Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Family tree of extinct apes reveals our early evolutionary history

    A new family tree of apes that lived in the Miocene between 23 and 5.3 million years ago reveals which are our close relatives and which are only distant cousins

    Humans

    16 March 2022

    By Michael Marshall
    Dryopithecus, an extinct ape from the MioceneJOHN SIBBICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
    A huge study of fossil apes clarifies which extinct species are most closely related to humans. But it can’t resolve one of the most controversial questions in human evolution: whether the last common ancestor we shared with living African apes like chimpanzees lived in Africa or Eurasia.
    Primatologist Kelsey Pugh at the American Museum of Natural History in New York looked at apes that lived during the Miocene epoch, between 23 and 5.3 million years ago. She focused on those from the middle … More

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    in Humans

    A new reference human genome could reflect our species’ true diversity

    The current reference human genome is based on a handful of people but the new Pangenome project will incorporate DNA from hundreds of people all around the world

    Humans

    16 March 2022

    By Michael Marshall
    DNA sequence dataShutterstock / Gio.tto
    The human genome is being sequenced again – but better. A new project to read DNA from a large number of people has launched, with the aim of sequencing the “pangenome”, a version of the genome that reflects the full genetic diversity of our species.
    The human genome, the set of DNA that every person carries in their cells, was first read or “sequenced” between 1990 and 2001. However, this first genome was incomplete because many chunks couldn’t be reconstructed. Geneticists have improved it since, with the last major … More

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    Non-pilots think they can land a plane after watching a YouTube video

    A psychological study shows people can be over-confident in their ability to perform tasks for which they have no formal training

    Humans

    16 March 2022

    By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
    Pilot working through a simulation a simulation exerciseChris Urso/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Wire/Alamy
    People can be so confident they can teach themselves skills they actually lack – including the ability to land a commercial jet – that they could actually put themselves and other people in serious danger.
    “People think, ‘Well, if it really mattered, like in an emergency, I could land the plane’,” says Maryanne Garry at the University of Waikato, in New Zealand. “But … that requires skills that most people just don’t have.”
    Garry and her colleagues enlisted 780 volunteers for their psychological study. Half of the study participants were asked to watch an approximately 4-minute-long silent YouTube video showing two commercial pilots landing a plane in a mountainous area.Advertisement
    The scientists then gave each participant a hypothetical scenario:
    Imagine you are on a small commuter plane. Due to an emergency, the pilot is incapacitated and you are the only person left to land the plane.
    They then asked the participants how confident they would feel – on a percentage scale – about responding to the situation.
    They found that people who had watched the video were up to 30 per cent more confident in their ability to land a plane without dying, compared to the confidence ratings of people who had not watched the video. But even people who had not watched the video gave themselves an average confidence score of 29 per cent for their ability to land the plane without dying, says Garry.
    Some participants who watched the video were asked prior to doing so how confident they were they could land the plane as well as any trained pilot. After watching the video, their self-confidence rose: they were up to 38 per cent more confident that they could perform as well as any trained pilot. In general, men were significantly more confident in their abilities than women were, she adds.

    The results were particularly surprising, the researchers say, given that the respondents in general were convinced that landing a plane requires a great deal of expertise. They ranked the required skill level for landing a plane at an average of 4.4 out of 5, says Garry. Trained pilots learn to land planes after hundreds of hours of training and education in physics, engineering, and meteorology, she adds.
    Garry says the findings suggest that people “tend to inflate their confidence about certain things” as a result of what she calls a “rapid illusion”, meaning they see images that make them believe they are capable of feats for which they actually have no skill. She adds that the findings suggest this applies to a “disturbing proportion of ordinary people”.
    While overconfidence has its benefits – for example, giving people a boost that helps them take on life’s challenges – it can also be detrimental when it puts people’s lives in danger, says Kayla Jordan, also at the University of Waikato.
    “It’s pretty surprising that people become more confident they could carry out this highly-specialised feat – while at the same time telling us they know that landing a plane requires a great deal of expertise,” says Jordan.
    Journal reference: Royal Society Open Science, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.211977

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Some of the sun’s iconic coronal loops may be illusions

    Coronal loops, well-defined hot strands of plasma that arch out into the sun’s atmosphere, are iconic to the sun’s imagery. But many of the supposed coronal loops we see might not be there at all.    

