Philippa Kaur

By Rowan Hooper
Star Trek captain James T. Kirk boldly drinking what no one has drunk beforeCBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
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THE most effective science fiction creates an entire world you can imagine living in – and a world I want to live in needs delicious drinks.
Think of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, created by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and described as the best drink in existence. No matter that drinking it is said to be “like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick”, I want to try it. Same with the intoxicating ambrosia enjoyed by the ragtag fleet of surviving humans in Battlestar Galactica.Advertisement

Then there is the frothy blue Bantha milk served in the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars, possibly the most famous bar in the universe. And what about the warm beer served on the frozen planet Gethen in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness? It comes with a spoon to crack the layer of ice that forms on the surface between sips, making it a truly multisensory experience.
At New Scientist, we aren’t content with merely imagining what these drinks taste like. We have teamed up with cocktail-designer Zoe Burgess at award-winning Atelier PIP in London to bring them to life. Burgess and her team use the techniques of molecular mixology to investigate taste. “We love to explore how the best flavour can be extracted from ingredients,” she says. “This is where science comes into play. Our centrifuge and vacuum distillation units are the heart of our lab. They allow us to work precisely and achieve our flavour goals.”
The Atelier PIP team has tested a range of flavour and alcohol combinations to recreate these science fiction drinks – in their signature style – and, in an act of supreme altruism, we at New Scientist have volunteered to test them. When our little embassy of three crosses interstellar space to visit the firm’s kitchen, I am delighted to see that the vacuum distillation units are named Pris and Rachael after two of the replicants in Blade Runner. We have clearly come to the right place.
While some technical kit can be used to prepare these drinks, they can all be recreated at home, and Burgess has avoided the use of exotic ingredients such as liquid nitrogen. They can also all be made alcohol-free: either leave the alcohol out altogether, or use a non-alcoholic substitute for the spirit or beer.
In retrospect, that may be a wiser choice. Stumbling out after sampling all four high-strength concoctions, I feel like I’m on a planet with a different gravity than ours.
BANTHA MILK
Lucasfilm/Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock
Provenance: Star Wars: A New Hope
Description: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a species of huge, hairy mammal evolved on a desert planet. The bantha of Tatooine produces a rich, blue milk that is said to be nutritious and to boost intelligence. In the absence of a milkable bantha, Zoe Burgess includes electrolytes such as sodium and potassium in her recipe and uses red cabbage for its antioxidants, vitamin K content and natural dyeing properties.
Ingredients (serves 4):
500g caster sugar
25g yogurt powder
250ml tap water
50g sliced red cabbage
Black Cow milk vodka
100ml mineral water with added electrolytes
Method: Make a yogurt syrup by combining the sugar, yogurt powder and tap water in a pan and gently heating while stirring to dissolve the sugar. Allow to cool. In a blender, whizz up the cabbage and 30ml of vodka. Strain through a coffee filter and store the liquid in a sealed bottle in the fridge. The cabbage will oxidise, so make this tincture fresh for each batch. Add neat vodka (we suggest 35ml) and yogurt syrup to a highball glass and stir to combine. Add a dash of red cabbage tincture to colour the drink. Top with chilled electrolyte water and serve.
Tasting notes: “Comforting”, “Sweet but not too cloying”, “Surprisingly non-alcoholic tasting”
7/10
AMBROSIA
NBC Universal Television
Provenance: Battlestar Galactica
Description: What is left of the human race is scuttling through space in search of the mythical planet Earth, chased by murderous, technologically advanced androids called Cylons. Only the protection of the ageing military Battlestar Galactica stands between the humans and certain death. It isn’t surprising that the fugitives need a drink. The fictional ambrosia is green, with a slightly sulphurous smell, which led Burgess to use Derrumbes San Luis Potosí mescal as the base spirit.
Ingredients (serves 4):
300g cored green apples, sliced with skin on
140g caster sugar
300ml verjuice
1g malic acid
10g fresh chives
1g spirulina powder
100ml filtered water
30ml Derrumbes San Luis Potosí mescal
Method: Combine the sliced apples, sugar and verjuice in a jug, cover and allow to infuse overnight. Add this mix to a blender along with the fresh chives and malic acid, then blend to a pulp. Strain through a muslin cloth, retaining the liquid. Keep this green juice in an airtight bottle in the fridge until needed. Combine the spirulina powder with the water and stir well. Strain this solution through a coffee filter, retaining the liquid. Add the mescal, 20ml of the green juice and 2ml of the spirulina solution into the desired short glass and serve.
Tasting notes: “Complex and savoury”, “Grassy”, “Smooth”, “Delicious”
9/10
PAN GALACTIC GARGLE BLASTER
United Archives Gmbh/Alamy Stock Photo
Provenance: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Description: As might be expected from a drink invented by Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox, this is a complex concoction with many components, not all available in this universe. To make it easier to work with at home, Burgess has distilled the recipe down into a delicious and punchy gin and tonic. Patchouli shares flavour compounds with mint, making it the perfect choice to give extra impact to the mint notes.
Ingredients (serves 4):
4 patchouli ice cubes (made from water and 10 microlitres of food-grade patchouli oil) or 4 ice cubes infused with lemon juice
50ml gin such as Hayman’s Old Tom
120ml tonic water
1.25ml hypermint float (combine 50ml Fernet Branca Menta with 100 microlitres of food-grade birch oil)
Almonds pickled overnight with lemons (if Algolian suntiger teeth remain unavailable)
Method: To make the ice cubes, combine the two ingredients in a centrifuge flask. Spin at 4500rpm for 10 minutes, then strain using a coffee filter to remove the oil from the water. The resulting water will now be flavoured with the patchouli oil. Add this to an ice cube tray and freeze. For those sadly lacking a home centrifuge, substitute this with an ice cube infused with lemon juice. Add the ice cube to a highball glass, followed by the gin, then tonic, and stir gently. Add the hypermint float and serve with pickled almonds on the side.
Tasting notes: “Wow”, “My god”, “That’s a beast”, “Feels like my brain’s been smashed out by a bottle of Listerine”
6/10
GETHEN BEER
David Stock
Provenance: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin
Description: To mimic the drinking habits of the inhabitants of Gethen, Burgess has created a crème brûlée-style drink, with a malty beer-soup under a crust of sugar sealed by gently heating with a blowtorch. The drink itself isn’t hot, but a paprika tincture provides a warming sensation.
Ingredients (serves 4):
300g double cream
36g full fat milk
7g black treacle
2 egg yolks
60g caster sugar
200ml beer, choose something with a good malty flavour
0.5ml per glass of hot paprika tincture
20g isomalt sugar
Method: Add the cream, milk and treacle to a pan and bring to a simmer. In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the caster sugar to form a paste. Slowly add the hot cream mixture to the egg sugar, stirring constantly. Add the beer and stir to combine. Pour the mixture into a glass, adding the paprika tincture. Put in the fridge to chill; the liquid will be semi-set. To finish the drink, sprinkle isomalt sugar on the surface of the liquid and melt very gently with a blowtorch. You want the sugar to liquify and set, but ideally not to brown.
Tasting notes: “Heavenly”, “Amazing”, “I’m definitely making this one at home”, “More of a pudding than a drink”
10/10

