Philippa Kaur

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

In the film Archive, George Almore attempts to put his late wife’s memories into a machine. The project is far from a roaring success, finds Jon O’Brien

Humans 8 July 2020
By Jon O’Brien
J3 is George Almore’s third robotic attempt to resurrect his late wife
Courtesy of Vertical Entertainment

Film
Archive
Gavin Rothery

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Available on demand from 10 July
“HE WHO remains passive when overwhelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering elasticity of mind,” Charles Darwin once wrote.
Passiveness certainly isn’t a trait that can be attributed to Archive‘s leading man George Almore (Theo James). He is a bereaved researcher secretly attempting to resurrect his wife, played by Stacy Martin, using analogue memories and robotics.
We meet George in 2038, two years and two prototypes into his mission. He has produced J1, a boxy, WALL-E-esque figure that is slightly rigid and watches vintage cartoons, and V2, its more advanced “sister” with a jealous streak.
Holed up in an isolated facility deep in the heart of Japan’s snow-capped Yamanashi prefecture, George must care for these specimens of “deep-tiered machine learning and artificial intelligence” while keeping his project a secret.

Having lived through the road accident that killed his beloved, Almore cuts an enigmatic yet often sympathetic figure. He has genuine compassion for the robots, all too aware they are essentially failed experiments. And there is a palpable survivor’s guilt driving his mission.
Though the film is very much about Almore, there are other good characters too. Take the hard-nosed, hologrammed vice president (Rhona Mitra), for example, who is threatening to withdraw funding from the project providing Almore’s cover. There’s also Toby Jones’s inquisitive company representative, who suspects that the 200 hours of posthumous conversation data from Almore’s wife is being misused. Oh, and let’s not forget the gun-toting risk-assessor, played by Peter Ferdinando.
“Almore has genuine compassion for the robots, all too aware they are essentially failed experiments”
The film will inevitably be compared with an episode of Black Mirror called “Be Right Back”, in which a widow revives her partner, who died in a car crash, using a mail-ordered digital consciousness.
Archive, however, focuses just as much on the mechanics behind the concept as its implications. Version 3.0 of Almore’s robot wife turns out to be difficult for him to control. Her construction from confused, disembodied head and torso to fully realised ghost-white being is also remarkable, and sometimes very disturbing to observe.
This is a feature-length debut for writer and director Gavin Rothery. His only previous sci-fi work was a 2014 short called The Last Man, in which a soldier is awoken into a war-ravaged world. Rothery also supervised the visual effects on Moon, including parts of the eerie mining facility that the film is set in.
While it doesn’t quite hit all of the heights that it could, Archive is an entertaining watch. Its clever ruminations on free will, grief and immortality provide an immersive and visceral experience – one that, like its protagonist, is anything but passive.
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New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans 8 July 2020Read

Aimee Spinks/NETFLIX

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The Old Guard sees Charlize Theron lead a cast of unkillable warriors on a winding route between CCTV cameras and other people’s cellphones in a desperate attempt to hide from the modern world. It is available on Netflix from 10 July.
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Axiom’s End features YouTuber Lindsay Ellis’s entertaining deconstructions of pop culture in an alternate history of 2007, the year we first encountered an alien species. Who will translate for the monsters?
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Audible podcast Exoplanets explores the hunt to find planets like our own outside our solar system. There are potentially millions of them out there, and more are found every day

Space 8 July 2020
By Chris Stokel-Walker

NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter

Podcast
Exoplanets: The search for another Earth
Audible

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THE hunt to find exoplanets like our own has only just begun. In 1992, the first planets outside our solar system were discovered via a pulsar 2300 light years away that signalled at slightly odd intervals, indicating there were two worlds orbiting it. Now, we know there are potentially millions of them out there and more are found every day, says Danielle George, the host of Exoplanets, a six-part series on Audible.
George is an experienced guide to the galaxy: she has worked with Stephen Hawking on the search for far-off worlds, as well as NASA and the European Space Agency. With other researchers as guests, she tackles questions about the size of the universe and what kind of life may live within it.
Though it lacks drama at times, the series is an interesting look at the current state of exoplanet science. George, an optimist, believes there is another Earth-like planet out there somewhere. Any plans for humans to visit such a place should be shelved, however, as exoplanets are all very far away.
The thornier question, then, is: are we alone or could there be intelligent life on an exoplanet somewhere? The series comes to an answer – sort of. If there were other advanced societies out there, surely they would have attempted to detect us in search of another home? Perhaps they don’t need to, having taken better care of their home planet: a message that George says we need to take to heart.
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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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