Philippa Kaur

Petrov’s Flu is an ode to Russian sci-fi and absurdist artSergey Ponomarev/Sovereign Films
Petrov’s Flu
Kirill Serebrennikov
In UK cinemas nowAdvertisement
PETROV (Semyon Serzin) is riding a trolleybus home across the snowbound city of Yekaterinburg when a fellow passenger mutters that the rich deserve to be shot. Seconds later, the bus stops, Petrov is pulled onto the street and a rifle is pressed into his hands. Street executions follow. Then, he is back on the bus and it is unclear how much of that actually happened.
Petrov’s Flu is an ambitious, mischievous film, one that is rich in allusions to Russian history, literature and cinema. It is also a painfully precise, gut-wrenching depiction of what it is like to run a high fever. Seeing everything from Petrov’s sick, disjointed point of view, we find the real world sliding away again and again, often into violent absurdity.
Petrov’s fever gradually breaks over the course of the film, but it is a while before we can be confident about what is real and what isn’t: whether his friend, the drunken mischief-maker Igor (Yuri Kolokolnikov), is real and whether Sergey (Ivan Dorn), the struggling writer who browbeats poor Petrov on every point, is a figment of Petrov’s febrile imagination.
At the start, Petrov’s Flu is very much a sci-fi movie. The city is languishing under an epidemic that arrived accompanied by lights in the sky; Petrova (Chulpan Khamatova), Petrov’s estranged wife, is possessed by a demonic alien force during a library poetry reading; UFO-themed street graffiti comes to life and wiggles across the screen.
As reality and hallucination part company, however, it becomes something different: a film about parents and children; about creative work, pretension and ambition; and also, strongly, about Russia’s love of science fiction.
“Petrov’s fever gradually breaks, but it is a while before we can be confident about what is real and what isn’t”
At its birth, Western science fiction, and especially US science fiction, celebrated adventure and exploration. Russian sci-fi has always been more about finding and building homes in a hostile environment. It is also strongly religious in spirit, and was indeed for many years one of Russia’s very few outlets for spiritual expression.
The aliens in Russian science fiction invariably offer some form of redemption to a struggling humanity, and Petrov’s Flu is no exception. One of the most affecting scenes in the film is when Petrov, overcome with fear, dashes with his son to a local hospital, only for the pair to be intercepted by a kindly UFO.
Such are Petrov’s fever dreams, coloured by his space-loving childhood and his adult career drawing comic books. At one point, he remembers his mum and dad decorating a Christmas tree with festive plastic astronauts; at another, Petrova goes on a murderous rampage among the climbing-frame rockets and spaceships of a dilapidated playground.
Fans of Andrei Tarkovsky, director of 1970s science-fiction classics Solaris and Stalker, will enjoy the nods to key moments in those films. But it would be a mistake, I think, to watch this film for the sci-fi in-jokes. True, Petrov’s Flu is a shocking and funny contribution to Russia’s centuries-old tradition of absurdist art. But it is also a film about people, not to mention an extraordinary evocation of febrile delirium and its assault on the mind.
In the end, as fantasy and reality separate, what might have seemed to be a disconnected bag of bits (some tender, some shocking, all horribly entertaining) turns out to be a puzzle that, once complete, leaves us exhausted but satisfied. More

As sea levels rise due to climate change, heritage sites all around the African coast will come under increasing risk of flood damage – including Carthage and sites linked to the Ancient Egyptian civilisation

Humans

10 February 2022

By Michael Marshall
Sabratha, an ancient Roman town in what is now LibyaSklifas Steven/Alamy Stock Photo
Rising seas will more than triple the number of African heritage sites exposed to the risk of dangerous coastal floods.
By 2050, over 190 of these locations could be in peril. They include the ancient remains of Carthage in Tunisia – which was the capital of the powerful Carthaginian civilisation in the first millennium BC – and a region of the Egyptian Mediterranean coast rich in archaeological sites connected to the Ancient Egyptian civilisation as well as to the Greeks and Romans.
“Understanding climate risk to heritage is critical,” says Nicholas Simpson at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.Advertisement
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Simpson and his colleagues mapped 213 natural sites and 71 cultural sites on the African coast, which were recognised by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre or the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance. “We didn’t know the spatial extent, the actual boundaries of most African heritage sites, believe it or not,” he says.
The team then combined this with a state-of-the-art model of sea level rise, which is one of the main consequences of climate change as warming seawater expands and ice sheets melt. Higher seas mean that major coastal floods, when they come, go higher and reach further inland.

