Humans

To become an interplanetary species, we may have to genetically engineer ourselves to be more resilient, says geneticist Chris Mason. He has a 500-year plan for life away from Earth

Earth

14 July 2021

By Joshua Howgego

Rocio Montoya
CHRIS MASON likes to think about the future. He isn’t dreaming about a summer holiday, or even planning his retirement. His thoughts extend much further – to the point where Earth is no longer a suitable home for humans.
Alarmed at the prospect, Mason has sketched out a plan of action in the form of his book The Next 500 Years: Engineering life to reach new worlds. It covers some of the usual ground: how we will first establish bases on the moon and Mars, and later on the solar system’s outer moons. Eventually, we will make an epic trip … More

By Layal Liverpool

Race-based adjustments are widely used in some diagnostic testsSean Justice/Getty Images
THE assumption that Black people have a lower level of cognitive function than white people was, until recently, built into a formula used by the US National Football League to settle head injury lawsuits. The NFL has now pledged to stop using this “race-norming” formula, but race-based adjustments in routine diagnostic tests remain pervasive in mainstream medicine. Although some scientific organisations are working to remove such adjustments, many contacted by New Scientist declined to take a stance on the issue, which … More

Many people strive to touch their toes or do the splits, but it is perfectly possible to get all the benefits of stretching without pushing your body to its limits

Health

14 July 2021

By Caroline Williams

Harriet Noble/Studio Pi
“I BEND so I don’t break.” No one knows who first coined this phrase, but search for it online and you will find it accompanying numerous pictures of yogis in various states of contortion. Flexibility, according to common wisdom, is not only impressive to look at, but something we should actively work towards.
Scientifically, however, the question of whether we should stretch to become more flexible has been difficult to answer. Assumptions about the benefits of stretching to prevent sports injuries and greater flexibility being better for our overall physical fitness hadn’t been confirmed by studies. Does it matter if you can’t touch your toes, let alone do the splits? Even in sports science, where most of the research has been conducted, there has been little agreement.
In recent years, though, answers have started to emerge. The surprising outcome is that, while stretching may well be good for us, it is for reasons that have nothing to do with being able to get your leg behind your head.
One thing is for sure: stretching feels good, particularly after a long spell of being still. We aren’t the only species to have worked this out. As anyone with a dog or cat will know, many animals take a deep stretch after lying around. This kind of stretching, called pandiculation, is so common in nature that some have suggested it evolved as a reflex to wake up the muscles after a spell of stillness.
Pandiculation aside, other species don’t seem to spend any time maintaining and extending their range of motion. Which raises the question, is there any reason why we should? … More

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

Neuroscience studies mostly don’t look at sex differencesAndrew Brookes/Westend61 GmbH/Al
Top neuroscience research papers are eight times more likely to only study male participants or samples compared with female-only studies, a review has found. In addition, only 4 per cent of papers look for sex differences in their data, suggesting that neurological disorders in women may be being overlooked.
Liisa Galea at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and her colleagues analysed the sex of samples used in every new research paper published by three of the world’s most respected neuroscience journals … More

By James Urquhart

A Stone Age pot from Europe that may have been worn around the neck or waistBine Kramberger
Some late Stone Age Europeans may have carried make-up inside miniature bottles that they wore around their necks or waists more than 6000 years ago.
Researchers have discovered traces of ingredients known to be used in cosmetic formulations by later civilisations inside small bottles unearthed in Slovenia, dating to between 4350 and 4100 BC.
The finding suggests that lead-based cosmetics were possibly used in Europe more than 2000 years earlier than previously thought, and more … More

Pavements date back some 2000 years, but are seldom built with pedestrians in mind. Here’s why reinvented sidewalks could benefit your joints — and the planet

