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The Tomorrow War propels schoolteacher-turned-conscript Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) 30 years into the future, to fight an alien threat on the brink of eradicating humanity. Amazon Prime Video, 2 July.

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Gathering Moss by botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the overlooked plant’s key place in the natural world, as well as revealing historical and sacred truths, and its scientific delights.Advertisement
Garry Jones
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UnNatural History, an international exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, UK, explores the role of naturalists and artists as an intrinsic part of the increasingly complex science of natural history. Runs until 22 August. More

New developments in a 10,000-year-old cold case have upended our ideas about how and when tuberculosis began infecting humans – and offered hope for a better vaccine

Health

23 June 2021

By Rebecca Batley

Israel G. Vargas
THIS was the coldest of cold cases. The remains of 83 people had lain under the earthen floor of a house in Dja’de el’Mughara, northern Syria, for thousands of years. Who put them there was no mystery: people living in the region during the Stone Age often buried their dead beneath their homes. But the cause of death – for some at least – was totally unexpected. When archaeologists carefully examined the bones, they discovered signs that five of these individuals had tuberculosis. They are the oldest confirmed cases that we know of.
The discovery is significant. Finding evidence of TB in people who died some 10,000 years ago challenges a long-held idea about the origins of this, the most deadly infectious disease to afflict humanity. It is a key piece in the puzzle that researchers are trying to put together to reveal where and how TB started to sicken humans and how it spread around the world. That isn’t just academic. We need this information to find new ways to fight TB, which currently kills at least 1.7 million people every year. By looking closely at the Dja’de el’Mughara remains, and other very cold cases, we might finally be able to stop this indiscriminate killer.
Tuberculosis is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which generally infects the respiratory system and spreads from person to person via airborne droplets. From the 17th century until the 19th century, it caused 20 per cent of all deaths in the Western world. German microbiologist Robert Koch won a Nobel prize for his discovery of the pathogen in 1882. A vaccine – BCG … More

By Anna Demming

Katherine Johnson was honoured by US president Barack Obama in 2015Kris Connor/WireImage/Getty Images
My Remarkable Journey: A memoir
Katherine Johnson, with Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore
HarperCollinsAdvertisement

IT IS rare to suddenly find yourself a household name at the age of 98. Yet until a few years ago, not many people had heard of Katherine Johnson and her pioneering work as a mathematician at NASA during the space race. All that changed in 2016 following the success of Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling book Hidden Figures and the subsequent film adaptation.
“How could I have imagined,” writes Johnson, in the introduction to her autobiography My Remarkable Journey, “that from ages 97 to 101 I would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (with a kiss from my favorite president); appear onstage at the Oscars; receive thirteen honorary doctorate degrees, including one from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa; have four major buildings named in my honor, including a second NASA facility…”
The list goes on. Her autobiography, written with input from two of her three daughters, Joylette Hylick and Katherine Moore, charts how she got there. Few, if any, of the other mathematicians who worked with Johnson at NASA during the space race share that kind of mainstream fame, but neither were they forced to overcome the kind of barriers Johnson faced.
Her memoir dwells on the things she loved – mathematics, family and the supportive communities around her – but doesn’t shy away from details of the relentless cruelty, violence and injustice of racial segregation and prejudice that steeped the lives of her family and friends, and those of African American people in general. Add to that her gender, at a time when women weren’t credited with much competence for anything beyond home building and raising children, and you get the picture that she was no ordinary NASA mathematician.
“Johnson needed to be better than her white male colleagues to succeed, and fortunately she was”
Johnson needed to be better than her white male colleagues to succeed, and fortunately she was. “The team soon discovered that I could do the equations quicker than all of them,” she writes unabashedly, though she puts that down to the foresight of her tutor, William Schieffelin Claytor, in adding analytic geometry of space to the curriculum he taught her, and the fact that she was the most recent college graduate.
Yet it was Johnson’s innate flair for her subject that had attracted special interest from Claytor in the first place, and she would continue to shine in her field for decades to come. As the person who first suggested she pursue a career as a research mathematician, Claytor appears more than once in a book rich in tributes to all the people who helped Johnson along the way, as well as to those who helped them. As a result, the memoir is replete with inspiring cameos from talented and tenacious role models who not only achieve great things against all odds, but are often equally dedicated to creating opportunities for those who may follow them.
These positive anecdotes are particularly welcome given the prejudice and racial tension that form a persistent backdrop to the book, from the denigrating impact of segregation on children’s self-esteem to violent lynchings. About halfway through, we get to Johnson’s time at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (and its later iteration NASA), which coincides with some of the more tumultuous moments of the civil rights movement.
She describes the times not just as a high-achieving black woman deeply invested in justice and equality, but as the anxious mother of three young women then just entering adulthood, and as hungry as the rest of their peers to play a role in the often terrifying events shaping social change.
People familiar with Hidden Figures will recognise the odd scene in her memoir, and where a little licence was taken on screen, Johnson is generous in pointing it out while providing excuses for the needs and challenges of the movie format.
Overall, her book is a personal account that tells the tale of a woman with a brilliance for mathematics, love and life. She was undeterred by circumstance, and that set her on the path for a remarkable journey.