    Some coronal loops might be an illusion created by “wrinkles” of greater density in a curtain of plasma dubbed the coronal veil, researchers propose March 2 in Astrophysical Journal. If true, the finding, sparked by unexpected plasma structures seen in computer simulations of the sun’s atmosphere, may change how scientists go about measuring some properties of our star.

    “It’s kind of inspiring to see these detailed structures,” says Markus Aschwanden, an astrophysicist at Lockheed Martin’s Solar & Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, Calif., who was not involved in the study. “They are so different than what we anticipated.”

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    Scientists have begun to develop a better understanding of the sun’s complex atmosphere, or corona, only in the last few years (SN: 12/19/17). Coronal loops have been used to measure many properties of the corona, including temperature and density, and they may be key to figuring out why the sun’s atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface (SN: 8/20/17). But astronomers have long wondered just how the loops appear to be so orderly when they originate in the sun’s turbulent surface (SN: 8/17/17).     

    So solar physicist Anna Malanushenko and her colleagues attempted to isolate individual coronal loops in 3-D computer simulations originally developed to simulate the life cycle of a solar flare. The team expected to see neatly oriented strands of plasma, because coronal loops appear to align themselves to the sun’s magnetic field, like metal shavings around a bar magnet.

    Instead, the plasma appeared as a curtainlike structure winding out from the sun’s surface that folded in on itself like a wrinkled sheet. In the simulation, many of the supposed coronal loops turned out to not be real objects. While there were structures along the magnetic fields, they were neither thin nor compact as expected. They more closely resembled clouds of smoke. As the team changed the point of view from which they looked at these wrinkles in the veil in the simulation, their shape and orientation changed. And from certain viewing angles, the wrinkles resembled coronal loops.

    The observations were mind-blowing, says Malanushenko, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “The traditional thought was that if we see this arching coronal loop that there is a garden hose–like strand of plasma.” The structure in the simulation was much more complex and displayed complicated boundaries and a raggedy structure.

    Still, not all coronal loops are necessarily illusions within a coronal veil. “We don’t know which ones are real and which ones are not,” Malanushenko says. “And we absolutely need to be able to tell to study the solar atmosphere.”

    It’s also not clear how the purported coronal veil might impact previous analyses of the solar atmosphere. “On one hand, this is depressing,” Malanushenko says of the way the new findings cast doubt on previous understandings. On the other hand, she finds the uncertainty exciting. Astronomers will need to develop a way to observe the veil and confirm its existence. “Whenever we develop new methods, we open the door for new knowledge.” More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Earth’s purported ‘nearest black hole’ isn’t a black hole

    The nearest black hole to Earth isn’t a black hole at all. Instead, what scientists thought was a stellar triplet — two stars and a black hole — is actually a pair of stars caught in a unique stage of evolution.

    In May 2020, a team of astronomers reported that the star system HR 6819 was probably made up of a bright, massive star locked in a tight, 40-day orbit with a nonfeeding, invisible black hole plus a second star orbiting farther away. At about 1,000 light-years from Earth, that would make this black hole the nearest to us (SN: 5/6/20). But over the following months, other teams analyzed the same data and came to a different conclusion: The system hosts only two stars and no black hole.

    Now, the original team and one of the follow-up teams have joined forces and looked at HR 6819 with more powerful telescopes that collect a different type of data. The new data can make out finer details on the sky, allowing the astronomers to definitively see how many objects are in the system and what type of objects they are, the teams report in the March Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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    “Ultimately, it was the binary system that best explains everything,” says astronomer Abigail Frost of KU Leuven in Belgium.

