Philippa Kaur

By Karina Shah

Some students struggle with morning lecturesBarry Lewis/Alamy
University students tend to get lower grades if their classes and lectures begin early in the morning.
Attending classes and sleeping well are both associated with increased engagement and performance at university – but a course with lectures scheduled early in the morning might compromise students’ ability to do both.
To investigate, Joshua Gooley at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore and his colleagues analysed the grades of 27,281 undergraduates enrolled at the National University of Singapore. The students were attending classes between 2018 and 2020, … More

Josie Ford
A high bar
Breaking news in the world of post. Raffi Katz writes perplexed at the UK Royal Mail’s announcement that it will be withdrawing all parcel products that “do not carry a 2D barcoded label”. Further mystifying those who assumed that labels were by their nature 2D, it goes on to say that this includes not only unbarcoded parcels, but also “1D barcoded product variants… (that use the multi-peel flash labels)”.
We can imagine the 1D labels are a bit fiddly to work with, so it is probably not before time. But of course, it is barcodes with bars that are, to a first approximation, 1D that are to be done away with. A 2D barcode is a blobby affair akin to a QR code that can be read in two directions. A barcode without bars, then. That this is now called a 2D barcode strikes Feedback as a prime example of the human tendency, noted by researchers recently, of finding fixes by adding complexity, rather than taking it away (17 April, p 19).
More examples of such linguistic redundancy through technological progress gratefully received. Meanwhile, Raffi notes that the Royal Mail doesn’t mention any timescale for the change, this presumably being a dimension or three more than they are used to working in.Advertisement
Head in the clouds
“They said money doesn’t grow on trees. We’re here to tell you, THEY were wrong.” So begins an email sent to Jeff Hecht, introducing what its subject line claims to be the “First EVER game to grow digital weed NFTs + earn crypto — influencer and celeb backed”.
“What if, by playing a game akin to Farmville and Roblox, users could use the power of Cannabis to build virtual farms, grow weed and make money?”, it asks. What if, indeed. Having confronted the uniquely self-important confluence of the cryptocurrency and art worlds a few weeks ago (1 May), we now find ourselves forced to consider this new fusion, “created by industry veterans in the Blockchain and Cannabis space, inspired by the future where users can all live, play, and make a living in the metaverse”.
At least the question of what they are smoking answers itself. But does virtual weed have the same effect? Possibly in the metaverse. All in all, our understanding of what this amounts to is a little hazy. But we are unpersuaded that it equates to a proof that THEY were wrong about the money and trees thing. Ah well, at least when the bubble bursts, it will help to be high.
Unforeseen circs
In evidence that reality sometimes doesn’t shy away from validating the best — that is, oldest — jokes, word comes from New South Wales that, having been postponed last year due to the south coast fires, Braidwood’s Good Earth Psychic Fair has been cancelled this year, apparently due to lack of interest. Thanks to Ken McLeod for that one.
A great fall
Dear readers, you rightly demand that every element of New Scientist’s output should be subject to the highest standards of accuracy and rigour. So we are grateful — truly grateful — to the many of you who wrote in querying our cartoonist Tom Gauld’s formula for the difficulty of putting Humpty Dumpty together again (22 May, p 55).
This was D = G/(x–y), where G is the greatness of the fall, x the number of king’s men and ythe number of king’s horses. The literary purists among you pointed out that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men who couldn’t put Humpty together again were involved in the rescue effort, so surely the denominator should be (x+y). Others accepted the equation’s implication that the presence of horses would probably hinder the rescue effort, but critiqued that the difficulty tends to infinity in the likely condition x = y, where each of the king’s men has exactly one horse.
Confused, perplexed and surrounded by pieces of paper covered in scribbled-out graphs and equations, we think this might be just the point, given that Humpty Dumpty remained, in the end, scrambled. But we are tempted to give credence to the behavioural science approach championed by Steve Powell and Helen Percy. Too many cooks spoil the broth, after all: perhaps “the general shape of this formula should be for the difficulty to decrease rapidly as the number of men increases from one to some optimum number and thereafter to increase slowly as more men are involved”.
We recall C. Northcote Parkinson’s contention — he of Parkinson’s law fame, that work expands to fill the time available for its completion — that more than about 20 people working on a single task would never agree or achieve anything, and subsequent academic work that backs this up. How Tom’s equation might adequately reflect that is an exercise left for the reader. To quote another pair of great humourists, do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.
Friendly wave
A special shout-out to Joseph Thomas at the International and Alumni Relations Office at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras for writing in on that last topic. This is purely because Joseph says he has been angling for a mention ever since starting to read New Scientist as a junior researcher in 1982. A request we can’t Chennai. Ahem.
Got a story for Feedback?Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES Consideration of items sent in the post will be delayed More

