Philippa Kaur

Spot visual patterns in humanity’s many scripts and boost the science exploring graphical communication with the online game Glyph, says Layal Liverpool

Humans

6 April 2022

By Layal Liverpool
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, PSL SCRIPTA
STOP reading for a moment and instead take a closer look at the letters that make up each of the words in this sentence. What shapes do the different letters in the alphabet have in common? What makes each letter unique?
Yoolim Kim at Harvard University and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany are trying to answer these questions. They are interested in analysing writing and graphical communication systems from around the world (see picture). You can help them by taking part in the Glyph citizen science project.
In … More

An intriguing new book by a semi-professional poker player looks at why we feel lucky, and reflects on some hard-won lessons about living with uncertainty

Humans

6 April 2022

By Simon Ings

RUSSIAN novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was a gambling addict. He believed that if he could only maintain his composure, the various strategies and systems he dreamed up to beat the roulette wheel would one day pay off. He was kidding himself. No strategy can defeat pure chance.
David Flusfeder is a semi-professional poker player, who knows all about the thrill of the gamble. In Luck, he bypasses the scientific harsh truth about randomness and probability and instead has written a book about the human side of luck, which he defines as “the operations of chance taken personally”.
His eccentric, insightful meditations focus on fortune’s favourites and its gulls throughout history. We hear the stories of the Marquis de Dangeau, 18th-century Versailles’s wiliest card shark, right up to the experience of four-time lottery winner Joan Ginther, also known as”the luckiest woman on Earth”.
In an effort to stop his project sprawling, each of the essays here is largely self-contained. They have to be, because Flusfeder decided to put the hand of fate to good use by presenting them in an order determined by an online randomiser.
Dostoevsky’s experience is perhaps the most compelling. Even after he managed to rid himself of his addiction, the novelist retained the conviction “that in games of chance, if one has perfect control of one’s will, so that the subtlety of one’s intelligence and one’s power of calculation are preserved, one cannot fail to overcome the brutality of blind chance and to win.”
Flusfeder reckons Dostoevsky was born in the wrong place at the right time; he should have been playing poker with French settlers in New Orleans. The card game invented there in 1829 really does reward composure and nerve, as well as luck.
Not that poker is an altogether rational pursuit. If it were, then Flusfeder wouldn’t be wearing green underpants to every important game. Superstition abounds on the poker circuit, as it does wherever people wield little or no control over their lives. Professional tennis is one example, writes Flusfeder. “There is so much time to think, and doubt, and lose the learned rhythms of technique, and to be afraid”, that the sport is awash with lucky tics, habits and absurd pre-match routines, he points out.
Superstition, Flusfeder argues, isn’t some primitive hangover from our distant past. It is the inevitable result of our capacity for taking mental shortcuts, which makes us capable of thinking on our feet, and without which we wouldn’t be able to function at all. If we had to constantly re-evaluate what was going on around us, we would quickly get left behind.
Instead, our brains make reasonable assumptions and update them if necessary. Along the way, we develop habits, and the impression that we live in a deterministic world in which what happened yesterday is a reliable guide for our actions today.
This works well enough in day-to-day life, but, writes Flusfeder, the extension of this very human way of thinking to economics often fails when it turns out that past results are an imperfect guide to future performance.
On this, statistician David Spiegelhalter, who studies the public perception of risk, puts it bluntly. Probability doesn’t exist outside the mind, he says: “It is not an objective aspect of the world. It’s a way to operationalise a belief.” At best, he says, it provides us with a map to help us navigate outcomes that are immeasurable and ultimately unknowable.
Given our weaknesses in the face of randomness, how should we proceed? According to Flusfeder, rather than cowering from the unknown and avoiding all randomness, we should pick our battles carefully, seizing good fortune when it arises, while swerving unnecessary risks. It is an imperfect guide to life, but it is a start at least.
Virtue may be an even better option, says Flusfeder. A life lived with honesty and integrity will at least be consistent, whether we are suffering adversity or enjoying good fortune. As the Renaissance poet Petrarch put it: “Many times whom fortune has made bond, virtue has made free.”

