Philippa Kaur

Maternal body odour signals to babies that they can safely build relationships with other adults, a trait that may have evolved so that mothers can share the load of child rearing

Humans

10 December 2021

By Alice Klein
A mother and daughterfizkes/Shutterstock
Babies are more socially receptive to unfamiliar women when they can smell their mother’s natural body odour, suggesting that maternal scent functions as a safety signal.
Previous research has found that mothers’ unique smell signatures allow their babies to recognise them and have a soothing effect when they are in pain.
Yaara Endevelt-Shapira at The Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, and her colleagues wondered if signals in maternal odour also change the way that infants respond to strangers.Advertisement
They asked 62 mothers to wear cotton T-shirts for two consecutive nights and avoid using deodorant or other scented products, so that their natural smell would rub off onto the clothing.
Their babies – aged 7 months on average – were then strapped into chairs and introduced to an unfamiliar woman who was about the same age as their mother, lived in the same area and was a mother herself.
When the babies had their mother’s T-shirt under their nose, they were more likely to smile, laugh and gaze at the stranger than if they were sniffing an identical unworn T-shirt.
Electroencephalography (EEG) devices fitted to both participants’ heads showed that the babies’ electrical brainwaves were also more likely to synchronise with the stranger’s when they could smell their mother’s T-shirt. The same kind of brainwave synchronisation is found between babies and their mothers when they gaze at each other and is thought to be a sign of feeling mutual connection.
The findings suggest that “maternal body odours can assist infants in transitioning to social groups, exploring new environments and communicating with unfamiliar partners”, says Endevelt-Shapira.

This could explain why bringing a “transitional object” like a blanket or cuddly toy from home can help young children settle into nursery school, because it might smell a bit like their mother, says Endevelt-Shapira. The researchers didn’t look at whether the scent of fathers or other familiar caregivers can have a similar effect.
Human babies benefit from bonding with adults other than their parents because they are more helpless than the young of other species and often require a wider circle of care, says Endevelt-Shapira. This may be why maternal odour facilitates these external relationships, she says.
The current study found that maternal scent helps babies to bond with women who are similar to their own mothers, but more research is needed to see if the effect extends to women from different cultures and men, says Endevelt-Shapira.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg6867
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By Josh Bell
When Dr Sewon Koh uploads memories from dead people, he doesn’t always like what he seesCourtesy of Apple
Dr. Brain
Apple TV+
WITH a name like Dr Brain, the title character of the first South Korean-language series from Apple TV+ sounds like he should be a second-string Marvel superhero. Yet while Dr Sewon Koh (Parasite‘s Lee Sun-kyun) does have superhuman powers of a kind, he isn’t a superhero, and no one actually calls him Dr Brain.Advertisement
The series is an adaptation of a South Korean webtoon in which a neuroscientist develops a way to mine the brains of dead people for their memories, which he can weave into his own. Despite the somewhat absurd premise, this adaptation plays it mostly straight, keeping its story grounded in character drama and sci-fi.
Sewon is a talented and eccentric neuroscientist who has devoted his life to understanding how brains work. He develops a technology called brain syncing, which connects two brains through a silly-looking contraption made of wires, dials and blinking lights that are supposed to have something to do with quantum entanglement. The details are hazy, but series director and co-writer Kim Jee-woon presents it all with due reverence.
Sewon decides that he must be the first human test subject for his invention. So he tasks his assistant with procuring a fresh body from the morgue and hooks himself up to the dead man’s brain.
As we soon discover, Sewon’s motivation for uploading other people’s memories isn’t solely scientific curiosity. He also comes overburdened with a tragic backstory, which began when his mother was killed in a road accident when he was a child. Then, years later, he saw his young son die in a house fire and his wife fall into a coma after a suicide attempt – a condition in which she remains.
The incidents with his wife and son occurred under mysterious circumstances, and soon after Sewon’s first brain sync, he is visited by a private investigator who is also looking for answers about those tragedies. The police soon show up, too, and Dr. Brain morphs into a murder mystery, as Sewon uses his skills to uncover a shadowy conspiracy that is targeting him and his family.
However, the more brains that Sewon syncs with, the more his mind fractures, as bits of the personalities and skills of the subjects take hold in his own brain. At one point, he hooks himself up to his family’s dead cat, which may have witnessed a murder. From then on, he possesses cat-like abilities, allowing him to quickly climb a tree, see better in the dark and land on his feet when jumping from a building. It is an appealingly goofy touch in a series that sometimes takes itself too seriously, given its somewhat outlandish premise.
Kim, who is best known outside South Korea for mind-bending thrillers A Tale of Two Sisters and I Saw the Devil (as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie The Last Stand), directs Dr. Brain as a mix of mundane police procedural and bizarre head trip.
The middle portion of the six-episode series drags a little, as it focuses more on crime solving and less on brain syncing. But Kim reliably returns to the surreal imagery of Sewon’s visions, regardless of whether he is hooked up to another brain or just receiving some crucial piece of insight. The director also stages some exciting action sequences, including a chase through a mall and a close-quarters fight in an empty cargo transport.
Dr. Brain isn’t quite as out there as fans of Kim’s best-known films might hope for (or as its faintly ridiculous set-up might suggest), but it is still an entertainingly off-kilter take on a murder mystery, with a protagonist who is admirably committed to his own strange ideas.