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By David Robson
Playing fosters imagination, a crucial ingredient in technological innovationKelly Davidson/Plainpicture
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FEW origin stories are as perplexing as the invention of the wheel. Thomas Edison famously claimed that genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration – for our ancestors, it was the 99 per cent that posed a problem. Even after they realised they could move objects with a rolling motion, they needed to refine their engineering skills enough to build a wheel that actually worked.
“Making a full-scale wheel takes a lot of physical resources, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of skill,” says Felix Riede, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. But how could any prehistoric inventor have afforded to pour so much blood, sweat and tears into experimentation when there were mouths to feed?Advertisement
Inspired by his young son, Riede has come up with a surprising solution. He thinks that the skills required for technological innovation were honed through play. While the adults went about the serious work of ensuring the group’s survival, youngsters naturally experimented with the objects around them. If Riede is right, some of humanity’s most important inventions – including the wheel, weaving and projectile weapons – have their roots in children’s toys.
“Some of humanity’s key inventions could have their roots in children’s toys”
The idea that toys shaped humanity builds on a growing understanding of just how important play has been to the evolution of our brains. Analyses of remains such as teeth from ancient hominins show that our species, Homo sapiens, enjoys an unusually long childhood. An extended infancy gives more time for imaginative play, which has been shown to train many important cognitive skills, including counterfactual thinking – the ability to ask “what if…” – and the capacity to envisage different scenarios. According to April Nowell at the University of Victoria in Canada, this might explain why we are the only species with such a rich symbolic and artistic culture.
Surprisingly, however, no one had examined toys in the archaeological record as objects that might have influenced the cognitive development of our ancestors – until Riede was inspired by the rising tide of plastic around his sons. “As soon as you have children, your home becomes flooded with playthings,” he says. This is not limited to the West: in almost every modern society, children play with miniature versions of adult objects.
A few psychological studies have shown that the characteristics of toys can have a direct influence on the cognitive development of children. In one experiment, kids playing with open-ended toys – building blocks that can be put together in many different ways, rather than ones forming a particular structure – tended to be better at solving so-called “divergent” problems. These require us to generate many solutions, such as finding new uses for a familiar object. Playthings can also help a child understand mechanical properties, such as the motion of a rolling ball, and practise social roles, such as parenting a doll. “Toys facilitate and also limit the kinds of cognitive activities and thinking that children engage in,” says Riede.
According to his hypothesis, prehistoric toys allowed children to explore new uses and adaptations of familiar objects while they played. This would have equipped them with greater technological understanding and the more-flexible outlook that underpins greater creativity. “It’s this cognitive priming that loads the dice in favour of an innovation that actually works,” says Riede. If he is right, you would expect to see some trace of this process in the archaeological record, with the presence of certain toys somehow pre-empting big cultural shifts in related technologies.
Inspired by play
It is early days for this idea, but Riede, Nowell and their colleagues recently published a paper outlining some intriguing case studies. For instance, examining the archaeological records of communities living in Greenland from around 4500 years ago, they found that the early colonisers lacked toys and also showed little innovation in their material culture, whereas the Thule, who migrated into Greenland around 800 years ago, had many miniature objects that appear to have been designed specifically for child’s play, including toy kayaks, sledges, weapons and dolls. Their appearance seemed to coincide with an explosion of new adult technologies, such as advanced designs for harpoons, sophisticated boats and elaborate clothes. The chronology isn’t refined enough to determine which emerged first, the toys or the advanced technology, but Riede thinks the two may have grown together, with the richer material culture inspiring new play objects, which in turn primed the young minds for further innovation.
The team also points to sites in Western Cape, South Africa, dating back 60,000 to 80,000 years ago. Analyses of rock fragments suggest that novices, presumably children, were mimicking the adults’ stone knapping, producing crude and functionally useless copies of real tools. This “play-copying” again seems to coincide with sophisticated new technologies, including the first arrowheads, suggesting that the childhood games might have sparked greater cultural innovation.
