to my older kid, I thought it was funny that it took her so long to realize her sister copies almost everything she does.

This egregious violation occurred just after I had read about an experiment that pitted young kids against bonobos in a test to see who might copy other individuals more. I’ll get right to the punch line: Kids won, by a long shot. The results, published online July 24 in Child Development, show that despite imitation annoying older siblings everywhere, it’s actually really important.

“Imitation is one of the most essential skills for being human,” says study coauthor Zanna Clay, a comparative psychologist at the University of Birmingham and Durham University, both in England. Learning how to talk, operating the latest iPhone and figuring out how to buy bulk goods at the local co-op — these skills all rely on imitation. Not only that, but imitation is also important for cementing social relationships. My daughter notwithstanding, “Humans like to be imitated, and we like those who imitate us,” Clay says.
Clay and her colleague Claudio Tennie tested just how strong the urge to imitate is in 77 children ages 3 to 5 and a group of 46 bonobos ages 3 to 29. In one-on-one trials, the researchers sat next to the kids and bonobos with a small wooden box about the size of a hand. Inside was a treat: a sticker for the kids and a bit of apple for the bonobos.

Before opening the box, the researcher performed nonsensical actions over it, either rubbing the box with the back of the hand and doing a wrist twist in the air or tracing a cross into the top of the box and then tracing the edges.

These hand motions were totally irrelevant to the actual opening of the box. Nonetheless, after seeing the gestures, the vast majority of the kids made the same motions before trying to open their own box. Not a single bonobo, though, copied the irrelevant actions.
What the bonobos did — not copying the meaningless gestures — “is the rational thing to do,” says Clay. “Yet the irrational thing that the kids did is part of the reason why human cultures have evolved so rapidly and so diversely.”

Such excessive imitation, called overimitation, is a special form of copying in which people perform actions that clearly serve no purpose. It may be behind rituals, social norms and language that keep our societies running smoothly.

And it may be unique to humans: Other studies have failed to spot overimitation among chimpanzees and orangutans. These findings hint that our powerful urge to imitate even nonsensical gestures may be one of the things that separate humans from other apes.

The 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan’s coast cast an enormous amount of debris out to sea — way out. Japanese marine life took advantage of the new floating real estate and booked a one-way trip to America. From 2012 to 2017, at least 289 living Japanese marine species washed up on the shores of North America and Hawaii, hitching rides on fishing boats, docks, buoys, crates and other nonbiodegradable objects, a team of U.S. researchers report in the Sept. 29 Science.

Organisms that surprisingly survived the harsh 7,000-kilometer journey across the Pacific Ocean on 634 items of tsunami debris ranged from 52-centimeter-long fish (a Western Pacific yellowtail amberjack) to microscopic single-celled protists. About 65 percent of the species have never been seen in North America’s Pacific waters. If these newcomers become established, they have the potential to become invasive, disrupting native marine habitats, says study coauthor James Carlton, a marine scientist at Williams College in Mystic, Conn.
Meet some of the slimiest, strangest and potentially most invasive marine castaways that took this incredible journey:

The Northern Pacific sea star (Asterias amurensis) is among the world’s most invasive species. Though this purple and yellow sea star is normally found in shallow habitats, it can live as deep as 200 meters.

Skeleton shrimp (Caprella cristibrachium and C. mutica (shown)) grasp onto algae with their strong rear claws, earning them the nickname “praying mantis of the sea.” These lanky amphipods can grow up to about 5 centimeters long and are found in the Sea of Japan.
A white, brittle Bryozoan (Biflustra grandicella) that can grow as big as a basketball is already invasive in Australia. The tiny swimming larvae of these sea creatures, also known as moss animals, may live up to a week, long enough to settle in to a new habitat.

Most of the wooden Japanese debris items collected carried at least one of seven species of large wormlike mollusks called Japanese shipworms (Psiloteredo sp.). Some of the more monstrous shipworms found, which bore into everything from wooden pilings to docks, had grown to about 50 centimeters long.
Five Japanese barred knifejaw fish (Oplegnathus fasciatus), also known as striped beakfish, were found trapped in the stern well of a Japanese fishing boat found beached in 2013 in Washington. These black-and-white striped fish are native to the Northwest Pacific Ocean and Hawaii. The well acted as a tide pool of sorts, sustaining the fish during their two-year journey.

The wavy-shelled slipper snail (Crepidula onyx), also known as a slipper limpet, has essentially come full circle in its journey around the Pacific Ocean. Native to the U.S. West Coast, the well-traveled snail became an invasive species in Japan, and now has returned to America on Japanese debris.