At the moment, 56 of the 284 coastal heritage sites the team mapped would be in danger if a once-in-a-century flood struck. However, by 2050 that number will rise dramatically. Under a moderate emissions scenario, 191 will be at risk, and higher emissions will put 198 in danger.
The threatened sites also include Sabratha, a former Roman town in Libya with a spectacular open-air theatre that the Beatles considered as a venue for their final concert, and Kunta Kinteh Island in the Gambia, which has the remains of a fort used by British slave traders.
Elsewhere, up to 44 per cent of the area of the Curral Velho wetland in Cape Verde could be exposed by 2100, under a high-emissions scenario.
The obvious solution is “hard protection strategies” like concrete sea walls, but these may not be the best approach, says Simpson. In some cases, a better tactic would be “hybrid protections” that rely on wildlife, “so just restoring the broader ecology of the area, restoring salt marshes, seagrasses, mangroves”. Buffer zones around the heritage sites are also an option, he says, as is “recognising the local and indigenous knowledge systems that are there”.
It may not be possible to protect everything, says Simpson, but it is essential to try. “I believe there are solutions to climate change if we think hard enough and work hard enough.”
Journal reference: Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/s41558-022-01280-1

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About 10,000 years before modern humans colonised Europe, a small group of them moved into a cave in southern France that had just been abandoned by Neanderthals – but they only stayed there for about 40 years

Humans

9 February 2022

By Michael Marshall
Excavations at the entrance of Grotte Mandrin Slimak-Metz
A small group of modern humans moved into what is now France about 54,000 years ago – which is 10,000 years before our species began spreading across Europe in earnest. The pioneering group only managed to survive in the area for about 40 years, before disappearing.
“It’s not just one wave of modern humans arriving and colonising all Europe, there are probably several attempts,” says Clément Zanolli at the University of Bordeaux in France. “What we have found… is probably one of those attempts, and there are probably other attempts that we did not find yet.”
It isn’t clear why this incursion into Europe was unsuccessful. “Did they go back to where they came from?” asks Zanolli. “Or did they just die there and not survive more than a few decades? It’s impossible to say.”Advertisement
Zanolli is part of a team that has been excavating at Grotte Mandrin in southern France since 1990. It is a small cave on a hill, overlooking the Rhône valley. Over the years, the team has found nearly 60,000 stone artefacts and more than 70,000 animal remains. Crucially, there are also nine hominin teeth, from at least seven individuals.
The team has used these artefacts, along with dating techniques, to reconstruct which hominins lived at Mandrin. The earliest known inhabitants were Neanderthals, who lived throughout Europe for hundreds of thousands of years until their extinction about 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals lived at Mandrin from more than 80,000 years ago until about 54,000 years ago.
However, one of the teeth belonged to a modern human. It was a baby or “deciduous” tooth, so it belonged to a child. The layer of sediment in which it was found was dated to between 56,800 and 51,700 years ago – probably about 54,000 years ago. The stone artefacts found in this layer were different from those associated with the Neanderthals, and resembled those made by modern humans elsewhere.

In younger layers of sediments, the team again found Neanderthal remains. Signs that the cave was being used by modern humans reappeared after 44,100 years ago. That is about when modern humans entered Europe in a big way.
The first switch from Neanderthals to modern humans happened quickly, says co-author Ludovic Slimak of the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès in France.
“Between the last fire in the cave by Neanderthals and the first fire in the cave by Homo sapiens, it’s something like a year maximum time.” The team could tell because they studied pieces of soot from fires, on which layers of calcite had formed that could be precisely dated. The soot and calcite evidence also helped to pin down the length of time the cave was occupied by modern humans to roughly 40 years.
The results are “convincing”, says Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Although the fossil evidence for modern humans consists of a single isolated deciduous tooth, dental remains, including deciduous teeth, have been shown to be highly diagnostic.”
In 2019, Harvati’s team presented evidence of modern humans living in Greece 210,000 years ago. This remains the earliest reported instance of Homo sapiens in Europe, far earlier than the Mandrin population.
Such studies show “the complexity of the process of dispersal and contact”, says Harvati. Instead of a simple story of modern humans entering Europe in one wave and replacing Neanderthals, there were “alternating occupations of geographical regions, occasional  contact and periods of isolation”.
Zanolli’s team found no evidence of cultural exchange between the groups – the later Neanderthals didn’t start making human-style artefacts, for example. Yet given that the two groups were in Mandrin in successive years, “it’s very likely that they met”, says Zanolli.

