Philippa Kaur

By Bethan Ackerley
Signature Entertainment
Synchronic
Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead
Now available to rent online

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WHEN they aren’t busy being the darlings of indie horror cinema, film-makers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are, by their own admission, armchair enthusiasts of astrophysics, philosophy and futurism. That heady cocktail of interests has influenced all their films to date, but perhaps none more so than their latest and most ambitious creation: Synchronic.
The film stars Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan as paramedics and friends Steve and Dennis, who are called out to a series of unusual drug overdoses across New Orleans. Although the victims are found in very different circumstances – one has been stabbed by a centuries-old sword, while others have been burned or frozen to death – they have all taken Synchronic, a designer drug based on the hallucinogen DMT.
Aside from those grisly incidents, the first third of Synchronic is a slow-burning drama about the quiet miseries that Steve and Dennis are mired in. Steve is a disaffected womaniser who has recently been diagnosed with a brain tumour, while Dennis’s marriage is strained by a new baby and his daughter Brianna’s teenage angst. Thankfully, these personal troubles are just a vehicle for a much more intriguing concept.
When Brianna (played by Ally Ioannides) vanishes after taking Synchronic at a frat party, Steve starts to buy up the remaining supplies. He eventually meets the drug’s creator, Dr Kermani (Ramiz Monsef), who matter-of-factly reveals that Synchronic manipulates your pineal gland, the same region of the brain as Steve’s brain tumour. It is reminiscent of the resonating device in H. P. Lovecraft’s short story From Beyond, which lets the user see alternative planes of existence. However, instead of seeing monsters from another dimension, Synchronic changes how you experience the flow of time.

Kermani explains that time isn’t linear, instead working like a vinyl record: you play one track, but the other grooves are always there. “Synchronic is the needle,” he says, letting people travel to the past while physically remaining in the present. The catch is that you have no control over where you end up, and if you manifest in the middle of a forest fire or in the path of a rampaging bull, you will still die in the present.
“Time works like a vinyl record: you play one track, but the other grooves are always there”
As soon as Steve starts experimenting with Synchronic in an attempt to find Brianna, the film’s real potential emerges. He approaches the task methodically, rationing out his limited supply to establish the rules of the drug. I won’t reveal much about which time periods Steve travels to, but his encounters are surreal and upsetting in equal measure. The past is a particularly dangerous place for a Black man, and the film is at its best when it explores how time travel is disproportionately terrifying for Steve.
While there are a few holes in the plot – why does the drug never take people to the future, for instance – the potential of Synchronic‘s central conceit is obvious. Unfortunately, while the film-makers are no strangers to small budgets, their ambitions were clearly hamstrung by a lack of funds.
The environments in the past are severely limited, with a few brief glimpses of deserts and snowstorms being about as adventurous as the film-makers can afford. Although they make up for that with some clever tableaux and eerie, roving camerawork, you still sense that Synchronic would have benefited immeasurably from having twice as much cash, and twice as much time spent mining the horrors of history.
All that said, Benson and Moorhead have still created a grim, uneasy thriller with truly hair-raising moments. For all that I mourn the unfulfilled potential of the concept, Synchronic is yet more evidence that these film-makers should be given the tools with which they can fully realise their mind-bending ideas.
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Proto-cities built from 6200 years ago in eastern Europe upend our ideas about when civilisation began and why people made the move from rural to urban living