By Vijaysree Venkatraman

‘Drinking together may help make us more creativeAlbum/Alamy
Drunk: How we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way to civilization
Edward Slingerland
Little, Brown SparkAdvertisement

SOME years ago, when author Edward Slingerland gave a talk at a Google campus, his hosts ushered him into an impressive room. This is where coders pop in for liquid inspiration when they run into a creative wall, they told him. It wasn’t a place to get drunk alone.
In his engrossing book, Drunk, Slingerland writes that such spaces, which allow for both face-to-face communication and easy access to alcohol, can act as incubators for collective creativity. The boost that alcohol provides to individual creativity, he emphasises, is enhanced when people get drunk in groups.
For millennia, people have used alcohol and other mind-altering substances to get high. Some archaeologists even suggest that the first farmers were driven by a desire for beer, not bread.
If intoxicants were merely hijacking pleasure centres in the brain by triggering the release of “reward” chemicals, or if they were once adaptive but are vices now, then evolution would have put the kibosh on our taste for these chemicals, says the author. So, what is going on?
Slingerland, a philosopher at the University of British Columbia in Canada, has a novel thesis, arguing that by causing humans “to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal… intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups”. In short, without them, civilisation might not have been possible.
This may seem an audacious claim, but Slingerland draws on history, anthropology, cognitive science, social psychology, genetics and literature, including alcohol-fuelled classical poetry, for evidence. He is an entertaining writer, synthesising a wide array of studies to make a convincing case.
Without a science-based understanding of intoxicants, we cannot decide what role they can and should play, he stresses. In small doses, alcohol can make us happy and sociable. But still, consuming any amount of intoxicant can seem stupid, he concedes, because the chemical targets the prefrontal cortex. This late-maturing brain region is the seat of abstract reasoning, which also governs our behaviour and ability to remain on task. Research suggests small children are very creative because their prefrontal cortex is barely developed.
“A childlike state of mind in an adult is key to cultural innovation – intoxicants allow us to access that state”
A childlike state of mind in an adult is key to cultural innovation, argues the author. Intoxicants provide an efficient route to that state by temporarily taking the prefrontal cortex offline, he says.
Slingerland cites research using the US prohibition movement to test the idea that the communal consumption of alcohol can drive innovation. Prohibition has a long history, with local bans dating to the early 1800s. Using state-level imposition of alcohol prohibition as a starting point, researchers compared counties that had been “dry” for a long time to counties that had been “wet,” but which were suddenly forced to close their communal drinking venues. State-wide bans saw a 15 per cent drop in the number of new patents annually in previously wet counties compared with counties with existing bans.
The last chapter looks at alternatives to alcohol, which don’t produce hangovers, liver damage or risk of addiction. In some centres of innovation, he finds microdoses of purified psychedelics becoming popular.
After exploring the stress-busting, trust-building, creativity-boosting, pleasure-inducing aspects of alcohol, Slingerland dwells on its darker side. From drink-driving to violence, he finds there are many kinks to be ironed out before we can use alcohol as a force for good. That, I imagine, will take some doing. This heady book is, ultimately, an ode to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, and is best savoured as a fresh take on a contentious topic.
Vijaysree Venkatraman is a science journalist based in Boston

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Peter H. Stranks/Netflix
Watch
Awake, Netflix’s latest high-concept sci-fi thriller, stars Gina Rodriguez as a former soldier whose daughter may be able to cure a world that, robbed of its ability to sleep, is steadily losing its mind. From 9 June.
Ryoji Ikeda, test pattern, ˝jack Hems.180 The Strand, 2021
Visit
Ryoji Ikeda, former DJ turned leading sonic-visual artist, comes to London, filling the labyrinthine 180 The Strand with dynamic digital artworks – some premieres – that fox, fascinate and educate the senses.Advertisement

Read
Coming to Our Senses, by neurobiologist Susan Barry, explains how our actions shape and reshape our senses throughout our lives, delving into this deeply personal developmental process. The book is on sale from 8 June. More