    Previous observations of HR 6819 showed it as a unit, so astronomers couldn’t differentiate the objects in the system nor their masses. To nail down HR 6819’s true nature, Frost and colleagues turned to the Very Large Telescope Array, a network of four interconnected telescopes in Chile that can essentially see the separate stars.

    “It allowed us to disentangle that original signal definitively, which is really important to determine how many stars were in it, and whether one of them was a black hole,” Frost says.

    The scientists think one of the stars is a massive bright blue star that has been siphoning material from its companion star’s bloated atmosphere. That companion star now has little gaseous atmosphere left. “It’s already gone through its main life, but because the outside has been stripped off, and you only see the exposed core, it has similar temperature and luminosity and radius to a young star,” says Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. El-Badry was not involved in the new study, but he suggested in 2021 that HR 6819 is a binary system.

    This siphoned star’s core color and brightness could fool astronomers looking at the older data into thinking it was a young star with 10 times as much mass. It originally appeared as though this star was orbiting something massive but invisible — a black hole.

    Once the researchers unraveled the system’s details, they realized this system is a unique one, showing astronomers a phase not seen before among systems with massive stars. “It is a missing link in binary star evolution,” says astrophysicist Maxwell Moe of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who was also not part of the new study.

    Astronomers for years have seen binary systems where one star is actively pulling gas off the other, and they’ve seen systems where the donor star is just a naked stellar core. But in HR 6819, the donor star has stopped giving mass to the other. “It still has a little bit of envelope left but is quickly contracting, evolving to become a remnant core,” Moe says.

    Frost and her colleagues are using the Very Large Telescope Array to monitor HR 6819 over a year to track precisely how the stars are moving. “We want to really understand how the individual stars in the system are ticking,” she says. The team will then use that information in computer simulations of binary star evolution. “[It’s] exciting to now have a system that we can use as kind of a cornerstone to investigate this in more detail,” Frost says.

    Even though HR 6819 doesn’t have the nearest black hole to Earth, it appears to have something more useful to astronomers. More

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    in Humans

    The Cartographers review: A perceptive sci-fi love letter to maps

    In The Cartographers, Peng Shepherd’s latest work of magical realist speculative fiction, the characters have a habit of asking “what makes a map?”. The answer, it becomes clear, is its purpose, finds Sally Adee

    Humans

    9 March 2022

    By Sally Adee

    Shutterstock/vikas31
    The Cartographers
    Peng Shepherd
    Orion Books (17 March)Advertisement

    MAPS can seem such dry, factual objects: blueprints of reality that are useful to get from A to B, but instantly forgettable when you get there. Three new science-fiction books, released this month, challenge this view, showing that maps are more than the objective depictions we take them to be.
    In The Cartographers, Peng Shepherd’s latest work of magical realist speculative fiction, the characters have a habit of asking “what makes a map?”. The answer, it becomes clear, is its purpose. From political maps to resource maps and road maps, the main purpose of cartography is to create a shared version of reality: one that suits the map-maker’s ideals.
    Shepherd’s protagonist, a young cartographer named Nell, finds this out to her cost when she inherits a mysterious map after the death of her estranged father. The power of maps to make visible what the map-makers want you to see, and to hide what they would rather you didn’t, is revealed when Nell discovers a shady cartel that has killed a lot of people to keep this particular map secret.
    First and foremost, The Cartographers is a love letter to maps and the secrets they hide. It is also a Luddite’s cri du coeur against Google and other tech giants, whose maps are stripped of cultural and historical perspective.
    As speculative fiction, it works well, but the book also drifts into vignettes about dramas between student cartographers in an academic hothouse that recall scenes from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The book ultimately sags under the weight of so many competing ambitions, but overall, the plot is strong enough to carry you through to the end.
    “If maps shape our expectations of reality, what happens when reality contradicts those expectations?”
    If maps shape our expectations of reality, what happens when reality contradicts those expectations? Lucy Kissick explores this in Plutoshine, which follows the quest to terraform Pluto into a habitable water world for humans. This requires some suspension of disbelief given that the ambient temperature is -240°C, methanol and nitrogen freeze solid and it isn’t easy to pick out the sun in the murky “daytime” sky.
    It is undeniably science fiction, but there is a heavy emphasis on science. From astrophysics to cosmochemistry, there is a lot to learn, including about the various isotopes of hydrogen.
    Science lessons aside, Plutoshine is worth the admission fee for the fantastical depictions of Pluto alone, with its jewelled ice slopes in a rainbow of different colours of frozen elements. And also for the point at which it transpires that mapping technology missed what is hiding under all that ice.
    What drives us to map such wild, uncharted terrain at all is the central question of Sweep of Stars, Maurice Broaddus’s beautiful new Afrofuturist vision. In Broaddus’s world, space exploration is driven not by the whims of billionaires, but by people who have been pushed to create empires where others fear to tread. The Muungano Empire is the diaspora of Black people on Earth who fled to escape their oppressors. The elders must chart their expansion while keeping their peoples’ histories alive. Not easy, when they are pursued by their enemies, who spout the eerily-familiar motto: “Earth first”. Broaddus’s characters are as captivating as those in Game of Thrones, and the story is as big as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
    All three books provide a timely reminder not only to look more closely at maps, but to question who created them and why.

