Philippa Kaur

New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans 3 February 2021
NASA on Unsplash

Watch
Earth, But Not As We Know It is a free online event by London’s Science Museum on 13 February, bringing James Lovelock and his peers into a conversation about his controversial idea that Earth acts like a living organism.

Zoonar GmbH/Alamy

Explore
Manchester Science Festival returns from 12 February with an online programme on our changing climate and ideas for a better future. There are photography exhibitions and talks on everything from improving air quality to eco-anxiety.

Read
The Genes That Make Us by Edwin Kirk combines his experiences from lab work and clinical practice to present stories from a revolution in medicine — one that may ultimately change what it means to be human.
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State-of-the-art special effects combined with a compelling story makes Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian viewing to be savoured on Disney+

Humans 3 February 2021
By Bethan Ackerley

The Mandalorian
Created by Jon Favreau
Disney+

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WHEN George Lucas set out to create Star Wars, he wanted to use special effects that had never been seen before. Over the course of the franchise’s history, that dream has been pursued relentlessly with mixed results.
The original Star Wars trilogy was brought to life by Lucas’s visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) through a groundbreaking combination of blue screens, miniatures, puppets and camera trickery. The prequel films (released between 1999 and 2005) were ambitious too, pioneering the use of digital film and fully computer-generated characters, but relied heavily on digital effects that didn’t always stand up to scrutiny. Since 2015, the latest Star Wars films have showcased some stunning effects, but it is now in TV show The Mandalorian that the series’ most exciting technological developments are taking place.
Set five years after Return of the Jedi, The Mandalorian follows a bounty hunter tasked with finding The Child (a pointy-eared alien better known to fans as Baby Yoda). Unable to surrender the infant to his nefarious client, the Mandalorian is forced to traverse the galaxy to protect his charge from remnants of the Empire.
So far, so Star Wars. Yet what makes The Mandalorian so special is how it builds on the successes and failures of every story in the franchise, especially when it comes to technology. Though you wouldn’t know it, the many alien worlds it features aren’t filmed in deserts and tundras around the world, but are instead realised by ILM on just one stage in Los Angeles, nicknamed “the Volume”.

“The many alien worlds of The Mandalorian are realised on a single stage in Los Angeles called ‘the Volume’”
This cavernous set is encircled by LED panels on its 6-metre walls and ceiling. Instead of shooting actors against green screens and adding a virtual background later, environments – Tattooine’s desert plains, say – are projected onto the walls during filming, blending seamlessly with practical props.
The advantages of this approach are manifold. While shooting with green screens means lighting and reflections have to be tweaked in post-production – a difficult task and part of why the prequel trilogy was so maligned – the Volume accurately lights a scene while it is being filmed, so every world our hero steps onto (in his gleaming beskar armour, no less) feels like a real location.
Those alien planets can be edited on set, so the crew can quite literally move mountains. ILM also uses Unreal Engine from Epic Games, the firm behind Fortnite, to create 3D environments in real time in the Volume. The screens respond to positional data from a camera, so as it moves, the setting shifts to provide realistic changes in perspective.
Beyond the Volume, the show builds on the techniques of its predecessors, using puppetry and animatronics alongside actors to create believable aliens. You only have to look at fans’ reactions to The Child and to “Frog Lady”, season two’s amphibious breakout star, to see how successfully they have been realised. Even old-school miniatures are used.
The Mandalorian represents the next generation of technology in Star Wars, which is fitting for a brand so obsessed with lineage. That doesn’t mean it should be judged on this alone. It is also a compelling story about fatherhood and duty, albeit one with meandering side quests that sometimes divide viewers. Yet with a universe this beautifully realised, who wouldn’t stop to take in the view from time to time?

Bethan also recommends…
TV
Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian
Disney+
This fascinating series explores key elements of The Mandalorian. A highlight is the episode looking into how composer Ludwig Göransson built the cool soundtrack around giant recorders.
Film
Empire of Dreams: The story of the Star Wars trilogy (2004)
Ken Burns
The original Star Wars films were taken from the brink of disaster and made into a global phenomenon. This documentary tells the tale.

