Philippa Kaur

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Unknown Origins sees a murderer recreate superhero origin stories in an entertaining caper set in Madrid. During production, comic fans mobbed its comic-book store set, thinking it was real. On Netflix from 28 August.
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Terra Incognita by Ian Goldin and Robert Muggah features “100 maps to survive the next 100 years”, showing how people, cities, wars, climates and technology are changing Earth.

Leonardo Santamaria for NPR

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Invisibilia tells sumptuously produced tales of scientific wonder as Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin explore the hidden forces shaping our behaviours, ideas and beliefs in this NPR podcast.
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A film about electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla makes interesting creative choices, such as imagining an alternative future. But it spends too much time focusing on Thomas Edison

Humans 19 August 2020
By Bethan Ackerley
Tesla leaves you more interested in Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan)
IFC FILMS

Tesla
Michael Almereyda
Out 21 August

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TO MANY, Nikola Tesla is a folk hero. He is a steady fixture in science fiction, and his role in the war over whether alternating or direct current should be used to transmit electricity in the late 19th century has cemented him in the popular imagination as a slayer of giants. Take that, Thomas Edison.
In Tesla, director Michael Almereyda makes hay out of that war and other events from the visionary inventor’s life, but not without including a few fantastical turns of his own.
The film begins with Tesla (Ethan Hawke) working at Edison Machine Works, where he butts heads with his employer over funding. Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) is bullish and xenophobic, asking Tesla, who was born in what is now Croatia, if he has ever eaten human flesh.
The depictions of Edison’s attempts to discredit alternating current, from using it to kill animals in public demonstrations to the botched electrocution of a prisoner, is well-trodden ground for people familiar with his ruthlessness.
Yet the film achieves more nuance in its brief flashes of Edison’s personal life than it ever does with Tesla’s. A biopic that leaves you more interested in the subject’s rival has gone wrong somewhere.

Part of this failure comes from the moments that the film prioritises. Tesla’s poverty after leaving Edison’s firm and being swindled by his own business partners is mentioned only briefly, for instance, in favour of repetitive demonstrations of his induction motor that have none of the visual dynamism such a revolutionary invention deserves. “No sparks,” one observer notes.
“Tesla’s poverty after leaving Edison’s firm and being swindled is mentioned only briefly”
The story is periodically interrupted by Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), the daughter of one of Edison’s principal investors, who sits with a laptop and offers up pithy, fourth-wall-breaking context.
The film is also peppered with farcical metaphors, including ice-cream fights, rollerblading accidents and even an anachronistic rendition of Everybody Wants To Rule The World.
While these choices confuse as often as they delight, it is fitting for a Tesla biopic to take risks and display such imagination. One poignant scene asks us to envisage a world in which Edison apologises to Tesla and suggests a partnership. What could Tesla have achieved with the commercial guidance of “an enlightened hustler” like Edison?
Hawke plays Tesla as a morose workaholic, bristling with social discomfort. Though there is a degree of truth in that portrayal, Tesla was reportedly well-liked when he did socialise and had a variety of interests, with one contemporary describing him as “a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink”.
Such qualities are barely touched on, save for a sequence in which he is deeply moved by actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan), who becomes a figure of fascination. It is in his interactions with her that Hawke is finally given something to do; Bernhardt witnesses Tesla’s humiliation at the hands of Edison and the shame breaks through his taciturn shell.
Ultimately, the film rarely finds the will to be interested in the man Tesla actually was. Coupled with its incoherent – if striking – aesthetic, this means Tesla too often feels like an empty frame, or a motor without the power to keep it running.
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What do we risk by expanding recklessly into the multiverse? Stephen Baxter’s World Engines series is gripping but frustrating, says Sally Adee

Humans 19 August 2020
By Sally Adee
Why do we risk so much in the hope of colonising space?
Gorodenkoff/Getty Images

