Philippa Kaur

Watch
Japan Sinks: 2020, streaming now on Netflix, brings Sakyo Komatsu’s hit 1973 science-fiction novel up to the present day. An ordinary family is put to the test as Japan is demolished in a series of massive earthquakes.
Read
X+Y: A mathematician’s manifesto for rethinking gender sees Eugenia Cheng apply maths to gender bias and inequality. Never mind identity politics, she says: thinking using mathematics can gift us a fairer world.

Ben Fisher

Visit
Fons Americanus is artist Kara Walker’s 13-metre-tall classically inspired fountain, whose stay in London’s Tate Modern has now been extended. It didn’t cost the earth: it is made from an innovative carveable, acrylic composite.
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By Catherine De Lange
Understanding how people are helping others can ease children’s anxiety
James Veysey/Shutterstock

SINCE lockdown began in the UK, Cathy Creswell at the University of Oxford and her colleagues have been surveying thousands of families to find out how they are affected by the covid-19 pandemic. The Co-SPACE Study has now published its first findings from a longitudinal study that questioned people over several months.
What has your survey of families during lockdown shown?
More than 10,000 people have now taken part. Our first report was at the beginning of April, looking at the first 1500 people. What we … More

Our bodies evolved to take rest breaks, but sitting on chairs and couches can cause long-term damage. Here’s how to change the way you sit and boost your health

Health 15 July 2020
By Herman Pontzer and David Raichlen

Jason Raish

ANOTHER blistering afternoon in northern Tanzania, another high-stakes game of musical chairs. Stumbling back into camp to escape the sun, desperate for a seat, we glanced at each other and then at the single unoccupied camp chair. In the other, grinning, sat Onawasi, a respected elder with a mischievous bent. He seemed to be enjoying this.
We were spending our summer with the Hadza community, one of the last populations of hunter-gatherers on the planet. Hadza men and women manage to avoid heart disease and other diseases of the more industrialised world, and we wanted to understand why. Our small research team had come in two Land Cruisers loaded with tech to measure every movement made and calorie burned as Hadza men and women scoured the landscape every day for wild game, honey, tubers and berries.
After a long morning, we felt drained by the inescapable heat and humidity. All we wanted to do was sit. Onawasi seemed to feel the same way. He had spent the morning hunting, and certainly deserved the chair more than we did. But this was getting out of hand. Our precious camp chairs that we took into the bush despite their weight were Hadza magnets. Every visitor to our little research area seemed drawn to them like moths to a porch light.
We knew we had a lot to learn from the Hadza about staying physically active. It turns out they also had something important to teach us about resting. Together, over the next 10 years, we would come to understand why chairs are so irresistible, and why they seem to make … More

Ancient engravings etched into mammoth tusks discovered in Siberia reveal the oldest known images of camels in Asia. Images of two-humped camels have been found etched onto a 1.5-metre mammoth tusk discovered in the lower Tom River in western Siberia. The tusk is about 13,000 years old and also has an etching of what researchers […] More

There are lots of claims that house plants filter the air, but it turns out you need an awful lot of them to beat just opening the window, finds James Wong

Humans | Comment 8 July 2020
By James Wong

10’000 Hours/Getty Images

AS YOU may know from my bio, I cohabit my small flat in London with more than 500 plants. I am therefore fascinated by the promise of a plethora of health benefits from gardening in the great indoors. With the current flowering of interest in the hobby, the internet is awash with handy advice for the “10 best air-purifying plants for the home” and species marketed as “Air so pure”.
Being a stats geek, I wanted to calculate exactly how much the concentration of plants in my apartment could clean the air. This turned out to be … More

Most adolescents dabble in delinquency, but few become lifetime offenders. Long-running studies can help tell us why and improve policing, says psychologist Terrie Moffitt