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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

6 April 2022

Josie Ford
Quantum ‘do
Feedback was relieved to read elsewhere in this august rag recently that black holes aren’t bald, featureless entities with an ever-expanding waistline, but have a bubbling frizziness around their outskirts known in some quarters as “quantum hair” (26 March, p 10). We are relieved not just because the middle-aged look has never been fashionable, but also because this promises a resolution to Stephen Hawking’s black hole information paradox, an unsolvable conundrum in fundamental physics that is also getting depressingly middle-aged.
And developing that new, fresh look is as simple as popping a daily pill, as Suzie Shrubb points out. She forwards us – with an eye on the black holes, we hope, not us – details of Quantum Nutrition Labs’ Quantum Hair, Skin, Nails capsules. These promise “Bioavailable Solubilized Keratin for Quantum-State Support for The Skin, Hair and Nails”, something we find merits the capitals, even as we wonder with Suzie whether the quantum state bit expresses some uncertainty about the product’s efficacy. Still, as she reasonably points out, you will only ever know after you have looked in the box.
For timeless style right from big bang to heat death, we can also recommend Zotos’s Quantum Classic Body hair perm, an acid perm that “creates soft, supportive body and supportive waves for a ‘non-permed’ look”. Coming soon to an event horizon near you.Advertisement
Lose friends, stay healthy
Epidemiology news, as Korean Vaccine Society vice president Ma Sang-hyuk announces that if you haven’t had the dreaded lurgy yet, it is because you have no friends. “Adults who have not yet been infected with COVID-19 are those who have interpersonal problems,” he is reported to have written on Facebook – comments that seem to have won him few friends, and so perhaps a degree of protection, as they were subsequently hastily deleted.
Feedback’s experience suggests you hardly need be in contact with anyone to catch the latest variant nasty. Certainly, we have been trying to build up immunity to infection through social isolation for years, and it didn’t work for us.
Not a prayer
Also strangely transient is Eternal Prayer, a website that briefly offered to mint the prayers of the devout as non-fungible tokens for a small consideration of real-world money.
As deities move in mysterious ways, it seems not unreasonable to us to desire non-falsifiable records of contracts entered into, even if, dinosaur that we are, we prefer the tablets of stone thing. But with the site now defunct, our eternal, fruitless search for meaning in the blockchain continues.
A mattress for all seasons
Bringing us back down to earth, Richard Bartlett notes that the care instructions for his John Lewis mattress include the advice “No turning required, rotate with the seasons.” “Perhaps I should not move it at all relative to the bed but simply allow the mattress to orbit the sun?” he asks. We consider this a wise starting point for anyone invested in a good night’s sleep. Or you could try the alternative interpretation of rotating yourself with the seasons, and see where that lands you.
Come shapely bombs
Feedback is a fan of what novelist Anthony Burgess termed the “arresting opening“. A frisson passes through us as we peruse an article from The Washington Post sent in by Mike Shefler of Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, among others. “Near steep vineyards of riesling grapes, in an underground vault at an air force base in western Germany, sits an American nuclear bomb. More than one of them, actually,” we read. “Each bomb is about the length of two refrigerators laid down end to end and as heavy as the average adult male musk ox. The bombs are slender and pointy and a little more than a foot wide.” We join Mike in a waking reverie on the slender pointiness of the adult male musk ox, and feel the mind-expanding power of quality journalism.
Naughty corner
“I know it’s a bad habit”, sighs our man with the laser sight Jeff Hecht, bringing us to our senses again as he forwards us a briefing from the Government Matters website on high-energy laser weapons. We read that the US Department of Defense plans to deploy a 300-kilowatt laser for testing this November and to develop megawatt lasers effective against some ballistic missiles within a few years. The progress is “really exciting”, says retired US Air Force colonel and director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Mark Gunzinger.
From beyond the jrave
Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, an invention that has done much to remove the need for words in internet communication, has died. We are commemorating him by playing our favourite GIF of UK politician Liz Truss pronouncing the words “pork markets” with relish. No reason, which is the point.
Sadly, there is no chance of reanimation for Wilhite, but his legacy has brought joy to millions, as well as a lovely debate about pronunciation. In lieu of words on accepting the 2013 Webby Award for lifetime achievement, Wilhite played a five-word animated gif: “IT’S PRONOUNCED “JIF” NOT “GIF”. Somehow, however often you repeat that one, it’s not sticking.
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

