Philippa Kaur

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.
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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

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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From Amazon warriors to pugilistic matriarchs, stories of female fighters abound. Where do they come from and what can they tell us about gender equality, past, present and future, asks Laura Spinney

Humans

| Columnist

9 February 2022

By Laura Spinney
Adam Eastland Art + Architecture/Alamy Source: www.alamy.com
THERE can be few myths as ingrained in our consciousness as that of the Amazons, an ancient caste of warrior women whose marksmanship struck fear into the hearts of their enemies, who chose sexual partners freely and who sacrificed their male offspring to preserve the matriarchy.
I have been musing on this while watching tensions rise on the Russia-Ukraine border. At the beginning of that conflict, in 2014, a Ukrainian biathlete and sports minister called Olena Pidhrushna was falsely accused on Russian TV of shooting Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine. Historian Amandine Regamey recognised this image of a gun-toting … More

Japanese folk songs evolved in the same way as those sung in English even though there are significant cultural differences in musical tone and scales

Humans

3 February 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
A woman playing a koto, a traditional Japanese musical instrumentShutterstock/PixHound
Japanese folk songs evolved in the same way as English language ones even though they are sung in different tones and scales.
Patrick Savage at Keio University in Japan and his colleagues analysed the musical notation of more than 10,000 folk songs, including the well-known Child Ballads from the pre-20th century. Around 4125 of the songs were sung in English and 5957 were Japanese.
The team defined a folk song quite loosely. “There are a lot of definitions, but we essentially said a folk song is an old song that has been orally transmitted between generations,” says Savage.Advertisement
There are a few differences between Japanese and English folk songs. For example, Japanese folk songs use a five-note musical scale, whereas English ones typically use a seven-note scale. They are also quite different tonally.
The researchers, however, were looking specifically at how the two musical genres evolved and whether there were any similarities. They first converted the musical notations into letter sequences that could be read by an algorithm that usually tracks evolutionary changes in nature. “This algorithm can identify highly related pairs of melody,” says Savage.

The nature of the subject matter influenced the analysis. “It is difficult to tell which version of a song or which style of melody came first,” says Savage. This means that when the researchers compared two similar songs, they couldn’t say for sure whether a difference in the number of notes between the two was due to an insertion or a deletion – so they treated all of these sorts of changes as the same.
They could, however, distinguish insertion/deletions from note substitutions, where the number of notes in a melody is the same in two songs, but a given note has a different value in each song.
The researchers found that these note substitutions were less likely than note insertions or deletions in both Japanese and English folk songs. “We think this is because note insertions or deletions don’t really affect the melody too much,” he says. “Substitutions, like singing everything in a lower note, obviously messes up the melody a lot more.”
What’s more, the effect was stronger in Japanese songs. “Ornamentation is a bigger deal in Japanese folk songs,” says Savage, referring to when small, rapid changes are made to non-essential notes in a melody.
The team also found that musical notes that played a bigger role in a song’s melody were less likely to change as the ballad evolved. “The way the music is being transmitted – whether they are Japanese or English – is very analogous,” says Savage.
“The patterns of change documented in this study will come as no great surprise to musicologists,” says Marisa Hoeschele at the Acoustics Research Institute in Austria. “But it is interesting that these same constraints apply cross-culturally.”
“Studying how folk music evolved can lead to insights into how cultural evolution occurs more generally,” adds Hoeschele.
Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.039
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New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

2 February 2022

Read
Strange Bedfellows accompany many of us through our lives, yet most of us know next to nothing about common sexually transmitted infections. Ina Park aims to change all that in this upbeat look at the science of STIs.
National Museums Scotland
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Audubon’s Birds of America is a chance to see this rare, hand-coloured natural history book and to learn more about its controversial creator, John James Audubon. It is on show at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh from 12 February.Advertisement
Shutterstock/Triff Source: Shutterstock
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Death by Shakespeare sees chemist Kathryn Harkup reveal the science behind some of the grisly methods used by the Bard to kill characters in his plays. Online talk by the Royal Institution on 10 February at 7pm GMT.

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From how food is grown to how we generate power, Vaclav Smil’s new book outlines the basic technologies that keep society going and commands us to know them better

Humans

2 February 2022

By Simon Ings

IN SUCH a complex world, no one can be expected to understand everything. But for energy expert Vaclav Smil, there are limits. In his view, it is inexcusable that most of us don’t know the first thing about the basic workings of modern life and the technologies that keep us all alive. It’s not all rocket science, he says. “Appreciating how wheat is grown or steel is made… are not the same as asking… somebody to comprehend femtochemistry.”
Smil deplores the way that Western culture disproportionately rewards work that is removed from the material realities of life on Earth. Most of all, he is concerned that the general public is abandoning its grip on reality. How the World Really Works is Smil’s attempt to redress the balance, showing the fundamentals of how food is grown, how the built environment is made and maintained, and how all of this is powered.
Smil believes it is worth understanding what might seem like outdated technologies given that the building blocks of our lives won’t change significantly over the next 20 to 30 years. Most of our electricity is still gener­ated by steam turbines, invented by Charles Parsons in 1884, or by gas turbines, first commercially deployed in the late 1930s, he writes. And many of the trappings of the industrial world still hinge on the production of ammonia, steel, concrete and plastics, all of which currently require fossil fuels for their production. Even the newest technologies – AI, electric cars, 5G and space tourism – get most of their energy from fossil fuel-based turbines, says Smil.
Alternative methods are on their way, of course, but they will take decades to fully establish. Coal displaced wood relatively easily in the early 20th century, but it will probably take longer to bring in renewables because global energy demand is now an order of magnitude higher.
Given the irrefutable evidence of climate change, does this mean that Western civilisation, so hopelessly dependent on fossil fuels, is doomed?
Perhaps, but Smil would prefer that we concentrate on practical solutions, rather than wasting our energies on complex socio-economic forecasts. In his view, such forecasts will get less accurate over time because “more complex models combining the interactions of economic, social, technical, and environmental factors require more assumptions and open the way for greater errors”.
How the World Really Works neither laments the possibly imminent end of the world, nor bloviates about the potentially transformative powers of the AI Singularity. Indeed, it gives no quarter to such dramatic thinking, be it apocalyptic or techno-utopian.
Instead, in an era where specialisation is seen as the pinnacle of knowledge, Smil is an unapologetic generalist. “Drilling the deepest possible hole and being an unsurpassed master of a tiny sliver of the sky visible from its bottom has never appealed to me,” he writes. “I have always preferred to scan as far and as wide as my limited capabilities have allowed me to do.”
He chooses to explain the workings of the world as it is today, from energy to food, materials, the biosphere, globalisation and the perception of risk. He covers sizeable ground that other commentators ignore. It is a grumpy, pugnacious account that, I would argue, is intellectually indispensable in the run up to this year’s COP27 climate conference in Egypt. In short, How the World Really Works fully delivers on the promise of its title. It is hard to formulate any higher praise.