REID MALENFANT wakes up from a cryogenic coma in the year 2469. It was 2019 when he crashed a space shuttle and entered medical deep freeze, just as Earth’s citizens were taking their first steps to colonise the solar system. The world he wakes in 450 years later is unrecognisable. We burned all our fossil fuels for the space race and the consequences are in full bloom: London, New York, Florida and many coastal areas are drowned, and the planet is tropical.
Those are just the cosmetic changes in World Engines: Destroyer, the first in Stephen Baxter’s series. The human project has ended – we retreated from the solar system, recognising our inability to thrive outside our biosphere. We retreated on Earth too, with a population fallen below 100 million, both as a result of centuries-long destruction and as a way to let nature heal.
As Malenfant digs deeper, though, he discovers another contributing factor. A solar system-rending cataclysm has been foreseen in about 1000 years, so Earth is in a period of managed decline. It isn’t a bad existence for the people. There is no pollution and no waste, with every car, cup and plate made to last generations. Universal basic income (UBI) means no one is poor. People still have children. But there is no drive to do more than exist in this Eden.
“In one universe, Richard Nixon created a Star Trek-like programme that had boots on Mars by 2005”
Yet the 25th century woke up Malenfant for a reason, of course. That reason takes him to the Martian moon Phobos, which has been displaying idiosyncracies that turn out to be a hatch to other universes. By the end of the first book, Malenfant has set out to discover who built the portal and what kind of entities play snooker with entire solar systems.
It is these questions that are addressed in the second book, World Engines: Creator, and their answers leave deeper questions about humanity’s relentless obsession with expansion. What do we risk by embarking recklessly into the solar system, the universe or even the multiverse? What is this impulse to colonise? Are the only choices eternal expansion or managed decline?
Many readers may have given up on the first book after some 200 pages because of Malenfant, a jerk ripped straight from the pages of 1960s sci-fi at its most toxically masculine. But the clue is in the name. Soldier on and it is clear that Baxter has written Malenfant to reflect our current condition as a species: selfish, greedy and full of toxic individualism.
As Malenfant begins to evolve, the books hit their stride, asking questions that telescope out into brain-exploding territory. Baxter has an encyclopedic knowledge of early space and military history that he remixes into delightful mash-ups. In one universe, instead of sinking in the Watergate scandal, US president Richard Nixon set up UBI, leading the world to follow suit – and to the creation of a Star Trek-like space programme that had boots on Mars by 2005.

In another, Winston Churchill is ousted by his opposition rival, Neville Chamberlain. This creates a British-led dominance of space in steampunk space behemoths, spreading diamond-cut accents and Victorian repression.
Other books have grappled with our place in the multiverse, but few have Baxter’s vision and ability to work at very different scales. World Engines: Creator isn’t always evenly paced, gets bogged down in science pedantry and can be exasperatingly opaque at times, but I am crossing my fingers for a third book.

Sally also recommends…
Book/Comic
The Space Between Worlds
Micaiah Johnson’s stunning debut is impossible to put down. It nails the stakes of the multiverse and employs a beautiful character transformation arc.
The Number of the Beast
Robert A. Heinlein’s book is the first and best in this genre.
Infinite Vacation
Nick Spencer’s comic world puts alternate versions of you up for sale. You choose the version you prefer that day, but there is always a price.

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While keen surfers take to the waves around Fukushima, plans are under way to dump contaminated water from the damaged nuclear power plant into the sea

Humans 19 August 2020
By Gege Li

Laura Liverani

PhotographerLaura Liverani
Agency Prospekt Photographers

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THIS surfer is one of many hoping to catch the waves at Kitaizumi beach in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture. The coastal spot was once hailed as a surfer’s paradise thanks to its high waves and sandy shores. Yet it has been almost a decade since it has been able to enjoy that status.
In 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant – situated around 25 kilometres from the beach – was the site of the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, after it was hit by a devastating tsunami. Kitaizumi reopened to the public in 2019 after a huge decontamination effort, and surfers are keen to see people return to the beach.
Taken by photographer Laura Liverani as part of a series called Fukushima Surfers, the image shows how the sport is making a comeback in the area. Though the building in the background is the Haramachi coal power station, not Fukushima Daiichi, the legacy of the nuclear plant still lingers.
Due to a lack of space, Japan plans to tip 1 million tonnes of contaminated water stored from the disaster – a combination of recovered groundwater and deliberately injected cooling waters – into the Pacific Ocean after it is treated. Managed properly, this shouldn’t release any harmful radioactive particles that could pass into marine sediment and fish or threaten surfers’ safe return to the sea.
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By Michael Le Page
The Border cave in South Africa
A. Kruger

People living in the Border cave in southern Africa slept on grass bedding 227,000 years ago – by far the oldest discovery of its kind.
“That’s quite close to the origin of our species,” says Lyn Wadley at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Her team has been excavating Border cave in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, which was inhabited on and off during prehistory. The peoples who lived there left many layers of deposits that have been preserved by the very dry conditions.