It started in psychology, but now findings in many scientific fields are proving impossible to replicate. Here’s what researchers are doing to restore science’s reputation

Humans

6 April 2022

By Clare Wilson
Andrea Ucini
I HAVE a confession to make: some of the articles that have appeared in New Scientist, including ones I have written, are wrong. Not because we deliberately misled you. No, our reports were based on research by respected scientists at top universities, published in peer-reviewed journals. Yet, despite meeting all the normal standards of credibility, some findings turned out to be false.
Science is in the throes of what is sometimes called the replication crisis, so named because a big hint that a scientific study is wrong is when other teams try to repeat it and get a different result. While some fields, such as psychology, initially seemed more liable than others to generate such “fake news”, almost every area of science has since come under suspicion. An entire field of genetics has even turned out to be nothing but a mirage. Of course, we should expect testing to overturn some findings. The replication crisis, though, stems from wholesale flaws baked into the systems and institutions that support scientific research, which not only permit bad scientific practices, but actually encourage them. And, if anything, things have been getting worse over the past few decades.
Yet as awareness of the problem has grown, so have efforts to tackle it. So, how are these opposing forces faring? Will the efforts to combat fake science succeed? And how can you know if the research you read about in New Scientist and elsewhere will ever make it out of the lab and start working in the real world?
It is hard to pinpoint when the replication crisis began, but many people got their first … More

Chris Faulkes and Lorna Faulkes
Watch
The Naked Mole-rat: Animal Superhero by evolutionary ecologist Chris Faulkes will explain how this rodent altered our view of human health and ageing. This online talk by London’s Linnean Society is on 13 April at 12.30 BST.

Read
The Book of Minds by Philip Ball argues that we must look beyond our own brains and delve into the minds of other creatures if we want to truly understand ourselves and comprehend the possibility of alien or machine intelligence.Advertisement
Amazon Studios
Watch
Outer Range stars Josh Brolin as a rancher in the Wyoming wilderness whose grip on reality is called into question when a mysterious black void opens up in his western pasture. It will stream on Amazon Prime from 15 April.

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A new micro-genre of science fiction explores how mind control is at the very heart of our networked existence

Humans

6 April 2022

By Sally Adee

In our hyper-networked world, memetic spread has become uncontrolledShutterstock/Mircea Moira
And Then I Woke Up
Malcolm Devlin
Tordotcom (from 12 April)Advertisement

