Philippa Kaur

By Katie Smith-Wong

Looking for one whale in the vast, deep ocean was never going to be easyCourtesy of Bleecker Street
The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
Joshua Zeman
Digital download from 4 AprilAdvertisement

IN 1989, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts detected an unknown sonic presence at 52 hertz. It was initially thought to be from a submarine, but marine biologist William Watkins later determined that it was the sonar signature of a whale, which he gave the nickname “52”.
It is an unusually high frequency for whale vocalisations, and Watkins was intrigued enough to search for 52 until his death in 2004. But despite picking up 52’s call every year, Watkins never found the mysterious whale.
In The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52, US film-maker Joshua Zeman picks up the search where Watkins left off, and sets out to find a whale that has since taken on almost mythical proportions.
Why 52 calls at this frequency is also a mystery – the whale’s species hasn’t been confirmed, and it is possible that it is the only one of its kind in the ocean. The one thing we do know is that 52 is almost certainly a he: male whales do the singing.
The reason for 52’s presumed loneliness has nothing to do with the fact that he has always been detected swimming alone. Instead, it is because the unique frequency of his call means that other whales can’t understand to respond. With 52’s unique call as the only lead, Zeman launches a seven-day search mission with bioacoustics specialist John Hildebrand and research biologist John Calambokidis.
They begin in the waters off California, at the Port of Los Angeles – the busiest container port in the western hemisphere. Their initial hopes aren’t high: the Pacific Ocean is deep and wide and the chances of finding 52 seem roughly the same as those of 52 finding a mate.
Zeman’s documentary has a strong sense of exploration and ambition: he believes he can locate 52, who has become the Moby Dick to Zeman’s Ahab. Although there is an underlying sense of excitement as to whether 52 can finally be found, there is a human aspect to the search and a personal story behind Zeman’s fascination.
In our increasingly connected world where contact and interaction is only the click of a button away, the fact that so many people still report feeling lonely makes it easy to identify with 52’s situation. There is something deeply affecting about a creature as intelligent and social as we know whales to be, swimming the vast ocean, year after year, never having any proper contact with another of its kind.
This, combined with a growing awareness of the harm that human activity has caused whales, has made 52 something of a focal point for whale conservation, with articles, poems and even a song by the K-pop band BTS about his plight.
Yet this is a story that goes deeper than just one whale. Whale populations are still under threat from hunting, pollution, climate change and collisions with ships. Even if they avoid these perils, the noise of shipping can drown out a whale’s calls, regardless of the frequency it may use. Arguably, Zeman’s quest says more about our collective guilt about this state of affairs than it does about our desire to solve the scientific mysteries surrounding 52.
Finding him is never a foregone conclusion. In fact, as 52 has never been seen or even definitively proven to exist, some within the scientific community are sceptical there is even a 52 to find.
Zeman’s attempt to create a sense of thrill and adventure as he embarks on his quest is hit-and-miss. Exciting footage of the search is punctuated with evocative images of the oceans, which makes the documentary’s tone feel inconsistent. At times, there isn’t enough to elevate the film above being a group of people spending time in a boat. At least not until the closing moments, when it appears that the team’s efforts may not have been in vain.
Overall, The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 offers a moving insight into a legendary whale and Zeman’s curiosity is infectious. Frustratingly, though, there isn’t enough discussion and explanation of the science behind whale communication, which leaves viewers, much like Zeman, wondering if they might have missed something important along the way.

