Philippa Kaur

The new slapstick sci-fi offering by French directorial royalty Jean-Pierre Jeunet is plagued by predictable innuendo

Humans

2 March 2022

By Gregory Wakeman

Romance can get complicated when you are locked in with a sex robot while the androids attackBruno Calvo/Netflix
Bigbug
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
NetflixAdvertisement

JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET is widely regarded as one of the finest French film-makers of the past 30 years, having overseen the likes of Delicatessen, A Very Long Engagement and the much adored 2001 romantic comedy Amélie.
Bigbug is Jeunet’s first feature film since 2013’s The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet and his first French-language film since 2009’s Micmacs. As fans of his work might expect, Bigbug, a futuristic sci-fi comedy, is downright bizarre.
Set in Paris in 2045, it takes place in a world where humans rely on robots to satisfy their every desire. Then four of Alice (Elsa Zylberstein)’s antiquated domestic robots decide to take her hostage, trapping her inside her home with her date Max (Stéphane de Groodt), his son Léo (Hélie Thonnat), her daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard), her ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his new girlfriend Jennifer (Claire Chust). Alice’s nosy neighbour Françoise (Isabelle Nanty), who happens to be visiting along with her sex robot Greg (Alban Lenoir), also gets locked in.
What starts off as a minor inconvenience soon gets real when it emerges that the latest generation of robots, the Yonyx (all played by François Levantal), is trying to take over the world. As the Yonyx get closer to Alice’s home, the humans start to turn against each other and the older robots, who may or may not be trying to keep them safe.
While Jeunet’s previous films are similarly quirky, in Bigbug, he plays for much bawdier laughs. Sometimes, it works. A robot’s analysis of why Max is lying to Alice at the start of the film, for instance, suggests that Jeunet might be about to explore artificial intelligence in a unique and irreverent way.
Unfortunately, though, that level of insight never materialises, and this early scene is about as funny as Bigbug gets. Sure, Victor’s increasing anger at being trapped inside is amusing to watch unfold, plus there are a handful of other slapstick moments that you can’t help but smile at. But in general, it is surprising how predictable most of the gags are.
Filming began in October 2020, and it seems that Jeunet has tried to channel the mental and emotional struggles of quarantine during covid-19 and to critique both the world’s reliance on technology and its infatuation with social media. Unfortunately, whatever message he is attempting to get across never really materialises. In its place are crude innuendos and sex jokes.
Some of Jeunet’s more unusual creative decisions also make Bigbug less successful than it should be. It is jarring that, despite the mighty financial backing of Netflix, the special effects look so cheap as to be genuinely off-putting. What’s more, while the characters are almost entirely motivated by sex and the film includes several scenes that are definitely not suitable for children, the world Jeunet has created looks and feels cartoonish.
Alice’s home, her clothes, her robots and even the flying cars all appear to have been inspired by The Jetsons, while the villainous Yonyx, who all look and act the same, could have been ripped straight from a 1970s comic book.
While these elements don’t come close to gelling, Jeunet’s light direction, bright colour palette and attractive set design do at least make Bigbug watchable. It helps that the script also takes some unexpected twists and turns that see the characters getting romantically entangled in ways that you might not initially expect.
But considering Jeunet’s past cinematic triumphs, and after so long away from the camera, Bigbug just doesn’t provide enough laughs or sufficient thematic depth to be anything other than disappointing.

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Shop-bought strawberries can taste disappointing, but home grown ones are delicious. Here’s how to succeed in growing these delicate fruits, says Clare Wilson

Humans

2 March 2022

By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Julia Boulton
THERE are plenty of reasons people grow their own fruit and vegetables: it is a satisfying outdoor hobby, it gets you some exercise and the produce has low food miles, usually making it good for the planet too.
Another reason is that many home-grown fruits and vegetables taste better than the ones on sale in shops. The difference is particularly noticeable for some types of produce, such as new potatoes, asparagus, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.
There can be several explanations. One is that the varieties grown by farmers are often different to those sold for home growing. Farmers use … More