“THE quality wasn’t very good, but it was good enough for a debate,” says Spence, the narrator of Malcolm Devlin’s short but powerful horror novella And Then I Woke Up. He is describing the viral video that kicked off the zombie apocalypse. “Some people said the men were kissing, some insisted one was biting the neck of the other,” Spence recalls. “He was eating him, they said. Eating him!”
Without giving too much away, Spence is recounting these events from the rehabilitation facility where infected people are slowly reintegrated into society. But if you think I just spoiled the plot, think again. This zombie apocalypse is nothing like what you have been taught to expect by previous books and movies. Devlin has written a horror story where the “zombies” are memes.
Memes are, of course, ideas that lend themselves to jumping from one brain to another. Like that trick where someone tells you not to think about an elephant, once the image has made its way into your mind, you can’t stop the chain of events that unfolds. Richard Dawkins coined the term meme for the phenomenon in 1976, back when it was a relatively unproblematic aspect of how units of culture are transmitted through society. But in our hyper-networked world, memetic spread has become uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and there is something a little unsettling about it. From the QAnon conspiracy theory to the cheezburger cat, there is no telling what will show up in your feed or who produced it. Whether you consent or not, it will nestle between the folds of your brain and start to lay its eggs.
This sinister process is well established in neuroscience: where our expectations lead, our perceptions of reality follow. Memes can set those expectations, distorting and warping them with someone else’s narrative. Sometimes, these are harmless, like the dress that seems to be both blue and white or the audio version, yanny/laurel. Other times, they are more sinister, like the kissing men who may or may not be cannibals, or a conspiracy theory that a pizza restaurant had paedophiles in its basement. Memes can even distort what is right in front of your face.
While the events of Devlin’s book are horrifically plausible, in There is No Antimemetics Division by Sam Hughes (also known by the pseudonym qntm), perceptual expectations are managed by some of the creepiest supernatural beings imaginable. As they lurk unseen by almost everyone, they wreak havoc on an unsuspecting public, who make sense of things by inventing narratives to explain the horrors around them. An entity that creeps around collecting fingers, for example, is explained away as an unusually high rate of kitchen and carpentry accidents.
Devlin and Hughes aren’t the first to explore the power that infectious memes wield over our reality. In The City & the City, China Miéville showed readers two overlapping metropolises in which citizens are trained from birth to “unsee” any evidence of the other city and its residents.
Authors are increasingly waking to the hypnotic power of memes, a topic that is becoming more relevant by the year. These three books are a great introduction to this growing micro-genre of science fiction. I recommend all three of them to the skies. You might end up with a mild case of existential horror, but at least, unlike the stories’ protagonists, you will know what to expect.
Sally also recommends…

Sea of Tranquility
Emily St John Mandel
Picador (from 28 April)

From the fine mind that produced Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel comes another treat: a century-spanning, genre-crossing, time-travel book about the nature of reality, set in a near-future of pandemics and parallel worlds.

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A portrait of three intrepid glaciologists brings the reality of climate change and glacial melting into sharp focus in this powerful documentary

Humans

6 April 2022

By Davide Abbatescianni
Leading glaciologist Alun Hubbard descends into a seemingly bottomless crevasseCourtesy of CPH:DOX 2022
Into the Ice
Lars Henrik Ostenfeld
CPH:DOX Film FestivalAdvertisement

A MAJESTIC aerial shot of the Arctic landscape opens Lars Henrik Ostenfeld’s epic documentary Into the Ice. Then his narration hits us with the hard truth: “The Greenland inland ice harbours a secret. You can see our future in it.” As if to illustrate what that future might look like, the camera then pans to deep rivers of meltwater.
The message of Ostenfeld’s film is familiar, yet what sets it apart is its focus on the fieldwork of three of the world’s leading glaciologists: Alun Hubbard, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen and Jason Box. Ostenfeld travels with them, on three separate trips, to the Arctic as they monitor how fast the Greenland ice sheet is melting.
Ostenfeld provides intimate portraits of the researchers, highlighting their distinct personalities and the motivations behind their work. Box is a family man who, when he isn’t playing with his daughter, is happiest digging the snow while listening to ABBA’s hit Chiquitita. Hubbard, the most adventurous of the three, embraces the idea of living every day as “a complete surprise”. His perilous descent into the depths of a seemingly bottomless crevasse is a case in point.
Dahl-Jensen, as Box describes her, is “about science with a capital S” and is dedicated to drilling ice cores as a window into the past. “When you walk through ice, you walk on climate history,” she says. She points to a darker ice layer, which dates from the last glacial period, while a more distant, lighter part is from an interglacial period.
During his time with the researchers, Ostenfeld becomes fully immersed in their work and their mission. His presence is well balanced and respectful, and his feelings of concern, fear and admiration emerge beautifully through his intimate voice-over commentary.
In this way, Ostenfeld achieves his aim of creating a strong empathic bond with the audience. This allows him to deliver a more serious message about the importance of studying changes in the ice as they are happening, no matter how perilous an undertaking it may be.
Throughout, we learn how the study of ice and its history are essential to uncovering the scope and consequences of climate change, and the importance of collecting and analysing data that will help us update our predictions of global sea level rise.
The initial light-hearted tone and good humour of the scientists gradually give way to a more serious feel as the realities of life and work in the Arctic become clear. We see the scientists face a lashing storm that forces them to hide in their tents for two days. And we feel their fear and excitement as they take on the elements to gather data.
The dangers of fieldwork become only too apparent as Box learns of the death of his mentor, climate scientist Konrad Steffen, who fell into an ice crevasse elsewhere in Greenland, on a separate research trip.
Towards the end of the film, Box and Hubbard head back into the deep crevasse to resume their work, only to discover an uncomfortable truth: the meltwater under the ice has progressed to a level never seen before. The glaciers are melting at a faster pace than we thought and our predictions of sea level rise are probably too cautious.
Accompanied by striking imagery and an engaging instrumental score, Into the Ice is a powerful documentary and one of the unmissable titles of this year’s festival season. It doesn’t try to soften the blow or to end on a hopeful note. Instead, it is a touching wake-up call, rich in sincerity and brutal home truths.

