Philippa Kaur

Your brain is exquisitely sensitive to your surroundings, tuning into external cues and distractions whether you like it or not. Understanding how this happens could change the way we work

Humans

11 August 2021

By Annie Murphy Paul

Objects we place in our workspace reinforce our sense of identityMelanie Acevedo/trunkarchive.com
IN THE summer of 2001, Sapna Cheryan was a new graduate interviewing for internships at tech firms in California’s Bay Area. At one company, she recalls, the workspace looked like a computer enthusiast’s basement hang-out, full of action figures and Nerf guns, with a soda-can model of the Golden Gate Bridge. To her, it seemed designed to promote an exclusive conception of the firm’s ideal employee. As a young woman of colour, she felt unwelcome, even alienated. She accepted a place at another company – one with a workspace that was bright and inviting.
Five years later, Cheryan’s next move was to Stanford University in California to start a PhD investigating how physical cues in our environment affect how we think and feel. She is among a growing number of psychologists and cognitive scientists whose research challenges the idea that the brain is like a computer. Computers are indifferent to their surroundings: a laptop works the same in a fluorescent-lit office or a leafy park. The same isn’t true of the human brain. In fact, Cheryan and others have found its performance to be exquisitely sensitive to the context in which it operates.
This research seems especially relevant right now. During the pandemic, many of us were abruptly forced to work and learn in different surroundings, and the effect of place on cognition came into sharp focus. As some of us return to offices and schools, we have an opportunity to reimagine these spaces in accordance with what researchers have … More

Michelle Durbano
THE Tokyo Olympics have brought some of the fastest times ever seen on the athletics track. At an astonishing number of races, athletes are beating personal bests along with national, Olympic and world records. Elaine Thompson-Herah set a new Olympic record in the women’s 100 metres, breaking Florence Griffith Joyner’s record set over 33 years ago. World records were smashed in both the men’s and women’s 400 metres hurdles, by Karsten Warholm and Sydney McLaughlin respectively. In both these events, the silver medallist also ran faster than the previous world record.
Is this just an unusually good Olympics for record-breaking races or is something different going on? Part of the answer can be found by looking down at an athlete’s feet.
If you look closely, you might spot some new technology known as “super spikes” – and underfoot, there is a high-tech track.Advertisement
Recently, track spikes – shoes that have spikes on the underside to give runners grip – have seen a similar shift in the performance-enhancing technology that previously took over marathon racing shoes. Marathon “super shoes” first emerged in 2017 with Nike’s Vaporfly 4%, which gave athletes average energy savings of 4 per cent compared with competitors not wearing them. By now, almost every brand has a super shoe, and the new technology is being applied to track spikes.
Similar to their super shoe counterparts, super spikes combine soft, compliant and resilient foam with a stiff, curved carbon-fibre plate. The exact benefits of super spikes are difficult to quantify, but each component probably plays a role.

Traditionally, track spikes have tried to lessen the amount of midsole foam to reduce weight and energy absorption. However, new technology is lightweight and the foam is better at returning energy to the athlete than foams before it, giving back as much as 80 to 90 per cent. In this way, the foam acts as a spring with each step the athlete takes.
The role of the carbon-fibre plate is less clear. Research has shown that stiffening track spikes will reduce the amount of energy lost during toe flexion. This may increase the demands on the ankle. However, it has also been shown that if an athlete is strong enough to meet these increased demands, the plate allows them to get a more effective push off.
Another new technology contributing to athletes’ speed in Tokyo is the track. While it may look like a regular track, Mondo, the company behind it, spent three years researching and developing the surface specifically for Tokyo 2020. The track has been precisely tuned to allow shock absorption and energy return, playing a similar role to the foam in spikes.
Research on engineered track surfaces is as old as 1978, when it was found that a compliant, resilient track surface could improve times by as much as 2.9 per cent. Although the exact savings of the Tokyo track are unknown, its developers have said it could improve times by as much as 2 per cent compared with previous Olympic tracks.
While it is tempting to attribute the record-breaking times to the new spike and track technologies alone, other factors are at play too. The games being delayed by a year due to the covid-19 pandemic may actually have benefited some athletes, giving them more time to train. Other, more variable, factors, such as the weather, can affect how an athlete performs on any given day. And above all, we cannot ignore the effort and talent of the athletes competing in these races. It may just be that we have got a particularly talented crop this year.
Overall, the record-breaking times seen in Tokyo are likely to be a combination of all the above, including fast shoes, fast tracks and extremely talented athletes. ❚
Laura Healey is a manager of footwear innovation at Puma 