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

Humans

30 March 2022

Josie Ford
On Earth …
As a fresh-faced 18-year-old, Michael Owen’s mazy run from the centre circle to score against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup round of 16 raised hopes of a new golden era of English football – “soccer”, we add, looking in no particular direction – just as surely as David Beckham’s subsequent sending-off and the inevitable loss on penalties dashed them. Back then, it was only 32 years of hurt; by now it is getting silly.
Altogether more forward-facing is Owen’s recent reinvention as a crypto guru. “Looks to me like blockchain is here to stay,” he announced last month on Twitter, hence he was working with a blockchain specialist on “a really exciting new football project”.
Rapid reaction on the social media site renowned for rapid unkind reaction was predictably unkind, largely along the lines that Owen possibly didn’t actually know what blockchain is. If so, he is welcome to join our club any time.Advertisement
This seems to follow a trend of ex-elite sportspeople advertising cryptocurrency projects, something we can associate with the ennui and need for new revenue streams associated with being an ex-elite sportsperson. We click further, on our eternal quest for both excitement and enlightenment. “The first Michael Owen official NFT collection comprises of 1233 NFT’s that are available across 5 increasingly exclusive tiers,” we read. We are somewhat the wiser: the blockchain is about football stickers. Welcome to the future.
… as it is in heaven
And much, much good may come of this sort of thing, going by a press release on behalf of a “visionary NFT production house” thrust our way by a colleague with eyes not so much rolling as whirling like pulsars.
collection – although the words quoted are from a press release so don’t appear there. Richard says he didn’t include it as it’s a money-making operation; up to you if you still want to put in, I think it’s fine without “On April 3, they’re launching 30 NFTs from their bestselling ‘Greatest Minds of Our Time’ – pop-art images of inspirational figures, such as Oprah, Elon Musk, and the Dalai Lama – into orbit on SpaceX,” the PR puff breathlessly informs us. “Once in space, passenger Israeli air force pilot Eytan Stibb [sic] will call them up on his tablet and bless them with starlight and cosmic rays. He’ll then ‘drop’ them from space directly into the blockchain collection.”
The selection of great minds of our time is interesting, but the ultimate aim – to auction the widgets off for the benefit of clean-water charities – is laudable. The whole process does strike us as a mite overcomplicated, though, given that starlight and cosmic rays are freely available on Earth. An interesting metaphysical question is, if digital art exists only when constituted as pixels, and is called into life only when in orbit, has it been launched into orbit?
No matter. We detect a whiff of good old performance art in all this, so we will politely just nod and smile.
Small island far away
Ceri Brown writes from Haverfordwest in Wales, querying a Sky News story about the position of Henderson Island, part of the Pitcairn group in the South Pacific that through historical accident finds itself a UK Overseas Territory. Populated largely by native crabs and non-native plastic waste, it is perhaps a measure of the seriousness with which the UK has taken its stewardship up till now that the Royal Navy recently found it situated about 1.5 kilometres to the south of where it thought it was.
“Henderson Island is uninhabited and is about the size of Oxford,” the article states, presumably following the principle of British units for British places. “Could you convert that to fractions of a Berkshire please?” asks Ceri, catching us slightly off guard. No, but in standard Imperial units, it is a smidgen under 2 milliWales. That is if anyone is actually sure how big Henderson Island is.
Atmospheric surge
This admirable effort to make global news local sends us rootling in our piles for a headline from the Essex Live website in the UK sent in by Anthony Jamieson in January. “Essex sees huge atmospheric pressure surge as Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption felt across East Anglia”, it screams, adding in smaller typeface that the pressure in Heybridge, Essex, jumped “from just over 1,023 millibars of pressure to 1,024”. No eardrums burst, we hope.
Out of time
Gerben Wierda writes from the Netherlands currying favour – quite our favourite curryable material – and challenging the orthodoxy that true New Scientist aficionados read the magazine back to front.
“I read NS from front to back,” he says, “but Feedback plays an important role in my NS backlog management. If I come across an issue and I am uncertain if it has been read, I check the first entry in Feedback.” We are thus not only the most memorable bit of the magazine, he says, but “like dessert: that most enjoyable end of a good experience.”
Your cheque is in the post. Of course, we recognise that the true measure of an aficionado of this magazine is a backlog of issues that you always convince yourself you are going to clear. Being stuck on the issue of 9 October 2021 has its advantages, says Gerben. “One can read news articles about the possible rise of the new delta variant of covid-19 and remain in a world that is still blissfully free of war crimes being performed in Ukraine.” We hear you.
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

From hydras to humans, this short book by two marine biologists explores the peculiar process of regeneration, showing that it is a far bigger subject than it might at first seem

Humans

30 March 2022

By Simon Ings

Is the regeneration of a forest after fire fundamentally the same as an animal regrowing a body part?KarenHBlack/Getty Images
What Is Regeneration?
Jane Maienschein and Kate MacCord
University of Chicago Press (out 6 April)Advertisement