Humans 24 February 2021
By Laura Spinney
Stuart Mcreath
AROUND 6200 years ago, farmers living on the eastern fringes of Europe, in what is now Ukraine, did something inexplicable. They left their neolithic villages and moved into a sparsely inhabited area of forest and steppe. There, in an area roughly the size of Belgium between the modern cities of Kiev and Odessa, they congregated at new settlements up to 20 times the size of their old ones.
This enigmatic culture, known as the Cucuteni-Trypillia, predates the earliest known cities in Mesopotamia, a civilisation that spanned part of the Middle East, and in China. It persisted for 800 years, but then, as mysteriously as it had begun, this experiment in civilisation failed. The inhabitants left the lightest of footprints in the landscape, and no human remains have been found. “Not a pinkie, not a tooth,” says palaeogeneticist Alexey Nikitin at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
This puzzling lack of evidence has fuelled a lively debate about what Nikitin calls the “Dark Ages” of European prehistory. “You talk to five Trypillian archaeologists, you get five different opinions,” he says.
But the data gap hasn’t stifled interest – quite the opposite. Several projects in recent years have tried to make sense of the Trypillian proto-cities. Despite big disagreements, what is emerging is a picture of an early and unique attempt at urbanisation. It may be the key to understanding how modern Europe emerged from the Stone Age – and even throw new light on the emergence of human civilisation in general.

Uruk and Tell Brak, which … More

We too often turn to insulting people’s brain power – and that closes off our ability to understand others, argues Melanie Challenger

Humans | Comment 24 February 2021Michelle D’urbano
BELITTLING the minds of others is commonplace. Stupid! Brainless! Imbecile! Dozy! Just scroll through the comments on pretty much any contentious article and you will find criticism by mental slander. Social media is littered with words like “unthinking” and “idiot”, especially when people are confronted with views with which they disagree.
Indeed, Twitter is a lightning rod of prejudices about minds. Former US president Donald Trump was perhaps the kingpin here, before Twitter banned him. Not only did he routinely boast of his own mental prowess – “sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest” – but he persistently used mental slurs to silence critics: “dummy!”.
Yet we can all be guilty of mental slander. Right-wing supporters frequently call those on the left “libtards”. Meanwhile, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s New Monitor Corpus, conservative voters in the US are often derided as “nutjobs”. Mental slurs are a fast and simple trick to silence an unwanted voice and to lower trust in evidence we resist. A growing body of research is allowing us to understand where this prejudice comes from.

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Humans are group-living animals. Probing and judging other minds is a part of how we coordinate with each other, cooperate and make and break alliances. By the age of 5, children make assumptions about people’s mental states, such as understanding that someone can be mistaken in their beliefs. Particular parts of the brain are implicated: the medial prefrontal cortex, the temporal poles and the posterior superior temporal sulcus. These work in concert to enable us to detect and make judgements about minds – both our own and those of others.
All this doesn’t stop at the neck. When we bond in a group – whether that is with kin or co-workers, friends or football fans – our bodies produce hormones like oxytocin that play a role in bringing us together. But, as psychologist Carsten De Dreu points out, these hormones don’t just unite us; they encourage exclusivity. This – directly or indirectly – can alter our views on other minds. In effect, we believe those in our group more readily, often exaggerating the mental abilities of those with whom we feel allegiance.
What follows from this is that we can undervalue the intelligence of those whose views differ from our own. Even more troubling, we can find ourselves responding more slowly to signals of emotion or experience from outsiders. Social psychologists Susan Fiske and Lasana Harris have used neurological imaging and behaviour studies to show that we shut down the medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in social cognition, when confronted with minds we wish to ignore. When we suspend parts of our brain key to recognising another’s mental and emotional states, we not only close our minds to one another, we cease to care.
All this has real-world consequences for whom we listen to and whose voices we trust. In an age of political polarisation and misinformation, the echo chambers created by social media do more than just seal us off from diverse possibilities and points of view; they muffle our ability to care about those whose views we might not like.

What can we do about it? First, we need to recognise the biases that prevent us from keeping one another in mind. We must make it less socially acceptable to use mental slander in the service of an argument. Beyond this, we would benefit from greater opportunities to hear one another out.
This pandemic is a reminder that we have very few mechanisms for listening and deliberating together. That needs to change. But a more radical option lies in a much larger paradigm shift. Is it time for our species to stop using the idea of own superior cognition as validation?
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Burn promises to change the way we think about food, exercise and life, as evolutionary biologist Herman Pontzer brings his 20 years of research experience to bear on the mysteries of human metabolism. (Buy from Amazon)

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The Big Freeze, the Scott Polar Research Institute’s arts festival, launches online on 4 March with the European premiere of Polar Self Portraits 2, a creative project connecting artists and their work from six continents.