Harvati agrees. “The co-existence of the two groups could have taken many forms and would not necessarily result in interbreeding or cultural exchange,” she says.
While we don’t know what happened to the modern human group, one possibility is that they were too few to survive on their own. Small groups moving into new areas often don’t survive. “Generally, you need to have social and genetic exchanges with the local population,” says Slimak. “If you don’t have genetic exchanges, you just disappear.”
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj9496
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A new book by ecologist Rebecca Nesbit argues that it’s time to stop being romantic about nature and make some rational decisions about what to save

Humans

9 February 2022

By Simon Ings

Would cutting down the last oak tree on Earth make you a bad person?Vandervelden/Getty Images
Tickets for the Ark
Rebecca Nesbit
Profile BooksAdvertisement

IMAGINE you are the last person on Earth. On your dying day, you cut down the only remaining oak tree, just because you can. Are you morally in the wrong?
Rebecca Nesbit would argue that you aren’t. A science writer and ecologist, she has form in tackling subjects where scientific rationalism and general intuition don’t necessarily line up. Her first book, Is That Fish in Your Tomato?, explored the pros and cons of genetically modified foods. In Tickets for the Ark, she turns her spotlight to the moral complexities of conservation.
She points out that, given we can’t save every species, we have some difficult decisions to make. For example, if push came to shove and their extinctions were imminent, should we choose to preserve bison or the Siberian larch; yellowhammers or Scottish crossbills; salmon or seals? And what criteria should we use to decide? Charisma, perhaps, or their edibility? Are native species more important than invasive ones? And is it morally acceptable to kill some animals to make room for others?
Working through these gnarly issues, Nesbit shows how complex and problematic conservation can be. In particular, she questions the way that efforts tend to focus on the preservation of species. This, she points out, is really us deciding to save what we can easily see. If our aim was to preserve the planet’s biodiversity, we could as easily focus on genes, individual strings of DNA or the general health of whole ecosystems, she argues.
At times, Tickets for the Ark reads as a catalogue of errors on the part of well-meaning conservationists. Many conservation projects are attempts to reverse human interference in nature – clearly an impossible task, considering we have been shaping the biosphere for at least 10,000 years.
Far from being a counsel of despair, though, Tickets for the Ark reveals the intellectual vistas that such blunders have opened up. Even supposing it ever existed, we know now that we can’t return Earth to some prelapsarian Eden. All we can do is learn how natural systems change – sometimes under human influence, sometimes not – and use this information to shape the future world according to our values and priorities.
In a sense, of course, we have always done this. What is agriculture, if not a way of moulding the land to our requirements? But now that we have learned to feed ourselves, perhaps it is time to think a little more broadly.
“If we accept that conservation is about the future not the past, the most troubling conundrums fall away”
To do that, we need to accept two things: one, that “nature” is a social construct, and two, that conservation is about the future, not the past. Then the most troubling conundrums in conservation fall away, writes Nesbit. The death of the last oak, at the hands of the last human, becomes merely the loss of a category (oak tree) that was defined and valued by humans – a loss that was inevitable at some point anyway. It is a conclusion that is counter-intuitive and feels uncomfortable, but Nesbit says that it should be liberating because it leaves us “free to discuss logically what we should save and why, and not just fight an anti-extinction battle that is doomed to failure”.
With this in mind, we can consider what conservation efforts will achieve for entire ecosystems and biodiversity as a whole without wasting our time agonising over whether, say, British white-clawed crayfish are natives, or if dingoes are a separate species from other wild dogs, or whether we are morally entitled to introduce bison to clear the steppe of Siberian larch. Larch is a native species, but it is also covering and warming ancient carbon-sequestering permafrost. In an era of potentially catastrophic climate change, Nesbit argues that we should keep our eyes on the bigger picture.
This is an ambitious and entertaining book, which foresees a dynamic and creative role for conservation in the future. Having freed ourselves of the idea that species belong in their original ranges, we may decide that it makes more sense to shepherd the most vulnerable species into new habitats where they have a better chance of survival. A brave proposal – but, as Nesbit points out, for some species, such drastic measures may be the only option.

