Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Geese may have been the first birds to be domesticated 7000 years ago

    Goose bones from Stone Age China suggest the birds were being domesticated there 7000 years ago, which could mean they were domesticated before chickens

    Humans

    7 March 2022

    By Michael Marshall
    Chinese geese (Anser cygnoides f. domestica)blickwinkel/AGAMI/M. Guyt/Alamy
    Geese may have been domesticated as early as 7000 years ago in what is now China, according to a study of preserved goose bones. That may make them the first bird to be domesticated, before chickens – although the timing of chicken domestication is uncertain.
    The finding extends the history of goose domestication and potentially the history of domestic poultry as a whole, says Masaki Eda at Hokkaido University Museum in Sapporo, Japan.
    Eda is part of a team that has excavated an archaeological site in east China called Tianluoshan, which was a Stone Age village between about 7000 and 5500 years ago. Its inhabitants “were basically hunter-gatherers”, says Eda, but they also grew rice in paddy fields.Advertisement
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    The researchers have identified 232 goose bones at Tianluoshan and say there are multiple lines of evidence that some of the geese were at least partially domesticated.
    Four of the bones belonged to immature geese that were less than 16 weeks old, with the youngest probably less than eight weeks old. This implies they must have hatched at Tianluoshan, says Eda, because they were too young to have flown in from elsewhere. However, no wild geese breed in the area today and it is unlikely they did so 7000 years ago, he says.
    Some of the adult geese also seem to have been locally bred, based on the chemical make-up of their bones, which reflects the water they drank. These locally bred birds were all roughly the same size, indicating captive breeding. Finally, the researchers carbon-dated the bones and found that the locally bred geese lived about 7000 years ago.
    Taken together, the findings suggest the geese were at an early stage of domestication, says Eda.

    “It’s a major study in our understanding of poultry domestication,” says Ophélie Lebrasseur at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France. “They’ve been very thorough.”
    “The main thing that stood out for me is the fact they actually did radiocarbon dating on the bird bones,” says Julia Best at Cardiff University in the UK. This makes the dating much more reliable than if they had simply dated the surrounding sediment.
    If geese were domesticated 7000 years ago, that would make them the first bird to be domesticated, says Eda. The other candidate is chickens, but there has been a dispute over when and where this first happened.
    Chickens were probably domesticated from wild birds called red junglefowl, which live in southern Asia. However, genetics has complicated the story, revealing that domestic chickens subsequently interbred with other birds like the grey junglefowl.
    A study published in 2014 reported that chickens were domesticated in northern China as early as 10,000 years ago, based on DNA from bones. However, it isn’t clear that red junglefowl ever lived that far north, says Lebrasseur. Furthermore, the bones weren’t directly dated and “a lot of the things they claimed were chickens were pheasants”, says Best. Firm evidence of domestic chickens only appears from around 5000 years ago, she says.
    This implies geese were domesticated before chickens, says Lebrasseur. “With the evidence we currently have, I think it is true,” she says. But she adds that bird domestications are understudied compared with those of mammals like dogs and cows, so the story could well change as more evidence emerges.
    It is very difficult to say why the geese were domesticated, says Eda. Meat, eggs, feathers and bone tools are all possibilities, and they may have been used in ritual ceremonies. “One of the things we see with chickens is they’re often held in high esteem when they’re first domesticated,” says Best.
    Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2117064119

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Astronomers may not have found a sign of the universe’s first stars after all

    A new study casts a haze over a hint of the universe’s first glimmers of starlight.

    In 2018, researchers claimed that a subtle signature in radio waves from early in the universe’s history had revealed the era when the first stars switched on, known as the cosmic dawn. But the first experiment to test that study’s conclusions found no sign of those early stars, scientists report February 28 in Nature Astronomy.

    Just after the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was a hot stew of matter. Stars probably didn’t flicker on until at least 100 million years later — a poorly understood era of the cosmos. Finding signs of the first beams of starlight would flesh out the cosmic origin story. So the 2018 claim of pinpointing those earliest gleams, from the EDGES experiment in the Australian outback, caused an astronomical hubbub (SN: 2/28/18).

