Philippa Kaur

Floating in space watching your ship speed away rivals moments in Gravity or Interstellar – and it’s one of the things that makes Outer Wilds among the best games ever made, says Jacob Aron

Humans 10 March 2021
By Jacob Aron
A view of Timber Hearth, the home planet where Outer Wilds begins
Mobius Digital
Outer Wilds
Mobius Digital

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PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
THE first few months of any year are a slow time for video game launches, but whether it is due to the pandemic or the recent release of next-generation consoles, new games are thin on the ground at the moment. That is why I spent this month checking out 2019’s Outer Wilds – and I am glad I did, because it is one of the best games ever made.
A bold claim, but hear me out. Outer Wilds is set in a miniature solar system filled with planets bearing evocative names such as Giant’s Deep and Brittle Hollow. As the newest member of Outer Wilds Ventures, an organisation that is as much a bunch of trail hikers as it is NASA, you set off to explore these worlds – and in 22 minutes, the sun explodes in a supernova, wiping out you and everything else in the solar system.
Moments later, the game resets and you begin another 22-minute session. This time limit, combined with the small solar system, gives you space exploration without the boring bits. After launching your trusty spacecraft, you can be walking on the surface of another planet within minutes. At the same time, everything operates under more-or-less realistic orbital mechanics, making space flight a challenge of matching orbits and velocities – you can’t just point at your destination and go.
I spent my first few runs getting to grips with the controls, which allow you to thrust in either direction along all three spatial axes, and more than once found myself falling into the sun, triggering an early reset. Yet little by little, I mastered my ship and was soon merrily exploring.
“There are no new abilities to unlock as you play – the only thing you gain is knowledge”

I am deliberately avoiding saying much about what I found because Outer Wilds is about the joy of discovering things for yourself: it really is everything you could want from a space-exploration game. To give you a flavour, during my playthrough, I fell into a black hole, docked with a mysterious space station and landed on a comet, before falling off again.
But not all in a single go. Your ship’s computer records your discoveries, linking them together like a corkboard with strings. This doesn’t reset, allowing you to uncover the game’s many mysteries over a number of runs. There are no new abilities to unlock as you play – the only thing you gain is knowledge, so you could theoretically complete Outer Wilds in your first 22 minutes.
The result is that the game is full of “aha!” moments that are both incredibly satisfying and make you feel very clever, but it is also mechanically brilliant. Launching your spacecraft at the start of a run is always a tiny thrill as you rumble into orbit. Your spacesuit has limited oxygen and fuel, making it essential to manage your resources. If you run out of fuel, you can use oxygen as propellant in a last-ditch effort to get to safety.
This comes together to generate moments that easily rival Gravity or Interstellar. At one point, I was floating around a planet, separated from my ship, which was orbiting another planet.
I could see the ship was heading away from me, and doubted I would be able to catch up with my remaining fuel. Instead, I pulled open my map of the solar system so I could estimate when the two planets would have their closest approach. Timing things just right, I jetted off for what I thought would be a daring rendezvous. For a moment, it seemed like I was on course… until I smashed into a moon, cracked my helmet and died. Thankfully, the next run was just a moment away.

Jacob also recommends…
Games
The Witness
Thekla
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Android, iOS
The Witness is full of mysteries. Set on an island split into regions, each locale puts its own spin on grid-based logic puzzles. It is gorgeous, but extremely mentally taxing.
No Man’s Sky
Hello Games
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
No Man’s Sky offers billions of procedurally generated worlds. This can make them feel samey, but the latest update lets you collect alien pets.

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By Sam Wong
Valeri Vatel/Alamy
PIZZA is the ultimate fast food, and the speed of cooking is vital to achieving perfection: brown and crispy on the bottom, but still tender and chewy on the inside, with a light, airy crust. This is easy to attain in a traditional pizza oven, which can reach temperatures of around 500°C and cook a pizza in under 2 minutes. At home, it is more challenging, but there are some tricks to making satisfying pizzas.
Paradoxically, it helps to think of pizza as slow food and start the process a few days early – difficult, I know, … More

By Michael Marshall
This may be the oldest stone tool yet found outside Africa
Dominique Cauche
ANCESTRAL humans may have left Africa half a million years earlier than generally thought, according to archaeologists who claim to have found a primitive stone tool from 2.6 million years ago in northern India.
If early humans really were there then, it would mean they migrated out of Africa remarkably early. The oldest evidence of the Homo lineage is from 2.8 million years ago at Ledi-Geraru in Ethiopia. This means these hominins would have had to expand their range rapidly to reach India.
The claim is … More

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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?
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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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