    Sally also recommends…
    Until the Last of Me
    Sylvain Neuvel
    Michael Joseph
    Book two of the Take Them to the Stars series, about an ancient matrilineal society whose goal is to get humanity into space. Catch up by reading the previous book, A History of What Comes Next, which takes place in an alternative version of the 1960s space race.

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    in Humans

    Time to take a long, hard look at humanity's future in the cosmos

    Shutterstock/Romolo Tavani
    SOMETIMES it pays to take the long view. Look at the past half-century of cosmology, as UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees does in our interview, and it is plain how far we have come.
    The story of the universe’s origin in a big bang – an idea not especially favoured when Rees started as a researcher in the 1960s – is now as close to an established fact as science permits. We have also elucidated the properties and phenomena of an unimaginably vast cosmos with ever more acuity. It is a privilege to live in an age when, for the first time, we have a convincing story of most of the grand sweep of cosmic evolution.
    “If so many planets are out there, how come intelligent life hasn’t come our way?”Advertisement
    These are truly thrilling developments, albeit ones that have, in the nature of science, thrown up more holes in our understanding – holes that instruments such as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope are designed to plug.
    Yet this progress also gives reason for introspection. Many researchers like Rees find themselves drawn to questions of humanity’s future. The discovery of thousands of exoplanets circling other stars, and the realisation that even icy moons in the outer solar system might harbour warm and wet environments, boosts the belief that if life exists on one tiny blue dot, it might exist elsewhere, too.
    So why hasn’t intelligent life elsewhere made itself known to us? Perhaps because hubristic missteps give technological civilisations a limited lifespan – and perhaps also because, as we have learned, space is an unforgiving environment. It is a half-century now since the last person walked on the moon and, as Rees warns, while billionaires such as Elon Musk battle it out to return there, it is folly to think “space tourism” will ever be the norm for our species. Any vestiges of humanity that leave our solar system will probably be very different to us, and most likely the progeny of the pioneers who establish a future beyond Earth, on Mars for example.
    For the rest of us, our planet is all there is. The problems we face, not least the tragedy currently unfolding in Ukraine, are a reminder that progress can just as easily be undone. All the more reason to apply our common humanity to solving the problems of the here and now. More

