Philippa Kaur

Josie Ford
Ever keeps on Given
The world rejoiced as the banking of the possibly good, but mainly just rather big, ship Ever Given at the southern end of the Suez Canal supplied an endless source of memes, a new unit for the horizontally stupidly oversized – about 0.5 Burj Khalifa – and a threat to global commerce and trade that wasn’t coronavirus. Or Brexit in UK parts, for that matter.
Our favourite related time-waster is a site brought to our attention by Elizabeth Barner from Leeds, UK: evergiven-everywhere.glitch.me.
Starting from a position that (shame on us) only by zooming out very, very far do we identify as the harbour of Boston, Massachusetts – whose famous tea parties were also some sort of statement about global trade practices back in the day – it allows us to “get the Ever Given stuck wherever you want it. Drag and zoom the map to move this big old boat somewhere else. Click the rotate button to get it wedged perfectly. Hit the ‘to scale’ button to make it approximately the right size. Or you can make it whatever size you feel like: get it stuck in a swimming pool or across the entire Atlantic Ocean.”

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Great fun, and all in the good cause of encouraging donations to the Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, we see.
Stressed out
Something has agitated the citizens of Leeds, as Martin Pitt also writes in from that city to add ire to our disparagement of “experiential” units of measurements rooted in no one’s experience (27 March).
The example we highlighted from The Wall Street Journal of an elephant suspended by a rope the diameter of a table tennis ball is meaningless for its stated purpose of measuring tension, or tensile force, he fulminates. “What the analogy should express is the tensile stress, which is the force per unit area, which would have been clear if they had also expressed it in conventional units such as Newtons per square metre.”
We are far from demurring, Martin. Mind you, the whole thing reminds us of the entry that used to stand in the good old Yellow Pages telephone directory under “Boring”: “See civil engineers”.
Don’t drink the water
We mean that only in self-referential jest, of course, as we do when we also say that our natural inclination on encountering any message beginning with the words “as a chemist” is to avert our eyes and hurry onwards in the hope we haven’t been seen.
Bill Appelbe writes in from Toronto, Canada, to take issue with our ridiculing of hydrogenated water as a facial exfoliation agent (13 March). Hydrogenated water, or H3O+, Bill points out, also using equations, is in fact a natural product of the ionisation of water in most environments save interstellar space – an environment where, he rightly points out too, few New Scientist readers are to be found, enjoying a facial scrub or not.
We stand corrected, Bill. We aren’t so sure about your advice to use a concentrated solution of sulphuric or hydrofluoric acid to get a really good dose of hydrogenated water with all its exfoliation benefits, but we understand you were writing as a chemist, not a beautician.
Oversight oversight
What we can only moodily and obliquely refer to as “other duties” leads Feedback to the website of the Oversight Board (motto: “Independent Judgment. Transparency. Legitimacy”), a body whose mission is so transparent it is apparently not necessary to state in its name what its independent judgement is lending legitimacy to.
To fill in the gaps, it has to do with a well-known social media company, which by appointing said board hopes to convince the world – we paraphrase, slightly – that while its medium may sometimes seem antisocial, it isn’t actually media, so doesn’t need regulating as such.
Not increasing our faith about the outfit’s resourcing is that, approaching its website using a well-known open-source browser, we see a confused mishmash of text and hyperlinks resembling the web circa 1999. Repeated links saying things like “A person scrutinizing a sphere she’s holding in her hand, while shapes and clouds float around her”, suggest images, yet lead to more text. The only thing that isn’t entirely 20th century is a warning that appears hovering above a “Share” link saying that if we click on it, a well-known social media company will be able to track our visit.
Oddly, when we use a well-known web browser associated with a well-known search company, we are transported back to the third decade of the 21st century, drawings of people scrutinising spheres surrounded by other geometry included. The power of big tech, eh?
Shining example
In a policy violation that our own Oversight Board shall investigate forthwith, we highlight Marc Abraham’s discovery of a paper from 2005. Very much in the spirit of a paper on incontinence by J. W. Splatt and D. Weedon that brought to life the monster of nominative determinism the best part of three decades ago – 5 November 1994, to be precise, we remember it as if it were yesterday – “Transparent Organic Light-Emitting Devices With LiF/Mg:Ag Cathode” is by B. J. Chen, X. W. Sun and S. C. Tan.
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MIT PRESS
Read
The Beauty of Chemistry captivates Philip Ball, as he explores unusual photos drawn from the online exhibition Envisioning Chemistry. Methods used to capture the images include high-speed, time-lapse and infrared photography.
POLYMORF
Explore
Symbiosis is a virtual reality trip to a post-human world teeming with tech hybrids. Dutch design collective Polymorf took inspiration from the ideas of biologist and postmodern feminist Donna Haraway. Catch it on the group’s website from 10 to 18 April.

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Prime Video
Watch
Them, Amazon Prime Video’s new anthology series created by Little Marvin and Lena Waithe, explores terror in the US. It begins with “Covenant”, set in 1953, about a black couple threatened by forces both real and supernatural. More

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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