Philippa Kaur

Netflix
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Apollo 10 ½ sees Richard Linklater use the hallucinatory animation style of his A Scanner Darkly to tell the fantastical tale of a young space fan living in Houston, Texas, in 1969, when anything felt possible. Via Netflix.

John McKenzie/courtesy the artist and Ingleby Gallery, EdinburghAdvertisement
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Requiem features an urn full of dust gathered by artist Katie Paterson from meteorites, rocks, corals and other detritus. From 9 April, it will be the focal point of an exhibition at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh, UK, that explores our planet’s past and future.

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Power in the Wild, by behavioural ecologist Lee Alan Dugatkin, reveals the realpolitik behind the lives of sweet-looking creatures from meerkats to field mice, as he examines the eternal struggle for dominance in nature.

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By Katie Smith-Wong

Looking for one whale in the vast, deep ocean was never going to be easyCourtesy of Bleecker Street
The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
Joshua Zeman
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IN 1989, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts detected an unknown sonic presence at 52 hertz. It was initially thought to be from a submarine, but marine biologist William Watkins later determined that it was the sonar signature of a whale, which he gave the nickname “52”.
It is an unusually high frequency for whale vocalisations, and Watkins was intrigued enough to search for 52 until his death in 2004. But despite picking up 52’s call every year, Watkins never found the mysterious whale.
In The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52, US film-maker Joshua Zeman picks up the search where Watkins left off, and sets out to find a whale that has since taken on almost mythical proportions.
Why 52 calls at this frequency is also a mystery – the whale’s species hasn’t been confirmed, and it is possible that it is the only one of its kind in the ocean. The one thing we do know is that 52 is almost certainly a he: male whales do the singing.
The reason for 52’s presumed loneliness has nothing to do with the fact that he has always been detected swimming alone. Instead, it is because the unique frequency of his call means that other whales can’t understand to respond. With 52’s unique call as the only lead, Zeman launches a seven-day search mission with bioacoustics specialist John Hildebrand and research biologist John Calambokidis.
They begin in the waters off California, at the Port of Los Angeles – the busiest container port in the western hemisphere. Their initial hopes aren’t high: the Pacific Ocean is deep and wide and the chances of finding 52 seem roughly the same as those of 52 finding a mate.
Zeman’s documentary has a strong sense of exploration and ambition: he believes he can locate 52, who has become the Moby Dick to Zeman’s Ahab. Although there is an underlying sense of excitement as to whether 52 can finally be found, there is a human aspect to the search and a personal story behind Zeman’s fascination.
In our increasingly connected world where contact and interaction is only the click of a button away, the fact that so many people still report feeling lonely makes it easy to identify with 52’s situation. There is something deeply affecting about a creature as intelligent and social as we know whales to be, swimming the vast ocean, year after year, never having any proper contact with another of its kind.
This, combined with a growing awareness of the harm that human activity has caused whales, has made 52 something of a focal point for whale conservation, with articles, poems and even a song by the K-pop band BTS about his plight.
Yet this is a story that goes deeper than just one whale. Whale populations are still under threat from hunting, pollution, climate change and collisions with ships. Even if they avoid these perils, the noise of shipping can drown out a whale’s calls, regardless of the frequency it may use. Arguably, Zeman’s quest says more about our collective guilt about this state of affairs than it does about our desire to solve the scientific mysteries surrounding 52.
Finding him is never a foregone conclusion. In fact, as 52 has never been seen or even definitively proven to exist, some within the scientific community are sceptical there is even a 52 to find.
Zeman’s attempt to create a sense of thrill and adventure as he embarks on his quest is hit-and-miss. Exciting footage of the search is punctuated with evocative images of the oceans, which makes the documentary’s tone feel inconsistent. At times, there isn’t enough to elevate the film above being a group of people spending time in a boat. At least not until the closing moments, when it appears that the team’s efforts may not have been in vain.
Overall, The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 offers a moving insight into a legendary whale and Zeman’s curiosity is infectious. Frustratingly, though, there isn’t enough discussion and explanation of the science behind whale communication, which leaves viewers, much like Zeman, wondering if they might have missed something important along the way.