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As the coronavirus crisis goes on, an increasing number of us are feeling worn out and unable to cope. Here’s how you can tell if this is burnout, and what you can do to protect yourself

Health 3 February 2021
By Caroline Williams

Nathalie Lees

“I AM not just busy, I am being overwhelmed by an onslaught of requests like yours…”
There is a certain irony to the email I have just received: the pioneer of burnout research is feeling utterly swamped by work. Christina Maslach, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, spearheaded the study of burnout back in the 1970s and has been working on ways to tackle the problem ever since. Her expertise was already highly sought after even before the coronavirus pandemic. Now she can barely move under the weight of her inbox.
It is hardly surprising. In the year since the word lockdown became ubiquitous, it seems as if almost everyone has hit the wall at least once. But amid the emotional roller coaster of work stress, homeschooling, social isolation and the not inconsiderable fact that there is still a pandemic raging outside, how can you tell when you have reached the end of your tether? When does feeling understandably stressed in difficult times turn into an irretrievable case of burnout? And what can you do to protect yourself?
Thankfully, five decades of research means we have a fairly good idea of what burnout is and what causes it. According to Maslach’s Burnout Inventory, an assessment tool she co-developed, burnout arises when three factors coincide: an overwhelming feeling of emotional exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment and a feeling of lack of accomplishment. For those experiencing burnout, these criteria might manifest in feelings like being exhausted even after plenty of sleep, being emotionally distant from loved ones or no longer caring about jobs that need doing. … More

By Krista Charles
A diagram showing the difference between human and chimpanzee thumb muscles
Katerina Harvati, Alexandros Karakostis and Daniel Haeufle

Our thumbs allow us to use a variety of tools, from hammers to smartphones, and a new analysis suggests they have a long history. Researchers have found that some hominins started developing more dexterous thumbs about 2 million years ago, which could have allowed them to exploit more resources, eventually leading to the emergence of human culture.
Katerina Harvati at the University of Tübingen in Germany and her colleagues looked at thumb efficiency across different fossil human species. The researchers looked at the shape of thumb bones and soft tissue, which is occasionally preserved. They also created 3D meshes of thumb samples and calculated their torque.
“Levels of dexterity very similar to what we see in modern humans were already present 2 million years ago,” says Harvati.

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Previous research has suggested that Australopithecus, an earlier genus of hominin, may have been the earliest toolmakers, but the researchers found these fossils lacked the same dexterity found in Neanderthals and Homo naledi.

The researchers suggest that Australopithecus might have been capable of using tools without being adapted for it, whereas the Homo genus developed dexterous thumbs and became adapted for more efficient tool making.
“Regardless of whether stone tool use started before the genus Homo, it’s only after 2 million years ago that stone tool use might have been more efficient,” says team member Fotios Alexandros Karakostis, also at the University of Tübingen. “Therefore, this increased efficiency is likely the factor that led to the gradual emergence of human culture rather than stone tool use itself.”
“All Homo share a common morphology that allows for more dexterity than what came before. And that is brought into light and well supported by this multidisciplinary approach,” says Sandra Martelli at University College London.
Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.12.041
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Demand for rare metals can only increase in the move to a zero-carbon economy. The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron lays out the terrifying cost

Humans 27 January 2021
By Simon Ings
A man working at a rare earth metals mine in Nancheng county, China
REUTERS/Stringer

The Rare Metals War
Guillaume Pitron (translator Biana Jacobsohn)
Scribe

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WE REAP seven times as much energy from the wind and 44 times as much energy from the sun as we did a decade ago. Is this good news? Guillaume Pitron, a French journalist and documentary maker, isn’t sure.
He is neither a climate sceptic nor a fan of inaction. But as the world moves to adopt a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, Pitron worries about the costs. The figures in his book The Rare Metals War are stark. Changing the energy model means doubling the production of rare metals about every 15 years, mostly to satisfy demand for non-ferrous magnets and lithium-ion batteries. “At this rate,” writes Pitron, “over the next 30 years we… will need to mine more mineral ores than humans have extracted over the last 70,000 years.”
Before the Renaissance, humans had found uses for seven metals. During the industrial revolution, this increased to a mere dozen. Today, we have found uses for all 90-odd of them, and some are very rare. Neodymium and gallium, for instance, are found in iron ore, but there is 1200 times less neodymium and up to 2650 times less gallium than there is iron.
Zipping from an abandoned mine in the Mojave desert to the toxic lakes and cancer-afflicted areas of Baotou in China, Pitron weighs the awful price of refining the materials, ably blending investigative journalism with insights from science, politics and business.
There are two sides to Pitron’s story, woven seamlessly together. First, there is the economic story of how China worked to dominate the energy and digital transition. It now controls 95 per cent of the rare earth metals market, making between 80 and 90 per cent of the batteries for electric vehicles, says Pitron, and more than half the magnets in wind turbines and electric motors.