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A set of ancient footprints seems to show children splashing around in water that had pooled in tracks left by a now-extinct ground sloth

Humans

6 April 2022

By Colin Barras
A 3D model of footprints discovered at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, created from multiple photographs. It shows the prints of several prehistoric children jostling around the larger marks left by a giant ground slothDavid Bustos/Matthew Bennett
The delight that children find when they jump in muddy puddles has a surprisingly long history. Fossil footprints discovered at an archaeological site in New Mexico show that a group of youngsters living at least 11,500 years ago spent a few carefree minutes engaged in some joyful splashing. But the world was very different back then: the puddles in question had formed in the deep footprints left by a now-extinct giant ground sloth.
The footprints were discovered at White Sands National Park, a site that is rapidly gaining a reputation for its astonishing archaeology. Within the park, there is a playa – a dried up lake-bed – some 100 square kilometres in size. The playa contains thousands of footprints left by humans, mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and other inhabitants of prehistoric North America. Some of the tracks suggest that humans had reached the Americas 23,000 years ago – about 8000 years earlier than we had thought.
But what really sets the ancient human footprints at White Sands apart is their power to vividly show us what life was like for early Americans. Matthew Bennett at Bournemouth University, UK, has been studying tracks at the site for several years. He and his team can measure the prints to work out things like the age of the person who made them and how fast they were walking or running. Then, they can follow them and see how events such as animal hunts unfolded. “It’s written in the tracks what happened,” says Bennett.Advertisement
In unpublished work, Bennett and his team have found one collection of prints that tell a particularly evocative tale. It begins with a set of roughly 40-centimetre-long footprints that show a giant ground sloth – measuring perhaps 3 metres from nose to tail – once lumbered across the landscape.
Later, a group of three to five small children showed up. The jumbled mess of footprints they left are focused around one sloth print. The way the children’s tracks deform the sloth print tells us that the ground was wet, says Bennett. It is impossible to be certain about what was going on, but Bennett says the best interpretation is that water had pooled in the sloth print to create a puddle that was perfect for splashing in – an irresistible target for children, even in prehistory.

Kevin Hatala at Chatham University in Pennsylvania says he is excited to learn more about the tracks once they appear in a formal scientific report. “Records like this demonstrate the unique potential for footprints to record information that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to observe or infer from other materials such as bones and stone tools,” he says.
Kim Charlie and her sister, Bonnie Leno, have made trips to see Bennett and his colleagues at work, studying the prints. They are both members of the Pueblo of Acoma near Albuquerque in New Mexico, one of several groups of Pueblo people who feel a spiritual connection to White Sands.
Charlie is fascinated by the idea that giant ground sloths were so common in the world inhabited by the first humans at White Sands, who may be among the ancestors of the present-day Pueblo people. “It’s fascinating,” says Charlie. “And you think: jeez, were these animals friendly?”
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