Philippa Kaur

By James Wong

Fotokostic/Shutterstock
THE interconnectivity of our world never fails to amaze me. Even as a plant scientist fascinated by food production, I am often astonished by the extent to which changes in a seemingly unrelated industry on a distant part of the planet can affect our dinner plates – and the reaction of pundits to these impacts.
Recently, news broke that soaring global fertiliser costs, created by factors such as rising energy prices in China, would be likely to have a devastating knock-on effect on the food security of some of the poorest people on Earth.
Surprisingly, some activists and thought leaders saw … More

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

3 November 2021

Josie Ford
Gone with the wind
How do natural disasters affect intimate relationships? Feedback maintains a long list of questions we had never thought of asking, a fact that will surprise no one who knows of our predilection for impossible logic. So we are pleased to see this query now comprehensively answered in the paper “Experiencing a natural disaster temporarily boosts relationship satisfaction in newlywed couples” by Hannah Williamson at the University of Texas at Austin and her colleagues.
The study involved 231 couples in Harris county, Texas, around the time of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and is the “first to use longitudinal data collected before and after a natural disaster to examine its effect on relationship outcomes”. This rather raises the question in our mind of how long the researchers were waiting, patiently observing, for disaster to strike – or perhaps it is merely a case of when, rather than if, in that part of Texas. Or maybe they have a button they can press, in which case we think we and the ethics board should be told.
No matter: for anyone wondering whether a fortuitously timed tornado might put the whirlwind back into their romance, whether a wildfire can relight their fire or whether Earth moving makes the earth move, the answer is yes – but make hay while the sun’s not shining. Couples soon “revert to their prehurricane levels of functioning as the recovery period continues”. For a longer-term boost, you will just have to move to somewhere more dangerous.Advertisement
Block head
Feedback is excited to learn that an article in New Scientist has been cited in the defence of Mike Graham, the presenter at talkRADIO – a UK radio station where the opinions can be as suddenly shouty as the name – who claimed while interviewing environmental activist Cameron Ford that you can grow concrete.
We fear the clues may be in the quotes in the headline, “Living ‘concrete’ made from bacteria used to create replicating bricks”, and in the first line of the article, “A type of living concrete made from bacteria could one day help to reduce the environmental impact of the construction industry”.
No, Mike and all: to the best of our knowledge, we cannot grow concrete. Mind you, with all the wonderful things we are learning you can do with cellulose, grasping at straws may prove to be a viable alternative.
Taking the low road
“They got you covered, either way”, is Quentin Macilray’s comment as he writes from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic with a picture of a van advertising Camino Eterno, a combined ambulance and undertaking service. We can’t better Quentin’s description of it as a quantum business governed by the collapse – or not – of the customer’s wave function. We are left wondering about the quality of the driving.
Menage au fromage
This week’s prize for research that made us involuntarily choke on our cocoa is “Sex in cheese: evidence for sexuality in the fungus Penicillium roqueforti”.
Our late-night stilton eating may never be as innocent again with the revelation that, far from living a life of monastic asceticism and reproducing purely asexually, the little blue-cheese-making blighters are – we know of no way to put this delicately – at it all the time. “The screening of a large sample of strains isolated from diverse substrates throughout the world revealed the existence of individuals of both mating types, even in the very same cheese,” the researchers write, with what sounds like glee.
Investigating the sexual capabilities of cheese mould isn’t something we had considered as a calling before. The affiliation of the team involved – the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France – causes us to narrow our eyes ever so slightly, while giving the faintest of wise nods.
Where’s my elephant?
Nick Parlow writes taking exception to a suggestion made in our thread on finding an elephant in the room (4 September and 2 October). “I’m sure that others have pointed out how ludicrous it is to paint an elephant’s toenails red and hide it in a cherry tree,” he writes. “That amount of red nail varnish would be prohibitively expensive. Happily there is a far more practical method: paint the soles of its feet yellow, and hide it upside down in the custard.”
We are pleased to make this plain, Nick, given also that you reference the source “Cunningham and Blake (1974), The Puffin Joke Book“, leaving us in no doubt that this is settled science and that the old ones are the best.
Elementary errors
While in the vein of nostra culpa, opprobrium – an alkaline earth metal, we believe – has rained down on the Feedback inbox following an ad for New Scientist subscriptions in our 23 October issue. With the tagline “That’s elementary”, it promised the gift of some rather surprising chemistry this Christmas. The non-metal selenium became a lanthanide, while both the transition metal rhenium and the excitingly short-lived halogen tennessine were Nobel gases.
No prizes there. Apologies to all who felt pH-imbalanced, and for all those asking what we intend to do with those responsible: barium.
Got a story for Feedback?Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TTConsideration of items sent in the post will be delayed
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