Josie Ford
The order of not things
Cambridge – of Cambridgeshire, not Massachusetts, before anyone jumps in – is famed as the academic home of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, three philosophers who did much to elucidate, not to say obfuscate, language, logic and meaning. It is very much in their spirit, we assume, that Cambridge City Council recently advertised an extra rubbish bin collection following staff absences, stating “bins will be collected in the order in which they were previously not collected”.
“Is it quantum mechanics then that enables us to determine the order in which things don’t happen?” asks Alison Litherland, we imagine hovering indecisively over her bins. Quite possibly. Our starting point must be the following question: if a bin isn’t collected, but no one sees it not collected, has it been not collected at all?
In purely practical terms, the only way of finding out is by looking in the bin, making this a particularly pure instantiation of Erwin Schrödinger’s cat paradox. Maybe Schrödinger’s trash didn’t have quite the same ring to it. As far as your problem goes, Alison, we fear that repeated measurement of identical bins may allow you to build up a picture of when it wasn’t collected, but this will only have statistical validity.Advertisement
Poet didn’t know it
Feedback is delighted to find, while searching for something else, that the physicist James Clerk Maxwell (died 1879) is listed as an author on the New Scientist website (born circa 1996).
Further investigation reveals a series of poems published by Maxwell in these pages in 2011. We are somewhat lacking context, but his Valentine By a Telegraph Clerk (Male) to a Telegraph Clerk (Female) bears rereading, with its culminating verse: “Through many a volt the weber flew,/And clicked this answer back to me;/I am thy farad staunch and true,/Charged to a volt with love for thee.”
Sweet, if of its time. Following our musings on how old the internet thinks you can be (26 February), at 180, we may have found our oldest contributor.
Standard elephants
Metrologists at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris may still be basking in the replacement, in 2019, of the international prototype kilogram – a platinum-iridium hulk that would feel exactly like 1 kilogram if dropped on your foot – by a fancy-schmantzy definition in terms of various physical constants. But as regular Feedback readers know, they are missing the… in the room. The elephant is well-established as the actual international standard unit of mass.
Proof positive, a report from The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario, Canada, sent in by Doug Thomson. A clean-up after storms there in January required the removal of “145,000 tonnes of snow – about 20,000 large, frozen elephants worth”. We can only imagine the difficulties of dealing with these homesick and discomfited beasts. The icing on the elephants clearly adds something to their weight, as we conventionally take an adult male African bush elephant to weigh about 6 tonnes.
Even as we hear calls for a standard prototype elephant kept under glass somewhere growing louder, news reaches us of a breakaway movement in New South Wales, Australia. Many of you highlight news of the seizure of 9.7 hectares’ worth of illicitly grown tobacco at Koraleigh “weighing the equivalent of 13 bulldozers”.
How many bulldozers of tobacco fit into Sydney Harbour, we wonder. Meanwhile, Brian Horton consults the delightful website “What Things Weigh” to find bulldozers range from a baby 8 (good old non-metric) tons to a fully grown 180 tons. Suffice to say, the amount of tobacco seized at Koraleigh was some 42 standard elephants.
His mummy’s voice
The interwebs have delighted themselves recently at a story first reported by New Scientist in 2020, that researchers have recreated the voice of an Egyptian mummy held at Leeds City Museum, UK.
The experience is slightly hard to reproduce on the printed page, but oddly, in some of the clips now circulating, the mummy is clearly saying “UUUUGRHH”, whereas two years ago it was a far more refined “EEEEERGH”. Mummies could presumably have made more than one sound, says a colleague – not unreasonably, with the qualification “when alive”. “This is the replication crisis writ large,” says another, damningly.
Vive la résistance!
Much as we try to stop buttered toast falling on our pages, right side up or no, still it rains down. But we are in a philosophical frame of mind, so we are grateful to J. Feralco for the reminder of a corollary to Murphy’s Law, first established by humorist Paul Jennings in the 1940s: “The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.”
This came as part of his Report on Resistentialism, a school of philosophy encapsulated by the phrase “Les choses sont contre nous” – “things are against us” – established on Paris’s Left Bank by “bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed” thinker Pierre-Marie Ventre. Resistentialism holds that there are limits to the sway humans can hold in a world of largely hostile, uncooperative things. It is worth rummaging around for the whole essay online as a parable for These Uncertain Times.
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The sarsen stones of the Stonehenge monument could have been designed as a calendar to track a solar year, with each of the stones in the large sarsen circle representing a day within a month

