Philippa Kaur

By Elle Hunt

CHASTENED by the sight of her newborn baby’s face lit up by the blue light of her phone, Catherine Price set about limiting the time she spent in front of screens. The journalist and her husband stopped mindlessly scrolling on social media and started taking 24-hour “digital sabbaths”.
By cutting down on her screen time, Price found that she had gained hours in her day – but now, she struggled to know how to pass them. What was missing from her life, she realised, was fun. But what was fun, if not bingeing on Netflix and playing games on her phone?
Price has form in turning “personal issues into professional projects”. Her previous book, 2018’s How to Break Up With Your Phone, was the result of her attempts to quell her overuse. With that problem more or less in hand, she decided to investigate what fun was, so that she could fill her life with more of it. The result is The Power of Fun, a practical guide with lessons for all of us, especially as we live through a decidedly not-fun pandemic.
This new book is a kind of spiritual sequel to How to Break Up With Your Phone, providing answers to the question of how to replace an all-encompassing habit.
Price comes up with a definition of the most satisfying type of fun, what she calls “True Fun”: typically a serendipitous experience that brings together “playfulness, connection and flow”, adding a dose of much-needed meaningful engagement to our lives.
It is this confluence of factors, Price argues, that distinguishes the most exhilarating, restorative fun from something fleeting and somewhat superficial, like getting a pedicure or going out to a bar.
That said, less-sophisticated fun isn’t just a frivolous activity that we can simply do without. It, too, can serve as an antidote to stress, making it vital for our physical and psychological well-being.
Price gives examples of True Fun from her own life, such as singing in the car with friends and learning guitar and playing in a group. “There is a reason that our moments of True Fun stand out in our memories: True Fun makes us feel alive,” she writes.
As for how to get more of it, Price found it isn’t as simple as just spending less time on screens, or trying to squeeze more activities into schedules that are already stretched thin. In fact, it often involves doing less: prioritising rest or sleep, for instance. Or it might mean coming up with a plan to ensure that household tasks or childcare are shared evenly to make room for moments of pleasure and serendipity.
Price draws from the science of positive psychology in her quest to have more fun, but rigorous research takes a back seat to her own exploration and the findings of her Fun Squad: a global group of about 1500 people that Price recruited from her newsletter subscribers and invited to share their fun-seeking exploits.
Including less from this somewhat self-selecting group and adding more on new psychological research would have helped to bolster the book’s scientific standing. However, this might have come at the expense of its practical relevance. The strength of The Power of Fun is that it is approachable, anecdotal and inviting. After two years of living through a pandemic, many of us have spent more than enough time trying to force fun into our lives (Zoom quiz anyone?).
“True Fun’ is typically a serendipitous experience that brings together playfulness, connection and flow”
The success of Price’s self-experimentation provides motivation to at least try to seek out more activities that we actually take pleasure in. And her main point, that we should clear space in our lives for the things that truly mean something to us, is a sound one.
Price quotes the author Michael Lewis: “If you get in the habit of life not being fun, you start to not even notice.” Once you have noticed and, more importantly, taken action, there is plenty of fun out there for the taking. Why waste your time on anything else?

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A concoction of vilca seeds and fermented alcohol may have provided a mild hallucinogenic experience, enabling Wari leaders in South America to bond with their people

Humans

12 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Anadenanthera colubrina, a tree species common to nearly all regions of South AmericanMatt Lavin/Flickr
Get high, make friends. Members of the Wari society, who lived in the Peruvian Andes more than 1000 years ago, may have mixed hallucinogenic seeds into their beer. Such a mind-bending drink might have offered a way for society leaders to create bonds with ordinary people.
“Being able to provide that experience would create heightened social status among Wari leaders,” says Matthew Biwer at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
The Wari culture flourished in what is now Peru between around AD 550 and 1000. Biwer calls them “the first example of an expansionary state in the Andes”, preceding the later Inca Empire. “There is no written record,” says Biwer, so we don’t know what they called themselves. But they left behind distinctive artefacts and structures including canals.Advertisement
Since 2015, Biwer and his team have been excavating a Wari site called Quilcapampa. He calls it “a waystation along a road” and says it was only occupied for a generation, between about AD 800 and 850.
In the centre of the site, the team found a pit filled with about a million seeds of Schinus molle: a kind of fruit known as molle, or sometimes Peruvian pepper. The molle fruits were used to make a fermented alcoholic drink, a bit like beer, known as chicha.

