Humans

By Simon Ings

A virtual model of a mouse neocortex seen in In SilicoCourtesy of Sandbox Films
In Silico
Noah Hutton

Advertisement

Available on demand in the US and Canada
SHORTLY after gaining a neuroscience degree, young film-maker Noah Hutton fell into the orbit of Henry Markram, a neuroscientist based at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
Markram models brains in all their complexity. His working assumption is that since the brain is an organ, a sufficiently good computer model ought to reveal its workings, just as “in-silico” models of kidneys, livers and hearts enrich our under standing.
The world is filled with people who seem to think in different ways. Much as we might want to understand this full diversity, no one is going to dig about in a living human. Markram hopes that a computer model will offer an ethically acceptable route.
So far, so reasonable. Except that, in 2009, Markram said he would build a working computer model of the brain in 10 years. This was during a TED talk about his Blue Brain Project (BBP), set up in 2005 to model the mouse brain.
Every year for well over a decade, Hutton interviewed Markram, his colleagues and his critics as the project expanded and the deadline shifted. Hutton’s film, In Silico, is the result.
Markram’s vision transfixed purseholders across the European Union: in 2013, he won €1 billion of public cash to set up the Human Brain Project (HBP).
“It is within our power to model some organs. But the brain isn’t an organ in the usual sense”
Although his tenure at its Geneva headquarters didn’t last long, Markram is hardly the first founder to be wrested from the controls of their institute. His BBP endures: its in-silico model of the mouse neocortex is visually astounding.
Perhaps that is the problem. In a voice-over, Hutton says the HBP has become a special-effects house, a shrine to touchscreens and VR headsets, but lacks meaning “outside this glass and steel building in Geneva”.
We have heard such criticisms before. What about how the CERN particle physics lab sucks funds from the rest of physics? There is no shortage of disgruntled junior researchers blaming it for failed grant applications. CERN, however, gets results; HBP, not so much.
The problem runs deep. It is within our power to model some organs, but the brain isn’t an organ in the usual sense. By any engineering measure, it looks inefficient. A spike in the neurons can trigger the release of this neurotransmitter, except when it releases another one – or does nothing. There is bound to be some commonality in brain anatomy, but so far research shows that every brain is like a beautiful, unique snowflake.
The HBP’s models generate noise, just like real brains. In the film, there is a vague mention of “emergent properties”. Yet linking that noise to brain activity is an intellectual Get Out of Jail Free card if ever there was one: no one knows what this noise means, so there is no way to tell if the model is making the right noise.
Deep learning guru Terrence Sejnowski, who is based at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, tells Hutton that the whole caper is a bad joke – if successful, Markram will only generate a simulation “every bit as mysterious as the brain itself”.
Hutton accompanies us into the yawning gap between Markram’s reasonable ambitions and the promises he makes to attract funds. It is a film made on a budget of nothing, and it isn’t pretty. But Hutton makes up for all that with the sharpest of scripts.

Sally also recommends…
Book
The Idea of the Brain
Matthew Cobb
Profile Books
In his dazzling history of neuroscience, zoologist Matthew Cobb explains why the metaphors we use to think about the brain stop us understanding it.
Film
Inception
Christopher Nolan
Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is out to steal from your mind in a groundbreaking sci-fi flick that gave Freudian psychoanalytic theory a jaw-dropping CGI makeover.

More on these topics: More

New research suggests the connection between exercise and the brain goes deeper than you might think. These six kinds of movement can help make you more creative, boost your self-esteem and reach altered states of consciousness

Health

19 May 2021

By Caroline Williams

Sergio Membrillas
FILTER-FEEDERS aside, humans are the only creatures that can get away with sitting around all day. As a species, we have been remarkably successful at devising ways to feed, entertain ourselves and even find mates, all while barely lifting a finger.
True, this is a sign of just how clever and adaptable we are. But there is a huge cost to our sedentary ways, not only to our bodies, but also our minds. Falling IQs and the rise in mental health conditions have both been linked to our lack of physical movement.
But the connection between movement and the brain goes deeper than you might think. A revolutionary new understanding of the mind-body connection is revealing how our thoughts and emotions don’t just happen inside our heads, and that the way we move has a profound influence on how our minds operate. This opens up the possibility of using our bodies as tools to change the way we think and feel.
Evidence is starting to stack up that this is indeed the case, and it isn’t all about doing more exercise. In my new book, Move! The new science of body over mind, I explore emerging research in evolutionary biology, physiology, neuroscience and cell biology to find out which body movements affect the mind and why.
Whatever it is that you want from your mind – more creativity, improved resilience or higher self-esteem – the evidence shows that there is a way of moving the body that can help. Here is my pick of the best ways to use your body to achieve a healthier, better-functioning mind.
Get on your … More

