Philippa Kaur

New Scientist Future of Science Survey in association with

New Scientist, in association with IPSEN, wants to find out. Take part in our survey and help us learn how to inspire more young minds into careers in science and healthcare.

Health 8 March 2021The innovation of tomorrow will be driven by the new generation of young minds.  But what do young people really think about science?  What do they like about science, what do they dislike, and what would put them off a career in science or healthcare?
Help us find out.
We want you to answer if you are aged 16-21. If you have children aged 7 to 15 please would you fill out the survey with them. We will be publishing the results in a forthcoming issue of New Scientist.
The questionnaire takes up to 10 minutes to complete. The information you give will only be used in aggregate and your views will be completely confidential in accordance with the UK Market Research Society’s Code of Conduct.
You can complete the survey here.
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By Krista Charles
People in Finland in 1941
Roman Nerud/Alamy
The second world war left a major mark on the genetic composition of Finland, researchers have found, though the work may not have included minority ethnic groups.
Matti Pirinen at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and his colleagues looked at the genomes of around 18,500 people to study how the genetic composition of 10 populations across 12 geographic regions covering most of Finland changed between 1923 and 1987.

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“We can really see with an accuracy of one year how the genetic structure has changed in Finland during the last century,” says Pirinen.
The team found that urbanisation has caused some changes in the genetics of people in Finland. But the biggest impact, increasing the number of regions each individual could trace their ancestry to,  came after the forced movement of people from Finnish Karelia to the rest of the country in 1940, following a peace treaty with the Soviet Union during the second world war.

The researchers chose the genomes of 2741 individuals who were born and whose parents were born within the 12 regions to form the basis of the 10 populations they studied. This definition could skew the results, says Eran Elhaik at Lund University in Sweden.
“Identifying people who lived closely next to each other as the most homogeneous people raises the question of how these people became so homogeneous,” says Elhaik. “These are likely farmers who have married each other for a very long time. What makes them represent the ancestors of Finns better than any other people in Finland?”
The researchers say that their populations probably don’t cover all relevant sources of genetic ancestry, such as minority ethnic groups, because it is likely that only a small number of individuals from these groups were included in the study. Individual data was pseudonymised, meaning it isn’t possible to know for sure, say the researchers, and they note that the study shouldn’t be used to define who is Finnish, in a social, legal or cultural sense.
Elhaik says this uncertainty over minority ethnic groups limits what the study can tell us about the Finnish population as a whole. “Focusing on a small data set of 10 per cent of the population carves Finns’ image as genetically homogeneous people. What about the rest of the people who are of more mixed origins and are not well represented by the model? No population is an island,” he says. “This method is not applicable to mixed individuals, which represent a growing proportion of individuals in any society.”

Journal reference: PLoS Genetics, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1009347
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By Ibrahim Sawal
The bacteria that causes tuberculosis
Phanie/Alamy
Ancient DNA reveals that people of European ancestry have lost a gene linked to tuberculosis (TB) susceptibility over centuries.
TB is one of the world’s deadliest diseases and is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria. People with two copies of a genetic variant called P1104A are more likely to develop symptoms of TB after being infected with the bacteria.

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To trace the frequency of P1104A over time, Gaspard Kerner at the Pasteur Institute in France and his team analysed modern human DNA from around the world and compared it to more than 1000 samples of ancient DNA from Europeans from the past 10,000 years.
They found that the variant first appeared in ancient DNA in low numbers around 8500 years ago in Western Eurasia. Using simulations and demographic models to date the origins and movements of this variant, the team predicted it may have originated in the same region around 30,000 years ago, long before the existence of TB in Europe. “It may have appeared randomly, like when animals have mutations in their genome,” says Kerner.
It then spread across central Europe 5000 years ago, and reached its highest frequency 3000 years ago, with around 10 per cent of the population carrying P1104A.
Kerner says it was able to spread without affecting an individual’s susceptibility to TB during that time as many people would only have one copy of the variant.

The frequency of the variant drastically decreased 2000 years ago, around the time modern TB bacteria became common. This may be because it was under strong negative selection from TB, Kerner says, as increasing migration made people more likely to inherit two copies of the variant and therefore become more susceptible to TB.
“Individuals carrying this mutation may have died faster than other individuals,” he says. The spread of TB during this time may have been aided by human migrations increasing populations and bringing new bacteria and diseases to Europe.