Humans

2 March 2022

By Alison George
Stonehenge – an ancient calendar?nagelestock.com / Alamy
Stonehenge has long been thought to be an ancient calendar due to its alignment with the summer and winter solstices, but exactly how the calendar system worked was a mystery. Now a new analysis shows that it could have functioned like the solar calendar used in ancient Egypt, based on a year of 365.25 days, with each of the stones of the large sarsen circle representing a day within a month.
“It’s a perpetual calendar that recalibrates every winter solstice sunset,” says Tim Darvill of Bournemouth University, UK, who carried out the analysis. This would have enabled the ancient people who lived near the monument in what is now Wiltshire, UK, to keep track of days and months of the year.
The key to unlocking this calendar system came from the discovery in 2020 that most of the sarsen stones were quarried from the same location 25 kilometres away, and were placed at Stonehenge at around the same time.Advertisement
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“All except two of the sarsens at Stonehenge come from that single source, so the message to me was that they’ve got a unity to them,” says Darvill. This indicates that they were intended for a common purpose. To find out what, he looked for clues in the numbers.
The sarsens were arranged in three different formations at Stonehenge around 2500 BC: 30 formed the large stone circle that dominates the monument, 4 “station stones” were placed in a rectangular formation outside this circle, and the rest were constructed into 5 trilithons – consisting of two vertical stones with a third stone laid horizontally across the top like a lintel – located inside the stone circle.
“30, 5 and 4 are interesting numbers in a calendrical kind of sense,” says Darvill. “Those 30 uprights around the main sarsen ring at Stonehenge would fit very nicely as days of the month,” he says. “Multiply that by 12 and you get 360, add on another 5 from the central trilithons you get 365.” To adjust the calendar to match a solar year, the addition of one extra leap day every four years is needed, and Darvill thinks that the four station stones may have been used to keep track of this. In this system, the summer and winter solstice would be framed every year by the same pair of stones.
This Stonehenge calendar system “makes a lot of sense,” says David Nash at the University of Brighton, UK.  “I like the elegant simplicity of it.”
Others are not so sure. “It’s certainly intriguing but ultimately it fails to convince,” says Mike Parker Pearson of University College London, UK.” The numbers don’t really add up – why should two uprights of a trilithon equal one upright of the sarsen circle to represent 1 day? There’s selective use of evidence to try to make the numbers fit.”

Although a calendar with 30-days months and an extra “intercalary” month of five days might not be familiar to us today, such a system was used in ancient Egypt from around 2700 BC and other solar calendars had been developed in the eastern Mediterranean region at around that time.
In the Egyptian calendar these five extra days were “very significant, religiously speaking,” says Sacha Stern, an expert in ancient calendars at University College London. This has led Darvill to think that the five trilithon structures at Stonehenge might have marked a five-day mid-winter celebration, an idea bolstered by the fact that the tallest stone at the monument, part of one of the trilithons, points to the sunrise on the midwinter solstice.
The similarity between the Stonehenge calendar and that used in ancient Egypt hints that the idea for the Stonehenge system may have come from afar. Recent archaeological finds support the idea of long-distance travel and trade around that time. Isotope analysis of the body of the Amesbury Archer, who was buried 5 kilometres from Stonehenge around 2300 BC, revealed that he was born in the Alps and came to Britain as a teenager, and a red glass bead found 2km from the monument appears to have been made in Egypt around 2000 BC.
However, Stern is not convinced by the argument that the Stonehenge calendar system originated elsewhere. “I wonder if you need to invoke the Egyptians. Why can’t we just imagine that [the people who built Stonehenge] created the whole system by themselves? They certainly knew when the solstice was, and from that point onwards you just have to count the days, and it won’t take long to figure out how many days you need in the year.”
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2022.5

