Humans

There’s a lot that can go slightly wrong with the human body and most of the time science can’t explain why. But even our unremarkable illnesses deserve closer inspection

Humans

22 September 2021

By Graham Lawton

Adam Nickel
FOR a few months last year, I broke the habit of a lifetime and started keeping a diary. I hadn’t taken a sudden interest in recording my innermost thoughts, I was conducting a scientific-experiment-cum-book-project. I called it my “Mustn’t Grumble” diary; every evening, I noted down all of my minor health woes from that day.
Keeping a record confirmed what I had suspected – that I’m constantly slightly ill. Highlights included a cold, a twitchy eyelid that drove me nuts for three days and a terrifying loss of taste and smell. There was also the tedious matter of my chronically … More

Food waste isn’t just morally objectionable; it also produces vast amounts of greenhouse gases. But this is one food fight we can win, with simple actions at home and new tech in industry

Humans

22 September 2021

By Marta Zaraska

Fabio Buonocore
I OFTEN feel guilty in the kitchen. The problem isn’t my cooking; I live in France and pride myself on my culinary skills. The cause of my guilt is the amount of food I keep throwing away. A pile of leftover pasta, the uneaten salmon from my daughter’s plate, some expired tofu discovered at the back of the fridge – in it all goes. It sits there in a heap on top of the plastic packaging in which most of the food came wrapped.
It might be a modest heap in my kitchen bin, but, worldwide, food waste is a problem of supersized proportions. About a third of all produce is lost or wasted, most of it thrown into landfill. As that food rots, it produces vast amounts of greenhouse gases. If food waste were a country, its carbon footprint would almost match that of the US. You might say that instead of cooking our food, we are cooking the planet. No wonder that scientists, campaigners – and plenty of ordinary folk like me – are deeply worried.
I decided to turn to science and ask what we really know about how to make sure less food is squandered. It was eye-opening, to say the least. I have changed the way I shop and eat. My preferences on the way food is packaged have been transformed. I also learned that the food industry is at the beginning of some sweeping technological shifts, which could see food waste become not a problem, but an opportunity.
For most of human history, sustenance has been hard won and not something we would have dreamed of … More

By Jacob Aron

The darkest corners of the mind are no match for the PsychonautsDouble Fine Productions/IGDB

Game
Psychonauts 2Advertisement
Double Fine

THESE days, film and TV are full of revivals: continuations of a much-loved story decades later that are a chance to revisit favourite characters when they are older and perhaps wiser. In recent years, I have enjoyed returning to the worlds of Jurassic Park, Twin Peaks and Veronica Mars to name just a few. Of course, there is always the chance that revivals go wrong – the most recent season of The X-Files probably should have remained buried in an FBI vault somewhere.
It’s this risk that had me holding my breath before beginning Psychonauts 2, a sequel to one of my favourite video games of all time. The original Psychonauts, a cult classic, came out more than 15 years ago, a gap almost unheard of in an industry that tends to release yearly sequels. Barring a brief virtual-reality spin-off in 2017, I wasn’t expecting to see another instalment.
Thankfully, I needn’t have worried about this revival. The new game’s story picks up just three days after the end of the first one, which saw a young boy called Raz attend a summer camp for individuals with psychic abilities run by the Psychonauts, a kind of psychic spy agency. Here, he learned to dive into people’s minds and help them come to terms with their deepest fears.
In Psychonauts 2, Raz becomes an intern for the organisation. The structure of the game is much the same – exploring weird and wonderful mindscapes – but its approach to mental health has grown in sophistication. “We’re not here to change people’s minds, not here to fix people,” one of the Psychonauts tells Raz early in the game. “We’re here to help people fight their own demons.”
“The entire game sparkles with wit and creativity, withoutshying away from serious issues”
The entire game sparkles with wit and creativity, without shying away from serious issues. For example, one level involves Raz helping someone with a fear of judgement. This manifests in his mind as a bizarre version of The Great British Bake Off, in which Raz has to prepare a variety of anthropomorphic ingredients (which are all very cute and extremely enthusiastic about being cooked) before presenting the results to a panel of judges.
Other mindscapes that Raz visits include a mash-up between a hospital and a casino, a city built from bowling lanes and a gigantic mailroom. But my favourite has to be the mind of a brain in a jar, played superbly by Jack Black, who has completely lost his sense of self. You help him rediscover it by reuniting his five senses, represented as band members who are scattered across a Yellow Submarine-esque psychedelic land.
The enemies you encounter within these minds all derive from mental health concepts. These include Regrets, which fly about and attempt to weigh you down; Bad Moods, which you have to study to find their source; and Panic Attacks, which frantically scrabble at you in a way that can be overwhelming. It’s all thematically fitting and very well thought out.
As a whole, Psychonauts 2 walks a fine line between exploring trauma and making light of it. The game opens with a thoughtfully worded mental health advisory, warning players that it tackles serious conditions, but usually in a comic manner. It could be a recipe for disaster, but the team succeeds in this balancing act even when events take a much darker turn in the latter half of the game. Even if you haven’t played the first instalment, I highly recommend it, as it is one of the best games so far this year.
Jacob also recommends…
Games
Persona 5
Atlus
PlayStation 3 and 4
More travels in other mindscapes. An enjoyable yet lengthy story.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Ninja Theory
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
A woman with psychosis battles her way through Norse mythology. Her experience bursts through via incredible audio effects. More