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By Jason Arunn Murugesu

School children in the UK tend to place male characters in the stories they writemartin-dm/Getty Images
Stories written by children are far more likely to feature male characters – regardless of whether the writer is a boy or a girl.
Yaling Hsiao at the University of Oxford and her colleagues analysed more than 100,000 short stories written by British children, aged 5 to 13, for a national writing competition organised by the BBC in 2019.
The researchers wanted to find out how a child’s gender influenced the gender of the characters … More

Discoveries of mass graves of Indigenous children in Canada have prompted new scrutiny of the residential school system – including the role physicians played in unethical experiments, says paediatrician Samir Shaheen-Hussain

Humans

4 August 2021

By Roxanne Khamsi

Unmarked graves were found in this cemetery near a former residential school outside Cranbrook, CanadaDave Chidley/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
IN RECENT months, more than 1300 unmarked graves of Indigenous children have been discovered in Canada. They were found at the sites of former residential schools, facilities authorised and funded by the Canadian government to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. Between the 1880s and 1990s, 150,000 children were taken from their families and placed in these schools, which were largely run by the Catholic church.
The recent discovery of these graves has sent shock waves around the world and confirmed what many Indigenous communities have long maintained – that children sent to these schools lived in dangerous and traumatic conditions, and many of them entered never to be seen again.
The legacy of prejudice that led to separating children from their parents continues to affect Indigenous communities in Canada today. Until recently, for example, when Indigenous children living in remote areas of Quebec needed emergency evacuation for medical care, their parents were barred from accompanying them. Samir Shaheen-Hussain, a paediatric emergency physician, was part of a successful campaign in 2018 to change that.
His participation in activism for Indigenous rights inspired him to look more closely at the residential school system. In his new book, Fighting for a Hand to Hold: Confronting medical colonialism against Indigenous children in Canada, Shaheen-Hussain examines the role that doctors and scientists working at the schools played in perpetuating the system and endangering children’s lives. He writes that not only did they let deadly diseases such as tuberculosis run … More

By Annalee Newitz

noEnde/Shutterstock
PICK up a pack of cigarettes and you will probably see a terrifying picture of cancer lesions with a stern warning about how smoking can kill. For decades in the US, this was called the surgeon general’s warning, and it was a reminder that cigarettes are so bad that the government’s top doctor was against them. Now, the current surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, has recommended that we apply similar warnings to social media misinformation.
Speaking in mid-July to CNN, Murthy said that social media networks played a “major role” in circulating misinformation about covid-19. He said that this “harms … More