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Wadley’s team has found grass bedding in many of these layers, made from several species including Panicum maximum, which still grows outside the cave. The oldest layers containing the bedding are between 227,000 and 183,000 years old.
This grass bedding was often on top of ash layers. In some places these ashes are of burned grasses, suggesting people burned their old, pest-infested bedding and placed new bedding on top.

In other places, the ashes are of burned wood, suggesting ashes from wood fires were spread out and grass placed on top. This means people were deliberately putting grass bedding on ashes to deter crawling insects, says Wadley.
The team also found burned bits of camphor wood – camphor is still used as an insect repellent today. “Maybe it was burned for the smoke it creates that would repel flying insects,” says Wadley.
She has no doubt that the grasses were used for bedding. They are found only towards the sheltered rear of the cave, and often near to fireplaces. In fact, sometimes the edges of the bedding are singed.

Shards of rock mixed in with some bedding suggest people sat on the bedding as they made stone tools.
There are even bits of ochre powder in the bedding that might have rubbed off people’s skin as they slept. However, there is ochre in the roof of the cave, so the team cannot be sure it didn’t fall from the roof.
Before this discovery, the oldest-known bedding was 77,000 years old. Wadley found it at Sibudu cave, also in KwaZulu-Natal.

Her team has also found evidence of people roasting vegetables as long ago as 170,000 years. “If you want to get to the nitty-gritty of everyday life, look at plants,” says Wadley.
Her team presumes the people living in Border cave 227,000 years ago were modern humans – Homo sapiens – but cannot be sure it wasn’t another species such as Homo naledi.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abc7239

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By Michael Marshall
These cremated bones are 9000 years old
Bocquentin et al, 2020 (PLOS ONE, CC BY)

Stone Age people were cremating their dead in fire pits about 9000 years ago, in what is now Israel. The development of cremation may have been linked to a shift in their religious beliefs, away from worship of ancestors.
For tens of thousands of years, people tended to bury their dead, says Fanny Bocquentin at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. There is also evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead about 70,000 years ago. Cremation, in which the body is intentionally burned, is a relatively recent invention.
Bocquentin and her colleagues have excavated a Stone Age village called Beisamoun in Israel. It was occupied between at least 7200 and 6400 BC.

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During the dig, they discovered a U-shaped pit, 80 centimetres across and 60 centimetres deep. The sides of the pit had been plastered with wet mud, similar to that used elsewhere in the village to make mud bricks. In the middle of the pit, the team found a large quantity of ash, which contained 355 fragments of charred human bone.
The bones all seem to belong to one individual: a young adult, whose sex couldn’t be determined. The remains have been dated to between 7030 and 6700 BC.

It isn’t clear how the person died. There was a projectile point embedded in the left shoulder blade, indicating the person had been injured, but this had healed. “It was a clean wound, no infection,” says Bocquentin.
The ash was the remains of wood that had been stacked into a pyre and burned. It isn’t clear if the body was on top of the pyre, inside it or under it.
Previous burial practices were occasionally elaborate. In some instances, people would bury a body, then they would return, dig it up and remove the skull – which they reburied in a new pit with other skulls. Sometimes they plastered the skull with lime plaster or mud, creating a new face. “It’s long funeral practices in several steps,” says Bocquentin. “You are taking care of the dead for a long period of time.” In the Stone Age village of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, bodies were buried under the floors of houses. This all indicates a reverence for ancestors and a desire to be close to them, says Bocquentin.

Cremation is much faster, says Bocquentin. “You don’t wait even for the decay process.”
This could reflect a shift in religious beliefs, suggests Bocquentin. “I would say the status of the dead and the relation between dead and living is totally different,” she says. “We might think that there are new beliefs, maybe that the dead are not as important as they were, and maybe a new kind of god appearing.”
The Beisamoun cremation is the oldest in south-west Asia, but not the oldest in the world. For instance, archaeologists have found the cremated remains of a child from 11,500 years ago in Alaska. It isn’t clear how many times cremation was independently invented, says Bocquentin.
Journal reference: PLoS One , DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0235386
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