A growing band of digital characters that converse, read faces and track body language is helping humans to communicate better with one another. While virtual helpers that perform practical tasks, such as dealing with customer service issues, are becoming ubiquitous, computer scientist M. Ehsan Hoque is at the forefront of a more emotionally savvy movement. He and his team at the University of Rochester in New York create software for digital agents that recognize when a person is succeeding or failing in specific types of social interactions. Data from face-to-face conversations and feedback from professional counselors and interviewers with relevant expertise inform this breed of computer advisers.

One of Hoque’s digital helpers grooms people to be better public speakers. With words on a screen, this attentive app notes, for example, how many times in a practice talk a person says “um,” gestures inappropriately or awkwardly shifts vocal tone. With the help of Google Glass, the app even offers useful reminders during actual speeches. Another computerized helper, this one in the form of an avatar, helps people hone their job interviewing skills, flagging long-winded responses or inconsistent eye contact in practice interviews. In the works are computerized conversation coaches that can improve speech and communication skills among people with developmental conditions such as autism and mediate business meetings in ways that encourage everyone to participate in decision making.

“There has been some progress in artificial intelligence, but not much in developing emotional aspects of AI,” Hoque says. “We’re just cracking through the surface at this point.”
The U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Army have taken notice. With their financial support, Hoque is developing avatars that collaborate with humans to solve complex problems, and digital observers that monitor body language to detect when people are lying.
This is heady stuff for a 35-year-old who earned a doctoral degree just four years ago. Hoque, who was born in Bangladesh and immigrated to the United States as a teenager, did his graduate work with the MIT Media Lab’s Affective Computing research group. The group’s director, Rosalind Picard, helped launch the field of “affective computing” in the 1990s, which focuses on the study and development of computers and robots that recognize, interpret and simulate human emotions.

Hoque’s approach puts a service spin on affective computing. As a grad student, he developed software he dubbed MACH, short for My Automated Conversation coacH. This system simulates face-to-face conversations with a computer-generated, 3-D man or woman that sees, hears and makes decisions while conversing with a real-life partner. Digital analyses of a human partner’s speech and nonverbal behavior inform the avatar’s responses during a session. A simulated coach may, for instance, let a user know if smiles during an interview look forced or are mistimed. After a session, users see a video of the interaction accompanied by displays of how well or poorly they did on various interaction skills, such as keeping eye contact and nodding at appropriate times.

MACH got its start in trials that trained MIT undergraduates how to conduct themselves during interviews with career counselors. First, Hoque analyzed smiles and other behaviors that either helped or hurt the impressions job candidates left on experienced counselors in mock interviews. In a series of follow-up studies, his team developed an automated system that recognized impression-enhancing behaviors during simulated interviews. That pilot version of MACH was then put to the test. Women, but not men, who received MACH training and got feedback from their digital coach while watching videos of their initial interviews with a counselor displayed substantial improvement in follow-up interviews. MACH trainees who watched interview videos but got no feedback showed minimal improvement. Testing with larger groups of men and women is under way.
As he developed MACH, Hoque consulted MIT sociologist and clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle. That was a bold move, since Turkle has warned for 30 years that, despite its pluses, digital culture discourages person-to-person connections. Social robots, in particular, represent a way for people to escape the challenges of forging authentic relationships, Turkle contends.

But she came away impressed with Hoque, whose goals she calls refreshingly modest and transparent. “His avatars will be helpers and facilitators,” she says, “not companions, friends, therapists and pretend people.”

Hoque’s approach grew out of personal experience. He is the primary caregiver for his 16-year-old brother, Eshteher, who has Down syndrome and does not speak. Eshteher can make sounds to refer to certain things, such as food, and has limited use of sign language. “I’ve spent a lot of time with him and can read what he’s experiencing, like when he’s frustrated or repentant,” Hoque says.
So it’s not surprising that Hoque’s next-generation MACH, dubbed LISSA for Live Interactive Social Skill Assistance, is an avatar that conducts flexible, “getting acquainted” conversations while providing feedback on users’ eye contact, speaking volume, smiling and body movements via flashing icons.

LISSA has shown promise in preliminary tests aimed at improving the conversational chops of college students attending speed-dating sessions and individuals with autism spectrum disorders. Hoque plans to expand this technology for use with people suffering from social phobia and post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s also working on an avatar that trains doctors to communicate clearly and compassionately with patients being treated for life-threatening cancers.

Hoque’s work on emotionally perceptive avatars may eventually transform the young industry of digital assistants, currently limited to voices-in-a-box such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, says cognitive scientist Mary Czerwinski, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond, Wash. Avatar research “could lead to more natural, personable digital assistants,” Czerwinski predicts. Hoque agrees.

“In the future, we’ll all have digital, personalized assistants,” he says. If he gets his way, emotionally attuned helpers will make us more social and less isolated. That’s something to applaud — if we can manage to put down our smartphones.