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Josie Ford
Ancient aromas
It can sometimes get a little – what’s the word – “close” in Feedback’s stationery cupboard cave. It is to this that we attribute a colleague advancing with pegged nose, thrusting our way on a pair of tongs an advert for the perfume line “Neandertal ® for modern human”.
“This pair of fragrances take us on an olfactory journey deep into humanity’s past giving voice to a lost civilisation whose DNA lives on today only through ourselves, while also celebrating the future they were never able to see,” we read among very many other words, not all of which necessarily make much sense to us. “The results are contemporary, highly original, and experimental fragrance structures, free from conventional and traditional perfumery standards.”
“With notes of BO and tooth decay?” a colleague asks, unkindly. Foliage, ginger, pink pepper, grapefruit and pine, apparently.Advertisement
A temporary blimp
Keith Macpherson from Somerset, UK, reports being informed by DHL of the imminent arrival of a parcel with a weight of 1 kilogram and a volume of 32,884 cubic metres and wondering who ordered a blimp. He later found this corrected to a weight of 1 kg, but a volume of 0 cubic metres, and wondered who had ordered a black hole singularity. “My daughter asked if we had been given a delivery window. My son replied no, an event horizon,” Keith reports – proof that, whatever it was that eventually arrived in Somerset, the dad joke seems safe for another generation.
Gorilla journalism
Many thanks to the many of you who allowed yourselves – and us – a chuckle at an erratum in a recent edition of The Economist: “Correction: Last week, in a chart accompanying a piece on nuclear power, we said Britain produced 235 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. That should have been 235 grams. We apologise for the rather large error.”
Indeed, fifteen orders of magnitude large. Our schadenfreude is tempered with a healthy dose of “there but for the grace…”. With weary experience, we call into being the journalistic version of the gorilla effect, where you don’t see the big thing because you are too busy concentrating on the small things.
Motions in the dark
Balance being another great journalistic trait, we are compelled to give space to Graeme Flint, who professes no financial interest in the matter, but writes in defence of motion-sensor toilet bowl lights (27 November). He points out that they enable you to do night-time business in low-light conditions while not activating noisy bathroom fans. “I think they are an energy and sleep saving triumph and more people should give them a try,” he says. Right of reply granted, Graeme – we aren’t entirely convinced, but we are at least going through the motions.
In their element
Ilpo Salonen writes in from Espoo, Finland, deploring the lack in our pages of late of a certain deterministic name phenomenon we shall not name. It being December and the season of goodwill, we hold back from sending the usual cease-and-desist letter. Especially as, by way of compensation for our oversight, Ilpo points us to the existence of a now sadly retired science correspondent at the Finnish Broadcasting Company, Yleisradio Oy, called Maija Typpi.
That’s Mary Nitrogen to her English fans. It is fair to say we are enjoying rolling these departures from Indo-European word roots around our tongue. We also find naming people after chemical elements, rather than the other way round, a fun excursion. Although by no means a unique one, come to think of it. The computer scientist Stephen Wolfram is a reminder of why there is a W in the periodic table, although no element officially beginning with W. We welcome other examples of elementary names from across the globe to enrich our cultural experience.
While we’re there…
The former captain of the Geneva firefighting force was Marc Feuardent (or Captain Strong Fire), there is a BBC wildlife documentary producer called Giles Badger and a 2004 paper in the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering was “Structure and mechanics of nonpiscine control surfaces” by Frank E. Fish.
We are mentioning these purely on the principle of not fouling our own nest. Or, as the French say, don’t piscine the…
All aflutter
Moving swiftly onwards, backwards and almost undoubtedly inwards to black holes, Jon Sparks raises suspicions that we are now trying to generate our own column inches with a choice experiential unit. He notes that our colleague Leah Crane, discussing the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy in her Launchpad newsletter, writes “Sagittarius A* is more than 4 million times as massive as the sun. An NBA basketball has a mass of 0.62 kilograms. So if Sagittarius A* had the mass of a basketball, the sun’s mass would be 0.16 milligrams – about the average mass of two eyelashes.”
Eye-watering. The thing is, Jon, you might have been wondering about the eyelash thing, but while everyone was distracted by the basketball, a gorilla waltzed across the back of the page.
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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

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Jay Shaw Baker/NurPhoto via Getty Images
THE best bits of being a particle cosmologist are the moments where I feel the mathematical pieces of an idea click into place. When I understand an equation or successfully solve one, I have the same experience I had over 30 years ago when I was learning my times tables. It is a unique kind of elation.
I realise that a lot of people have never had this experience. I write this column especially for those of you who were discouraged because I know that whether or not you love most people are interested in the universe beyond their everyday … More