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    “It definitely completely excited our whole community with this fascinating result,” says radio astronomer Saurabh Singh of the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India.

    The researchers reported detecting a dip across particular wavelengths of radio waves, a sign of light from the first stars interacting with surrounding hydrogen gas. But the result quickly raised skepticism, because the dip was deeper than expected. To know whether the hint of the first starlight was real, scientists would need to make more measurements.

    Singh and colleagues did just that with the Shaped Antenna Measurement of the Background Radio Spectrum 3, or SARAS 3. Similar to EDGES, the experiment uses an antenna to pick up radio waves. But SARAS 3 has a different design from EDGES, with a differently shaped antenna. And SARAS 3 is designed to float atop a lake. “That gives us a very distinctive advantage,” Singh says.

    On Earth, radio waves come from a variety of sources, which must be carefully accounted for to reveal the subtler signal from the cosmic dawn. Misunderstanding those other sources of radio waves could lead to an unaccounted-for experimental error that might give incorrect results.

    In particular, experiments on land must contend with radio waves emitted from the ground, which are difficult to estimate due to the complex, layered nature of soil. When the antenna is atop a lake, it’s easier to estimate what kinds of radio waves come from the uniform water below. Data taken from two lakes in India revealed no sign of the dip.

    The new study “highlights just how difficult this measurement is,” says physicist H. Cynthia Chiang of McGill University in Montreal. It’s uncomfortable that the two studies disagree, she says, but notes that the disagreement “isn’t quite enough to make any definitive conclusions at this point.”

    And some of the same types of experimental issues that may affect EDGES could also affect SARAS 3, says experimental cosmologist Judd Bowman of Arizona State University in Tempe, a member of the EDGES team. “We still have more work ahead to reach the final outcome.”

    An improved version of EDGES will be deployed later this year, and the SARAS 3 team has additional deployments planned. Other experiments are also working on similar measurements. Those tests may finally illuminate the universe’s transition from darkness to light. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    How Russia’s war in Ukraine hinders space research and exploration

    Space exploration may seem like a faraway endeavor from Earth’s surface, but events on the ground ripple into space. The Russian war on Ukraine is no exception.

    From a rocket launch system to a rover set to explore Mars, a wide range of space missions is facing postponements or cancelations due to escalating tensions on the ground in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine on February 24. The European Union, United States and others have imposed sanctions on Russia; Russia, as a result, is continually changing and canceling its space-related plans. The shifts are having an impact on everything from international collaborations to missions that rely on Russian rockets to get to space.

    Here’s a closer look at some of those projects.

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    ExoMars rover

    The ExoMars mission is a partnership between the European Space Agency and the Russian space agency Roscosmos. This is a two-part mission to Mars consisting of an orbiter and a rover. The orbiter has been at the Red Planet since late 2016, but the Rosalind Franklin rover was supposed to launch this September (SN: 10/18/16).

    “The sanctions and the wider context make a launch in 2022 very unlikely,” the European Space Agency, or ESA, said in a February 28 statement in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Due to Earth’s and Mars’ orbital geometry, the most direct trajectory for a spacecraft from our planet to Mars repeats every two years, and that launch window remains open for less than two weeks. The ExoMars rover, which will look for signs of past life, was originally to launch in 2020, but due to the pandemic and technical issues, it slipped to 2022 (SN: 3/12/20). Now it’s at risk of slipping again to 2024.

    The eROSITA telescope

    Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma is a space-based X-ray observatory, run jointly by Germany and Russia, that has been mapping the large-scale structure of the universe for the last two and a half years (SN: 7/8/20). The probe’s main telescope, eROSITA, has discovered hundreds of celestial objects, including a bizarre stellar explosion known as a “cow” (SN: 1/21/22). On February 26, the Germans placed eROSITA into safe mode as an action to “freeze co-operation with Russia,” according to a statement from SRG leadership at the Max Planck Institute in Garching, Germany.  