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Josie Ford
Post quantum?
One minor consequence of the global pandemic has been the many hours spent indoors waiting for the doorbell to ring – often, once we have made it from the office stationery cupboard, to be left with a card saying they are sorry we were out, and that the parcel we were waiting for is now being redirected to a sorting office in one of the less fashionable outer London suburbs.
This game of cat and mouse has been given an additional edge recently by the sort of text message sent by the UK’s Royal Mail to reader Martin Andrews, which states that his delivery is due to arrive “between 11:11am and 3:11pm”. “This made me wonder what function it serves to be so precise in their vagueness,” Martin writes.
The Royal Mail’s spread in ETA of exactly 4 hours suggests to us an origin in fundamental physics. Quantum uncertainty would dictate that if your parcel is at a well-defined location in relation to you, you can’t know how fast it’s travelling towards you, and vice versa, so time of arrival will always be, to a certain extent, moot.Advertisement
Putting in the numbers, assuming a spread of velocities between zero and the UK’s national speed limit, only leads us to a truly huge value for a parcel’s wavelength of some 500 metres. Fundamental physics having failed us, yet again, we have put in an enquiry with the Royal Mail press office. We’ll keep you, ummm, posted.
Heard it here last
Stephen Jorgenson-Murray enjoys our Twitter account’s own mazy travels in the fourth dimension as it tweets “Partial solar eclipse will be visible in the UK and Ireland on 10 June” on 13 June.
Drowning out our social media guru’s dark mutterings about the algorithm going wrong – presumably, going by last week’s cover story, one of the ones that runs our life – we’re happy to accept Stephen’s charitable suggestion that a cutting-edge magazine like our own would naturally take the lead in catering to the time traveller market.
Love shine a light
As we write, the summer solstice is just passing in our northern hemispheric climes. Top of our list of concerns, as you might expect, is how to harness the energy of the sun at its zenith and what effect this might have on our relationships.
Only half of that question is ever going to be answered by a working nuclear fusion reactor, and we’re increasingly doubtful whether that will be in our lifetime. So we are grateful that both parts are tackled in what appears to be a PR email for a boiler installation website in consultation with “renowned psychic Inbaal”.
“During this time, those in relationships will enjoy increased attraction to their partners and will be keen to meet up frequently and passionately,” it burbles. “With this natural phenomenon bringing a new or stronger urge to be outdoors, it is the season of al-fresco amore.”
Fortunately, this being the UK, it was raining with fair commitment the other side of Feedback’s curtains this midsummer morn. We hope this will assist our fellow citizens in keeping their passions sensibly zipped up.
Head in the clouds
A delightful prospect is afforded by the bed spotted by Tony Cuthbert on eBay, promising “Height 820 mm” and “Height from under bed to floor 200 m”. Just beware of the sensation of falling you sometimes get as you are about to drift off.
Brighter than 160 GKet
Inappropriate measurement comparison of the week comes via various readers from various US news media. These quote oceanographer Gregory Johnson as saying that an increase in Earth’s heat imbalance (between what we gain from the sun and lose to space) from 2005 to 2019 was the energy equivalent of “four detonations per second of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or every person on Earth using 20 electric tea kettles at once”. Apropos Johnson’s additional comment: “It’s such a hard number to get your mind around.” Latching on to the second of those numbers, that’s quite some tea party.
How many kangaroos?
Our contingent in Australia, meanwhile, pops by with the culturally attuned unit of the week, courtesy of an article on The Conversation from the discoverers of the country’s largest dinosaur, Australotitan cooperensis.
The description in the title that Australotitan spanned the length of two buses being deemed, we presume, too generic, the body copy goes on to describe it as having weighed “the equivalent of 1,400 red kangaroos”. “How many red kangaroos = one blue whale?” asks Carol Symington, while Libby Kerr bemoans the lack of a conversion into quokkas. Given the uncertainty we uncovered last week, we are wondering about Australotitan‘s volume in Australian pints.
Drink to that
It’s that time of day already – give or take 4 hours, anyway. And so, a toast. A. P. Dawid is a distinguished statistician, emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society, but that isn’t the reason we raise our glass.
No, that is because he is the first, although by no means the only, person to write noting the newly appointed deputy chair of the Wine Society, Eleanor de Kanter. Cheers!
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By Elle Hunt