Humans 8 July 2020
By Terrie Moffitt

Rocio Montoya

OUR attitudes towards crime and punishment are highly political. They often come down to how much we believe a person’s particular life circumstances should be taken into account when deciding whether their punishment fits the crime they committed. But criminal justice isn’t an evidence-free zone. Behavioural scientist Terrie Moffitt at King’s College London has spent her career trying to uncover biological and environmental roots to criminal behaviour. Now she has evidence from brain imaging and genetics to support her idea that there are generally two groups of people who persistently commit crime, each with different causes for their behaviour and different prospects for reform.
Dan Jones: How has the nature-nurture debate influenced views on criminal behaviour?
Terrie Moffitt: Our thinking about the roots of antisocial behaviour has followed pendulum swings between putting nature or nurture centre stage. Writing in the late 17th century, philosopher John Locke came down on the side of nurture, arguing that we are born as blank slates and learn all our behaviours, bad ones included. Then in the 19th century, Cesare Lombroso, the founder of criminology, suggested that bad people were born that way and could be identified by the shape of their eyes, ears, teeth and eyebrows. By the 1960s, after John Watson and B. F. Skinner developed behaviourism, the pendulum had swung back to nurture.
Everything changed in the 1980s and 90s, and the debates really heated up. Scientists started reporting studies of crime drawing on thousands of twins and adoptees in Scandinavian registers, which seemed to point to genetic transmission of criminal behaviour from parent to child. This was like … More

A train called Snowpiercer loops the planet after a global disaster, as an onboard mystery keeps the plot of this TV show rolling, says Emily Wilson

Humans 8 July 2020
By Emily Wilson
Jennifer Connolly, Mike O’Malley and Daveed Diggs in Snowpiercer (left to right)
Netflix

TV
Snowpiercer
Streaming on Netflix

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This review is designed to be as spoiler-free as possible. It was written based on the first five episodes
SNOWPIERCER is set in a nearish future in which some last fragments of humanity live on a train powered by an “eternal engine”. This 1001-carriage-long ark endlessly circles a frozen Earth made uninhabitable by bungling geoengineers who had been trying to fix climate change.
If you can accept the central premise for what it is, asking no awkward science questions about eternal engines or how a rail track can circumnavigate the globe, then there is plenty to enjoy on board Snowpiercer.
The plot, based on a film by Bong Joon-ho (now of Parasite fame) and before that a French graphic novel, imagines the train as a “fortress to class”.
Up front, a few privileged families live a life of luxury, the decor a cross between a Wes Anderson movie and an Agatha Christie novel.

Next, you get second class (not quite as nice, more economy lodge) and third class (a bit Blade Runner, loud music, steam punk vibe).
Finally, right at the back, you get the filthy wagons occupied by “tailees” who got on the train without a ticket and have subsequently been treated very poorly indeed.
Our two lead characters hail from opposite ends of the train. From the front, we get the leader of train hospitality, Melanie Cavill, played by Jennifer Connolly. Her job is to ensure perfect order on the train or, as she puts it, she “wears many hats”. Connolly, very elegant in her gorgeously cut turquoise uniform, is a mysterious and queenly, yet very human, presence.
Then, from the back of the train, we get a former homicide detective called Andre Layton, played by Daveed Diggs. He has spent the seven years since the train set off living in conditions of horrific squalor, scrabbling to make ends meet, endlessly working towards the revolution that the tailees long for.
“Right at the back, you get the filthy wagons occupied by ‘tailees’ who got on the train without a ticket”
The two leads meet when Layton – as the only murder-solving police officer left on the planet – is scrubbed clean and then dragged forwards from the tail to solve a killing “up train”.
The police procedural is a bit of a clunky addition to a show about a dystopian future on a train cutting through avalanches, but the advantage of it, of course, is that we get to explore the train properly as our cop pokes around, looking for the killer.
We get to see carriages devoted to agriculture and even a lovely aquarium, as well as the various living quarters of our new Snowpiercer friends and a secondary rail system sitting under the carriages that takes workers hither and thither.
As well as piecing together the main murder story, we get to piece together clues about a different background puzzle: the underlying mystery of Mr Wilford. He is said to be the owner and inventor of the train, and to be on board, although the ticket holders don’t see him.
I can’t quite work out yet how this story can keep going beyond its initial 10 episodes, given how tiny this closed world is – will they meet other people, get off the train?
Either way, season 2 has already been commissioned, so it looks like this eternal engine will keep rolling for some time to come, if not for eternity.
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