SOME animals are able to grow an entire new body from tiny parts. Crabs and lobsters can regenerate lost tentacles and claws. Hydras and some worms can regrow their heads. We humans can replace our skin, hair, fingernails and even our liver.
Regeneration is such a peculiar ability that, even in science, it is surprisingly under-researched. As a result, there is much we still don’t know. What Is Regeneration? is a collaborative effort between Jane Maienschein and Kate MacCord, both at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to fill some of the gaps. Together, they explore why regeneration occurs when it does, why it doesn’t always happen and what the process can tell us about the grander mysteries of birth, death and development.
It turns out to be a seemingly simple phenomena that, on closer inspection, becomes far more complicated. For instance, are we thinking only about regeneration of structure, about regeneration of function or both? Is the regeneration of the gut flora in your intestines after a course of antibiotics or the regeneration of woodland after a forest fire at all similar to regrowing a body part?
To try to pin it down, the authors begin with a history of the study of the subject, starting with Aristotle and ending with Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz’s ongoing research on cellular signalling. Their account pivots on the work of Thomas Hunt Morgan (better known as a pioneer of chromosomal genetics) and, in particular, his 1901 book Regeneration. Morgan, more than anyone before or since, attempted to establish clear boundaries around the phenomenon, and the terminology he came up with remains useful.
He identified three kinds of regeneration. The first two are restorative regeneration, which occurs in response to injury, and physiological regeneration, which describes replacement, as when an elk moults its antlers and new ones grow in their place. The third, morphallaxis, refers to more extreme cases, such as when a hydra, cut into pieces, reorganises itself into a new hydra without going through the normal processes of cell division.
The key to this categorisation is that the mechanisms of regeneration aren’t, as the authors put it, “a special response to changing environmental conditions but, rather, an internal normal process of growth and development”.
So here is the problem: if the mechanisms of regeneration can’t be distinguished from those of growth and development, what is to stop everything ceaselessly regenerating? What dictates the process of regrowth and why does it happen only in some tissues, in some species and only some of the time?
Maienschein and MacCord argue that, to fully understand this, we need to see regeneration as a window into the world of biology in general, and the complex feedback loops that decide what grows, divides and dies, where and when.
Far from being an interesting curio, then, studying regeneration can tell us much about life in general, from a cellular level right up to the level of ecosystems, and inform everything from regenerative therapies using stem cells to ecosystem protection and recovery.
Seen through this lens, regeneration is a far bigger subject than it might at first seem, and Maienschein and MacCord take fewer than 200 pages to anatomise the complexities and ambiguities that their simple question throws up. It is to their credit that they mostly focus on the big picture and don’t make the biology any more complex than it needs to be.

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The DNA of people who lived in Great Britain thousands of years ago has markers of natural selection at work – and the driving force seems to have been a shortage of vitamin D

Humans

29 March 2022

By Michael Marshall
An artist’s impression of a Bronze age settlementLennart Larsen/Nationalmuseet
Natural selection was at work on Bronze Age Britons, ancient DNA reveals. Within the past 4500 years, evolution has acted on genes involved in the production of vitamin D – which people living in Britain are sometimes short of due to a lack of sunlight for much of the year.
The genetic changes have had knock-on effects on other traits, from the ability of people todigest milk to their skin colour.
One of the ways evolutionary change can happen is through natural selection: … More

Stress-linked changes in the activity of genes may be why Black people in the US often have worse chronic pain than white people

Humans

28 March 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
An enzyme adding methyl groups to DNA in a process called methylationLAGUNA DESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Black people in the US have worse chronic pain than white people due in part to gene expression.
Chronic stress has previously been linked to racial discrimination, and can lead to changes in gene expression. Edwin Aroke at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and his colleagues collected blood samples from 98 people – half were Black and half were non-Hispanic white, and they had an average age of 45. Half the group had chronic lower back pain, … More

Read
The End of Astronauts is nigh, say astronomer Martin Rees and science writer Donald Goldsmith. They argue that, given the vast distances and the dangers involved in space travel, it is robots, not humans, that will lead us to the stars.
Kojima Productions/IGDB
Play
Death Stranding, from game creator Hideo Kojima, gets a substantial makeover in this director’s cut edition, which launches on PCs from 30 March. You play as Sam Bridges, who is on a mission to reunite a shattered world.Advertisement

Watch
Are Plants Intelligent? asks philosopher Stella Sandford in this online talk from the Linnean Society of London. In light of new evidence, should we rethink our anthropocentric view of intelligence? 30 March, 12.30pm BST.