    “This is a standard, reversible, operation mode of the telescope, in which we do not take data, but keep the vital subsystems on,” says Andrea Merloni, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, also in Garching, and eROSITA’s project scientist. He declined to comment on any other aspect of the mission or collaboration with Russia.

    The Russian News Agency TASS reported March 1 that Roscosmos intends to estimate the financial loss of that safe-mode action and other European space-related sanctions, and the Russian space agency will then bill “the European side” of the projects.

    ESA, meanwhile, is “assessing the consequences on each of our ongoing programmes conducted in cooperation with the Russian state space agency,” the agency said in its February 28 statement.

    Navigation satellites

    In response to international sanctions against Russia, the head of Roscosmos announced February 26 that the agency was suspending cooperation with the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, and withdrawing its dozens of employees from the site. Several space missions were set to launch from this location via a Russian Soyuz rocket in the next year, including a pair of European navigation satellites in early April.

    These satellites would have joined with the already-launched two dozen that make up the Galileo navigational system, the European answer to the United States’ GPS system. Two additional Galileo satellites are also in orbit, but they were placed incorrectly and instead focus on science and search and rescue (SN: 12/10/18).

    OneWeb internet network

    The U.K. company OneWeb, which is building a space-based internet network with hundreds of low-Earth satellites, is also facing a launch postponement.

    A Soyuz rocket was scheduled to send up a few dozen OneWeb satellites March 4, one of a series of launches aimed at completing the network in 2022. But in the early hours of March 2, the head of Roscosmos tweeted the space agency wouldn’t launch the satellites without a guarantee from the company that they wouldn’t be used for military purposes. He also demanded the U.K. government sell its share of the mission, which it has refused to do.

    Venera-D mission to Venus

    The Russian-Ukraine war has also affected U.S. space activities, but to a lesser extent than its impact on its European counterparts. NASA has relationships with several commercial partners, so the agency relies less on Roscosmos. But NASA is still feeling some effects.

    For instance, in retaliation to U.S. sanctions, the head of Roscosmos tweeted on February 26 that NASA’s participation in the Russian-led Venera-D mission to Venus would be “inappropriate.” This mission will include an orbiter, lander and surface station, and it will focus on understanding Venus’s former and present habitability.

    However, Venera-D won’t launch until late this decade, and NASA has been involved only in some planning groups. The U.S. space agency already has two of its own Venus missions in the works (SN: 6/02/21).

    International Space Station

    While many areas of cooperation in space with Russia are fraying, the International Space Station collaboration so far remains unchanged. “NASA continues working with all our international partners, including the State Space Corporation Roscosmos, for the ongoing safe operations of the International Space Station,” NASA public affairs officer Joshua Finch, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, said in an e-mailed statement.

    Currently, there are two Russian cosmonauts, four NASA astronauts and one ESA astronaut aboard the station. Later this month, a Russian Soyuz capsule is set to return the two cosmonauts and one of the NASA astronauts to Earth, landing in Kazakhstan as scheduled, Finch said.

    However, during a March 1 NASA Advisory Council meeting, Wayne Hale, a former NASA associate administrator, recommended the U.S. space agency consider contingencies in case Russia no longer collaborates on the space station. At the same meeting the following day, former U.S. representative Jane Harman recommended that NASA think about what cooperation with Russia will look like going forward. More

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    in Humans

    How to Stay Smart in a Smart World review: Why humans still trump AI

    Despite AI’s impressive feats at driving cars and playing games, a new book by psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer argues that our brains have plenty to offer that AI will never match

