Philippa Kaur

From rewinding time in Prince of Persia to fighting alongside past selves in Super Time Force, there is lots to enjoy in pure time travel says Jacob Aron

Humans

7 April 2021

By Jacob Aron

In Prince of Persia, a magical dagger lets you rewind timeUbisoft
NEARLY all video games involve a form of time travel: if you die in a game, or even simply mess up, most will let you reload and have another go. But some games make a real feature of it, and this month I’m looking at my favourites.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and its sequels literally turn reloading your game into a feature. The titular prince has a magical dagger that allows you to rewind time for a few seconds, perfect for jumping sections that involve dodging traps with split-second timing. The dagger can only be used a few times before it has to be recharged, so you need to choose carefully when to use it.

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As time travel goes, simple rewinding is pretty mundane. The puzzle game Braid takes a more interesting approach. Each set of levels involves using some form of time manipulation to traverse a Super Mario-esque world. The first set follows the same rules as Prince of Persia, but subsequent levels introduce more complications, such as tying the passage of time to your movement in space, so that moving left rewinds time but moving right lets it flow forwards. You soon find yourself holding the past, present and future in your head at once.
One set of levels in Braid lets you record your actions, then rewind to replay the level in tandem with your recording – handy if, say, you need to be in two places at once to both activate a switch and go through a door.
Other titles have spun this concept into entire games. The jauntily titled The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom lets you create multiple recordings and even move them about with a whack of an umbrella.
“You jump between time periods, including a dinosaur-dominated deep past and a post-apocalyptic future”
Taking this even further is Super Time Force, a cartoonish shooter game that sees you rewinding time to fight alongside past selves and even stop them being killed, creating paradoxes that translate into power-ups. Speaking at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2014, Kenneth Yeung, one of Super Time Force‘s developers, explained they were inspired by science to solve some of the challenges that arise when you create such a game, though that might be a stretch.
For example, Yeung said they looked to quantum physics for the idea that objects can only interact with the world if they have an observer, allowing the developers to avoid creating enemies who are shot off-screen by one of your past selves – nothing to do with the quantum mechanics I understand!
Of course, developers can just ignore paradoxes and the like and focus on using time travel to create a great story. The best game of this type is Chrono Trigger, a Japanese role-playing game from 1995 with an amazing soundtrack. Initially set in a fairly typical fantasy world, you play as a band of misfits trying to stop the end of the world and jump between periods, including a dinosaur-dominated deep past and a post-apocalyptic future.
Chrono Trigger indulges in all the classic time-travel tropes. Early in the game, the party travels back 400 years, where one character is mistaken for her similar-looking ancestor, ultimately leading to her never being born. Later, you pick up a robot companion in the future, travel back to the past and leave it to spend centuries growing a forest before reuniting in the present – an example of the “going the long way round” time travel much beloved by Doctor Who.
As befits a game about time travel, I have enjoyed revisiting Chrono Trigger many times over the years, even if nothing ever really changes.
Braid
Number None
PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Android
Chrono Trigger
Square
SNES, PlayStation, Nintendo DS, PC, Android, iOS
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Ubisoft Montreal
PC, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox
Super Time Force
Capybara Games
PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4
The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom
The Odd Gentlemen
PC, Xbox 360

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Tasty and tender meat takes a good marinade. Testing theories behind them in the kitchen shows that it’s a trickier than it seems – but there is a clear winner, says Sam Wong

Humans

7 April 2021

By Sam Wong

Getty Images/iStockphoto
AS WELL as adding flavour, marinades are supposed to tenderise meat before it is cooked and make it more juicy. There is plausible scientific theory and evidence to back up these claims, but when I tested some marinades, they weren’t all successful.
Salt is common to most marinades, in the main to improve flavour. But it affects texture too, dissolving some muscle proteins. Once salt has diffused into the meat, it draws moisture in from the marinade and ensures less moisture is lost during cooking.
Some marinades include acids such as citrus juice. Acids cause muscle proteins to … More

By Matthew Sparkes

A test using Lego found people were likely to overlook simple solutionsNiels Quist/Alamy
Leonardo da Vinci said that a poet recognises perfection when there is nothing left to remove. In other words, less is more. But when solving problems, people tend to think the other way, adding elements rather than removing them.
Gabrielle Adams at the University of Virginia and colleagues asked people to complete several tasks where solutions involved either adding or subtracting parts. All of the experiments were designed so that subtraction would be one of the most efficient options.