In modern Europeans and Americans, the variant appears in low frequencies, but it is absent in African and Eastern Asians populations. Kerner says this is consistent with the findings P1104A emerged in Eurasia, and that other genes may be behind the prevalence of TB in Africa and Asia today.
“People still get sick from TB, both in Europe and elsewhere,” says Vegard Eldholm at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Around 10 per cent of those infected with the bacteria develop TB. “This might reflect a long history of co-evolution, and humans having adapted to contain the infection. But it takes time for evolution to purge the gene,” Eldholm says.
Journal reference: The American Journal of Human Genetics, 10.1016/j.ajhg.2021.02.009., DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2021.02.009.
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By Simon Ings
The symbol of the QAnon far-right conspiracy theory
Pacific Press/Lightrocket via Getty Images
You Are Here
Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner

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MIT Press
THIS is a book about pollution, not of the physical environment, but of our civic discourse. It concerns disinformation (false, misleading information deliberately spread), misinformation (false, misleading information inadvertently spread) and malinformation (information with a basis in reality spread specifically to cause harm).
Communications experts Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner finished their book just before the election that replaced Donald Trump with Joe Biden. That election and the seditious activities that prompted Trump’s second impeachment have clarified many of the issues the authors were at pains to explore. You Are Here: A field guide for navigating polarized speech, conspiracy theories, and our polluted media landscape is an invaluable guide to our problems around news, truth and fact.
The authors’ US-centric – but globally applicable – account of “fake news” begins with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Its deliberately silly name, cartoonish robes and the routines that accompanied all its activities, from rallies to lynchings, prefigured the “only joking” subcultures of Pepe the Frog and the like that dominate social media.
Next, their examination of the 1980s Satanic panics reveals much about conspiracy theories. They also unpick QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a secret cabal of cannibalistic, Satan-worshipping paedophiles plotted against Trump. This pulls together their points in a way that is more troubling for being so closely argued.
Polluted information is, they say, a public health emergency. By treating the information sphere as a threatened ecology, the authors push past factionalism to reveal how, when we use media, “the everyday actions of everyone else feed into and are reinforced by the worst actions of the worst actors”.

This is their most striking takeaway: the media landscape that enabled QAnon isn’t a machine out of alignment, or out of control, or somehow infected, but “a system that damages so much because it works so well”.
It is founded on principles that seem only laudable. Top of the list is the idea that to counter harms, we must call attention to them: “in other words, that light disinfects”. This is fine as long as light is hard to generate. But what happens when that light – the confluence of competing information sets, depicting competing realities – becomes blinding?
Take Google. The authors characterise it as an advertising platform that makes more money the more people use it. The deeper down the rabbit holes our searches go, the more Google and others earn, incentivising promulgators of conspiracy theories to produce content, creating “alternative media echo-systems”. When facts run out, create more. Media algorithms don’t care: they are designed to serve up as much as possible of what Phillips and Milner call pollution.
The authors bemoan the way memes, rumours and conspiracy theories have swallowed political discourse. They teeter on the edge of a more important truth: that our moral discourse has been swallowed too. You Are Here comes dangerously close to saying that social media has made whining cowards of us all. So what is to be done? The authors’ call for “foundational, systematic, top-to-bottom change” is mere floundering. It has taken the environmental movement decades to work out mechanisms to address the climate emergency. Nothing in You Are Here suggests the media emergency will be less intractable.

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Read
The Spike is computational neuroscientist Mark Humphries’s vivid tale of the epic 2.1-second journey taken by a single electrical impulse as it propagates through the billions of neurons of a human brain.
Hulu
Watch
Boss Level, a new film streaming on Hulu from 5 March, stars Frank Grillo, Naomi Watts and Mel Gibson in a not entirely serious sci-fi shoot-em-up involving a dastardly government project, time loops and a race to save tomorrow.

Read
Under the Blue, by debut novelist Oana Aristide, sees speculation about artificial intelligence collide with the story of an artist fleeing a global plague: a startling, intellectual, post-covid adventure.
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For All Mankind, the alternative space race story from Apple TV+, returns with US-Soviet relations at a new low and NASA under pressure to militarise the moon

Humans 3 March 2021
By Bethan Ackerley
Molly Cobb (played by Sonya Walger) faces some tough choices
Apple TV
For All Mankind
Created by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi

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Apple TV+
EARLY in the second season of For All Mankind, Ronald D. Moore’s counterfactual take on the space race, astronaut Molly Cobb is faced with an impossible decision: let a friend die on the lunar surface as a massive solar storm hits, or rescue him and risk getting a fatal dose of radiation. Viewers know Cobb has beaten tougher odds before, but as she is forced to choose, you fear that she is living in a world that no longer rewards heroics.
The show’s alternative history began with one key change: in this universe, the US was beaten to the moon by the Soviet Union in 1969. The rivalry between the nations grew and accelerated progress in space, with NASA sending women to the moon in the early 1970s and establishing a base, Jamestown, there in 1973.
After a slow start, the first season did a terrific job of conveying the importance of space travel, while killing off astronauts left and right to show what a grim endeavour it can be. All the same, despite the thrills, it felt a little soulless at times.
When the second series begins, after a jump to 1983, life on Earth doesn’t look too rosy. In its version of world events, Ronald Reagan became president earlier than he really did and superpower relations curdled, prompting yet more resources to be poured into space exploration. History fans should comb through the opening montage to catch all the ways this drama diverges from the real timeline: the Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the Iran hostage crisis among them.
“Politicking threatens to scupper plans for an astronaut and a cosmonaut to shake hands while in orbit”

In this version of the 1980s, the moon is just another front of the cold war. Up to 30 astronauts at a time now live at Jamestown while looking for lithium at Shackleton crater, but the Russians edge ever closer to US mining operations. On Earth, the Johnson Space Center’s director Margo Madison and other NASA officials are under pressure to militarise the moon. Politicking even threatens to scupper plans for an astronaut and a cosmonaut to shake hands while in orbit, the lone gesture of peace in a world on the brink of annihilation.
For All Mankind is hardly the most nuanced take on the US-Soviet relationship – aside from a few scenes between Madison, astronaut Danielle Poole and their Russian counterparts, almost no common ground is acknowledged between the nations. Yet the cold war setting has made the show a leaner, darker beast.
Underdeveloped characters like Ed Baldwin, the sour-faced, square-jawed lead, have fewer but better things to do this time around. Ed, for instance, is now unhappily settled in his role as head of the astronaut office, sartorially muzzled by milquetoast sweaters and clearly longing for adventure.
And despite the streamlining, key plot threads from last season aren’t left dangling. Take Poole’s decision to break her own arm to hide a fellow astronaut’s declining mental health. Though she was the first African-American person in space, Poole’s “accident” gave NASA an excuse to sideline her – like the few other black astronauts.
As the season progresses, it is clear the astronauts and the NASA team are at the mercy of natural and geopolitical forces almost entirely outside their control – almost. It is in the small moments of defiance and sacrifice, whether that is staring down a solar storm or shaking an enemy’s hand, that For All Mankind proves it has figured out what kind of show it wants to be.

Bethan also recommends…
TV
Battlestar Galactica (2004-9)
Ronald D. Moore
When human civilisation is decimated, survivors must travel the galaxy in search of a home. Moore’s thoughtful series doesn’t shy away from the grim practicalities of space exploration.
Film
The Martian Ridley Scott
Stranded on Mars, astronaut Mark Watney goes to ingenious lengths to survive. A rare space blockbuster in terms of its homage to realism – or something close.

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Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has found that our friendships are governed by secret rules, based on everything from your sex to your sleep schedule. Our unique social fingerprints help determine who we are drawn to, which friendships last and why some friends are ultimately replaceable

Humans 3 March 2021
By Robin Dunbar
Anđela Janković
FACEBOOK users used to have a lot more friends. The social networking site pursues a commercial strategy of trying to persuade people to “friend” as many others as possible. However, sometime around 2007, users began to question who all these people they had befriended were. Then, someone pointed out that we can only manage around 150 relationships at any time. A flurry of “friend” culling followed and, since then, the number 150 has been known as “Dunbar’s number”. Thank you Facebook!
Modern technology may have brought me notoriety, but Dunbar’s number is rooted in evolutionary biology. Although humans are a highly social species, juggling relationships isn’t easy and, like other primates, the size of our social network is constrained by brain size. Two decades ago, my research revealed that this means we cannot meaningfully engage with more than about 150 others. No matter how gregarious you are, that is your limit. In this, we are all alike. However, more recent research on friendship has uncovered some fascinating individual differences.
My colleagues and I have made eye-opening discoveries about how much time people spend cultivating various members of their social networks, how friendships form and dissolve and what we are looking for in our friends. What has really surprised us is that each person has a unique “social fingerprint” – an idiosyncratic way in which they allocate their social effort. This pattern is quite impervious to who is in your friendship circle at any given time. It does, however, reveal quite a lot about your own identity – and could even be influencing how well you are coping with … More