Philippa Kaur

By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Jonathan Buckley
ANYONE who is just starting to grow their own vegetables might want to consider sweetcorn, especially if they are keen to get children involved. It is, for the most part, easy to grow and the end result of corn on the cob is usually appreciated by all, no matter their age.
At first, I tried the “three sisters” companion planting method, developed by Indigenous groups in North America. This means growing sweetcorn with two other types of plants, squash and beans, and they help each other thrive.
Beans improve soil fertility because, as a legume (like peas and lentils), they … More

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
An abandoned inflatable boat used by migrants to reach Dover, UK, in 2020BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images
HEALTH bodies and charity workers fear that the UK government’s plan to send adult asylum seekers to settle in Rwanda, rather than allowing them to settle in the UK, will inadvertently lead to unaccompanied children being deported. This is because, despite the government’s proposed Nationality and Borders Bill calling for “scientific methods” to confirm that child asylum seekers aren’t adults, experts say there is no such way to determine someone’s age.
Age assessments aren’t mere form filling. Unaccompanied children arriving in the UK need to enter education and be found a foster family as soon as possible. There are also fears that adults may claim they are children in the hope of being treated more favourably by the UK’s asylum system.
“There is no medical or psychological test which can definitively state a person’s age”Advertisement
But many people who flee their home countries can’t prove their age. They may have lost their documentation in conflict, never had a birth certificate in the first place or simply be from a culture that doesn’t celebrate birthdays.
Last year, there were 3762 claims for asylum in the UK made by unaccompanied children, but officials from the country’s Border Force or local councils disputed 2517 of them and ordered an age assessment. Around 60 per cent of these were judged to be at least 18, and so adults.
Such assessments are controversial. Several charity workers and lawyers have told New Scientist that caseworkers are using pseudoscience to help justify their decisions on whether an asylum seeker is a child or an adult. Lawsuits have been brought against the UK’s Home Office in the past few years due to officials judging child asylum seekers to be adults and putting them into hotels unsupervised, without safeguarding measures.
Current age assessments in the UK are largely conducted by local government social workers and are based on a series of interviews with the asylum seeker as well as judging their appearance and demeanour. This process can be subjective and lacking evidence.

“I was so stressed [by the whole process],” says Jerome*, an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK in 2020 with no identification. Jerome says he was 16 when he arrived in the country, but Border Force didn’t believe him.
After three months and four separate interviews, two social workers claimed that Jerome was lying about his age and judged that he was aged between 19 and 22. New Scientist has seen documents produced by the social workers to justify this assessment. In the “appearance and demeanour” section, they claim that because Jerome’s skin didn’t look youthful, he was unlikely to be 17.
The report also suggests that because Jerome had broad shoulders and a pronounced Adam’s apple, it was likely that he had “completed puberty”. In order to claim that Jerome’s broad shoulders were a sign of adulthood, the report linked to a website that instructs readers on how best to draw the human body.
“It’s complete pseudoscience,” says Jerome’s independent charity social worker*. “It’s medieval.”
But Jerome’s case isn’t unusual. Bob*, a charity worker, says he worked with a 15-year-old asylum seeker* last year who was asked to tell social workers where exactly his body hair was. In another case, a woman* from an East African country was told she couldn’t be 17 because her hips were too wide for teenage women from that region.
Bob also had a case in which the facial hair of an asylum seeker* from a north-eastern African country was taken as evidence that he was over 18 because the assessors judged that men from the region don’t develop facial hair until adulthood. “It’s just plain wrong and racist,” says Bob. “I believe age assessments are one of the most disturbing aspects of the entire asylum system [in the UK].”
Bob says the UK’s new migration plans risk children being wrongly assessed as over 18 and quickly moved to Rwanda. “The Home Office could decide to take the precautionary approach not to remove anyone whose age has been disputed – but I can’t see this happening,” he says. “They’d say that everyone will then claim to be a child at the border.”
The Home Office told New Scientist that it won’t send unaccompanied children to Rwanda. “Everyone considered for relocation will be screened, interviewed and have access to legal advice,” says a Home Office spokesperson. “Decisions will be taken on a case-by-case basis and nobody will be removed if it is unsafe or inappropriate for them.”
The spokesperson also said the current age assessment method is “very subjective” and that measures put in place through the Nationality and Borders Bill will stop adults who are seeking asylum claiming to be children.
Wrist X-rays are used for age assessments in the European UnionMarco Ohmer/Alamy
In January, the Home Office launched a scientific committee to look at alternative age assessment techniques. The committee is looking at three main methods, according to a source with knowledge of the matter who spoke to New Scientist on condition of anonymity.
The first method, dental X-rays, works on the assumption that teeth mature at a constant rate and that all teeth, except the third molars – also called wisdom teeth – are fully mature by the age of 20. The technique is used in countries like France and Sweden to assess the ages of asylum seekers.
But the British Dental Association (BDA) has called the methodology inaccurate, saying that children as young as 16 can have mature wisdom teeth, while some people never develop them at all.
“Dental age checks fail basic standards on accuracy and ethics,” says Eddie Crouch at the BDA. “If ministers go down this path, it seems inevitable that some child refugees risk being handed a one-way ticket to Rwanda.”
The second method involves taking X-rays of the wrist bone and comparing the image to the X-rays of other similarly aged people. A briefing note on the topic published on 15 March by the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology said the method should be used with caution because we don’t really know how trauma or malnourishment, both common in asylum seekers, may affect wrist bone density.
“There is no medical or psychological test which can definitively state a person’s age,” says Zoë Greaves at the British Medical Association (BMA). “In addition, the use of procedures such as radiographs of bones and teeth to determine age is not only unreliable but also poses a risk [from X-ray exposure] to individuals forced to undergo the procedure.”
“The BMA believes that it is not ethical for doctors to use their clinical skills to take part in an age-assessment process that results in vulnerable and traumatised people being sent to an offshore facility,” says Greaves.
The scientific committee is also investigating whether DNA methylation can be used to assess a person’s age. This is the chemical modification of DNA that happens throughout our lives and studies have shown that the “biomarkers” of this process, found in blood or saliva samples, can be used to estimate a person’s age. But Eugénia Cunha at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, who studies the technique, says the results aren’t accurate enough to be used in real-world age assessments.