By Davide Abbatescianni

Jake (Colin Farrell) is taught important life lessons by an android in After YangA24 FILMS
After Yang
Kogonada
Distribution pendingAdvertisement
MANY great works of art have depicted complex relationships between humans and androids, and how their interactions could shake up how we see society and its constructs. Take Steven Spielberg’s movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Isaac Asimov’s seminal novel I, Robot or even David Cage’s recent video game Detroit: Become Human. Now there is After Yang, from director Kogonada.
The movie, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last month, is based on Alexander Weinstein’s short story Saying Goodbye to Yang. It follows tea seller Jake (Colin Farrell) and his wife Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), who have bought an android named Yang (Justin H. Min) for their adopted daughter Mika (newcomer Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja).
Their hope is that Yang, who resembles a teenager, will help Mika reconnect with her roots in China. After a few days, the android stops working and Jake must find a way to reactivate him. Yang, however, is a refurbished “technosapien”, so the seller can only offer Jake a discount on his next purchase or to destroy Yang for a fee.
Mika has already developed a connection with the android and Jake doesn’t want to disappoint her. Through different repair attempts and an encounter with a technosapiens museum curator, Cleo (Sarita Choudhury), Jake delves into his own past as well as Yang’s. In the process, he starts to question the way he sees organic and synthetic life, gradually discovering that Yang is capable, like “real” humans, of loving, remembering and appreciating the taste of a good cup of tea.
Thanks to the elegant production design, the future depicted by Kogonada is a visual feast, loosely echoing the world evoked in Spike Jonze’s Her. Here, advanced technology and environmental awareness seem to coexist within a heavily urbanised, multicultural society. It is a place where androids and humans can live together peacefully, or at least tolerate each other’s presence.
Throughout the film, Kogonada builds a strong bond between the family and Yang. Yes, Yang is a machine programmed to feel and express emotions, but what makes him human (or at least “organic”) are his memories, which let him develop an identity and learn from other people’s emotions and experiences.
Yang’s life with Jake’s family is meaningful: his presence and (spoiler alert) subsequent demise force the family to go through an unexpected crisis, but also help them heal deeper wounds, with Jake and Kyra coming to realise that they are the only ones who can really be in charge of Mika’s future and how she reconnects to her Chinese roots.
The cast – Farrell and Turner-Smith, in particular – deliver understated performances, which suit the intimate atmosphere of this tale. Skilfully combining elements of family drama and science fiction with elegant tributes to Japanese director YasujirŌ Ozu, Kogonada creates a compelling, quasi-philosophical piece about the mystery of the soul. The movie could have ended before the final exchange between Jake and Mika, but never mind, it’s still enchanting.
If you are hungry for similar fare, try Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent novel Klara and the Sun, a darker world where children are genetically engineered to achieve academically and are homeschooled by solar-powered AIs.

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By Clare Wilson

In How to Mars, the Red Planet is so boring that TV ratings have tankedgorodenkoff/Getty Images
How to Mars
David Ebenbach
Tachyon PublicationsAdvertisement

IN 2012, a Dutch group announced a novel plan for financing the literally astronomical costs of setting up a base on Mars: the firm would sell the TV rights for the selection and training of the would-be astronauts and the colonisation process too.
While there was massive public interest and more than 4000 people worldwide applied to be part of what was admitted to be a one-way mission, the company involved, Mars One Ventures, seemed out of its depth and went bankrupt in 2019. Now the idea lives on in fiction, in the form of How to Mars, the debut sci-fi novel from David Ebenbach.
The book explores with both humour and pathos the consequences of humanity leaving the challenging task of extraterrestrial colonisation to a TV company focused on ratings and sponsorship opportunities. The pitfalls are obvious from the start. During the selection process, the firm, Destination Mars!, seems less interested in finding people with the “right stuff” than in creating a telegenic melting pot.
Scandinavian Stefan, who speaks almost accentless English, is secretly told to “sound more Danish”, leaving him suspicious of the accents of his competitors. During the training programme in an Australian desert, another applicant is ejected for making the mistake of “breaking the fourth wall”, or speaking to the camera.
“The Mars settlers are in a vulnerable position: their survival depends on the goodwill of a TV company”
As the book opens, the six scientists at the colony are two years into their mission and all is not well. The crew members have become bored – of each other, the monotonous food and the never-changing scenery.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, viewers are bored too, which means the team suffers the indignity of the show being cancelled for poor ratings. The TV company has no incentive to move to Stage Two: sending out the next batch of colonists and terraforming Mars. The crew’s handlers on Earth have been suspiciously quiet about that side of things for a while.
The settlers are in a vulnerable position: their survival depends on the goodwill of a company on which they are now just a financial drain. When they disagree about something with a handler, she sets them straight: “Do you realize that you don’t even get to eat unless we send you food?”
Fortunately for the story, the colonists’ lives soon take a more interesting turn, bringing fresh challenges as well as the return of TV viewers.
The humour has shades of Douglas Adams, whose The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series excelled at satirising the frustrations of ordinary people battling faceless bureaucracy. In Ebenbach’s novel, Destination Mars! saddles the colonists with towels that aren’t absorbent because they bear enormous company logos.
But on the whole, How to Mars is a more serious read than Hitchhiker’s, exploring themes such as bereavement and mental illness. One crew member’s turmoil in particular is portrayed with convincing realism.
Indeed, a genuine fear for Earth’s real-life space agencies is that future missions to Mars may be jeopardised by the astronauts coming to hate each other. This has been investigated in mock missions, where crews are isolated for months in sealed habitats.
So far, no space agencies have turned any such projects into reality TV. If How to Mars is any guide, let’s hope they never do.