Technology

7 July 2021

By Anthony King

Paving materials come in many forms (clockwise from top: granite, cement, marble, cobbles), but being hard makes them less than ideal for pedestriansTop: Gordon Scammell/Alamy; Bottom (L/R): Franck Legros/Getty Images; David Keith Jones/Alamy; The Photo Works/Alamy
WHEN Viveca Wallqvist first phoned a local asphalt company, she didn’t mince her words. “I have something to tell you,” she said. “Your material is really hard – too hard. People are getting hurt.” Her comments didn’t go down well. “They were like,’Who is this crazy scientist?,’” she recalls. Asphalt is supposed to be hard, they said. But a few days later, the company rang back. It was the beginning of a journey that could reinvent the ground we walk on.
Wallqvist’s passion is rare. It is more than two millennia since the Romans laid their first pavimentum, from where we get the word “pavement”. Since then, very few people have questioned the fact that the pavements we walk on are, in effect, extensions of the road surface, made of stuff with properties that almost exclusively reflected the needs of horse-drawn and then motorised vehicles rather than pedestrians. Wallqvist, a materials chemist at the Research Institutes of Sweden in Stockholm, is determined to change that.
Meanwhile, in London, plans are afoot to build a giant research facility to test new, spongier walking surfaces. It is the brainchild of Nick Tyler at University College London, who is also convinced that pavement pounding is harming us. The average person takes around 200 million steps in a lifetime, he notes, and we aren’t evolved to deal with such hard surfaces.
So, after waiting more than 2300 years for a pavement … More

By Clare Wilson

Aaron, Jess and Josh must navigate the ethics of an unusual surrogacyMonument Releasing
The Surrogate
Jeremy Herch
UK cinemas
THE Surrogate is billed as being about a moral dilemma, so I assumed that the film would address some of the complex ethical questions surrounding surrogate pregnancies, when someone deliberately conceives in order to give the baby away.
For example, if the surrogate is paid a fee, some feel that the arrangement can seem exploitative, and even when people do it for altruistic reasons, problems can arise if participants change their minds halfway. … More

By Adam Rutherford

Michelle D’urbano
UNSHARED science is of little value. The whole scientific endeavour relies on ideas, methods and data being available to all. The words we use are vital to making sure that we are all on the same page and our ideas are conveyed accurately. But in my field of genetics, the language we use isn’t up to scratch. Terms in common usage present problems ranging from being scientifically confused or ambiguous, to being rooted in a racist history that echoes in our present.
Every scientific discipline has its own jargon used to summarise or label the complexity of the world. And as our genome is the richest data set we have ever tackled, it is no surprise that human genetics is particularly burdened with terms that strive to encapsulate our ancestry and the secrets of our behaviour, evolution and disease.
Genetics is also a field with a pernicious history. Its origins are inextricably entwined with the 18th-century invention of race, then using pigmentation and skull measurements to hierarchically taxonomise people. With that came scientific racism marshalled into the justification of slavery and subjugation, and the eugenics projects of the early 20th century followed not far behind.Advertisement
Contemporary genetics has unequivocally demolished the attempts to use ancestry, anatomy and genetics to assert a biological basis for race. Although people around the world differ, the genetics underlying those differences doesn’t correspond to the racial classification that we use today. “Black” – meaning people of recent African descent – covers more than a billion people with more genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together. From a genetic point of view, it isn’t an informative term. Yet we use it. This is why we call race a “social construct” – race exists because we perceive it, but has no meaningful biological basis.
Nevertheless, the scientific language of the past resounds today. That is why I and colleagues in various fields of genetics are calling for a change in these language conventions, which, we argue, don’t serve scientific insight and shackle us to the prejudices of history.
Some examples are widespread. Caucasian, for example, is a word used today in official forms, public discourse and in many academic papers. Does it mean white European? Does it include people from south Asia or North Africa? Different definitions have included these populations and others. Furthermore, it was originally coined to indicate the “beauty” and “superiority” of white Europeans. It has no place in science today.
Other examples are arguably less prejudicial, but equally unsound. Bantu is often used to broadly describe people from southern Africa with a shared linguistic heritage. Yet the diversity of dialects in more than 400 million people renders their grouping imprecise and not inherently meaningful. Even terms like “ethnicity” and “ancestry” have subtly different meanings when used in different fields and by different people.
In the genetics community, there is growing recognition that we have to change our language. The American Society of Human Genetics stated in 2018 that “the invocation of genetics to promote racist ideologies is one of many factors causing racism to persist”.
Humans are all of one species, but people from around the world are different, and genetics reflects those regional adaptations and different evolutionary journeys. Grouping people is a necessary part of understanding similarities and differences in our DNA.
Our intention isn’t to police language, but to prompt it to evolve. Some genetics terms should be consigned to the dustbin; others will require thought and discussion. Our hope is to spark a conversation for changing to a lexicon that better serves our understanding of human diversity, and simultaneously frees us from a troubling history.

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