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In one, around 200 people had to alter a Lego building to support a weight in order to gain a $1 bonus. The roof of the building was balancing precariously on just one support. A solution would be to add several bricks to better support the roof, which they were told would cost 10 cents each.
Another way of shoring up the structure was to simply remove one brick. Only 41 per cent of the control group opted to remove a brick, but when another group was prompted that removing bricks incurred no cost, this rose to 61 per cent. The team didn’t collect any demographic data for this part of the test.
In another task, around 300 people had to make a grid of 100 squares symmetrical by either adding or removing green tiles. When asked to take the test with no practice, only 49 per cent of people opted to remove tiles, but when given three practice runs before taking the test, this rose to 63 per cent. In this test, just over 40 per cent of participants were women.

During the research, the team spoke to a company with a newly appointed leader who asked staff for improvement suggestions. For every idea to remove a policy or rule, the leader received eight to add one.
In a pre-prepared Q&A, Adams said that balance bikes are a great example of the subtractive approach. “These are kids’ bikes without the pedals or the chain. Most people who have seen a toddler zipping down the street on a balance bike instantly recognise that subtractive invention as superior to the clunky additive change of training wheels.”
She said that this tendency to add complexity may cause us to miss potentially superior options and designs. “Addition may be culturally valued. It’s easier to demonstrate your contribution with an addition than a subtraction, and additions might get more praise.”
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03380-y

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By Michael Marshall

Ancient dogs had to make do on a plant-rich dietchris-mueller/Getty Images
Many early domestic dogs ate almost no meat. Dogs living around 3000 years ago in what is now Spain were instead fed cereals, such as millet, by their owners.
Although the diet may reflect the fact that meat was relatively scarce among human societies at the time, feeding dogs with cereals could have been advantageous, says Silvia Albizuri at the University of Barcelona in Spain. It may have been a way to ensure the dogs had plenty of energy for the strenuous work of herding and guarding livestock, … More

By Alexander McNamara
and Matt Hambly

In the city of Paris, 1794, French mathematician Sophie Germain swerved the École Polytechnique’s ban on women by assuming the identity of a male student who had left. She was able to conduct her studies by taking over his lecture notes and submitting work under his name, only to be rumbled when a professor demanded to meet this young scholar whose work had suddenly improved so dramatically. Luckily for her (and for mathematics), he was sufficiently enlightened to encourage her further, and in 1816 she became the first woman to win a prize from France’s Royal Academy of Sciences.
World Autism Awareness Day is recognised on 2 April
Megapress / Alamy
In 2007, to highlight the issues faced by autistic people around the world, the United Nations General Assembly signed a resolution that 2 April every year would be recognised as World Autism Awareness Day.
Autism is a condition that influences how people perceive the world, which can affect communication and understanding of social stimuli. However, understanding of autism has been skewed by an overly medical focus, says Anna Remington, head of the Centre for Research in Autism and Education at University College London, in a 2018 interview with New Scientist. Autism, says Remington, can bring extra abilities and the differences it produces could just represent diversity.

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Preserving snakes in brandy funded one scientist’s research

Naturalist and scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian was well into her 50s when she set sail for South America, spending two years studying wildlife in Suriname. To recoup her costs, she preserved crocodiles, iguanas and snakes in brandy to sell to rich collectors. She was a meticulous observer, and during her trip she recorded the habits and life cycles of insects, devising a classification system still admired today. She has six plants, nine butterflies and two beetles named after her.
Triassic dinosaurs weren’t very big
Mohamad Haghani / Alamy
The Triassic period started 252 million years ago after the Permian-Triassic extinction event, and in the 50 million years before the next extinction event, huge reptiles evolved and ruled the planet. One particularly fearsome species known as the rauisuchians stretched 9 metres from nose to tail with teeth like steak knives. However, the dinosaurs that existed at the time were much smaller creatures, many not much bigger than a cow. Though they were lacking in stature, some had some unusual features, like Tanystropheus, with a neck twice as long as its body.
We can maintain relationships with only around 150 friends
Clare Jackson / Alamy
Although the number of friends on your Facebook profile might be a long way north of 500, there is a natural upper limit to the number of people you can maintain a stable social relationship with. This is known as Dunbar’s number, and it plays out in many more situations than you might realise. For example, historically it was the average size of English villages, the ideal size for church parishes, and the size of the basic military unit, the company.
There is also a correlation between primate brain size and the size of their social groups. Extrapolate this relationship to the size of a human brain and guess where that leads us? Yes,  around 150 social contacts.
Mount Everest’s summit would be 2 kilometres underwater at the ocean’s deepest spot
Alexmumu/Getty Images
At its deepest point, in an area known as the Challenger Deep, the Mariana trench plunges to a depth of 10,984 metres (36,037 feet) below sea level. This is roughly the same distance below the waves that commercial airliners fly above them, and if Mount Everest were to start at the ocean’s lowest point, at 8849 metres it would still be more than 2000 metres below the surface.