    Humans

    2 March 2022

    By Chen Ly

    IN THE 1950s, Herbert Simon – a political scientist and one of the founders of AI – declared that, once a computer could beat the best chess player in the world, machines would have reached the pinnacle of human intelligence. Just a few decades later, in 1997, the chess-playing computer Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov.
    It was an impressive feat, but according to Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, human minds don’t need to worry just yet. In How to Stay Smart in a Smart World, he unpacks humanity’s complicated relationship with artificial intelligence and digital technology. In an age where self-driving cars have been let loose on the roads, smart homes can anticipate and cater for our every need and websites seem to know our preferences better than we do, people tend to “assume the near-omniscience of artificial intelligence”, says Gigerenzer. But, he argues, AIs aren’t as clever as you might think.
    A 2015 study, for example, showed that even the smartest object-recognition system is easily fooled, confidently classifying meaningless patterns as objects with more than 99 per cent confidence. And at the 2017 UEFA Champions League final in Cardiff, UK, a face-recognition system matched the faces of 2470 football fans at the stadium and the city’s railway station to those of known criminals. This would have been useful but for 92 per cent of the matches turning out to be false alarms, despite the system being designed to be both more efficient and more reliable than humans.
    There are good reasons why even the smartest systems fail, says Gigerenzer. Unlike chess, which has rules that are rigid and unchanging, the world of humans is squishy and inconsistent. In the face of real-world uncertainty, algorithms fall apart.
    Here, we get to the crux of Gigerenzer’s main argument: technology, at least as we know it today, could never replace humans because there is no algorithm for common sense. Knowing, but not truly understanding, leaves AI in the dark about what is really important.
    Obviously, technology can be, and often is, useful. The voice and face-recognition software on smartphones are largely convenient and the fact that YouTube seems to know what I want to watch saves the hassle of working it out for myself. Yet even if smart technology is mostly helpful, and is showing few signs of replacing us, Gigerenzer argues that we should still be aware of the dangers it can pose to our society.
    “Knowing, but not truly understanding, leaves artificial intelligence in the dark about what is really important”
    Digital technology has created an economy that trades on the exchange of personal data, which can be used against our best interests. Companies and political parties can purchase targeted adverts that subtly influence our online shopping choices and, even more nefariously, how we vote. “One might call this turn to an ad-based business model the ‘original sin’ of the internet,” writes Gigerenzer.
    So, what can be done? Gigerenzer says that more transparency from tech firms and advertisers is vital. But technology users also need to change our relationship with it. Rather than treating technology with unflinching awe or suspicion, we must cultivate a healthy dose of scepticism, he says. In an age where we seem to accept the rise of social media addiction, regular privacy breaches and the spread of misinformation as unavoidable downsides of internet use – even when they cause significant harm to society – it is perhaps time we took stock and reconsidered.
    Using personal anecdotes, cutting-edge research and cautionary real-world tales, Gigerenzer deftly explains the limits and dangers of technology and AI. Occasionally, he uses extreme examples for the sake of making a point, and in places he blurs the lines between digital technology, smart technology, algorithms and AI, which muddies the waters. Nevertheless, the overall message of Gigerenzer’s book still stands: in a world that increasingly relies on technology to make it function, human discernment is vital “to make the digital world a world we want to live in”.

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    in Humans

    Can quantum mechanics help a UK council plan when to collect bins?