A few steps away, in a garbage pit, the team found seeds from vilca trees (Anadenanthera colubrina). Vilca seeds contain hallucinogenic substances and have been widely used in Andean cultures. “I haven’t tried vilca myself,” says Biwer, but ethnographic accounts often describe it causing “a sensation of flying”.
If you eat vilca seeds, your stomach enzymes deactivate the active compounds within them – so the seeds are more normally ground up and taken up the nose as snuff, producing a strong effect. However, chicha suppresses those stomach enzymes, so the combination of the two would allow “a very mild and controlled hallucinogenic effect”, says Biwer.
As the Wari state expanded throughout the Andes, its leaders needed ways to impress local people and create bonds with them. They often did so by holding feasts, says Biwer. Providing a hallucinogenic experience would have been an added selling point – especially as vilca doesn’t grow in the Quilcapampa area and must have been imported.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.177
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The characters used to write the Vai script, which was invented in Liberia in 1833, have become visually simpler over time, reflecting the evolutionary pressures acting on writing

Humans

11 January 2022

By Colin Barras
A character representing the syllable “bi” in Vai scriptKelly et al
The symbols we use to write words evolve to become visually simpler over time, and an analysis of a writing system from West Africa shows that they can do so over just a few generations.
The script used to write the Vai language was invented in Liberia in 1833 and is still in use today. Those who devised it may have had some awareness of the Latin and Arabic alphabets, but the Vai script isn’t modelled on either. Its characters denote … More

Cut marks on animal bones suggest ancient hominins butchered them for their meat, and that they were first on the scene instead of having to scavenge from carnivores like big cats

Humans

11 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Notches on a bone left by human butchering activityJennifer A. Parkinson, Thomas W. Plummer, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop
Ancient humans were regularly butchering animals for meat 2 million years ago. This has long been suspected, but the idea has been bolstered by a systematic study of cut marks on animal bones.
The find cements the view that ancient humans had become active hunters by this time, contrasting with earlier hominins that ate mostly plants.
The new evidence comes from Kanjera South, an archaeological site near Lake Victoria in Kenya. Kanjera South has been excavated on and off since 1995. It … More

By Colin Barras
Ancient Egyptians had a wide range of medical knowledgeAndrAfter virtually unwrapping the mummified body of a young girl who died 2000 years ago, archaeologists have found something unique: an ancient Egyptian bandaged wound.
The ancient Egyptians were no strangers to linen bandages, which they first used to wrap their dead more than 6000 years ago, about a thousand years before the first pharaohs rose to power. But until now, Egyptologists haven’t found bandages that were used to dress the wounds of living ancient Egyptians.
As part of a study … More

By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Tim Gainey
IN THE depths of the UK winter, most of my vegetable beds are bare, except for my star performer: purple sprouting broccoli. It is in the middle of its fabulous January growth spurt.
This giant of a broccoli plant is arguably the queen of the brassica family of vegetables. Also known as winter sprouting broccoli, it is very tolerant of cold, and requires several weeks of cold weather before it puts forth its flower buds and becomes ready to harvest.
Unlike ordinary broccoli plants, which have a single large head and are usually harvested by autumn, purple sprouting broccoli … More

By Jacob Aron

You can run a safe theme park. Or you can unleash chaos. Which is more fun?Frontier Developments
Game
Jurassic World Evolution 2
Frontier DevelopmentsAdvertisement