Is the reducetarian diet for you? Sundry Photography/Getty Images
When it comes to eating meat, it is never purely about protein. Some carnivores are so committed, they recognise vegetables only as side dishes, while those who abstain from animal products will almost certainly refuse a steak from an ethical, organic supplier – but might do so in favour of an intensely processed vegan proxy. Our attitudes to eating animals are highly personal, but increasingly consequential. Is it possible to strike a middle ground?
Meat Me Halfway, by Brian Kateman at non-profit organisation the Reducetarian Foundation, is a thoughtful, engaging documentary about our attachment to eating animals, and how we might move on from it.
It follows Kateman as he seeks to unpick the resistance he has encountered in encouraging people not to give up meat altogether, but simply to eat less. As a failed vegetarian in college, he co-founded the Reducetarian movement to target those who would never dream of going entirely (or even mostly) plant-based.Advertisement
Eating less meat seemed a no-brainer to Kateman when considering its benefits to individual health and in terms of lowering greenhouse gas emissions and lessening our reliance on the structural cruelty of factory farming. Yet he was met with scepticism and ridicule from committed carnivores, and anger from animal rights activists who saw him as undermining their ethical position.
By staking out the middle ground, Kateman seemed to provoke the polar views on meat-eating, while some people like his father – equally sceptical of climate change and guacamole – remained unconvinced of the need to cut down. Indeed, meat consumption has gone up alongside our awareness of its toll on the environment.
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Last year, people in the US are thought to have eaten an average of more than 100 kilograms of red meat and poultry, a return to levels not seen since the 2007 recession. Meanwhile, the UN has warned that we have less than a decade to act before the climate crisis is irreversible.
Food systems account for more than a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. But as Bill McKibben of non-profit organisation 350.org notes in the film, against now-familiar scenes of planetary collapse, food has the benefit of being one area “where change is possible” – starting with dinner tonight.
For much of the 80-minute runtime, Kateman cedes the floor to experts who mount a wide-reaching case against meat – or, as he would have it, in favour of less. (The film is partially funded by a cultivated meat company.)

But a subject often as resistant to logic as this one needs to be treated with nuance befitting of the knottiness of the issue, and empathy for those who lack the luxury of choice. Here, Kateman puts himself forward as a guide.
In his own uneasy navigation of the world of meat – from the farm and slaughterhouse to the supermarket and lab – Kateman is even-handed, self-aware and willing to test his own convictions at the expense of appearing an expert.
But it is in his fond, frustrated engagements with his parents that Kateman is at his most relatable. Their circular conversation about climate change will be familiar to many, and refreshing to see. These quotidian conversations, at once casual and high stakes, rarely feature in representations of the climate crisis, though they may be how we most often engage with it.
“Like watching a sinking ship,” Kateman despairs after leaving his parents’ home. But the turnaround by the film’s end brings hope that the stalemate at the dinner table cannot last forever.
Meat Me Halfway will be available on demand on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vimeo and other platforms from Tuesday 20 July

