Philippa Kaur

By James Urquhart

Dog food often contains grains – and may have done so for thousands of yearsJaromir Chalabala / Alamy Stock Photo
Dog diets often contain more starch than those of their carnivorous wolf ancestors, and an analysis of fossilised dog faeces helps explain how the animals made the dietary change. Long before their genomes adapted to their plant-rich chow, their gut microbiome gained a starch-digesting profile.
Due to their close association with humans, it is thought that dogs’ diets shifted to less meat and more carbohydrates when farming began – an idea that was supported by an archaeological analysis … More

By Jon O’Brien

Alma and Tom gradually become closer in this offbeat love storyChristine Fenzl
Film
I’m Your Man
Maria SchraderAdvertisement

CAN happiness flourish even when it is knowingly built on fabrication? Is perfection conducive to a healthy partnership? Can artificial and emotional intelligence truly coexist? Fresh from her Emmy-winning success with the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, Maria Schrader leaves such questions hanging in I’m Your Man, her fourth film.
Adapted from Emma Braslavsky’s short story Ich bin dein Mensch, this German-language tale stars Downton Abbey‘s Dan Stevens as Tom, the ideal life partner. He is a handsome sharp-dresser with blue eyes that could pierce a stone, a penchant for romantic gestures and a willingness to cater to every whim. He is also a humanoid robot.
Love in the time of algorithms has been explored in the Amazon anthology Soulmates and Netflix’s Osmosis and The One. However, the central coupling here is born out of necessity rather than a search for “the one”.
Academic Alma (Maren Eggert) has reluctantly agreed to house Tom in a three-week experiment, which will help finance her research. She is completely uninterested in sharing a bed, or even a conversation, with this apparent kindred spirit, created to make her happy. “Leaving me alone should be no problem at all,” she tells Tom, who can’t compute her disdain. “That’s what makes me happiest.”
I’m Your Man is a curiosity. You could call it a sci-fi rom, yet there is little if any sci-fi or, indeed, rom. The tech behind Tom comes into play just once when he briefly malfunctions, while the film’s Berlin setting is a near-future whose aesthetic is more soft pastels than dark dystopia.
Despite Tom’s best efforts to ignite a spark using the millions of data strands at his disposal, he is thwarted by a dismissive Alma at every turn. “Ninety-three per cent of German women dream of this,” he remarks, after running a candlelit bath, strewn with rose petals. “Guess which group I belong to,” comes the reply.
It is only when Tom tones down the programmed cliches and starts responding less, well, robotically that the iciness thaws. He senses the sadness behind Alma’s steely exterior, and his matter-of-fact, yet effective, probing renders their “couples counsellor” (Toni Erdmann‘s Sandra Hüller) obsolete. Before long, Alma surprises herself by defending Tom from a colleague with no sense of personal space.
If I’m Your Man had emerged from Hollywood, this would be the cue for wedding bells. But European arthouse tends to avoid wrapping things up neatly in a bow. Although she slowly succumbs to Tom’s attributes, both physical and mental, Alma always remains aware that she is being manipulated by his constant recalibration. Happily-ever-after never looks likely.
Still, the two stars ensure you remain invested in this relationship, wherever it leads. Eggert offsets Alma’s abrasiveness with a quiet vulnerability and compassion, particularly in the scenes with her cranky dad (Wolfgang Hübsch) who has dementia, which hint at her fear of ending up in a lonely state, too.
Meanwhile, Stevens is charm personified in a performance partly inspired by Cary Grant. His comic timing is exquisite, proving that his scene-stealing turn in last year’s Eurovision movie was no fluke.
Schrader has served up a new, if resolutely low-key, tragi-comic spin on the digital love story that combines depth, humour and, no matter how mechanical, heart.

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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

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 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