The source with knowledge of the Home Office’s scientific committee says they believe the department intends to go ahead with some of these methods in the coming year, especially dental X-rays. The Home Office didn’t confirm or deny this before publication.
Using these kinds of biological signs to determine age may appear to be accurate and impartial, but they aren’t, says the source. The main benefit is cost. “If you ignore the fact that they get the answer wrong quite a lot of the time, it’s much cheaper than a social worker assessment,” says the source.
So if current age assessments are flawed, and the government’s proposed scientific methods are also unreliable, what is the solution? Jo Schofield has 10 years’ experience conducting age assessments for local councils. She has since set up an independent firm called Immigration Social Work Services in the UK for whenever someone wants to challenge an official assessment.
“I believe social workers can do this work if they are trained properly,” she says. “We do 9-hour assessments which are trauma-informed and give the asylum seeker the benefit of the doubt.” She says budget cuts, a lack of training, overwhelming caseloads and a culture of disbelief have led to social workers conducting age assessments too hastily. Schofield estimates that a properly carried out assessment can cost a few thousand pounds, while those that may have been done incorrectly, resulting in legal challenges, can cost £45,000.
In February, Schofield set up a qualification for age assessment that any social worker can take. She believes that such holistic assessments are the best way to assess a young person’s age. “It just needs to be done properly,” she says.
*names have been changed and specifics left out to protect people’s identities and because legal cases are ongoing

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New insight into how we age suggests it may be driven by a failure to switch off the forces that build our bodies. If true, it could lead to a deeper understanding of ageing – and the possibility of slowing it

Humans

27 April 2022

By Claire Ainsworth
Shutterstock/Microone
IT WAS as if someone had turned back time. Once-faltering paws gripped objects with renewed strength. Hearts and livers regained their youthful vitality. Fuzzy memories sharpened. And according to Steve Horvath’s experiments, the biological age of his rats had been cut in half. “I was stunned,” he says.
Horvath, an anti-ageing researcher at the University of Los Angeles, California, saw these startling effects in 2020 after injecting old rats with blood extract from younger rodents. And he isn’t alone. A growing number of labs are reporting findings that indicate we might have been thinking about ageing the wrong way.
Rather than the result of the accumulation of wear and tear as time ticks by, ageing could be driven by the forces that build our bodies in the uterus and maintain them after we are born. In youth, they help us, but a failure to switch them off brings the deterioration of old age. This new view offers a deeper understanding of what ageing actually is and the possibility of slowing or even partly reversing it.
While the processes that drive ageing are a matter of debate, biogerontologists do agree on one thing – what it looks like: the progressive decline in physical function that most creatures experience with the passage of time. They have catalogued the cellular changes accompanying this decline, which include crumbling chromosome ends, damaged and unstable genomes and changes in the way that cells sense nutrients.
For many years, biologists have favoured the idea that these hallmarks were the result of damage such as that wrought by reactive molecules called free radicals produced by our … More

Oscar winners alive today are expected to die aged 81.3, on average, compared with 76.4 for their fellow nominees and 76.2 for their unnominated co-stars

Health

26 April 2022

By Alice Klein
Katharine Hepburn in the 1981 film On Golden Pond, for which she won the Best Actress Oscar, aged 74Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy
­­Oscar-winning actors are expected to live five years longer than thespians who never take home an Academy Award.­
While watching the Oscars one year, Donald Redelmeier at the University of Toronto in Canada noticed the actors on stage appeared more vivacious than people of the same age who he treats.
Together with his colleague Sheldon Singh, Redelmeier looked at the 934 actors who were nominated for an Oscar, from the award’s … More

The number of crashes on Texan roads increased when electronic signs were used to display driving fatality figures