Meanwhile, spinning whorls essential for the production of fabrics may have been inspired by “rondelles”, threaded discs engraved with pictures of animals. Archaeologists believe that these discs, found in Europe during the Late Stone Age, would have spun around the thread to alternate between the images on either side, a bit like a prehistoric flick-book. “There is cognitive overlap between the idea of these spinning discs and the idea that you can use rotation for a purpose – to make fibres,” says Riede.
Jason Raish
It is the invention of the wheel, however, that offers the most compelling support for Riede’s idea. The oldest evidence of wheeled vehicles suggests that the technology emerged around 5500 years ago, across western Eurasia – in the northern Caucasus, Mesopotamia and central and northern Europe. But some two centuries beforehand, we see small models of animals with holes drilled through their feet for an axle, and ceramic discs that functioned as wheels. The tops of the animals were hollowed, leading to the suggestion that they were ornate drinking vessels, perhaps used during rituals. But given their size and the fact that miniature animals are playthings in many modern cultures, Riede believes that they were toys. “You could easily call them quite cute,” he says.
If so, like any toddler with a train set today, children playing with those toys would have been getting to grips with the mechanics of rotary motion. They might have used their toys to carry various objects, and practised different ways of propelling them – from the front or the back, or letting them roll down a slope. They might even have experimented with wheels of different sizes, or made from different materials. As the children grew up, those same skills would have helped them make the cognitive leap necessary to imagine a wagon, whereas a society that lacked those toys would have struggled to envisage a workable design.
“A society that lacked toys with wheels would have struggled to envisage a workable wagon”
Perhaps the early inventors even used toys to produce prototypes. “You could easily make 100 of these miniature figures, all different, play around with them – quite literally – and then see what sort of design works best,” says Riede.
Archaeologist Michelle Langley at Griffith University in South East Queensland, Australia, agrees that the idea is worth further study. “You don’t just wake up one day as an adult, able to do all these things. You need to practise and to get familiar with the raw materials and how they work,” she says. “There’s this big learning process and you need to start young.”
Like Riede, Langley has been inspired by her own child’s behaviour. She recently published an article arguing that various archaeological objects, including rondelles and clay figurines often seen as ritual objects, should be reinterpreted as playthings. Animal figures, for instance, might have been important to teach children about hunting. “It’s easier when you have these little props.”
Langley is currently designing a study that will involve giving replicas of prehistoric objects to small children to help determine the characteristic patterns of wear and tear that come with play – whether they become smooth and polished, or cracked and chipped, for instance. This should then allow archaeologists to better identify which artefacts really were toys, perhaps providing further evidence for Riede’s hypothesis.
Riede, Langley and Nowell are now planning to organise a conference in Australia that will draw together scientists from diverse disciplines to explore exactly how children, so long overlooked by archaeologists, drove cultural change. Riede is excited about what they might find. “We need to look at the stuff we already have with new eyes and from a different angle because the children’s material culture is really important for understanding long-term trajectories of innovation and creativity,” he says.
If they are right, our greatest advances might truly have been child’s play.

Fight clubs
Team sports have long been known to bring out our tribal instincts. But did they first emerge to train us for warfare? That’s the hypothesis of Michelle Scalise Sugiyama at the University of Oregon.
She scoured the ethnographic record for information about the physical strategies used by traditional societies during their typical battles, such as when they raid another camp. Her final list of eight items included moves such as kicking, striking and blocking blows to the body, throwing and dodging objects, and group coordination. “They have to track the behaviours and infer the intentions of multiple individuals,” says Scalise Sugiyama. She then compared this list with ethnographic accounts of team games, many of which resembled Western sports such as rugby.
Sure enough, 36 per cent of the societies played a game incorporating at least half of the strategies that are crucial for battle. Scalise Sugiyama thinks this is probably an underestimate because anthropologists sometimes see such games as trivial activities. “If you’re lucky, you get a couple of pages of information,” she says. But if team sports do serve an important evolutionary function, we should take play more seriously.

This article appeared in print under the headline “R toys us?”

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