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Josie Ford
Not at all dull
Are we boring you? As we leaf listlessly through the paper “Boring People: Stereotype characteristics, interpersonal attributions, and social reactions” from Wijnand van Tilburg at the University of Essex, UK, and his colleagues, we feel the answer is probably “no”. Although we will make a fair stab at it.
To get the oldest and best one out of the way first, the paper isn’t about civil engineers. Boredom, we read, is often conceptualised as “the adverse experience of wanting but being unable to pursue satisfactory activity” – or, alternatively, being stuck at a party with someone who is doing their own conveyancing.Advertisement
In a series of experiments – involving asking people in the UK what professions, hobbies and personality traits they associate with boring people, using those answers to invent very boring, middlingly boring and sparklingly unboring people, and asking other people how boring they would find those people – the researchers find that, in the main, we find boring people boring, don’t like them and go out of our way to avoid them.
This is capital-s Science. We are especially intrigued by some of the occupations (busboy, graveyard watcher) and hobbies (sleeping, ant study, even “going to gales”) that entered the mix, which confirm our suspicion that you shouldn’t ask the Great British Public anything, or possibly everything.
Sad to say, the most boring professions are data analysis, accounting and tax/insurance, suggesting numeracy is considered an evil, if a necessary one. But what do we see here? Near the top of the chart of most unboring occupations are science and journalism.
On that basis, we are off the scale. The authors stress that the study only examined the stereotypes that people hold about boring and non-boring people, and the actual characteristics of boring people may differ. Codswallop. If someone will just unlock the stationery cupboard door, we have a lot more to say about that.
Round in circles
Boring and delighting the planet in equal measure, meanwhile, is the question of whether there are more doors or wheels in the world, after a tweet from formerly dull and blameless Ryan Nixon from Auckland, New Zealand, went viral.
We wouldn’t presume to enter the debates on whether a wheel can be a door (yes, it is why we keep getting stuck in the revolving ones) or a door a wheel (only if you lay it on its side, but please extract us first). But we are delighted to see the Burj Khalifa, one of our favourite measures of bigness, pop up as a character witness for the door side, because it has some 17,000 doors (including the world’s two highest revolving ones – who knew?), but no wheels.
But then, just think of the number of wheelie suitcases it must contain. Taking a broader view, we will plump for the doors, on the basis that evolution hasn’t yet seen fit to invent wheels, but things like doors seem to exist in abundance, both in nature and perhaps also in the wider cosmos, if you count black holes as one-way exits. On the whole, however, this is possibly a conversation that has gone on too long already.
Up, up and away
As we attempt to move swiftly on, Barry Cash waylays us with the Float-A-Poo dog waste disposal system, which “uses helium to float dog poo away forever”. “Once your bag is filled, seal it with a tie and release,” the website trills. “Avoid power lines, windmills, falcons and airports.”
“I hope it’s a joke,” says Barry. “But in the mad world in which we live, I fear it isn’t.” We can – we think – confirm it is merely a prank box for enclosing an alternative gift. But on the basis the system might plausibly work, we fear it is only a matter of time before someone does invent it.
Giraffe attack
Far be it from Feedback to question, glancing nervously over our shoulder, the news values that made Mail Online the most-read newspaper website in the world. We don’t read it and we don’t know anyone who does. Nor do you, and you all sent us the same article last week purely because you ran across it accidentally while looking for something else.
Still, since the article is entitled “Asteroid half the size of a giraffe strikes Earth off the coast of Iceland – just two HOURS after it was discovered by astronomers”, this pleases us immensely.
Freyja Burrill of Kendal, UK, wonders what fractions of African megafauna are doing raining down in such northerly climes, and whether moose or orca might be more appropriate. We can’t answer on the planetary dynamics front, but we see that the largest mammalian fauna native to Iceland is the puny Arctic fox, which seems a pretty meh unit for anything.
Meanwhile, Craig Morris of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa – “home to many 2 x [Giraffa] camelopardalis units”, as he puts it – is puzzled as to what a standard giraffe-slicing technique is. “Laterally, vertically, or axially, including a head and neck, one or two pairs of legs and/or the tail end…?”.
We have locked horns with the related question of giraffe tessellation before, without success (13 February 2021). Let’s instead celebrate the advances in near-Earth observation technology that gave us two HOURS warning. Time was when, if you saw anything half the size of a giraffe falling on your head, it was already too late.
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