By Sam Wong

Shutterstock/bigacis
TO CREATE perfectly cooked food, you need precise control over its temperature. It is this thinking that led to the invention of the sous vide method, in which food is cooked in a water bath held at a steady temperature. If you like splashing out on gadgets, you can buy the equipment to do this at home, but DIY methods also exist.
Why bother? Suppose you are cooking a thick steak and you want it to be medium rare. How well cooked a steak is largely depends on the maximum temperature the meat reaches, rather than how long it … More

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

Polynesian sacred idol statue on Raivavae island, PolynesiaDmitry Malov/Alamy
A genetic study has helped shine a light on how the Polynesian islands of the central and southern Pacific – some of which are thousands of kilometres apart – were populated over the past thousand years.
Alexander Ioannidis at Stanford University in California and his colleagues analysed the DNA of 430 people of Polynesian descent to map their genetic ancestry.
Polynesia is made up of around 1000 islands that span one-third of the world. It includes New Zealand, Hawaii, Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and Samoa. … More

By Elle Hunt

Mark Cousins has an eye for making innovative filmsBofa Productions
The Story of Looking
Mark Cousins
In cinemas from 17 SeptemberAdvertisement
NOT long before I watched The Story of Looking, I was shown an image of the inside of my eye. At my annual sight check-up, I’d agreed to something called an optical coherence tomography scan, examining the surface of my retina for abnormalities.
One picture resembled a red sun, lined with veins; the cross-section view revealed undulating layers like those of Earth’s crust. I looked at my eye, and my eye looked back. Thinking about it, I started to feel a little queasy. It is this visceral, charged relationship between being and seeing – how what we take in of the world shapes our understanding of it – that Mark Cousins explores in his personal, exploratory film.
The Story of Looking extends his 2017 book of the same name to bring together medium and message, as he did a decade ago with The Story of Film: An Odyssey, his 15-hour epic on the history of cinema. At 90 minutes long, his new offering is relatively glancing, but in some ways just as ambitious in attempting to tell “the story of our looking lives”.
The film begins with a clip of musician Ray Charles, who went blind aged 7, being interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show in the US in 1972. Given the option, he would refuse to have his sight permanently restored, but might consider it for one day, he says. “There are a couple of things that I would maybe like to see, once.”.
The idea that a person might choose not to see floors Cousins, as “somebody who has always loved looking”. He makes sense of his life through visual markers – some undeniable, such as the sight of his late grandmother in an open coffin, but many more apparently inconsequential: a sunrise, a tree outside his bedroom window, a glimpse of his neighbour.
But the ephemeral nature of this “visual world” was thrown into relief by his discovery, during lockdown last year, of a cataract in his left eye. The parallel between the pandemic curtailing his experience and the potential of his failing vision to do the same isn’t lost on Cousins, who sets out to capture what sight has meant to him. “Where do I begin to tell the story of my looking?” he wonders on the day before cataract surgery.
“Why do I take selfies? Why has that tree, that panorama, that particular image stayed with me for years?”
Inspired by the artist Paul ézanne’s description of his developing “optical experience”, Cousins traces his own, starting with his earliest memories – by extension, his earliest sights. The intimacy of this is emphasised by our own view of Cousins, shirtless in bed, curtains drawn: shut inside with him, we see what he sees, if only in his mind’s eye. He even projects into the future, beyond his surgery, to bring this “journey through our visual lives” full circle.
The Story of Looking is essayistic in form, even impressionistic, combining personal experience, wide-ranging references and globe-trotting footage from Cousins’s archives to create a kaleidoscopic picture.
Some of this, such as Cousins reading aloud responses to his tweeted request for thoughts on looking, isn’t that captivating to watch. But the evocativeness of his followers’ words, and Cousins’s emotional response to them – especially at a time of enforced isolation – underscores his point: we don’t need to be present, or together, to see for ourselves.
Likewise, if the film’s meditative pace sometimes fails to hold the attention, it feels like an extension of Cousins’s challenge to our preconceptions – of what we consider to be “worth seeing”, or what we believe we must “bear witness” to. “Blurs are failures, aren’t they?” he says, of his cataract.
Just as the film-maker’s looming surgery causes him to reflect on what he has seen, “to go around the city for a day with my eyes wide open”, The Story of Looking prompts me to see my own “visual world” anew. Why do I take selfies? Why has that tree, that panorama, that particular image stayed with me for years?
The effect is oddly uplifting, as though my own aperture has been enlarged. Indeed, it casts the news that I need a first pair of prescription glasses in a new light – as another chapter in my own story of looking.

More on these topics: More

We like to think that science can give us definitive answers to our questions, but uncertainty is a crucial part of the scientific process, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Humans

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15 September 2021

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Lidiia/Shutterstock
EARLIER this month, science journalist Adam Mann reported a story for Science News that had one of my favourite headlines of 2021: “Astronomers may have seen a star gulp down a black hole and explode.”
The article discusses a new paper, published in Science on 3 September, that describes observations of a supernova that were collected with the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico. The strong radio signal observed in coordination with this event suggested to lead researcher Dillon Dong and his team that they should follow up using a different set of tools, this time through … More

Plaque fossilises while we are still alive. Now, dental calculus is giving up the secrets of our ancient ancestors, from what they ate to how they interacted and evolved

Humans

15 September 2021

By Graham Lawton

Spencer Wilson
IT IS the only part of your body that fossilises while you’re still alive,” says Tina Warinner at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.
To see what she is describing, stand in front of a mirror and examine the rear surfaces of your lower front teeth. Depending on your dental hygiene, you will probably see a thin, yellowish-brown line where the enamel meets the gum. This is plaque, a living layer of microbes that grows on the surface of teeth – or, more accurately, on the surface of older layers of plaque. If … More