By Alexander McNamara
and Matt Hambly

Monica Bertolazzi/Getty Images
Laughing gas, otherwise known as nitrous oxide, has been used as an anaesthetic since the 19th century. These days, it is most commonly found in small, steel cartridges sold to the catering industry for making whipped cream. However, nitrous oxide is also a potent greenhouse gas and ozone-depleting chemical. Although it is present in the atmosphere at much lower concentrations than carbon dioxide – just 330 parts per billion – it has 300 times the heat-trapping capability. Indeed, a pulse of nitrous oxide released from plants 14,500 years ago may have hastened the end of the last glaciation.
We don’t necessarily yawn because we are tired
Gints Ivuskans / Alamy
We tend to think of yawning as a sign of being tired or bored. That probably explains the popular perception that it is a way to get more oxygen into the blood to increase alertness. However, psychologist Robert Provine at the University of Maryland tested this idea and found people were just as likely to yawn when breathing air high in oxygen. A closer look at when people yawn suggests another explanation. It turns out that most spontaneous yawning actually happens when we are limbering up for activity such as a workout, performance or exam, or simply when we wake up. That has led to the idea that yawning helps us gear up by increasing blood flow to the brain.

Advertisement

The placebo effect can depend on whether a pill is colourful
Derek Croucher / Alamy
The placebo effect is the mysterious reduction in a patient’s medical symptoms via the power of suggestion or expectation, the cause of which remains unexplained. However, what we do know is that a number of different factors can affect the power of the placebo effect. It can be triggered by administering pills, injections or surgery, or even just an authority figure assuring a patient that a treatment will be effective. In fact, experiments have shown that the power of the placebo effect depends on surprising factors like the appearance of tablets. For example, colourful pills work better as a placebo than white ones.
Some people can taste music
Anna Bizon / Alamy
Forget feeling the music, some of us can actually taste it. Around one in 20 of us have synaesthesia, a condition that creates a strange connection between our senses. For these people, words may take on certain colours and music may have a particular taste or texture.
Although we aren’t certain of the causes of this unusual condition, studies have given us some idea of what is happening. As infants, our brains’ cells have millions of connections that are pruned away as we get older. Some studies suggest that people with synaesthesia have genetic variations that prevent this pruning from happening normally in certain brain regions, giving them unusual connections between sensory areas.
Being stronger reduces your risk of death
Javier Sanchez Mingorance / Alam
Here’s the motivation you need for your next trip to the gym: having stronger muscles reduces the risk of dying of any cause, and is especially important in preventing type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Broadly speaking, exercise of any kind is good for you, but unlike aerobic fitness regimes, strength training also helps to build bone, which can decrease your risk of osteoporosis. It can even help to prevent cognitive decline and memory loss in old age. Maintaining and improving your strength throughout life has become such an important, yet forgotten, aspect of general fitness that the UK government recently placed it above aerobic exercise in its new guidelines.
We have 19 different smiles but only one is ‘genuine’
Superb Images/Getty Images
The 42 facial muscles it takes to break out into a grin are capable of producing 19 different types of smile, but, according to French anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne, only one is ‘genuine’. In 1862 Duchenne identified that the difference between a genuine smile and a fake one lay in the eyes — the orbicularis oculi — to be precise. All smiling involves contraction of the zygomatic major muscles, which lifts the corners of the mouth. But a Duchenne smile is characterised by the additional contraction of the orbicularis oculi, crumpling the skin around the eyes into crows’ feet. Largely overlooked at the time, the Duchenne smile’s reputation has grown. In the 1950s a study found that Duchenne smilers had a 70 per cent chance of living until age 80 compared with 50 per cent for non-smilers. However, more recent findings have suggested that smiles don’t necessarily indicate that we are happy, but instead signal collaboration or bonding.

More on these topics: More

By Krista Charles

The Temple of Victory at Himera, Sicily, constructed after the first Battle of Himera in 480 BCKatherine Reinberger
The ancient Greeks relied on help from non-Greek mercenaries when it came to fighting their enemies, suggests an analysis of bodies in 2500-year-old mass graves.
The western Mediterranean witnessed several conflicts between about 2600 and 2300 years ago as a number of Greek-led city-states – including Syracuse on the island of Sicily – fought against the Carthaginians, whose base of power lay in what is now Tunisia. The Sicilian wars were documented by contemporary writers, including Herodotus in his book The Histories. But given that Herodotus was Greek, it is possible that his accounts of the conflicts may have been biased to paint the Greek fighters in a favourable light.