Then there is the ecological story of the lengths China took to succeed. Today, 10 per cent of its arable land is contaminated by heavy metals, 80 per cent of its groundwater isn’t fit for consumption and air pollution contributes to around 1.6 million deaths a year there, according to Pitron (a recent paper in The Lancet says 1.24 million deaths in China a year are attributable to air pollution – but let’s not quibble).
China freely entered into this Faustian bargain. Yet it wouldn’t have been possible had the Western world not outsourced its own industrial activities, creating a planet divided, as Pitron memorably describes it, “between the dirty and those who pretend to be clean”.
The West’s comeuppance is at hand, as its manufacturers, starved of rare metals, must take their technologies to China. It should have seen how its reliance on Chinese raw materials would quickly morph into a dependence on China for the technologies of the energy and digital transition.
By 2040, in our pursuit of ever-greater connectivity and a cleaner atmosphere, we will need to mine three times more rare earth metals, five times more tellurium, 12 times more cobalt and 16 times more lithium than we do now. China’s ecological ruination and global technological dominance advance in lockstep, unstoppably, unless the West and others start to mine for rare metals in Brazil, the US, Russia, Turkey, South Africa, Thailand and Pitron’s native France.
Better that the West attains some shred of supply security by mining some of its own land, says Pitron. At least there consumers can fight (and pay) for cleaner processes. Nothing will change if we don’t experience “the full cost of attaining our standard of happiness”, he says.

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Last and First Men tracks the beginning and end of humanity. It is a film that ranks with Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey and it may even break your heart, says Simon Ings

Humans 27 January 2021
By Simon Ings
Last and First Men uses eerie architectural shots to explore humanity’s end
Sturla Brandth Grovlen

Last and First Men
Jóhann Jóhannsson
Streaming on BFI Player

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“IT’S a big ask for people to sit for 70 minutes and look at concrete,” mused Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson about his only feature-length film. He was still working on Last and First Men when he died, aged 48, in 2018.
Admired for his keening orchestral pieces, Jóhannsson was well known for his film work: Prisoners and Sicario were made strange by his sometimes terrifying, thumping soundtracks.
Last and First Men is, by contrast, contemplative and surreal. It uses a series of zooms and tracking shots set against eerie architectural forms, shot in monochrome 16-millimetre film by Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen.
The film draws its inspiration and script (a haunting, sometimes chilly, off-screen monologue performed by Tilda Swinton) from Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 novel of the same name. His day job at the time of writing – lecturing on politics and ethics at the University of Liverpool, UK – seems of little moment now, but his sci-fi novels have barely been out of print and still set a dauntingly high bar.
Last and First Men is a 2-billion-year history, detailing the dreams, aspirations, achievements and failings of 17 different kinds of future humans (Homo sapiens is first). In the light of an ageing sun, they evolve, blossom, speciate, die; the film is set in the moment of extinction.