A study of young heterosexual people on blind dates found that those who instantly felt sparks developed synchronised patterns of heart rates and palm sweating

Humans

1 November 2021

By Alice Klein

During a successful date, people’s heart rates synchroniseShutterstock/Dragon Images
When people feel instant chemistry with each other on a first date, their hearts start to beat in tune, a new study shows.
We often think we know what we are looking for in a partner, but research shows that the people we actually end up falling for often don’t match our ideal preferences.
“While someone may seem a perfect match on Tinder, we may feel nothing when we meet the person in real life,” says Eliska Prochazkova at Leiden University in the Netherlands. This may be because attraction isn’t simply based on what someone “looks like on paper”, but also on a gut feeling we get when we are with them, she says.Advertisement
To study what happens at a physiological level when people instantly spark on a first date, Prochazkova and her colleagues set up “dating cabins” at three festivals – one for music, one for arts and one for science – in the Netherlands.
They invited 142 single heterosexual males and females aged 18 to 38 to go on 4-minute blind dates in these cabins. The participants wore eye-tracking glasses, heart rate monitors and devices for monitoring the sweatiness of their palms.
Some pairs reported becoming more attracted to each other as their dates progressed, while others failed to click. Of all the pairs that were matched up, 17 per cent expressed a mutual wish to go on another date.

The pairs that wanted to see each other again and rated each other as attractive tended to be those who developed physiological synchrony. Their heart rates began to speed up and slow down at the same time and their palm sweatiness increased and decreased in tandem.
It was common for pairs to also mirror each other’s smiles, laughs, head nods and hand gestures, but this type of synchrony didn’t predict mutual attraction.
The results largely replicate those that the team found in an earlier version of the study, which they posted to a preprint server in 2019.
The mechanism underlying physiological synchrony is still unclear, but it is possible that when you meet someone you really like, you unconsciously pay attention to their micro-expressions, such as pupil dilation, eye blinking or blushing, says Prochazkova. “Although you do not consciously register these subtle changes, your brain and body unconsciously process these micro-expressions, which causes your heart rate and skin conductance to sync with the partner.”
Physiological synchrony has also been observed between mothers and their babies while they are playing together, suggesting it may help to strengthen social bonds more generally, says Prochazkova.
Although the new study shows what happens at a deeper biological level when two people feel mutual attraction, we still need more research to answer why we fall for the people we do, says Prochazkova. “What sparks this feeling between people remains one of the unsolved mysteries of science.”
Journal reference: Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01197-3

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Two complete statues of a man and a woman, along with other Roman objects, were uncovered by archaeologists working on the planned route of the UK’s HS2 high-speed railway

Humans

28 October 2021

By New Scientist
and Press Association

One of the Roman statues unearthed at the site of St Mary’s Church in Stoke Mandeville, UKPA Media
Archaeologists digging on the planned route of the UK’s HS2 high-speed railway have uncovered an “astounding” set of Roman statues. The discovery was made at the site where St. Mary’s, a medieval church in Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire, once stood.
Two complete statues of what appear to be a man and a woman were found, plus the head of a child. A hexagonal glass Roman jug was also uncovered with large pieces still intact, despite having been in the ground for what is thought to be more than 1000 years. A vessel on display in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is the only known comparable item.
Rachel Wood, lead archaeologist for HS2 contractor Fusion JV, told the Press Association news agency: “They’re hugely significant because they’re really rare finds in the UK. To find one stone head or one set of shoulders would be really astonishing, but we have two complete heads and shoulders as well as a third head as well.”Advertisement