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By Elle Hunt

Through Luna the dairy cow, we see the reality of life lived on human termsMubi
Cow
Andrea Arnold
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MOST documentaries chronicle exceptional lives that anyone would be curious about, or highly ordinary ones that warrant a second look. Andrea Arnold’s new film does both, providing an immersive look into the world of a dairy cow.
Arnold is the celebrated director of projects as diverse as Red Road and Fish Tank, which explore working-class Britain; the Shia LaBeouf epic American Honey; a 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights; and episodes of Transparent and Big Little Lies. In Cow, her fifth feature and first documentary, Arnold turns her trademark unflinching gaze on a subject that is both familiar and entirely other: a cow named Luna on a cattle farm in the English countryside.
Six years in the making, the BAFTA-nominated Cow follows Luna in her day-to-day life, from grazing and mating to birthing and milking. It is about as immersive and visceral a depiction of a non-human being as one can imagine, with Arnold filming from Luna’s perspective as much as possible and using zero narration.
For many viewers, the first surprise may be the immediate, easy charisma of her subject: in an early scene, Luna holds the camera’s gaze, mooing insistently, in such a way that it leaves the audience in no doubt about her curiosity and appraising intelligence. Likewise, shots of her caring for her just-born calf and taking obvious pleasure from an open field suggest a multifaceted mind, which is portrayed clearly and without sentimentality.
For an essentially quiet film, sound is used to great effect in Cow. Mournful pop songs by Billie Eilish and others are piped into the milking shed, adding pathos to the scenes of Luna’s everyday life, while snatches of chatter from her largely faceless farmers lend them structure. The emotion we come to feel for Luna, our investment in her well-being, is organic and earned.
The only point where Arnold relaxes her commitment to realism is a late-night mating sequence, set to R&B pop music and with spliced-in fireworks, a moment that concludes with some post-coital cuddling. The surreal comedy of the scene excuses any charge of anthropomorphism, as does the sequence where Luna is being milked on Christmas morning by a farmer wearing a Santa hat, set to the sound of Fairytale of New York.
This is no hard-bitten slaughterhouse exposé: it is clear that Luna is well cared for, even loved. But the life of a dairy cow is, by definition, one that is punctured with sudden violence. Though Cow may not depict the industrial-scale horrors of animal production, Arnold doesn’t shy away from depicting the indignities and intrusions that feature in a dairy cow’s world. An early scene of calves being dehorned with a cauterising iron reportedly had critics at the Sundance film festival covering their eyes.
The end, when it comes, manages to be at once inevitable and shocking – the harshest possible awakening from the dreamlike state viewers have been lulled into. It encapsulates the film’s understated political point: that, from beginning to end, this is a life led entirely on humanity’s terms, for the production of milk and meat. Luna may not suffer more than is essential to the existence of a dairy cow, but is that a price we are willing to accept?
In honouring the sacrifice of one farm animal, Arnold quietly but insistently invokes the spectre of far more – many of which aren’t treated with the same dignity as Luna, even if we choose to remain ignorant of the details.
Empathetic and often unexpectedly moving, Cow may not instantly turn you vegan, as more aggressive accounts of animal production might – but you will never see its subject in the same way again. Equally, having gently led us to assume the bovine gaze, what may be most unsettling is how we see ourselves.

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The DNA of people who lived in Great Britain thousands of years ago has markers of natural selection at work – and the driving force seems to have been a shortage of vitamin D

Humans

29 March 2022

By Michael Marshall
An artist’s impression of a Bronze age settlementLennart Larsen/Nationalmuseet
Natural selection was at work on Bronze Age Britons, ancient DNA reveals. Within the past 4500 years, evolution has acted on genes involved in the production of vitamin D – which people living in Britain are sometimes short of due to a lack of sunlight for much of the year.
The genetic changes have had knock-on effects on other traits, from the ability of people todigest milk to their skin colour.
One of the ways evolutionary change can happen is through natural selection: … More

Stress-linked changes in the activity of genes may be why Black people in the US often have worse chronic pain than white people

Humans

28 March 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
An enzyme adding methyl groups to DNA in a process called methylationLAGUNA DESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Black people in the US have worse chronic pain than white people due in part to gene expression.
Chronic stress has previously been linked to racial discrimination, and can lead to changes in gene expression. Edwin Aroke at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and his colleagues collected blood samples from 98 people – half were Black and half were non-Hispanic white, and they had an average age of 45. Half the group had chronic lower back pain, … More

A mind-bending light and sound extravaganza is coming to a town near you, and it could help unravel the mysteries of the brain