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By Chris Stokel-Walker

Empty stadiums still lead to a home advantage for football teamsStu Forster/Getty Images
Football teams appear to retain an advantage over opponents when playing at home despite there being no fans in the stadium – puzzling those who thought the home crowd helped player performance.
In European football leagues, historical analysis of games shows the home team wins around 50 per cent of matches, with the chance of a draw or home defeat both standing at around 25 per cent. The home advantage has been theorised to be caused by the roar from the crowd geeing up the home players – and possibly intimidating the referee in a way that encourages them to give decisions advantageous to the home team.

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The closure of sports stadiums to fans during the coronavirus pandemic gave Daniel Memmert and his colleagues at the German Sport University Cologne the chance to test these ideas. They looked at data from 40,000 men’s football matches before and after the banning of fans from sports events, including more than 1000 held behind closed doors across Europe.
The researchers found that the referee’s bias towards the home team disappeared in the games played during lockdown, with fewer yellow and red cards given to away teams than in games played in front of fans. But the proportion of away teams winning matches played without fans increased just 7 percentage points across Europe, which Memmert says falls below the level of statistical significance.

“We think territorial behaviour could be one factor for the home advantage,” says Memmert, comparing it to children being more dominant and outgoing in their own homes, and more reserved when visiting a friend’s house.
There were differences by country. In the English Premier League, the likelihood of home teams winning, losing or drawing barely changed, while in the German Bundesliga, home teams were 15 percentage points more likely to lose during the pandemic.
The findings are “striking”, says Joey O’Brien at the University of Limerick, Ireland. But he cautions against using them to draw firm conclusions. “The data used was in the later stages of most of these leagues,” he says: some games at this stage may be less competitive because the teams they feature are safe from relegation, but also not challenging for the league’s top spots.
Yet as sport carries on behind closed doors, the availability of almost an entire season of data without spectators will firm up the hypotheses, says O’Brien.
Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248590

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Josie Ford
Lunar living
“Fancy buying a house on the Moon?”, an email that plops into Feedback’s inbox asks, continuing, before we have a chance to say, “Not particularly”, “It would cost you £234k a MONTH!”
“With Earth becoming increasingly populated and space technology advancing, it won’t be long before lunar living becomes the new normal,” this email, which appears to have come from a price comparison website, asserts. Yes, they were saying that back in ’69, too.
Mind you, recent revelations about lunar infrastructure developments such as kilometres-high concrete towers and fully operational sperm banks (20 March) might be enough to convince us this is an idea whose time has come.

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Alas, “Living on the moon is not as simple as life on Earth” – a statement Feedback would definitely describe as the under-variety. Building and transport costs, land licences and a property markup of 27.61 per cent, plus such boondoggles as solar panels, industrial-strength heaters and meteor-proof windows, mean we are looking at a surprisingly precise £44,525,536.42 for a first-time buy. Plus £1 billion for the nuclear-powered option.
What planet are they on, we can only ask. Although, considering the pre-pandemic prices of some of the real estate we see from our London penthouse stationery cupboard, the answer might well be Earth.
Lost in the post
In that pre-pandemic spirit of peering moodily into estate agents’ windows wondering who lives in a house like that, we find ourself moved to browse the Lunar Registry. This is the virtual shop window of the International Lunar Lands Authority, a body tasked – by itself, we presume – “with administering and allocating real property located on Luna, Earth’s Moon, and registering ownership claims to properties on the Moon on behalf of individuals and business entities around the world”.
Vast lava plains are very much in this season, we note, with land parcels on the hopefully named Mare Imbrium, or Sea of Rains, commanding an impressive $130.26 per acre at our time of looking (with a 35 per cent discount on 10 acres). Meanwhile, the going rate for an acre on the Sea of Tranquillity – the historic scene of the Apollo 11 landings – is just $52.61. Anticipation of just too many darn tourists blasting in and out and parking their moon buggies on the verges, we imagine.
Sad to read, though, that shipments of titles to lunar land outside the US may be subject to delays and restrictions owing to pandemic-related postal problems. Feedback considers this an unexcitingly 20th-century technology to rely on. Those in a hurry can download a PDF, but we are holding out for delivery on one of Elon Musk’s rockets, preferably one that doesn’t explode shortly after touchdown.
On second thoughts, we’ll wait for the post. Even this pandemic will be over before it’s time to assert our lunar land rights.
Coming out in the wash
We are as mystified as Ros Hancock by an ad for washing machine cleaning tablets that keeps popping up in her Facebook feed. “According to experts, the rate of bacteria counts exceeding the standard for household washing machines is as high as 81.3%,” it states.
We think it is trying to say that our assumption that washing machines are largely self-cleaning is invalid, perhaps by as much as 81.3 per cent. Whether we need a “triple Active Oxygen Decontamination Complex” to remove 99.9 per cent of bacteria and other pathogens lurking in the drum among our errant smalls is another matter. Another of our assumptions is that the remaining 0.1 per cent will soon reoccupy the vacated space.
Pray for a vaccine
Stuart Arnold was casting around for vaccination centres with available appointments near his home in south-west France when he happened upon one in Lourdes.
The tourism authorities might have wanted to keep that one quiet, he suggests – pilgrimages to the town for healing via other means being a thing. On the other hand, Stuart, if it works for you, how are we to tell whether it was the vaccine or St Bernadette?
Full of beans
Somehow it is always Feedback’s colleagues who are pressing the latest research on how caffeinated beverages improve productivity from their jittering hands into ours. We say “research”; we actually mean a PR puff dreamed up by someone with an interest in selling coffee and related products. An easy enough mistake to make in the early-morning brain fog.
As ever, though, it raises more questions than it answers. If an espresso boosts productivity by 80 per cent (an average of five standardised tasks done in an hour before drinking a shot, nine after), we are left wondering why latte drinkers could only manage two tasks in the same time frame before a caffeine infusion. Equally, we marvel at how the tip-top productivity of drinkers of Irish coffee was improved still further by a nip of the hard stuff. Well, it has been our saviour during lockdown.
Plain vanilla
Yes, that is Carolyn Beans you see writing about vanilla on page 46. Over and out.
Got a story for Feedback?
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