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Josie Ford
Va va vacuum
Like many people who have difficulty distinguishing science fact from fiction, Feedback is anticipating with trepidation the rise of the sentient machines. We see the story recently reported by the BBC, “Robot vacuum cleaner escapes from Cambridge Travelodge”, as a kind of low-budget prequel.
“The automated cleaner failed to stop at the front door of the hotel in Orchard Park in Cambridge on Thursday, and was still on the loose the following day,” the article informs us, emphasising the point made by observers, sensibly hiding on social media, that robotic vacuum cleaners have no natural predators in the wild.
Nature also abhors a vacuum, of course. Fortunately, the Cambridge incident had a happy ending: the errant sweeper was “found under a hedge on Friday”. A mere test run, we fear. As is traditional, we would like to take this opportunity to state that we, for one, welcome our new robot vacuum cleaner overlords.Advertisement
Big. Very big.
“Asteroid bigger than Carrauntoohil to soar past Earth tonight,” boomed the Irish Examiner on 18 January, in a clipping sent by Stuart Neilson. “Named 7482 (1994 PC1), the asteroid is more than a kilometre wide at 1,052m and is just about bigger than Ireland’s highest peak, Carrauntoohil which is 1,038m tall.”
For those still struggling with just how big that is, never fear. “Its size means it is also bigger than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai which, at 830m, is the world’s tallest building,” we further read.
So pretty big, then. “Most asteroids that whizz past the Earth are about the size of a family car. They’re not terribly big but this one is not the size of a family car, it’s the size of Carrauntoohil,” space commentator Leo Enright added helpfully. Our only open question now is how big is a family car in Burj Khalifas.
Mind that gravity
“Is the Hubble crisis connected with the extinction of dinosaurs?” enquires physicist Leandros Perivolaropoulos at the University of Ioannina, Greece, in a paper recently added to the arXiv preprint server, meriting an immediate induction into our pile of “questions we had not thought to ask”.
To back up some 13.8 billion years: the Hubble crisis (we paraphrase, slightly) is the fact that if you look at what the universe was doing very far over there in the dim and distant, and then work out what it should be doing over here now, what it is actually doing now is different, meaning something naughty must have happened when our backs were turned.
Something like, we don’t know, someone pressing a taped-over button on a control panel saying “do not touch” and inadvertently increasing the strength of gravity rather suddenly about 100 million years ago.
Stuff happens. The point is, had this increase actually occurred, it might explain the Hubble crisis and also, according to Perivolaropoulos’s calculations, have discombobulated the outer solar system sufficiently to have sent a load more space rocks careering towards Earth. This might have included the one that came steaming in flying a dino skull and crossbones flag some 66 million years ago.
We like this idea, on the basis that no one is going to tell us it isn’t true. And on the scale of cosmic conspiracies, this is hardly the largest. Everything is connected to everything else, after all, which is why we are going to go out on a limb and say it was actually the big bang that did for the dinosaurs.
Quantum whipping
A hop, skip and a jump across the Ionian Sea away, meanwhile, Theodore Andronikos and Michael Stefanidakis at the Ionian University on Corfu consider how a quantum parliament would work, also on the arXiv server.
Why, you may ask. The way things are going right now, we might counter: why not? Yet despite staring very hard at the paper for some time, our answer is somewhat indeterminate. The premise is replacing a system in which party loyalty dictates how legislators vote with a “free will radius” that can take any value from 0, for total loyalty, to 1, for total independence, running it through a quantum voting system and then seeing what happens.
Answer: it depends. But why stop there? What if not just quantum voting systems are employed, the authors muse, but voters, parties, politicians and bills themselves become quantum? “This is a fundamental question of a rather philosophical nature that is probably very hard to answer and, in our view, it deserves further consideration,” they write. We add it to our pile of ones we never thought to ask. Or not.
Entangled thinking
The covid-jabbed may find out sooner than we thought, if US anti-vaxxer Sherri Tenpenny is to be believed, an assertion to which we prophylactically assign a classical truth value of 0. “Remember this term, because you’re going to hear a lot of it in the next year: quantum entanglement,” she avers in a clip circulating on Twitter. “From a physics perspective, what happens when you take that shot in? There’s all this entangling that goes on, and what the artificial intelligence hooking you up to the Google credit scores and all of the dematrix and all of those things.”
Not only that, Sherri, it unleashes the robot vacuum cleaners, too. If this is the best we can come up with, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
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