Humans

23 March 2022

By Carissa Wong
Dreamachine’s light and sound show can produce intense hallucinations and a sense of calmBrenna Duncan
Dreamachine
Jennifer Crook
Unboxed FestivalAdvertisement
IN THE late 1950s, when altered states of consciousness were all the rage, the artist Brion Gysin invented a drug-free route to psychedelic euphoria. His Dreamachine – a spinning cylinder that shines flashing lights onto a viewer’s closed eyes – was intended as a shortcut to spiritual enlightenment for the masses.
Now, art producer Jennifer Crook has revisited Gysin’s invention as a sci-art multimedia experience. The aim is to produce a communal head trip that will not only expand visitors’ experience, but also probe the depths of human consciousness.
Crook got the idea for the project after having a transcendent experience while at a gig by electronic music artist Jon Hopkins. She went on to enlist Hopkins to provide the soundtrack to the updated Dreamachine, which will be touring the UK as part of the Unboxed Festival.
At the centre of the installation are vivid hallucinations created by the brain in response to specific sensory inputs. In the 1950s, the pioneering neuroscientist Grey Walter discovered that dreamlike hallucinations could be induced by lights flashing on closed eyelids at 8 to 12 hertz, the same frequency as the oscillations of “alpha” brainwaves when we are relaxed and wakeful with our eyes closed. Normally, when we open our eyes, these alpha waves are disrupted by visual inputs. Flashing lights at alpha wave frequencies on closed eyelids stimulates the optic nerve, but provides little visual information, and the brain responds by generating hallucinations.
Because of this, the Dreamachine can produce kaleidoscopic visions and a sense of calm. These hallucinations may also reveal a lot about the way the brain works. As part of the project, neuroscientists Anil Seth and David Schwartzman at the University of Sussex, UK, Dreamachine‘s light and sound show can produce intense hallucinations and a sense of calm are collecting the experiences of visitors, which they hope to use as a window into the workings of the brain. Seth is among the many scientists who believe that hallucinations are part of the way that our brains generate our conscious experience of the world.
One major question concerns perceptual diversity – how varied or similar our internal mental experiences may be. We know that we all see the world in different ways, but science can’t yet explain how and why. In an attempt to investigate this, an optional survey will ask participants to log their visual experiences using colour palettes, animations and shape selections.
Other questions will address the emotional aspects of the experience, which can be intense. Hopkins’s music alone, when played through 360-degree speakers around the audience, can give an eerie feeling of stepping out of time and into a state of being that usually comes with a meditative state.
As well as the physical exhibition, an online census will capture perceptual diversity from millions of people around the world, while a schools programme will be rolled out around the UK. Through activities and resources, children will be encouraged to ask questions about how they perceive the world and to explore how this differs from the experiences of others. The research team’s resident philosopher, Fiona Macpherson, says the goal is to show them how, in our differences, we are all connected.
This aim brings Dreamachine back to the ideals of its inventor, who hoped to give people the experience of being catapulted into a higher level of consciousness. Crook’s new vision is even more ambitious: to explore the depths of the human brain while realising the variation in our inner worlds and celebrating neurodiversity.
Dreamachine will tour London, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh from May to September. Sign up for free tickets at dreammachine.world.

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The End of Astronauts is nigh, say astronomer Martin Rees and science writer Donald Goldsmith. They argue that, given the vast distances and the dangers involved in space travel, it is robots, not humans, that will lead us to the stars.
Kojima Productions/IGDB
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Death Stranding, from game creator Hideo Kojima, gets a substantial makeover in this director’s cut edition, which launches on PCs from 30 March. You play as Sam Bridges, who is on a mission to reunite a shattered world.Advertisement

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Are Plants Intelligent? asks philosopher Stella Sandford in this online talk from the Linnean Society of London. In light of new evidence, should we rethink our anthropocentric view of intelligence? 30 March, 12.30pm BST.

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Physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili discusses the power of wonder, the importance of overcoming our biases and the biggest mysteries in fundamental physics

Humans

23 March 2022

By Richard Webb
Nabil Nezzar
IT SEEMS nobody spends quite as much time discussing the joys of science as Jim Al-Khalili. Whether with guests on his BBC radio programme, The Life Scientific, in the documentaries he presents or with the students he teaches and mentors at the University of Surrey, UK, he is on an insatiable quest to find out “why”. He told us where this all started, why scientists need to question their own biases and about the importance of never growing up.
Richard Webb: To turn the tables a bit, what made you take up a life scientific?
Jim Al-Khalili: I guess my passion for science, well, physics, began in my early teens, when I was obsessed with football and discovering girls and thinking I’d one day play for my beloved Leeds United, who were a good team back then in the mid-1970s. But I suddenly fell in love with physics. It was like puzzle solving; it was common sense. With chemistry and biology, I had to remember stuff, and I’m terrible at remembering stuff. Physics also dealt with the big questions. Where does the universe come from? What does an atom look like? What’s inside a star? So from about the age of 13 or 14, I wanted to do physics. If I got to play for Leeds United, that would be nice, but I was going to be a physicist.
Your latest book is called The Joy of Science. Is that something you feel on a day-to-day basis?
It is, actually. Part of why I enjoy science communication is that I like doing the science. I like … More