Advertisement

In particular, Herodotus suggests that in 480 BC, during the first Battle of Himera, local soldiers received aid from other Greek allies and successfully defeated the Carthaginians. But during a second battle in 409 BC, the local soldiers went unaided and the city of Himera fell to the Carthaginians.
Following the recent discovery of eight mass graves associated with the Battles of Himera, it is now possible to explore whether Herodotus’s account was faithful or not.
Katherine Reinberger at the University of Georgia and her colleagues analysed strontium and oxygen isotopes from the tooth enamel of 62 individuals from the mass graves, which can reveal whether someone was born and raised locally or not.

The team’s analysis revealed that some historical claims could be validated – there were two battles, about two thirds of the Himeran forces in the first conflict weren’t local while only a quarter in the second battle weren’t from there, and Greek soldiers from outside of the city did fight alongside local Himerans. But the contemporary accounts weren’t entirely accurate: the isotope evidence suggests that many of the non-local soldiers weren’t actually Greek, but came from across the Mediterranean.
“Finding evidence of people who were foreign and maybe not even Greek is unusual and interesting and sort of indicates that maybe ancient communities, and definitely ancient armies, could have been more diverse than we originally thought,” says Reinberger. These foreign soldiers might have been hired mercenaries, she says.
“Isotopic studies suggest that these could have been people hired all the way from the Catalan coast, from the Iberian peninsula, or from mainland Greece or even from the Black Sea coast,” says Mario Novak at the Institute for Anthropological Research in Croatia.
“So, this could have been either Greeks but also some Indigenous people that classical sources considered barbarians. Obviously, these ‘barbarians’ were much more incorporated into the everyday lives of the “proper” Greeks than previously thought,” he says.
The team theorises that historical accounts downplayed the involvement of foreign mercenaries in order to create a more Greek-centric narrative and align the victory of the first battle with Greek successes against other forces they were facing at the time, including the Persians under Xerxes the Great.
Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248803
Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution

More on these topics: More

Read
The Spirit of Green is Nobel prize-winning economist William D. Nordhaus’s account of how green thinking can help overcome today’s challenges, from climate change to corporate wrongdoing, without sacrificing prosperity.
Claudia Marcelloni, CERN
Visit
Halo, at Brighton Festival in the UK, is an intricate multisensory installation that lets you experience conditions shortly after the big bang. Created by artist duo Semiconductor, it is driven by data collected at the CERN particle physics lab. From 19 May to 4 June.
Toni Marinov/Alamy
Listen
Princeton University Press Ideas Podcast interviews Lucas Bessire in an episode called “The water crisis on the High Plains”. Bessire talks about his new book, Running Out, and the imminent depletion of a vital aquifer. More

By Karina Shah

Bales of rubber like this one washed up on Brazilian shores during 2018Carlos Teixeira at Federal University of Ceará
Unidentified packages that appeared along the Brazilian coast in 2018 have been confirmed as bales of natural rubber coming from a German shipwreck from the second world war.
Throughout 2018, around 200 square packages washed up along 1600 kilometres of the Brazilian coastline from the states of Maranhão to Sergipe. Each weighed up to 200 kilograms and they ranged in size from 0.06 to 3.4 cubic metres. They caused considerable public concern as people were unsure what they were made … More

By Michael Marshall

The Cerne Abbas GiantNational Trust Images/Mike Calnan/James Dobson
A mysterious chalk carving of a huge, naked man on an English hillside was made in the 10th century, according to the first attempt to archaeologically date the giant. The finding is unexpected because the earliest mentions of the Cerne Abbas Giant are from just over 300 years ago, suggesting it was forgotten for centuries.
Historians and archaeologists had many ideas about when the giant was constructed, says team member Mike Allen, an independent geoarchaeologist at Allen Environmental Archaeology in Codford, UK. “Everyone was wrong.”

Advertisement

The giant is carved into a hillside overlooking the village of Cerne Abbas in southern England. It is a figure of a man with a large, erect penis, holding a club. It was made by digging trenches into the hillside, then filling them with white chalk.
The earliest known reference to the giant is from 1694, from the records of the church in Cerne Abbas. The giant is absent from earlier records, notably a 1617 survey of the area by John Norden, who was famously thorough.
Historians have argued for decades over when the giant was created and what it represents. Some believe it was made in the 1600s, in line with the historical records, while others think it dates to Roman times.