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hasn’t gone to plan and has led to an economic backlash from the West. If Russian president Vladimir Putin feels backed into a corner, there is a real possibility he could use a nuclear weapon in an attempt to show strength, say analysts

Humans

| Analysis

28 February 2022

By Matthew Sparkes
Vladimir Putin may feel increasingly isolatedRussian Look Ltd. / Alamy
Nuclear conflict is a distinct but remote possibility as global tensions are ratcheted up by Russia’s faltering invasion of Ukraine, warn analysts. Russian president Vladimir Putin is in a vulnerable and unpredictable position as he contends with a lacklustre economy, increasing dissent among his citizens and, now, the potential for military defeat.
On 27 February, Putin raised Russia’s nuclear readiness system level by ordering his forces to take a “special regime of combat duty”. Patrick Bury at the University of Bath, UK, says this announcement was unusually vague, counter to the typical nuclear deterrence strategy of acting clearly and transparently as a warning to others. He and fellow academics and analysts assumed that the country would have been at level 2 of Russia’s four-level system already, given the situation in Ukraine.
But Putin’s announcement is being widely interpreted as a move from level 1 (stood down) to level 2 (ready to accept an order to fire). Bury believes we are closer to nuclear conflict now than at any point since the cold war tension of the 1980s. “Putin has poked a sleeping giant,” he says. “The West has responded massively.”Advertisement
This response included Western nations sending weapons and aid to Ukraine, while stronger-than-expected economic sanctions from around the world are piling on the pressure against Putin. If Russia’s invasion now fails, he could be removed from power or even killed in a coup, which Bury warns is a situation that backs Putin into a corner.
Bury puts the odds of a nuclear detonation as a result of this crisis at between 20 per cent and 30 per cent, but points out that it need not lead to all-out nuclear war. Instead, we could see a low-yield device used against the military in Ukraine, or even a large device detonated at sea simply as a show of force.
David Galbreath at the University of Bath says that the conflict is about more than Ukraine: it is a flexing of Russian muscles against what Putin sees as the growing threat of cooperation in the European Union and the NATO military alliance.

Galbreath says it was obvious in the build-up to the invasion that the types of personnel and weapons amassing at the border were the type one would deploy to quickly strike Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, oust Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and install a puppet leader – not those needed to occupy a country.
If this was the plan, it has already failed. And therefore we may now see the use of stronger military options that are available to Putin, such as electronic warfare that can cripple enemy surveillance and vehicles, and sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles that would prevent Ukraine from defending its airspace – currently it is still able to launch its aircraft and dogfights with Russian aircraft continue. Nuclear weapons are also a possibility, but only as a last resort, says Galbreath.
“In terms of military action, I think what we’ve seen so far is fairly limited. I think they’re going to get heavy next. And I think we need to prepare for far worse casualties,” says Kenton White at the University of Reading, UK.
White points to Russia’s military tactic of maskirovka, or disinformation, which the country has already used during the invasion. In an extreme case, White says this could stretch to a false-flag operation, such as the detonation of a small nuclear bomb outside Ukraine’s border, which is blamed on NATO.
“There’s a lot of talk about rationality of action when you’re discussing nuclear deterrence,” says White. “Well, President Putin has a rationality all of his own.”