Humans need all the help they can get from their senses to stop them making mistakes with their varied diet. Let’s hear it for aroma and flavour that helped make them what they are, say Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez in their fascinating book Delicious

Humans

31 March 2021

By Simon Ings

Humans have long searched for complex flavours in our foodPublic Domain/The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Delicious: The evolution of flavor and how it made us human
Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez

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Princeton University Press
HOW do we know what to eat? Dolphins need only hunger and a mental image of what food looks like. Their taste receptors broke long ago and they no longer detect anything but salty flavours, thriving on hunger and satisfaction alone.
Omnivores and herbivores, on the other hand, have a more varied diet – and more chance of getting things badly wrong. They are therefore guided by much more highly developed senses of flavour and aroma.
In Delicious, evolutionary biologist Rob Dunn and anthropologist Monica Sanchez weave together what chefs know about the experience of food, what ecologists know about the needs of animals and what evolutionary biologists know about how our senses evolved. Together, this knowledge tells the story of how we have been led by our noses through evolutionary history, turning from chimp-like primate precursors to modern, dinner-obsessed Homo sapiens.
Much of the research described here dovetails neatly with work described in biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s 2009 book Catching Fire: How cooking made us human. Wrangham argued that releasing the calories bound up in raw food by cooking it led to a cognitive explosion in H. sapiens around 1.9 million years ago.
As Dunn and Sanchez rightly point out, Wrangham’s book wasn’t short of a speculation or two: there is, after all, no clear evidence of fire-making this far back. Still, they incline very much towards Wrangham’s hypothesis.
“The loss of a bone that helped separate our mouth from our nose had consequences for human olfaction”
There is no firm evidence of hominins fermenting food at this time either – indeed, it is hard to imagine what such evidence would even look like. Nonetheless, the authors believe it took place. They make a convincing, closely argued case for their rather surprising contention that “fermenting a mastodon, mammoth, or a horse so that it remains edible and is not deadly appears to be less challenging than making fire”.
“Flavor is our new hammer,” the authors admit, “and so we are probably whacking some shiny things here that aren’t nails.” It would be all too easy, out of a surfeit of enthusiasm, for them to distort their readers’ impressions of a new and exciting field, tracing the evolution of flavour.
Happily, Dunn and Sanchez are scrupulous in the way they present their evidence and arguments. As primates, our experience of smell and flavour is unusual, in that we experience retronasal aromas – the smells that rise up from our mouths into the backs of our noses. This is because we have lost a long bone, called the transverse lamina, that helps to separate the mouth from the nose.
The loss had important consequences for olfaction, enabling humans to search out tastes and aromas so complex that we have to associate them with memories in order to individually categorise them all.
The story of how H. sapiens developed such a sophisticated palate is also, of course, the story of how it contributed to the extinction of hundreds of the largest, most unusual animals on the planet. Delicious is a charming book, but it does have its melancholy side.
To take one dizzying example, the Clovis people – direct ancestors of roughly 80 per cent of all living Indigenous populations in North and South America – definitely ate mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, bison and giant horses. They may also have eaten Jefferson’s ground sloths, giant camels, dire wolves, short-faced bears, flat-headed peccaries, long-nosed peccaries, some tapir species, giant llamas, giant bison, stag moose, shrub-oxen and Harlan’s muskoxen.
“The Clovis menu,” say the authors, “if written on a chalkboard, would be a tally of a lost world.”

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