Allen is part of a team that carried out excavations on the giant in 2020, with the support of its owner, the National Trust. The researchers dug in the soles of both its feet and the crooks of its elbows.
The team looked for grains of quartz in the chalk and in the soil next to the trenches. A method called optically stimulated luminescence dating could then be used to determine when the quartz was last exposed to sunlight.
Using the technique, the researchers dated the oldest chalk to between AD 650 and 1310. The giant was probably created sometime between these dates, with the year AD 980 falling in the middle of that window. In theory, the giant might be older, because the chalking has been replaced several times. But the soil data suggests not. The oldest date for the soil is AD 700 to 1100. “[The giant] cannot be older than that,” says Allen.
Intriguingly, a Benedictine monastery was founded in Cerne Abbas in the late 10th century. Allen speculates that the giant might represent a response to that.
“It would almost seem to be an act of resistance by local people to create this fantastically rude pagan image on the hillside,” says Alison Sheridan, a freelance archaeological consultant based in Edinburgh, UK. “It’s like a big two fingers to the abbey.”
It isn’t clear why there are no mentions of the giant for centuries. Allen says other findings from the excavation hint there was a time when the site was covered with long grass, suggesting the giant became overgrown and invisible.
However, Timothy Darvill at Bournemouth University, UK, says prehistoric monuments were often ignored. “Even sites like Stonehenge don’t get that much mention,” he says.
The giant is one of only three surviving “ancient” hill figures in England. The others are the Long Man at Wilmington and the Uffington White Horse. Only the horse can safely be said to be prehistoric, however.
Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution

More on these topics: More

By Alexander McNamara
and Matt Hambly

Anna Bizon / Alamy
Forget feeling the music, some of us can actually taste it. Around one in 20 of us have synaesthesia, a condition that creates a strange connection between our senses. For these people, words may take on certain colours and music may have a particular taste or texture.
Although we aren’t certain of the causes of this unusual condition, studies have given us some idea of what is happening. As infants, our brains’ cells have millions of connections that are pruned away as we get older. Some studies suggest that people with synaesthesia have genetic variations that prevent this pruning from happening normally in certain brain regions, giving them unusual connections between sensory areas.
Being stronger reduces your risk of death
Javier Sanchez Mingorance / Alam

Advertisement

Here’s the motivation you need for your next trip to the gym: having stronger muscles reduces the risk of dying of any cause, and is especially important in preventing type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Broadly speaking, exercise of any kind is good for you, but unlike aerobic fitness regimes, strength training also helps to build bone, which can decrease your risk of osteoporosis. It can even help to prevent cognitive decline and memory loss in old age. Maintaining and improving your strength throughout life has become such an important, yet forgotten, aspect of general fitness that the UK government recently placed it above aerobic exercise in its new guidelines.
We have 19 different smiles but only one is ‘genuine’
Superb Images/Getty Images
The 42 facial muscles it takes to break out into a grin are capable of producing 19 different types of smile, but, according to French anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne, only one is ‘genuine’. In 1862 Duchenne identified that the difference between a genuine smile and a fake one lay in the eyes — the orbicularis oculi — to be precise. All smiling involves contraction of the zygomatic major muscles, which lifts the corners of the mouth. But a Duchenne smile is characterised by the additional contraction of the orbicularis oculi, crumpling the skin around the eyes into crows’ feet. Largely overlooked at the time, the Duchenne smile’s reputation has grown. In the 1950s a study found that Duchenne smilers had a 70 per cent chance of living until age 80 compared with 50 per cent for non-smilers. However, more recent findings have suggested that smiles don’t necessarily indicate that we are happy, but instead signal collaboration or bonding.
The hydrogen in your body was formed in the Big Bang
Worldspec/NASA/ Alamy
You may have heard that we are all stardust, but that isn’t strictly true. There are about 20 different elements in the human body, most of which were made inside ancient stars. There’s oxygen, which makes up about half of your body’s mass but only a quarter of its atoms, and then carbon, accounting for another 12 per cent. And just after that, there’s hydrogen, the only element in your body that wasn’t made inside a star long ago and flung into space by a supernova explosion. The hydrogen atoms in your body, accounting for a little over 10 per cent of you, were formed much earlier during the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago.
The smallest insect on Earth is a wasp
The Mymaridae, commonly known as fairyflies or fairy wasps.Scenics & Science / Alamy
There are more than 110,000 known species of wasp, and while we tend to think of them as the black-and-yellow-striped nuisances, wasps come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes. Only one third of species have stings, for instance, and while some live in colonies, the vast majority of wasp species are solitary. There’s even a wasp that can lay claim to the title of smallest insect on the planet. The Mymaridae or fairy wasp has a body length of just 0.139mm, shorter than that of an amoeba.
The first space walker became trapped outside his ship
Over the Black Sea. Museum: Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, Moscow. Author: Leonov, Alexei Arkhipovich.Album / Alamy
Alexei Leonov became the first person to walk in space when, on 18 March 1965, he left the Voskhod 3KD spacecraft for 12 minutes. Although he spent such a short time alone in the vacuum of space, the walk was not without incident. Free from the atmospheric pressures of the spacecraft, his space suit ballooned, preventing him from getting back inside the airlock. Leonov had to bleed his suit of air until it was flexible enough for him to get back inside the ship. Despite the rapid decompression resulting in Leonov developing the bends, he made it back inside safely and returned to Earth shortly afterwards.

More on these topics: More