Humans

21 April 2022

By Matthew Sparkes
Some warnings on electronic road signs might do more harm than goodWillowpix/Getty Images
Electronic signs above US highways that highlight annual traffic fatalities are intended to shock people into driving safely, but statisticians warn there is compelling evidence they actually cause accidents.
Although the messages are displayed in many US states, Jonathan Hall at the University of Toronto in Canada and his colleagues chose to examine crash data from Texas because the state uses electronic signs for fatality warnings just one week out of each month, providing ample control data for comparison.
The researchers compared the number of crashes from the two years before the signs were introduced with five years of data while they were in place. They discovered that displaying a fatality message increased the number of crashes on the 10 kilometres of road after the sign by 4.5 per cent. Their findings suggest fatality messages caused an additional 2600 crashes and 16 deaths per year across Texas.Advertisement
Hall puts the effect down to distraction and the increase in a driver’s cognitive load while absorbing the information. “You see it and you’re thinking about it, and so you don’t put on your brakes quite as soon, and these little errors, 1 in 50 times, might cause a crash,” he speculates. “The perfect evidence would be a randomised control trial. I want to be clear that we don’t have that. But I think we actually have really, really compelling evidence.”

He says that the number of fatalities displayed on a sign also changes its impact as larger numbers are more shocking. In Texas, the state fatality numbers were reset each year in February and the team saw a big drop in crashes in February compared with January.
Hall says his team has written to all states that show such warning messages and asked them to collaborate on further research, but they have received little positive response. “If you’re going to do a safety campaign, it’s not that hard to say, ‘hey, let’s randomly draw five weeks from the next six months to show this sign, and analyse crashes’. But they haven’t done that, because there’s just a presumption that the signs can’t hurt,” he says.
The Texas Department of Transportation didn’t respond to a request for comment, but is understood to no longer display such warning messages above highways.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abm3427

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Scientists analysed the remains of skin patches attached to three English church doors, discovering they came from farm animals – not Viking raiders

Humans

21 April 2022

By Joshua Howgego
“Daneskin” and a hinge taken from the door of St. Botolph’s church in Hadstock, near Cambridge, in the UKSaffron Walden Museum
Patches of skin supposedly flayed from Viking raiders and attached to the doors of some English churches are actually animal hides, a genetic analysis has revealed.
At least four medieval churches in England have remains of these so-called daneskins. The most well-known example is from St. Botolph’s church in Hadstock, near Cambridge. According to local myth, St. Botolph’s macabre adornment was taken from a Viking after they attempted to pillage … More

The campfire was a social hub for ancient humans, and a virtual reality investigation suggests that the flickering light may have made art etched on flat rocks look animated

Humans

20 April 2022

By Colin Barras
The position of replica Stone Age plaquettes in relation to fire during an experimentNeedham et al., 2022, PLOS ONE, CC-BY 4.0
Stone Age Europeans may have huddled around campfires at night to watch simple animations created when firelight danced across artwork etched on flat rocks.
The ancient paintings preserved on the walls of European caves tell us that Stone Age artists could depict animals with astonishing realism. What makes this prehistoric art even more impressive is that a lot of it must have been painted by firelight, because it lies far from cave entrances and beyond the reach of the sun.
Recently, some archaeologists have speculated that ancient humans saw this flickering firelight as an opportunity to enhance their work. By producing multiple overlapping pictures on the cave wall, artists could create rudimentary animations as the light from their flaming torches highlighted first one and then another image.Advertisement
Now, Andrew Needham at the University of York, UK, and his colleagues have found evidence that these simple animations weren’t confined to deep caves. Instead, some appear to have been etched onto flat stones placed near hearths around which Stone Age people would gather in the evening.

The stones, called plaquettes, were excavated in the 19th century from the Montastruc rock shelter in southern France. Most of them are 10 to 20 centimetres in length and width and have images of animals – usually horses or reindeers – etched on one or both sides. They were created by so-called Magdalenian people, probably between about 16,000 and 13,500 years ago.
Little is known about how the plaquettes were originally used. But Needham and his colleagues point out that most of them have one feature in common: evidence of exposure to heat. Because other ancient artefacts from the rock shelter don’t show evidence of heat exposure, the researchers argue that the plaquettes were routinely placed near campfires.
Needham and his colleagues wondered what effect flickering light from the flames might have had on the artwork. To explore this, they produced 3D computer models of the plaquettes and used virtual reality to simulate dim light dancing over their surfaces.

Doing so revealed that the light can draw the viewer’s attention to first one and then another animal engraved on the plaquette, giving an impression of movement.
“This must have been quite a powerful visual effect,” says Needham – particularly in the context of a campfire. “This was likely an important social space. It might have been a place to share stories or chat and bond with each other after long days spent out in the landscape hunting and gathering.”
He says the research is a reminder of the need to think about ancient art in its original context when possible.
“The art is not just the engraved lines on the rock, but those engraved lines experienced under the correct conditions of darkness and roving light,” says Needham. “It changes our appreciation of what art was and how it was used by Magdalenian people.”
Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266146
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