    Josie Ford
    The order of not things
    Cambridge – of Cambridgeshire, not Massachusetts, before anyone jumps in – is famed as the academic home of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, three philosophers who did much to elucidate, not to say obfuscate, language, logic and meaning. It is very much in their spirit, we assume, that Cambridge City Council recently advertised an extra rubbish bin collection following staff absences, stating “bins will be collected in the order in which they were previously not collected”.
    “Is it quantum mechanics then that enables us to determine the order in which things don’t happen?” asks Alison Litherland, we imagine hovering indecisively over her bins. Quite possibly. Our starting point must be the following question: if a bin isn’t collected, but no one sees it not collected, has it been not collected at all?
    In purely practical terms, the only way of finding out is by looking in the bin, making this a particularly pure instantiation of Erwin Schrödinger’s cat paradox. Maybe Schrödinger’s trash didn’t have quite the same ring to it. As far as your problem goes, Alison, we fear that repeated measurement of identical bins may allow you to build up a picture of when it wasn’t collected, but this will only have statistical validity.Advertisement
    Poet didn’t know it
    Feedback is delighted to find, while searching for something else, that the physicist James Clerk Maxwell (died 1879) is listed as an author on the New Scientist website (born circa 1996).
    Further investigation reveals a series of poems published by Maxwell in these pages in 2011. We are somewhat lacking context, but his Valentine By a Telegraph Clerk (Male) to a Telegraph Clerk (Female) bears rereading, with its culminating verse: “Through many a volt the weber flew,/And clicked this answer back to me;/I am thy farad staunch and true,/Charged to a volt with love for thee.”
    Sweet, if of its time. Following our musings on how old the internet thinks you can be (26 February), at 180, we may have found our oldest contributor.
    Standard elephants
    Metrologists at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris may still be basking in the replacement, in 2019, of the international prototype kilogram – a platinum-iridium hulk that would feel exactly like 1 kilogram if dropped on your foot – by a fancy-schmantzy definition in terms of various physical constants. But as regular Feedback readers know, they are missing the… in the room. The elephant is well-established as the actual international standard unit of mass.
    Proof positive, a report from The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario, Canada, sent in by Doug Thomson. A clean-up after storms there in January required the removal of “145,000 tonnes of snow – about 20,000 large, frozen elephants worth”. We can only imagine the difficulties of dealing with these homesick and discomfited beasts. The icing on the elephants clearly adds something to their weight, as we conventionally take an adult male African bush elephant to weigh about 6 tonnes.
    Even as we hear calls for a standard prototype elephant kept under glass somewhere growing louder, news reaches us of a breakaway movement in New South Wales, Australia. Many of you highlight news of the seizure of 9.7 hectares’ worth of illicitly grown tobacco at Koraleigh “weighing the equivalent of 13 bulldozers”.
    How many bulldozers of tobacco fit into Sydney Harbour, we wonder. Meanwhile, Brian Horton consults the delightful website “What Things Weigh” to find bulldozers range from a baby 8 (good old non-metric) tons to a fully grown 180 tons. Suffice to say, the amount of tobacco seized at Koraleigh was some 42 standard elephants.
    His mummy’s voice
    The interwebs have delighted themselves recently at a story first reported by New Scientist in 2020, that researchers have recreated the voice of an Egyptian mummy held at Leeds City Museum, UK.
    The experience is slightly hard to reproduce on the printed page, but oddly, in some of the clips now circulating, the mummy is clearly saying “UUUUGRHH”, whereas two years ago it was a far more refined “EEEEERGH”. Mummies could presumably have made more than one sound, says a colleague – not unreasonably, with the qualification “when alive”. “This is the replication crisis writ large,” says another, damningly.
    Vive la résistance!
    Much as we try to stop buttered toast falling on our pages, right side up or no, still it rains down. But we are in a philosophical frame of mind, so we are grateful to J. Feralco for the reminder of a corollary to Murphy’s Law, first established by humorist Paul Jennings in the 1940s: “The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.”
    This came as part of his Report on Resistentialism, a school of philosophy encapsulated by the phrase “Les choses sont contre nous” – “things are against us” – established on Paris’s Left Bank by “bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed” thinker Pierre-Marie Ventre. Resistentialism holds that there are limits to the sway humans can hold in a world of largely hostile, uncooperative things. It is worth rummaging around for the whole essay online as a parable for These Uncertain Times.
    Got a story for Feedback?
    You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

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    in Humans

    Bigbug review: A sci-fi comedy about a sexy kind of singularity

    The new slapstick sci-fi offering by French directorial royalty Jean-Pierre Jeunet is plagued by predictable innuendo

    Humans

    2 March 2022

    By Gregory Wakeman

    Romance can get complicated when you are locked in with a sex robot while the androids attackBruno Calvo/Netflix
    Bigbug
    Jean-Pierre Jeunet
    NetflixAdvertisement

    JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET is widely regarded as one of the finest French film-makers of the past 30 years, having overseen the likes of Delicatessen, A Very Long Engagement and the much adored 2001 romantic comedy Amélie.
    Bigbug is Jeunet’s first feature film since 2013’s The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet and his first French-language film since 2009’s Micmacs. As fans of his work might expect, Bigbug, a futuristic sci-fi comedy, is downright bizarre.
    Set in Paris in 2045, it takes place in a world where humans rely on robots to satisfy their every desire. Then four of Alice (Elsa Zylberstein)’s antiquated domestic robots decide to take her hostage, trapping her inside her home with her date Max (Stéphane de Groodt), his son Léo (Hélie Thonnat), her daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard), her ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his new girlfriend Jennifer (Claire Chust). Alice’s nosy neighbour Françoise (Isabelle Nanty), who happens to be visiting along with her sex robot Greg (Alban Lenoir), also gets locked in.
    What starts off as a minor inconvenience soon gets real when it emerges that the latest generation of robots, the Yonyx (all played by François Levantal), is trying to take over the world. As the Yonyx get closer to Alice’s home, the humans start to turn against each other and the older robots, who may or may not be trying to keep them safe.
    While Jeunet’s previous films are similarly quirky, in Bigbug, he plays for much bawdier laughs. Sometimes, it works. A robot’s analysis of why Max is lying to Alice at the start of the film, for instance, suggests that Jeunet might be about to explore artificial intelligence in a unique and irreverent way.
    Unfortunately, though, that level of insight never materialises, and this early scene is about as funny as Bigbug gets. Sure, Victor’s increasing anger at being trapped inside is amusing to watch unfold, plus there are a handful of other slapstick moments that you can’t help but smile at. But in general, it is surprising how predictable most of the gags are.
    Filming began in October 2020, and it seems that Jeunet has tried to channel the mental and emotional struggles of quarantine during covid-19 and to critique both the world’s reliance on technology and its infatuation with social media. Unfortunately, whatever message he is attempting to get across never really materialises. In its place are crude innuendos and sex jokes.
    Some of Jeunet’s more unusual creative decisions also make Bigbug less successful than it should be. It is jarring that, despite the mighty financial backing of Netflix, the special effects look so cheap as to be genuinely off-putting. What’s more, while the characters are almost entirely motivated by sex and the film includes several scenes that are definitely not suitable for children, the world Jeunet has created looks and feels cartoonish.
    Alice’s home, her clothes, her robots and even the flying cars all appear to have been inspired by The Jetsons, while the villainous Yonyx, who all look and act the same, could have been ripped straight from a 1970s comic book.
    While these elements don’t come close to gelling, Jeunet’s light direction, bright colour palette and attractive set design do at least make Bigbug watchable. It helps that the script also takes some unexpected twists and turns that see the characters getting romantically entangled in ways that you might not initially expect.
    But considering Jeunet’s past cinematic triumphs, and after so long away from the camera, Bigbug just doesn’t provide enough laughs or sufficient thematic depth to be anything other than disappointing.

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    in Humans

    Don't Miss: New Scientist Live, the greatest science show on Earth

    Katie Yu
    Watch
    Upload, a sci-fi comedy that satirises the idea of a digital afterlife, returns for a second season. Created by Greg Daniels (Parks and Recreation, Space Force), the series will be available on Amazon Prime Video from 11 March.

    Visit
    New Scientist Live will be at Manchester Central and online from 12 March. With talks from over 40 speakers across four stages, there are also live, hands-on demonstrations and exhibitions. 14 March is dedicated to schools and home learners.

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    Read
    An Infinity of Worlds may exist in the universe. In this eye-opening account of cosmic inflation, physicist Will Kinney points out that if this were true, it would raise difficult questions about what the cosmos actually is. More

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    in Humans

    How to grow strawberries and protect them from slugs

    Shop-bought strawberries can taste disappointing, but home grown ones are delicious. Here’s how to succeed in growing these delicate fruits, says Clare Wilson

    Humans

    2 March 2022

    By Clare Wilson
    GAP Photos/Julia Boulton
    THERE are plenty of reasons people grow their own fruit and vegetables: it is a satisfying outdoor hobby, it gets you some exercise and the produce has low food miles, usually making it good for the planet too.
    Another reason is that many home-grown fruits and vegetables taste better than the ones on sale in shops. The difference is particularly noticeable for some types of produce, such as new potatoes, asparagus, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.
    There can be several explanations. One is that the varieties grown by farmers are often different to those sold for home growing. Farmers use … More