“They’re even more significant to us archaeologically because they’ve actually helped change our understanding of the site here before the medieval church was built,” she said.
The discoveries at old St Mary’s Church have been sent to a laboratory for specialist cleaning and analysis. “They are so significant and so remarkable that we would certainly hope that they will end up on display for the local community to see,” said Wood.
Experts believe the location was used as a Roman mausoleum before the Norman church was built. Around 3000 bodies have been removed from the church and will be reburied at a new site.
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By Michael Marshall

Artist’s rendition of Homo bodoensis, a new species of human ancestor that lived in AfricaEttore Mazza
A new species of extinct human has been named: Homo bodoensis. The species hasn’t been identified based on new fossils, but on re-examination of old ones. Why do researchers think there is another species of human? Here’s what you need to know.
Who was Homo bodoensis?
Homo bodoensis is the proposed name for fossils of a group of hominins that lived in Africa during a period commonly known as the Middle Pleistocene, but now technically called the Chibanian, between 770,000 and 126,000 years ago. The species has been described by Mirjana Roksandic at the University of Winnipeg in Canada and her colleagues. It is named for the Bodo cranium, which was found in 1976 at Bodo D’ar in the Awash river valley of Ethiopia. The cranium is about 600,000 years old.Advertisement
The researchers argue that H. bodoensis lived widely throughout Africa for hundreds of thousands of years. They suggest that other specimens of this species include Kabwe 1 from Zambia, the Ndutu and Ngaloba skulls from Tanzania and the Saldanha cranium from Elandsfontein in South Africa. H. bodoensis may also have wandered into the eastern Mediterranean, they say.
What were all these fossils classified as before?
They were given various species designations, which were often used in contradictory ways. For example, depending on which studies you read, the Bodo cranium is variously called Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis. Both species are hard to pin down.
H. heidelbergensis is named for a 609,000-year-old jawbone found in Mauer, Germany. A number of similar bones are known from Europe and Africa during the Middle Pleistocene. But researchers differ on whether they are all H. heidelbergensis.
Meanwhile, H. rhodesiensis was first named to describe the Kabwe 1 skull. This bone was found in 1921 in what is now Zambia, but was then called Northern Rhodesia. At the time the area was controlled by the British Empire. The name Rhodesia originates with Cecil Rhodes, a British mining magnate and politician. Partly because of this association, Roksandic says, the name is rarely used.
What other hominins lived during the Middle Pleistocene?
In a word, lots. In Europe, the Neanderthals emerged during this period, while further east in Asia their sister group the Denisovans also evolved. In southern Africa there was Homo naledi. Finally, modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago – about halfway through the Middle Pleistocene.
This tangle of species has been dubbed “the muddle in the Middle Pleistocene”. The problem is sorting out which fossils belong to which species and thus how widespread and long-lived each species was. There is also the issue of figuring out which species gave rise to which.
For example, it used to be thought that H. heidelbergensis was the ancestor of Neanderthals. However, this cannot be true because genetics tells us that Neanderthals emerged early in the Middle Pleistocene, possibly even before the time of the oldest H. heidelbergensis fossils. There were Neanderthals living in northern Spain 430,000 years ago. In the past five years, many European specimens previously described as H. heidelbergensis have been reclassified as early Neanderthals.

Where does H. bodoensis fit into all of this?
Roksandic and her colleagues want to make sense of the muddle. They argue that all the African fossils previously called H. heidelbergensis or H. rhodesiensis should be thought of as one species, H. bodoensis. This species, they argue, eventually gave rise to ours.
Meanwhile, they say H. heidelbergensis fossils found in Europe can all be reclassified as early Neanderthals, and that fossils from the eastern Mediterranean that don’t quite fit any of the species could represent interbreeding.
The team chose H. bodoensis so that these African hominins would “finally” have an African name, says Roksandic.
Does everyone agree we need a new species name?
It’s not necessary, says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London.
Stringer does agree that H. heidelbergensis has been used too loosely. “I’m partly to blame for this wide usage of heidelbergensis,” he says apologetically. He thinks it should now be confined to the original Mauer jawbone and some other European fossils, such as the BH-1 jawbone from Mala Balanica cave in Serbia.
As for the African remains, Stringer is happy to use H. rhodesiensis. He argues it was named for the country in which it was found, not for Cecil Rhodes himself, and therefore doesn’t honour him. Furthermore, the rules set out by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature state that established names have priority – so because H. rhodesiensis has already been formally named, it should be used unless the original description was wrong.
Alternatively, if H. rhodesiensis is deemed unsuitable because of its imperial connotations, Stringer says there are pre-existing alternatives. For example, the Saldanha cranium – one of the specimens Roksandic’s team placed in H. bodoensis – was dubbed Homo saldanensis by Matthew Drennan in the 1950s. “Even if you got rid of rhodesiensis, there are other names that would apply rather than creating a new one,” says Stringer.
Stringer is also sceptical of the claim that the Bodo cranium is our direct ancestor. In 2019, his team published a study of the evolution of the human face, which found that the species the Bodo cranium belonged to had gone down a different evolutionary path to our species.
Journal reference: Evolutionary Anthropology, DOI: 10.1002/EVAN.21929
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Tatanka Iyotake, popularly known as Sitting Bull, is famed as a 19th century leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux people – and DNA strengthens the claim that he has living descendants