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Klara and the Sun is Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2017. It tells the story of an artificial friend who is learning not to invest too much in the promises of humans. (Buy from Amazon)
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Let’s imagine you have inherited a fortune and want to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Here’s the best way to spend your money to make a difference to climate change, disease and poverty

Life 24 February 2021
By Rowan Hooper
Andrea Ucini
MOST of us have had that conversation: what would you do if you won the lottery? Pay off the mortgage, quit your job, maybe start a small business doing something you have always dreamed of. But what if you acquired a truly vast fortune – not just a few million but a trillion dollars? And what if you had to spend it on making the world a better place?
I know, a trillion dollars – a thousand billion dollars – sounds like a vast amount of money, especially during the twin crises of recession and pandemic. But in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t. A trillion dollars is about 1 per cent of world GDP. It is what Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is on course to be worth by 2026. The world’s richest 1 per cent together own $162 trillion in assets. And it’s just one-twelfth of what governments around the world found in 2020 alone for economic stimulus packages in response to the new coronavirus.
What could you do with such a relatively modest sum, if charged to spend it on the world’s biggest challenges? This is the central question of my book, How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, in which I choose 10 megaprojects (all things scientists are working on now) and explore what could be achieved if we showered them with money. Here we examine three of the most urgent of those challenges: solving world poverty, halting runaway climate change and curing all disease.

Eradicate world poverty

Perhaps the most important thing we could do for human welfare would be to alleviate poverty. According … More

Bill Allsopp/Loop Images Ltd/AlaSOME readers might remember the 1985 movie Brewster’s Millions. Richard Pryor’s character has to spend $30 million in 30 days in order to inherit a $300 million fortune. This week, we update the conceit, inflating the sum to a cool $1 trillion, and set a few ground rules: the money has to be spent on projects to improve human welfare, to restore the environment and to advance science.
It is the premise of How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, a new book by New Scientist‘s podcast editor Rowan Hooper that takes 10 megaprojects and costs them out. It is a … More

By Karina Shah
A bone fragment, found in south-east Alaska, belonging to a dog that lived more than 10,000 years ago
Douglas Levere / University at Buffalo
Dogs were domesticated at least 27,000 years ago, and they have been tagging along with humans ever since. Now, we may have the strongest evidence yet that early dogs even accompanied the first Americans as they moved along the Pacific coast.
Charlotte Lindqvist and her colleagues at the University at Buffalo in New York extracted DNA from the oldest known dog remains found in the Americas, and found the genetic signature is consistent with the idea that dogs first arrived in the region between 17,000 and 16,000 years ago – which is also roughly in line with the currently accepted time for the arrival of the first Americans.

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The small bone – a piece of the dome-like head of a thighbone – measures 1 centimetre in diameter and was originally found in the late 1990s in Lawyer’s cave, a site in south-east Alaska.
About 15 years ago it was carbon dated to a little more than 10,000 years old, although at the time the small bone fragment was assumed to have come from a bear. Only when Lindqvist and her colleagues studied DNA from the specimen did they realise it belonged to a dog, which makes it the earliest evidence of dogs found so far in the Americas.
The team isolated mitochondrial DNA from the bone to understand the dog’s genetic history. “The mitochondrial DNA gives us a history of the dog’s mother because it contains maternally inherited DNA,” says Lindqvist.
The DNA sequence showed that the ancient Alaskan dog was closely related to the lineage of domestic dogs that were living in the Americas before European contact and colonisation. In detail, the exact lineage the Alaskan dog belonged to branched off from these “precontact dogs” about 14,500 years ago. The genetic data also showed that the Alaskan dog’s lineage branched off from dogs living in Siberia roughly 16,700 years ago.