A mind-bending light and sound extravaganza is coming to a town near you, and it could help unravel the mysteries of the brain

Humans

23 March 2022

By Carissa Wong
Dreamachine’s light and sound show can produce intense hallucinations and a sense of calmBrenna Duncan
Dreamachine
Jennifer Crook
Unboxed FestivalAdvertisement
IN THE late 1950s, when altered states of consciousness were all the rage, the artist Brion Gysin invented a drug-free route to psychedelic euphoria. His Dreamachine – a spinning cylinder that shines flashing lights onto a viewer’s closed eyes – was intended as a shortcut to spiritual enlightenment for the masses.
Now, art producer Jennifer Crook has revisited Gysin’s invention as a sci-art multimedia experience. The aim is to produce a communal head trip that will not only expand visitors’ experience, but also probe the depths of human consciousness.
Crook got the idea for the project after having a transcendent experience while at a gig by electronic music artist Jon Hopkins. She went on to enlist Hopkins to provide the soundtrack to the updated Dreamachine, which will be touring the UK as part of the Unboxed Festival.
At the centre of the installation are vivid hallucinations created by the brain in response to specific sensory inputs. In the 1950s, the pioneering neuroscientist Grey Walter discovered that dreamlike hallucinations could be induced by lights flashing on closed eyelids at 8 to 12 hertz, the same frequency as the oscillations of “alpha” brainwaves when we are relaxed and wakeful with our eyes closed. Normally, when we open our eyes, these alpha waves are disrupted by visual inputs. Flashing lights at alpha wave frequencies on closed eyelids stimulates the optic nerve, but provides little visual information, and the brain responds by generating hallucinations.
Because of this, the Dreamachine can produce kaleidoscopic visions and a sense of calm. These hallucinations may also reveal a lot about the way the brain works. As part of the project, neuroscientists Anil Seth and David Schwartzman at the University of Sussex, UK, Dreamachine‘s light and sound show can produce intense hallucinations and a sense of calm are collecting the experiences of visitors, which they hope to use as a window into the workings of the brain. Seth is among the many scientists who believe that hallucinations are part of the way that our brains generate our conscious experience of the world.
One major question concerns perceptual diversity – how varied or similar our internal mental experiences may be. We know that we all see the world in different ways, but science can’t yet explain how and why. In an attempt to investigate this, an optional survey will ask participants to log their visual experiences using colour palettes, animations and shape selections.
Other questions will address the emotional aspects of the experience, which can be intense. Hopkins’s music alone, when played through 360-degree speakers around the audience, can give an eerie feeling of stepping out of time and into a state of being that usually comes with a meditative state.
As well as the physical exhibition, an online census will capture perceptual diversity from millions of people around the world, while a schools programme will be rolled out around the UK. Through activities and resources, children will be encouraged to ask questions about how they perceive the world and to explore how this differs from the experiences of others. The research team’s resident philosopher, Fiona Macpherson, says the goal is to show them how, in our differences, we are all connected.
This aim brings Dreamachine back to the ideals of its inventor, who hoped to give people the experience of being catapulted into a higher level of consciousness. Crook’s new vision is even more ambitious: to explore the depths of the human brain while realising the variation in our inner worlds and celebrating neurodiversity.
Dreamachine will tour London, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh from May to September. Sign up for free tickets at dreammachine.world.

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