Humans

28 October 2021

By Alakananda Dasgupta

Sitting BullClassic Image/Alamy
A study that blends history with contemporary DNA technology has further strengthened the claim of a familial relationship between a living Native American and a historical figure: Tatanka Iyotake, popularly known as Sitting Bull.
Sitting Bull was a leader of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux people. In 1876, he was victorious against General Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment of the US Army in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.
Today, Ernie LaPointe, a Native American author and president of the Sitting Bull Family Foundation, is widely accepted as the great-grandson of Sitting Bull. Now, LaPointe has had his claim strengthened by genetics.Advertisement
LaPointe and his three sisters have previously used historical records, including birth and death certificates, to make a strong case of a familial relationship with Sitting Bull. In 2007, a lock of Sitting Bull’s hair that had been preserved at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC was repatriated to LaPointe and his sisters – and a small sample was sent to a team of geneticists led by Eske Willerslev at the University of Copenhagen to allow for DNA analysis.
The outcome of the analysis was important for LaPointe, who is named as a co-author on the new study. In order to secure the right to determine the fate of the final resting place of Sitting Bull, he needed to provide irrefutable evidence that Sitting Bull was indeed his forbear. Genetic evidence would serve this purpose.

By comparing DNA from Sitting Bull’s hair with DNA from LaPointe’s saliva, the new study does indeed irrefutably establish that LaPointe is the great-grandson of the legendary leader, says Willerslev.
Willerslev says the methods generally used to establish ancestry, such as analysis of the Y chromosome, weren’t possible in this case because the DNA in the hair sample was so degraded. But it was possible to use haplotype frequency to establish a relationship. A haplotype is a set of alleles inherited from one parent. Even unrelated individuals can share common haplotypes, so Willerslev’s team took saliva samples from non-related members of LaPointe’s community, to detect haplotypes that were specific to Sitting Bull’s bloodline.
“It’s fair to say that the more material you have… the more reliable your results will be,” says Willerslev, but he is still confident that the genetic evidence is incontrovertible.
Willerslev, who has been fascinated by Sitting Bull and his legacy since childhood, attended a traditional Lakota ceremony where Sitting Bull’s spirit was resurrected to obtain permission to use the reclaimed lock of hair for scientific scrutiny.
Oglala Lakota Nation President Kevin Killer, a Lakota Sioux Native American leader, explains that hair has a special significance in Native American culture and is considered sacred and the seat of the spirit.

Killer, who wasn’t involved in the study, welcomes the research, which lends support to the culture of oral history of Indigenous people. “To see [our oral history] backed up by science… is a step in proving how strong our oral history that dates back to 10,000 years [is].”
Kimberly TallBear-Dauphine at the University of Alberta in Canada, a Dakota Native American who wasn’t involved in the study, says that LaPointe’s descent from Sitting Bull was never really contested since Lakota people’s genealogies are very well documented both through paper documentation and oral history.
“I’m sure there are benefits for scientists in the use of this technology… [but] they are simply confirming genetically what we already knew through other kinds of evidence,” she says.
Putting the study in perspective, she says: “It certainly doesn’t give Lakota people anything they didn’t already know in terms of Ernie’s relationship with Sitting Bull.”
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abh2013

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