Stapledon’s book isn’t a drama. There are no actors or action. It isn’t really a novel, more a haunting academic paper from the beyond. The idea to use the book came late in Jóhannsson’s project, which began life as a film essay on Spomeniks, the huge, brutalist war memorials erected in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between the 1960s and the 1980s by dictator Jozip Broz Tito.
“Who knew that staring at concrete and listening to the end of humanity could wet the watcher’s eye?”
In 2017, the film, with a live performance of an early score, was screened at the Manchester International Festival. Jóhannsson told the audience how Tito thought he was building a utopian experimental state that would unite Slavic nations. Because there were so many different religions, the architects looked to Mayan and Sumerian art, rather than religious icons. “That’s why they [spomeniks] look so alien and otherworldly,” he explained.
Swinton’s regretful monologue proves an ideal foil for the film’s explorations, lifting what would be a stunning but slight piece into dizzying, speculative territory: the last living human, contemplating the leavings of 2 billion years.
Last and First Men was left unfinished. The film was cut and Swinton had recorded the monologue by the time the film was presented at the Manchester International Festival. As far as Jóhannsson was concerned, there was still a lot to be done to finish the score. On his death, Yair Elazar Glotman was brought on board to arrange his notes and come up with a final performance for the soundtrack. No one hearing how the film was put together would imagine it could amount to more than a tribute, but sometimes the gods are kind. It is hugely successful, wholly deserving of a place beside Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Who knew that staring at concrete and listening to the end of humanity could wet the watcher’s eye and break their heart? It is tragic that Jóhannsson didn’t live to see that, in his own words, “we’ve taken all these elements and made something beautiful and poignant. Something like a requiem.”

Simon also recommends…
Film
La Jetée (1962)
Directed by Chris Marker
This short black-and-white film, assembled mostly from stills, is a masterful tale of love, apocalypse and time travel. The story inspired Terry Gilliam’s 1995 thriller 12 Monkeys.
Book
Summa Technologiae
Stanislaw Lem
The Polish parodist and sci-fi writer’s only full-length philosophical work projects humanity into the future and explains why we are doomed to mess it up.

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An overzealous push for breastfeeding is affecting availability of baby formula in food banks, worsening problems for the poorest people, writes Clare Wilson

Health | Comment 27 January 2021
By Clare Wilson

Michelle D’urbano

WITH many people enduring extreme hardship because of the covid-19 pandemic, food banks in the UK are providing a more important function than ever. These vital institutions, funded mainly through public donations, act as a safety net so those in financial crisis at least don’t go hungry.
But there is one section of society who cannot always benefit from their support, and they are among the most vulnerable group of all: infants. In the UK, most babies are entirely or mainly dependent on formula milk.
Baby milk takes up a hefty chunk of a low-income family’s food budget. It can cost up to £30 a week and most food banks don’t stock formula milk because it is seen as clashing with breastfeeding promotion.

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Some local authorities and health boards explicitly tell food banks not to supply it, often citing recent UN guidelines on the issue, according to a recent report from Feed, a Scottish-based charity that aims to provide impartial advice on infant feeding.
The resistance to providing formula milk stems from a long-running dispute over infant feeding. In the past, some manufacturers wrongly claimed that their formula milk was the healthiest choice. Today, we know that breast milk contains a range of beneficial substances like antibodies that fight off microbes and there is some evidence that breastfed babies have fewer infections in their first year of life.
But many of the broader claims about the benefits that breastfeeding can lead to in later life, like protecting against obesity and asthma, and raising IQ, may not be true. Studies suggest that these apparent correlations arise because, in high-income countries like the UK, breastfeeding is more common among better-off families.
Child health organisations tend to say that if families have a baby that they can’t feed, they need specialist help, which is best given by referring them to health or social services. This can take time, however, and people are resorting to watering down formula or giving unsuitable milk alternatives, which risks babies’ health, Feed’s investigation has found.

It isn’t as if families can simply switch from formula milk to breastfeeding if financial circumstances change. When someone stops breastfeeding, or doesn’t start, milk production ceases. So saying that someone ought to breastfeed when they are unable to is about as helpful as saying someone ought not to be poor.
Health benefits aside, not everyone can breastfeed. For example, a woman may not make enough milk or be on medication that would be harmful for their baby if they did breastfeed.
Breastfeeding can also be painful and take up a lot of time and effort. It is often said that breastfeeding is free, but that is only the case if you view women’s time and labour as financially worthless.
In other words, breast isn’t always best, and only the people involved can decide if the health benefits outweigh any toll to well-being to make that decision.
In the past decade or so, breastfeeding promotion has been overzealous, making some who use formula milk feel so guilty it threatens their mental health. It has triggered a backlash from groups, such as Fed is Best, that say the health system shouldn’t try to control people’s bodies in this way.
People who have so little money that they need handouts of food may be in no position to argue with health workers over their personal autonomy – but it is a disgrace that the often unscientific debate over breast milk versus baby formula is harming the most vulnerable. It has to stop.
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