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By Deepa Padmanaban

A Jain Mahavir statue within the remnants of a temple complexSatyajit Ghosh
An Indian religious settlement built 1000 years ago had an early form of air conditioning created using natural resources and strategic design. The settlement contained Jain temples and dormitories, and was part of a small village called Artipura in what is now the southern state Karnataka in India, a region frequently affected by droughts both now and in the past.
The predominant feature of the settlement was a large granite-skirted natural reservoir storing rainwater, around which temples and dormitories were … More

By Michael Marshall

A grave in Vitry-la-Ville, France, that shows historical signs of being disturbedCourtesy Éveha-Études et valorisation archéologiques
In the Early Middle Ages, many European people reopened their relatives’ graves to recover family heirlooms. The practice had previously been interpreted as grave robbing, but closer examination has revealed patterns in the objects that were taken.
Alison Klevnäs at Stockholm University in Sweden and her colleagues compiled data from dozens of cemeteries dotted across Europe, from Britain and France in the west to Transylvania in the east. All of the graves dated from between AD 500 and 800.
Many of the graves had been reopened and objects removed, as evidenced by leftover traces such as metal flakes from a sword, but the most valuable items were not consistently taken. For example, at one site in Kent, brooches were removed from the corpse’s clothing, but silver gilt pendants and a necklace with glass beads were left behind. “They’re absolutely not trying to maximise profit from each reopening,” says Klevnäs.Advertisement

Instead, it seems the items removed were ones that had been passed down through generations, such as swords and brooches. Items that were personal to the individual, such as knives, were left in the graves – this is consistent with historical attitudes to such items. “They go back into those from living memory, so it’s something about connection to the relatively recent dead,” says Klevnäs.
A small fraction of the graves show evidence of being disturbed for a more sinister reason. “There are a few graves spread over the whole area where it looks like people are doing things to the bodies that suggest they are afraid of the undead,” says Klevnäs. “For example they turned the skulls around and prop it into place with stones backwards, or they might cut off feet.” But these graves account for less than 1 per cent of the total, she says.
The idea that corpses would be buried and then left entirely undisturbed is far from universal, says Klevnäs. Late Stone Age graves were designed to enable people to revisit the bodies. “We know there are these extended mortuary customs,” says Klevnäs. Today, many cultures have customs or festivals in which people interact with relatives’ remains.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.217
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By Chris Stokel-Walker

Few of the US patents granted for biomedical inventions go to female researchersLuis Alvarez/Getty Images
There are well-known biases that limit the number of women in science and technology. Now evidence has shown that fewer women are named on biomedical patents, which appears to have led to a reduced number of patented technologies designed to address problems specifically or disproportionately affecting women.
Rembrand Koning at Harvard Business School and his colleagues used machine learning to analyse more than 444,000 biomedical patents filed in the US between 1976 and 2010.
Algorithms analysed the text of drug and medical patents, attributing each with a male or female tag depending on what the text contained. For instance, texts mentioning “female organs” or “female genetics” were tagged as female. The researchers also cross-checked the gender of named inventors whenever possible.Advertisement
The proportion of patents awarded to inventor teams containing at least as many women as men has increased over the years, but not by much. Some 6.3 per cent of all patents awarded in 1976 fell within this category; in 2010, the equivalent figure was 16.2 per cent. In total, women were listed as co-inventors in just a quarter of all patents filed during the period analysed.

“We know there’s just a lot of sexism in society,” says Koning. “And we know that women face barriers just becoming scientists, and they face barriers when commercialising their ideas.”
Koning and his colleagues also analysed what the patents in the study were intended to achieve. Patents filed by all-female teams were a third more likely to focus on issues concerned with women’s health than those filed by all-male groups.
Teams in which most of the co-inventors were women were 18 per cent more likely to have filed patents for technologies that would help women.
Had there been equality in the number of men and women applying for patents, Koning and his colleagues estimate that there would have been roughly 6500 more female-focused inventions successfully patented between 1976 and 2010.
“Not only are women’s needs and problems invisible, when fewer women get patents and commercialise their ideas, this reinforces the stereotype that women do not create things of value and are neither inventors nor entrepreneurs,” says Jessica Lai at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aba6990

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