By Jacob Aron

In The Colonists, you can build a super-efficient world with your robotsCodebyfire
I have been thinking a lot about supply chains recently. It is a marvel of science that more than 1.7 billion doses of the coronavirus vaccines have been administered globally as of 27 May, just a year and a half after the virus was first discovered, but it is also a triumph for logistics.
Getting jabs in arms has meant boosting manufacturing capacity for everything from fatty nanoparticles to glass vials, and we have had to ensure that everything is exactly where it needs to be at exactly the right time. It is amazing that we are managing it, though much more must be done to get vaccines to lower-income countries.
What does any of this have to do with video games? Well, this month, I have been playing a few games that boil down to managing supply chains, and that is more fun than it sounds.Advertisement
First, there is The Colonists, recently released on consoles. The premise is simple, if a bit daft: a bunch of self-3D-printing robots decide to escape humanity and set up their own colony. For some reason, they need food, water and shelter just as humans do, meaning you have to build a civilisation from scratch.
It starts simple – you land a colony ship that is capable of producing a few basic resources, then begin expanding. Make a logging outpost and the robots will start cutting down trees that you can use to build a mine to gather stone. As the game progresses, the supply chains become increasingly complex.
All the resources are distributed by robots following paths you lay out, which creates traffic jams if, like me, your town-planning skills aren’t up to scratch. Thankfully, there is a percentage meter at the top of the screen that tracks how efficiently your robots are transporting resources, compared with a theoretical perfect journey.
“Perhaps your apples are having to travel across half the map to reach a cider press, so you should move it”
You can drill down and see which routes are the worst performing – perhaps your apples are having to travel across half the map to reach a cider press, so you should move it closer to your orchard. If all of this sounds like work, I guess it kind of is – but it is fun, I promise!
The other game I have been playing that is along these lines is Subnautica, which has more of an exploration element to it. You crash-land on an alien world that is covered by a huge ocean, and must scavenge to survive. Starting out with a limited toolset, you mine ore, harvest plants and catch fish, but eventually you will be able to build underwater bases and submarines, allowing you to expand further into the creepy ocean depths. It has really sucked me in, and I am looking forward to checking out the recently released sequel, Subnautica: Below Zero.
There are now loads of games in this supply chain/factory simulation genre – the 2D Factorio is one of the most expansive, while the 3D Satisfactory splits the difference between Factorio and Subnautica by allowing you to wander around your ever-growing factory. One I haven’t yet played, but have my eye on, is Dyson Sphere Program, which gives you entire star systems to harvest in the service of building a Dyson sphere, a megastructure that can capture the energy of a star.
Of course, there is another reason I have been thinking about supply chains. The global computer chip shortage, caused in part by the knock-on effects of the pandemic, means PlayStation 5s are in short supply. Thankfully, after months of trying, I have finally managed to get my hands on one.

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By Sam Wong

Anutr Yossundara/Alamy
MOST foods are pretty challenging to eat when they are frozen, but ice cream manages to be soft and creamy when it has just come out of the freezer. It seems magical, but there are some easy ways to make delicious ice cream at home, without any special equipment.
A basic ice cream is made from cream, milk and plenty of sugar. The sugar doesn’t just provide sweetness, it lowers the freezing point of the cream. To solidify into ice, water molecules must arrange themselves into a framework. Sugar molecules are big and don’t fit into the framework very … More

Mindfulness is hailed as a treatment for a vast array of problems and the apps are now hugely popular. But do the claims about its benefits stack up? New Scientist investigates

Health

2 June 2021

By Jo Marchant

Stephan Schmitz
THERE is nothing wrong with thinking. It is what makes us human. Our ability to remember the past and imagine the future has made us the most successful species on the planet. But can we take it too far? Scientists and self-help gurus alike argue that spending too much time ruminating on our worries can make us stressed and miserable, while blinding us to the joys of what is happening right now. The cure, we are told, is to be more mindful. The practice of mindfulness – paying attention to our experience in a non-judgemental, accepting way – promises to help us escape the tyranny of our thoughts, boosting our mood, performance and health along the way.
At this point, there can’t be many people on the planet who haven’t tried mindfulness at least once. Secular versions of the practice were first developed from Buddhist roots in the 1970s, paving the way for scientific studies into its effects on the mind. Since it burst into the mainstream in the 1990s, high-profile research papers and media reports have claimed dramatic changes in brain structure and function, and benefits ranging from sharper attention to boosted mood, memory and a younger-looking brain.
Mindfulness is now prescribed by doctors, taught in schools, provided by employers and is readily available to download on our smartphones. It is no longer a fringe topic, but part of daily life. “Now, everyone’s got the app,” says a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California.
In recent years, though, some researchers have begun to urge caution, warning that the benefits of the practice have been hyped and potential harms ignored. It is … More