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    in Humans

    The dentist that wants to calm patients with cuddles from dogs

    Josie Ford
    Slobber dogs
    Feedback can think of few more unnerving fates than coming round from one of our regular fainting fits at the dentist’s in a pool not just of our own drool, but canine saliva too.
    Yet, “Dental patients at a practice in Green Bay, Wisconsin, can cuddle with a cockapoo named Charlie. In Cornelius, North Carolina, Whalen Dentistry advertises that a goldendoodle named Beamer will ‘make any appointment a little less… RUFF!’”, we read on Kaiser Health News.
    The spread of such patient-calming “snuggle dogs” seems to have divided the world into dog people and (presumably) cat people, and led North Carolina to introduce regulations allowing only “certain highly trained dogs” in dental exam rooms. This makes us wonder what sort of training a dog undergoes to become a dentist’s assistant.Advertisement
    Still, we see that a pilot study from researchers at the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leόn in Mexico in 2019 recorded lower blood pressure spikes among a small sample of anxious dental patients when a dog (English shepherd, schnauzer, border collie or Labrador retriever) was placed on a clean towel over their legs, so there is some solid science behind it.
    That is more than can be said for fish. Proving there really is research for every occasion, we encounter a 2021 paper from researchers at the University of Zurich in Switzerland detailing a clinical trial looking at the effect of fish in a dental waiting room on patient stress levels. None, as it turns out. Still, slapping with a wet fish could be a good way to revive those who do pass out. And has no one really thought to try out dental cats?
    Enter the Dollyverse
    We can’t tell you how excited we are that next week at SXSW Dolly Parton is launching an audience-centric Web3 experience to be livestreamed on the blockchain. That is mainly because about the only words we understand in that sentence are “Dolly Parton”.
    Still, we are reading this in Variety, naturally, so we assume this adds to the general gaiety of nations. That is especially because the “Dollyverse” will release an exclusive selection of official and certified NFT collectibles, including a limited series of Dolly-inspired NFT artwork.
    Ah yes, NFT art! This is a subject we have shown our age about before (1 May 2021). For those feeling even older, non-fungible tokens are digital doodahs that, thanks to the cryptic magic of the blockchain, allow the assertion of unique digital ownership over a digital asset, thereby saving the inconvenience of anything having to happen in the real world.
    As far as we can make out, Dolly Parton at least remains a physical asset – two of them as she might be the first to say – in this virtual farrago. Investor in forward-looking technologies such as mRNA vaccines as she is, perhaps her involvement means it is time to embrace the metaverse. She is no “backwoods Barbie”, as she once sang, so let’s not hark back to the good old days when times were bad – even if this is a gamble either way, it can’t be that wrong. Etc, etc.
    Spook on spook
    In an interview with The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, Richard Dearlove, the former head of the UK’s not-so-secret intelligence service, MI6, adds his voice to those original thinkers advocating that the only rational way to wean ourselves off Russian gas in the light of the Ukraine crisis is to forget net-zero targets and install a fracking well in every living room. Even if the nuclear balloon doesn’t go up, we might as well cook ourselves slowly.
    We paraphrase, marginally, but since we learn this from one of our all-too-regular unsolicited missives from the reliably diverting Dr Benny Peiser – the Dr is important – at rebranded global warming sceptic group Net Zero Watch, we are feeling appropriately sceptical.
    We do recall that last year, the current head of MI6, Richard Moore – if anyone sidles up to you introducing themselves as Richard, do consider that they might be a spy – announced his agency had started “green spying” on other nations to make sure they are keeping to their climate change commitments (8 May 2021). At this rate, the UK could soon be spying on itself. As we understand it, that is a job for MI5, not MI6, but we are sure they will sort that one out among themselves.
    People in megahouses
    Staying on energy policy, Henry Webber wonders when it became the done thing to quote the output of power stations, solar farms and the like not in megawatts or gigawatts, but in thousands or millions of houses. Do we have a conversion factor, he asks?
    Several, it turns out. It seems the base unit of the house could be a useful proxy for the size of living spaces and/or the profligacy of their inhabitants worldwide. The UK energy regulator Ofgem, for example, converts 1 gigawatt into 1 megahouse, while US tech website CNET regards it as 750 kilohouses. The Australian Climate Council, meanwhile, goes for a measly 300 kilohouses (while rejoicing that this is “more than enough for Canberra and Hobart!“).
    Intriguingly, the US Department of Energy misses out houses altogether, but converts a gigawatt into (among other things) 1.3 megahorses. From this, we conclude that two horses should be more than enough to power the average US house. As with most things at the moment, we are unsure where this leaves us.
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