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Josie Ford
The eyes have it
Valentine’s Day fast approaches – indeed, given the state of many postal services, you may thankfully already be hearing its Doppler-shifted whoosh to lower frequencies.
This can only mean the world is agog for the latest top tips on love and dating from Feedback’s stationery cupboard-cum-boudoir. Giving us all hope in these uncertain times is a paper from Farid Pazhoohi and Alan Kingstone at the University of British Columbia in Canada, thrust through our door by an attractively half-masked colleague, entitled “Unattractive faces are more attractive when the bottom-half is masked, an effect that reverses when the top-half is concealed”.
Feedback likes papers with titles that say it like it is. We delve further only to confirm that mask-wearing doesn’t enhance the attractiveness of faces already deemed highly appealing. Given beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we can only wonder why we didn’t all seize the evolutionary benefits of mask-wearing long ago. We can only surmise that, if inclined to act on any impulses, masks would start getting in the way at some point.Advertisement
A nice touch is that wearing a mask on the top part of your face, covering your eyes, makes highly attractive faces less attractive – but has no effect on the perceived attractiveness of less attractive faces. Noted, but we humbly submit that, as a mating strategy, this is both undesirable and impractical.
Love in the time of crypto
“Owning cryptocurrency may make you more desirable on the dating scene, study finds”, reports CNBC, meanwhile. Feedback also likes a good study that finds, especially when, for example, the study doing the finding that “33% of Americans said they would be more likely to go on a date with someone who mentioned crypto assets in their online dating profile” is sponsored by a cryptocurrency trading platform.
What’s more, “nearly 20% of singles would be more interested in you romantically if you set an NFT as your profile picture on a social platform or dating site”.
“Non-fungible token”, we helpfully supply. Rapid, snarky reactions on a social media site famed for rapid, snarky reactions included “In the metaverse tho…lmfao”. Of course, in the metaverse, we will all be wearing those eye masks, which may make things easier, or not.
Um-tiddly-um
Talking chemistry, Jim Ainsworth has been amusing himself by finding chemical elements that didn’t make it into the periodic table, and therefore our fiendishly difficult Christmas word search. It is an exhaustive, not to say exhausting list, encompassing, among many others, premium (a top element), superbium (even topper), tedium (long half-life), imodium (essential in some diets), pandemonium (unpredictable properties) and, verging dangerously on satire, putinium (few electrons, probably rigged) and trumpium (lacking a truth particle, capable of splitting a country down the middle). Thank you, Jim. Since you’ve got time on your hands, do try the word search.
CHEAP
Speaking of word games, the purchase of viral hit Wordle by The New York Times – they might not want your money, but they want your data – prompts Sarah Bossanyi to remind us of the low-budget version “Bulls and cows”, in which two players take it in turns to guess each other’s five-letter words. “HYENA” or “PHLOX”, she suggests, to which we counter “UVULA” or “WLONK”. The rules are freely available online, and a pen and paper are considerably cheaper than somewhere northwards of $10 million, as Sarah sensibly points out.
It never rains…
The weather-weirdening effects of climate change are brought sharply into focus by an article from ABC News sent in by several of you, reporting that Country Downs, a cattle station in the Kimberley, Western Australia, has recorded the highest daily rainfall total in that state in more than a century.
After just 17 millimetres of rain in all of December, 652.2 millimetres were recorded on 1 February, sending the Fitzroy river into unprecedented spate – “almost 500,000 megalitres a day” at Fitzroy Crossing, we are told. We imagine that is quite a lot in our favoured fluid scruples.
Fortunately, we need not leave it to our imagination. “Picture a Sydney Harbour going under that bridge in 24 hours,” the article says. With difficulty. This leaves us with a description from Michael Salinas, a hydrologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, of “3,000 Tesla Model 3s flowing every second”. The tesla being a unit of magnetism, we are now even more confused. We don’t know where these cars were swept away from, but we imagine somebody wants them back, which could possibly be achieved using a large magnet.
Stony-faced
Richard Hind writes from York, UK, under the subject line “A geek joke for you!”, reporting that he followed his dentist’s advice to purchase an electric toothbrush for removing calculus, but, having bought two to compare, he finds he can no longer differentiate. If our face seems impassive, it is only because of the mask permanently covering our visage for the mating season – although the words Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain spring to mind from somewhere.
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