Clare also recommends…
Book series
Red Dwarf
Grant Naylor
If funny sci-fi is your thing, try the Red Dwarf series by “Grant Naylor” – actually jointly written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, the two scriptwriters of the TV series of the same name.
Film
Galaxy Quest
Dean Parisot
This Star Trek spoof didn’t make a big splash on its release, but now has a cult following.

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By Layal Liverpool

Systemic inequalities mean Black people often face worse health outcomesER Productions Limited/Getty Images
Inflamed: Deep medicine and the anatomy of injustice
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
Allen LaneAdvertisement

THE covid-19 pandemic exposed stark inequalities globally, with socially and economically disadvantaged groups facing higher than average risks of becoming seriously ill and dying.
“Not all patients were equal,” write Rupa Marya and Raj Patel in their new book, Inflamed. The authors, both academics and activists, write: “[In the US,] Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) were over-represented, their bodies subject to inflammation of all kinds, long before the SARS-CoV-2 virus ever settled into their lungs. Not only lack of access to health care, but systemic social and economic disenfranchisement rendered their bodies most susceptible to Covid when it hit.”
Inflammation is the body’s response to infection or damage. Immune cells spring into action and a flurry of chemicals are released to promote repair and recovery – for instance, by destroying invading microbes or healing a wound. Once healing is complete and balance restored, inflammation should subside.
But sometimes it persists, transforming the body’s healing mechanism into what the authors describe as “a smoldering fire that creates ongoing harm”. For doctors to truly identify and treat the underlying causes of ill health, the two argue, they must begin by understanding how systemic racism and inequality contribute to this type of persistent, harmful inflammation in people’s bodies.
Inflamed delves into a growing body of research examining how inequality drives health disparities. For instance, Black people in the US are more likely to earn less and have more debt compared with white people, contributing to chronic stress. They are also more likely to be exposed to environmental health hazards, such as lead in drinking water, and to live in areas with limited access to affordable, healthy food options, making it difficult to maintain a healthy diet.
“High mortality rates in Black infants are halved when they are cared for by Black physicians”
All these factors, driven by systemic racism, combine “to create a potent pro-inflammatory threat”, write Marya and Patel. They add that the unequal distribution of these triggers of inflammation may explain why Black people have the highest rates of cardiovascular disease in the US.
Daily discrimination damages people’s health too, argue Marya and Patel. For instance, a 2018 US study found that Black men who reported directly experiencing unfair treatment by police, or hearing stories about it, had on average shorter telomeres – caps of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes, and that shorten each time a cell divides – compared with Black and white men who didn’t report experiencing this trauma. “Racism is a cognitive load that is experienced throughout the body,” write the authors.
Doctors also contribute, they argue. In the US, Black newborn babies die at more than twice the rate of white newborns. Research suggests this mortality rate is halved when Black infants are cared for by Black physicians. Meanwhile, race-based medical practices, such as the use of an adjustment for Black race in equations used in many countries to estimate people’s kidney function, also contribute to health disparities.
Doctors need to be more aware of how someone’s environment and life experiences contribute to disease, say the authors. Even something as simple as air quality differs significantly depending on the environment, they say, with disparities within countries and between them. Most deaths linked to air pollution occur in low and middle-income countries.
Inflamed takes the reader on a journey deep inside the human body, travelling through the immune, circulatory, digestive, respiratory, reproductive, endocrine and nervous systems. In doing so, it reveals how external inequalities affect these systems and cause serious harm.

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