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Absynthe by Brendan Bellecourt is a delirious tale of altered realities set in a world where the first world war ushered in a technological utopia of automata and monorails, plus a serum that can give people telepathic abilities.
Mark Waugh
Visit
Cancer Revolution at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK, explores the new science that is allowing more of us than ever before to live longer and better with the disease. The exhibition is free and runs until March 2022.Advertisement

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Racism, Not Race is a rigorous discussion of the scientific answers to questions of race. Joseph Graves Jr and Alan Goodman explain why race isn’t a biological fact and ponder why society continues to act as if it is.

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To explain the paradox of a smart species that embraces fake news, conspiracy theories and paranormal woo, we need to rethink rationality, says psychologist Steven Pinker

Humans

8 December 2021

By Graham Lawton
Jennie Edwards
HUMANITY faces some huge challenges, from the coronavirus pandemic and climate change to fundamentalism, inequality, racism and war. Now, more than ever, we need to think clearly to come up with solutions. But instead, conspiracy theories abound, fake news is in vogue and belief in the paranormal is as strong as ever. It seems that we are suffering from a collective failure of rationality.
Steven Pinker doesn’t buy into this disheartening conclusion. In his new book, Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters, the Harvard University psychologist challenges the orthodoxy that sees Homo sapiens … More

By Sally Adee

Are we really just puppets being controlled by the words of those in charge?Shutterstock/SvetaZi
Outcast
Louise Carey
Gollancz 20 JanuaryAdvertisement

“YOU’VE exceeded everyone’s expectations.” These are words that Tanta, the hero of Louise Carey’s InScape series, hears often from her boss. The resulting dopamine rush is strong enough to make her knees tremble and to reinforce her total devotion to her employer, InTech.
InTech isn’t just any tech company. It is also the local government, a role it assumed in the wake of a global disaster that obliterated nation states. Civil rights have been replaced by end-user licence agreements, and violations of community guidelines get you executed.
Tanta, like most of her coworker-citizens, has internalised her company’s values so completely that the worst thing you can say about someone is that they are “not being very corporate”.
In Outcast, the second book in the series, Tanta has been assigned the task of finding the deeply uncorporate mole who is selling company secrets. But there is a twist: first, she needs to rid her mind of the phrases used by the corporate autocracy to command loyalty in its citizen-employees.
This is the point at which the series pivots to deft satire, skewering the cult-like employee culture that exists not only in Carey’s dystopian future but in our present, too. From Mark Zuckerberg’s exhortation to “move fast and break things” to Disney’s insistence that all its employees, down to the janitorial staff, identify as “cast members”, corporations already use certain phrases to get inside employees’ heads. Carey has a degree in psychology, which clearly informs her send-up of the way companies do this.
“In Outcast, your employer determines whether you live or die and you think that is good and fair”
In Battle of the Linguist Mages, Scotto Moore takes the idea of weaponised linguistics to the next level. In this world, human language began as an embedded sentient alien mind virus that colonised humanity back in the mists of time, shaping the way we communicated ideas. Then one human finds a way to weaponise these mind viruses into “power morphemes”, sounds that can bypass logic and motor control to evoke a particular feeling, action or belief.
This book won’t be for everyone. It veers wildly from one style to the next: one minute it reads as a snackable version of Ready Player One, the next it channels the loopy extravagance of Douglas Adams, then it abruptly skids into the style of a dense Wikipedia entry. In between the main plot, driven by a glitter-caked, disco-themed multiplayer game where bad guys are killed with a kaleidoscopic beam, Moore plunges into discursive ravines where he explores concepts like memetics and the weaponised persuasion tactics of the advertising industry.
These are very different books by very different authors, but the thread running through both is the unstoppable evolution of persuasion techniques. Using words as weapons is as old as advertising and politics, of course. The question is where the iterations will end. In Outcast, the endpoint is that your employer determines whether you live or die, and you think that is good and fair. In Battle of the Linguist Mages, others can use words to control your ability to think.
What’s scary is that if language as a form of mind control is even theoretically possible, you can be sure some executive has assigned a working group to it. This is the world we live in now. But at least we get to laugh at it through the medium of science fiction.

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StockFood/Jones, Huw
CREATING a gingerbread house is a fun festive activity, but shoddy construction can spoil the party and put any gingerbread inhabitants in serious danger. This recipe and some tips will help you avoid catastrophe.
First, create a design. It is helpful to draw the pieces for your house on paper, then cut these shapes out to use as templates. The quantities of ingredients listed will give you enough gingerbread to make a structure 30 centimetres tall with walls 20 cms wide.
Building requires a strong and stable biscuit. A dense dough with a low moisture content is ideal, so … More