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By Michael Marshall
A visualisation of relationships between ancestors and descendants in the genealogy of modern and ancient genomesWohns et al. (2022)
Meet your relatives. A family tree of humanity has been constructed using genetic data from thousands of modern and prehistoric people. The tree gives a view of 2 million years of prehistory and evolution.
“Humans are all ultimately related to each other,” says Gil McVean at the University of Oxford. “What I’ve long wanted to do is to be able to represent the totality of what we can learn about human history through this genealogy.”
The new family tree suggests that our earliest roots were in north-east Africa. It also offers clues that people reached Papua New Guinea and the Americas tens of thousands of years earlier than the archaeological record implies, hinting at early migrations that haven’t yet been discovered. However, both these ideas would need to be confirmed by archaeologists.Advertisement
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Geneticists have been reading people’s entire genomes for the past two decades. McVean and his colleagues compiled 3609 complete genomes, almost all of which belonged to our species, Homo sapiens, except for three Neanderthals and one from the Denisovan group, which may be a subspecies of H. sapiens or a separate species.
Putting them together into a tree was challenging. “The different data sets have been produced over time, using different technologies, analysed in different ways,” says McVean.
The team focused on bits of DNA that vary from person to person. They identified 6,412,717 variants and tried to figure out when and where each one arose. To do this, they also looked at an additional 3589 samples of ancient DNA that weren’t good enough to include in the tree, but did shed light on when the variants emerged.
Variants that emerged before 72,000 years ago were most common in north-east Africa, and the oldest 100 variants were also from there, specifically in what is now Sudan. Those oldest variants are about 2 million years old, so they long predate our species, which emerged around 300,000 years ago. Instead, the variants date to the earliest members of our genus, Homo.
The simplistic interpretation of this is that humanity first evolved in that region, but it is likely that subsequent migrations have interfered with the data. “I would definitely not take the naive and immediate answer,” says Jennifer Raff at the University of Kansas.
The earliest H. sapiens fossils are from the north and east of Africa, but few have been discovered, so we don’t know our species’ early range with any certainty. The oldest known specimens are from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, in north Africa, and are perhaps 315,000 years old. The next oldest are those from Omo-Kibish in Ethiopia, in the east. They were thought to be 197,000 years old, but a paper published in January presented evidence that they are more like 233,000 years old.
Many anthropologists now think there were multiple populations spread across Africa, which were sometimes separated and sometimes interbred. If that is correct, humanity doesn’t have a central origin point. “Our findings are certainly perfectly compatible with that,” says McVean. “There’s a lot of very deep lineages within Africa, which are suggestive of that notion of there being multiple source populations, very deeply diverged, representing really ancient splits.”