THE original Jurassic Park was released in 1993, and as a dinosaur-obsessed 7-year-old, I simply had to see it. I badgered my parents to take me, even though I was probably a bit too young to watch people being eaten by monsters.
Needless to say, I loved it, and have had a soft spot for both the books and films ever since. So I jumped at the chance to make my own dinosaur park in Jurassic World Evolution 2.
The game adds dinosaurs to the template of classic management sims such as Theme Park or RollerCoaster Tycoon. You begin after the events of the fifth film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, when dinosaurs were released en masse into the wild. Your job, working with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is to round them up. This teaches you the basics of building enclosures, looking after dinosaurs and so on, but it isn’t particularly exciting.
Jeff Goldblum and Bryce Dallas Howard voice their characters from the films and offer advice, but it seems the developers couldn’t secure Chris Pratt, so settled for a substitute that sounds nothing like him.
While the campaign serves as a useful tutorial, where the game really shines is in Chaos Theory mode. This puts you in charge of parks from the five films to see if you can avoid disaster, and is much more fun. In the era of the first film, dinosaurs don’t exist yet, so you send scientists out to find fossils and extract their DNA.
“I hatched two T. rex. They began fighting. Then one killed the other, bust a hole in the fence and escaped”
I started with velociraptors, or at least the Jurassic Park versions, which are roughly as big as a human – the real thing was turkey-sized and had feathers. Despite this inaccuracy, it was a thrill to release them into their enclosure, ready for paying guests. “Every precaution has been taken, we’re following the science,” said one of the researchers, in what feels like a knowing wink to the UK’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic – Frontier Developments is based in Cambridge, UK.
Keeping your park going involves balancing science, business, entertainment and logistics. You need a steady stream of research to create new dinosaurs and modify their DNA, but that requires a positive cash flow. Guests are your main revenue source, but they don’t only want dinosaurs: you have to build restaurants, hotels and toilets to keep them happy. Then there is the back end of the park – power stations, park rangers and medical teams – which supports everything else.
With all this to keep track of, it is no wonder that John Hammond’s original Jurassic Park was a disaster. I managed to hold things together, just. There is a fun moment when Hammond echoes the “we have a T. rex?” line from the original film, which he asks with a mixture of glee and surprise as you prepare to unleash one.
I actually hatched not one T. rex but two and plopped them down in an enclosure I had built to house them as the pride of the park. Unfortunately, I didn’t give them enough food and they began fighting. Then one killed the other, bust a hole in the fence and escaped. It was a scary moment, until I realised I could simply dispatch a helicopter to tranquilise it and ferry it back to the enclosure.
That moment highlights a tension that the game doesn’t quite manage to solve – you want your park to run smoothly, but to really recreate the atmosphere of Jurassic Park, you want to unleash chaos.
Jacob also recommends…

Games
Jurassic Park
Ocean Software
NES and Nintendo GameBoy

Planet Zoo
Frontier Developments
PC

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By Margaret Cuonzo

A WOMAN once approached me with a curious problem concerning her husband. Like most people who choose to get married, she had promised to love her spouse to the exclusion of all others. But there was a problem: according to her, the man she married simply wasn’t the same person any more. He had the same name and career, the same memories and skills. But over many years, an accumulation of small changes had, she felt, made her husband a completely different person.
This woman had approached me not because I’m an expert in matters of the heart, but because I had just given a talk about paradoxes. These puzzles have entertained and perplexed us for millennia. They force us to grapple with some of the deepest matters of logic and meaning. What does it mean for something to be “the same”, for instance?
I couldn’t offer the woman any simple answers. I reminded her that she had probably changed quite a bit since her youth too. And I pointed out that sometimes our intuitions about concepts like identity can be unhelpful.
In fact, the point goes well beyond relationships. Chewing over paradoxes can show us places where our intuitions need tweaking, and this applies everywhere from the foundations of mathematics to social media and our efforts to live more sustainable lives. Paradoxes have helped thinkers resculpt our understanding of key concepts and attain fresh scientific insights time and again. Now, a new way of thinking through paradoxes is emerging, one that holds promise because it puts our mushy human intuition front and centre.
One reasonable way … More