When a wealthy technology entrepreneur invents an AI-driven system capable of predicting how human fear affects the world’s financial markets, nothing turns out quite as he planned

Humans

9 February 2022

By Linda Marric
Alex Hoffman (Josh Hartnett) creates an AI-based system to monetise fear in The Fear IndexSky
The Fear Index
David Caffrey
Sky Atlantic/NOW TVAdvertisement

IN RECENT years, big corporations have made it their business to keep a close eye on developments in artificial intelligence. From predicting trends in markets to planning risk-mitigation strategies, companies are constantly on the lookout for new ways to capitalise on AI to stay ahead of the game.
The Fear Index, a four-part psychological thriller based on Robert Harris’s 2011 bestselling novel of the same name, explores the ethical and moral issues wrapped up in applying AI to business, and asks some pertinent questions about the morality of using scientific advances for the sole purpose of making money.
Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor, The Black Dahlia) stars as Alex Hoffman, a wealthy technology entrepreneur who invents an AI-driven system capable of predicting how human fear affects behaviour and how that, in turn, affects fluctuations of the world’s financial markets. This knowledge promises not only power, but also considerable returns for Alex’s multibillionaire clients.
Directed by David Caffrey (Peaky Blinders, The Alienist), the series also stars Line of Duty alum Arsher Ali as Alex’s best friend and business partner Hugo, alongside Leila Farzad (I Hate Suzie) as Alex’s wife Gabby.
The action covers an intense 24-hour period in which Alex, a former scientist at the CERN particle physics laboratory, prepares to launch his morally questionable money-spinner. “Humans act in very predictable ways when they are frightened,” he assures his wealthy investors.
Yet, having promised billions in profit to his already rich clients, Alex’s plans are thrown into chaos when he is attacked by an unknown assailant at the home he shares with Gabby the night before the launch, leaving him disoriented and confused.
The next day, acting increasingly erratically and struggling to keep on top of things, Alex and Hugo don’t quite get the launch day they had in mind. It doesn’t help that an unexpected tragedy prompts some of their employees to start to question the morality of the whole endeavour.
Meanwhile, Alex becomes convinced that mysterious forces are conspiring to frame him for a series of acts he has no memory of having carried out. Questioned by the police and deserted by his wife, Alex finds himself in free fall, no longer sure what is real and what is happening only in the darkest corners of his imagination.
The Fear Index takes us not only into the mind of a man in a mental health crisis, but also provides a glimpse into a world where billions are made and spent in seconds, and where whole economies can be derailed by the timely use of a mathematical equation.
Caffrey adds a faint air of sci-fi and mystery to the proceedings, and ultimately delivers a gripping and robust thriller in which nothing is quite what it seems. A series of red herrings are peppered throughout the story to keep viewers on their toes. These add a note of suspense to the narrative but, to my mind, the series works best when viewed as a psychological drama about a man struggling to cope with psychosis as his life falls apart.
Although clearly made with fans of Line of Duty – the BBC’s long-running cop show – in mind, The Fear Index sadly lacks its punchiness and accessibility. With a screenplay filled with overly melodramatic exchanges and jarring technical jargon, the series often feels confusing and needlessly meandering. Still, Hartnett delivers a phenomenal turn and is the best thing about this flawed, yet highly watchable, mystery.

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Peter Richardson/English Heritage
Visit
The World of Stonehenge is revealed at London’s British Museum in an exhibition exploring the science of why the monument was built and the surprisingly cosmopolitan society that created it. From 17 February.

Read
A Human History of Emotion is told by psychologist Richard Firth-Godbehere, who explores the central and often underappreciated role that emotions have played in human societies throughout history and how they shaped today’s world.
Diyah Pera/Netflix
Watch
Space Force returns to Netflix for a second season of the out-of-this-world workplace comedy. Steve Carell is the hapless General Naird, while John Malkovich … More