In line with this, a second study published this week obtained ancient DNA from six sub-Saharan African people who lived within the past 18,000 years. They carried DNA from three distinct lineages that originated in the distant past, from eastern, central and southern Africa. These groups began interbreeding more around 50,000 years ago, but by 20,000 years ago this largely stopped.
The new genealogy also contains hints of early journeys. It suggests that people were living in Papua New Guinea 140,000 years ago, almost 100,000 years before the earliest documented inhabitants. Similarly, it indicates that people were in the Americas 56,000 years ago, despite many archaeologists having settled on 18,000 years ago as the earliest entrance.
The idea of people in the Americas earlier than this is controversial because, prior to that, great ice sheets covered the northern regions, blocking migration. Nevertheless, a study from September 2021 described footprints from White Sands National Park in New Mexico, which suggest humans were in the Americas between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago. There is also disputed evidence of humans living in Chiquihuite cave in Mexico as much as 33,000 years ago. But 56,000 years ago is still a big reach.
“I think there are three possible explanations,” says McVean. “One is, we’re wrong.” The second is that people really were in these places very early.
The third option is a more complex scenario. The first people to live in the Americas came from eastern Asia, and it may be that the population from which they came has died out in Asia. This would mean the oldest American-looking genetic variants are actually from people who lived in Asia – but the only living people with those variants today are in America, throwing off the analysis. A similar story could have played out for Papua New Guinea.
“It’s very common in our genetic data that there are ancient lineages which don’t persist throughout time,” says Raff. “That’s completely plausible.”
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abi8264
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By Bethan Ackerley
Mark Scout, played by Adam Scott, works for a shadowy corporationAtsushi Nishijima/Apple TV+
Severance
Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle
Apple TV+Advertisement
THE first thing you should know about Mark Scout is that he is an employee of Lumon Industries, the nebulous corporation at the heart of new sci-fi thriller series Severance from Apple TV+. He is many other things besides – a cynic, a widower, a former history professor – but it is this fact that has come to define him, right down to his very biology.
That is because Mark (Adam Scott) is one of a select few who have chosen to undergo severance, an irreversible brain surgery that causes their memories of their jobs to be divided from the rest of their life. While working in Lumon’s macrodata refinement department, Mark’s “innie” has no knowledge of who he is outside the office. Likewise, his “outtie” can’t recall how he is treated at Lumon or the nature of the work he performs.
Why sever your job from your personal life? Lumon pitches the procedure as a means of creating a healthy work-life balance. When you head out of the door at 5pm, you really are switching off until tomorrow. For some, there are other benefits: severance means Mark can briefly forget about his wife’s death and hold down a job despite his still-debilitating grief. The severed workers made their decisions willingly, but there are few ways out once the process is complete.
Mercifully, Severance contains no explicit allusions to the pandemic’s effect on our relationship with work, despite the series being filmed in 2020 and 2021. It largely steers away from implausible explanations of how severance is achieved, something that requires suspension of disbelief for anyone with a basic knowledge of how memory works.
Instead, the series is an indictment of what the working world has long been for many: a slow, degrading assault on the soul. Mark’s job is dull, requiring him to sort data packets into folders according to unknown, seemingly arbitrary criteria. He is assured without evidence that his work is of vital importance, and his weak incentives are the promise of a desk toy or a waffle party at the end of the quarter.
Sound familiar? The life of a macrodata refiner is only a few degrees removed from so many jobs. Even the devil’s bargain of severance is just an extreme version of what many employees already do: leave your personal life at the door, do what you are told and, above all, be grateful.
“Severance is an indictment of what work has become for many: a degrading assault on the soul”
It takes the arrival of a new recruit after the sudden disappearance of his colleague Petey (Yul Vazquez) for Mark to start to question this arrangement. Like all severed workers, Helly (Britt Lower) wakes up on a boardroom table and is unable to even remember her name. Her fervent requests to leave are finally granted, only for Helly’s outer self to inexplicably return to Lumon each day, putting her in the confusing position of being both prisoner and jailer. “Every time you find yourself here, it’s because you chose to come back,” Mark reminds her.
Soon, Helly’s defiance rubs off on work-based Mark, while in the outside world he is contacted by Petey, who has reconnected to both sides of his memories at a grave cost to his health. Unbeknownst to each other, the two versions of Mark start to question what Lumon really does.
Severance is a compelling thriller, with a look and feel straight out of a Stanley Kubrick film. Even the most casual Kubrick fan will notice the homages to his style, from the clinical basement where severed workers spend their days to the unnerving stare of Mr Milchick (Tramell Tillman), the department overseer. The Lumon office even sits on the edge of a snowy, isolated town, haunting the residents like a corporate version of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining.
Despite borrowing from such illustrious influences, Severance is a rare beast in that its premise is original. In a viewing landscape increasingly dominated by sequels and remakes, it is a unique concept that provides a genuine commentary on the all-encompassing role of work in our lives. The perspective it offers is disturbing – and will keep you coming back each week, even if, like Mark and his colleagues, you aren’t exactly sure why.

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New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

23 February 2022

Read
Carbon Queen is Maia Weinstock’s account of the remarkable life of nanoscience pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus, who, from the 1950s, defied society’s expectations of women to become an influential scientist and engineer.
Daniel Locke
Visit
Two Heads delves into how our brains work with other brains. Join renowned husband-and-wife researchers Uta and Chris Frith as they explore the real-life implications of social neuroscience. At 7pm GMT on 1 March at the Royal Institution, London.Advertisement
NASA/Gregory B Harland
Watch
GOES-T launch provides the chance to (virtually) be in the room as NASA and NOAA’s latest, and most advanced, weather and environmental satellite blasts off into space at 9.38pm GMT on 1 March. Register online.

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