“This dog belonged to a descent of very early dogs that moved into the New World soon after the ice age around 17,000 years ago,” says Lindqvist.
Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests humans also moved into the Americas roughly 17,000 years ago – several thousand years earlier than once thought. This has led to a reassessment of how they did so.

Originally it was thought early Americans migrated along an internal corridor between the two large ice sheets that were covering the land after the last peak in glacial activity. This would have seen them enter what is now the lower 48 states of the US via what is now Montana. But this route didn’t become viable to travel through until 13,000 years ago, so the very first Americans must have taken a different route.
Many researchers now think the early Americans travelled along the coast of what is now Alaska and British Columbia, probably because the ice sheet at the North Pacific coast began retreating earlier and provided an ice-free coastal corridor. If dogs also moved into the Americas about 17,000 years ago, they presumably did so with these coastal human communities.
“Humans must have moved over Siberia and Alaska into the New World via a route along the coast, and they brought their dogs with them,” says Lindqvist.
The dog bone found in south-east Alaska is around 250 years older than the previously confirmed earliest dog remains reported from a site in Illinois in 2018. “I am very happy to lose our record for the earliest dogs in the Americas, as this new Alaskan dog represents an important piece of the puzzle,” says Angela Perri at Newcastle University, UK, who led the research in 2018 and wasn’t involved in this new study.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2020.3103
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By Alison George
A colour-enhanced image of the ancient kangaroo artwork
Damien Finch
A life size kangaroo painted in red ochre around 17,300 years ago is Australia’s oldest known rock art. This indicates that the earliest style of rock art in Australia focused on animals, similar to the early cave art found in Indonesia and Europe.
Thousands of rock art sites are found all over Australia, with the Kimberley region of Western Australia containing a particularly rich record. But dating the images is challenging as the minerals and organic material needed to determine when the art was created are hard to find.

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Stylistically, Australian rock art has been categorised into five different phases, with the oldest thought to be the so-called naturalistic phase depicting mainly animals and sometimes plants such as yams. But with no firm dates, no one knew for sure.
Now, Damien Finch at the University of Melbourne and his colleagues have dated the images in eight rock shelters in Balanggarra Country, which lies in the north-eastern Kimberley region. Finch and his colleagues worked with the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, which represents the Traditional Owners of the land, and members of the Corporation reviewed their research paper.
They dated the images by measuring the radiocarbon signal from ancient wasp nests that lie beneath and on top of the artwork.

They discovered that a kangaroo image (pictured above) on the ceiling of a rock shelter containing thousands of ancient mud wasp nests was painted between 17,500 and 17,100 years ago. “This is an amazing site, with wonderful paintings all over the place,” says Finch. And, crucially for the dating, “wasps have been building nests at this site pretty much consistently for 20,000 years“, he says.
This kangaroo painting is around 2 metres long, with details of its fur depicted within an outline of its shape.
“The dating of this oldest known painting in an Australian rock shelter holds a great deal of significance for Aboriginal people and Australians and is an important part of Australia’s history,” said Cissy Gore-Birch, Chair of the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, in a media statement.

Analysis of 15 other images, including a 3-metre-long snake and a lizard-like creature, as well as other kangaroo-like animals, showed that this naturalistic style of animal paintings proliferated between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago.
After this, it seems to have been superseded by the so-called Gwion style of rock art, which predominantly features images of humans. A 2020 study by Finch, also using wasp nest dating, showed that this style of art proliferated from around 12,000 years ago.
The kangaroo is unlikely to be Australia’s oldest painting. Humans may have reached Australia as early as 65,000 years ago and the researchers have studied a tiny number of images in the rock art. “We have only worked on a fraction of the Kimberly. The chances are we haven’t found the oldest painting,” says Finch.
Journal reference: Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-01041-0
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