Humans

Mindfulness is hailed as a treatment for a vast array of problems and the apps are now hugely popular. But do the claims about its benefits stack up? New Scientist investigates

Health

2 June 2021

By Jo Marchant

Stephan Schmitz
THERE is nothing wrong with thinking. It is what makes us human. Our ability to remember the past and imagine the future has made us the most successful species on the planet. But can we take it too far? Scientists and self-help gurus alike argue that spending too much time ruminating on our worries can make us stressed and miserable, while blinding us to the joys of what is happening right now. The cure, we are told, is to be more mindful. The practice of mindfulness – paying attention to our experience in a non-judgemental, accepting way – promises to help us escape the tyranny of our thoughts, boosting our mood, performance and health along the way.
At this point, there can’t be many people on the planet who haven’t tried mindfulness at least once. Secular versions of the practice were first developed from Buddhist roots in the 1970s, paving the way for scientific studies into its effects on the mind. Since it burst into the mainstream in the 1990s, high-profile research papers and media reports have claimed dramatic changes in brain structure and function, and benefits ranging from sharper attention to boosted mood, memory and a younger-looking brain.
Mindfulness is now prescribed by doctors, taught in schools, provided by employers and is readily available to download on our smartphones. It is no longer a fringe topic, but part of daily life. “Now, everyone’s got the app,” says a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California.
In recent years, though, some researchers have begun to urge caution, warning that the benefits of the practice have been hyped and potential harms ignored. It is … More

By Michael Marshall

The full sequence of the human genome is finally hereKTSDESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
We have finally sequenced the complete human genome. No, for real this time.
When scientists first announced that they had read all of a person’s DNA 20 years ago, they were still missing some bits. Now, with the benefit of far better methods for reading DNA, it has finally been possible to read the whole thing from end to end.
“Having been part of the original Human Genome Project in 2001, and especially focused on the difficult regions, it’s really … More

By Garry Shaw

Catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and PeterD. Gliksman/INRAP
Ancient human remains found in a catacomb in Rome belonged to a migrant from northern Africa who grew up along the Nile valley before travelling to the heart of the Roman Empire more than 1700 years ago.
The remains, consisting of only a jawbone fragment with three teeth attached, were found in the Catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter, south-east Rome. They were uncovered in a chamber during a rescue excavation, conducted before a support pillar could be installed.
Kevin Salesse at the Free … More

By Michael Marshall

Tell Banat North in Syria was submerged in 1999
An earthen mound in what is now Syria may be the oldest known war memorial in the world, constructed before 2300 BC. The remains of what could be foot soldiers and charioteers were buried in distinct clusters in a monument made of piled-up soil. However, it isn’t clear if they belonged to the winning or losing side, or what the conflict was about.
The finding comes from a re-examination of remains from the White Monument, which was excavated in the 1980s and 1990s. The area was submerged in 1999 by the construction of the Tishrin Dam on the Euphrates river, and hasn’t been investigated since.
Anne Porter at the University of Toronto in Canada was one of the leaders of the excavations. “It was a salvage project,” she says. The flooding was “a really traumatic experience” because the area was “the most fabulous site you could imagine working on”.Advertisement
Immediately to the north of a small mountain called Jebel Bazi, Mesopotamian people built a settlement that archaeologists call the Banat/Bazi complex. It was occupied between about 2700 and 2300 BC. The site included a set of earthen mounds called Tell Banat, and slightly further north a single large mound called Tell Banat North or the White Monument.
The White Monument got its name because it was coated in a chalky mineral called gypsum. Porter says it was built in three stages. The first was a smooth mound, which the team never managed to excavate due to the flooding. Later, people built smaller mounds on top of it, containing human bones. “Imagine upside-down ice cream cones on the outside of a pudding,” says Porter. “That’s what it must have looked like.”

Finally, the people constructed stepped platforms around the edge of the mound. In the soil, the team found lots of fragmentary bones. Some were human. Others belonged to animals similar to donkeys – the exact species is unclear.
Porter has now worked with a class of undergraduates to reconstruct where all the bones were placed in the earth platforms. “It was them that realised there’s a pattern here,” she says.
One cluster held the remains of humans buried with hard pellets of compacted earth, which may have been projectile weapons. The team argues that these were foot soldiers.

The other set tended to have a single donkey-like animal paired with an adult human and a teenager. The team suggests these were charioteers: the adult driving the chariot and the teenager jumping on and off the chariot.
Porter suspects the monument reflects “an internal conflict” rather than an invasion. At the time, hierarchical societies were emerging, creating “a tension between a community-based kinship society and then these narrowing elites who are in control”, she says.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.58
Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution

More on these topics: More

If a strange tingling feeling comes over you when someone whispers, chews or taps in your ear, you might be lucky enough to experience autonomous sensory meridian response or ASMR. This strange but relaxing sensation has spawned countless videos on YouTube, but what exactly is it? Sit back, relax and let Science with Sam explain.
More Science with Sam:
What is a black hole? And could you survive one?
Is our reality just one part of a multiverse? More

By Krista Charles

An archival photograph showing a double burial at Jebel SahabaWendorf Archives of the British Museum
Individuals buried at the prehistoric cemetery Jebel Sahaba in Sudan seem to have experienced violence and trauma at several points during their lives. The discovery may help us understand the prehistory of violence before the origin of farming.
At about 13,400 years old, Jebel Sahaba is one of the earliest sites displaying signs of mass conflict. Violence between communities seems to have become more common once people settled in one place to farm, which had begun happening by about 12,000 years ago. But evidence of organised violence among more mobile communities, like those represented by Jebel Sahaba, is unusual.
The remains at the cemetery were exhumed in the 1960s, and once it was clear that 20 of the skeletons carried injuries, it was suggested they had belonged to people who had died during a single war. A reanalysis shows that this probably wasn’t the case.Advertisement
Isabelle Crevecoeur at the University of Bordeaux in France and her colleagues examined the remains of 61 individuals, including the 20 already found to have injuries. They identified more than 100 healed and unhealed bone lesions that were previously undocumented and indicate that these pre-agricultural people survived several instances of violence during their lives.

“We knew that we were going to find maybe some additional lesions, but, in this case, this systematic and really thorough analysis of the remains allowed us to add 21 individuals to the 20 that were already recognised with traumatic lesions,” says Crevecoeur.
There were probably deliberate, sporadic and recurrent attacks between different cultural groups among these hunter-fisher-gatherers, says Crevecoeur.
“We do not know of any other cemetery at that time which shows such a high rate of people injured and killed,” says Thomas Terberger at the University of Göttingen in Germany. “This high rate of conflict is something unique and it will be a task for the future to analyse whether this is outstanding evidence, or perhaps the reanalysis of other [similarly ancient] sites will show more evidence of such conflicts.”
The team found that most of the lesions were related to impact marks from projectiles, and in some cases there were still bits of stone embedded in the bones of both men and women. These fragments may have come from the heads of arrows or spears.

“These results enrich our understanding of the contexts in which violence emerges among foragers,” says Luke Glowacki at Harvard University. “They provide additional evidence for an emerging consensus that foragers, just like agricultural peoples, had interpersonal violence in the form of raids and ambushes.”
Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-89386-y
Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution

More on these topics: More

Josie Ford
No selfie
As a philistine, Feedback is unsure whether AI art is a good or a bad thing, or better or worse than the alternative. All we can say is that it is a Thing, and one that some people are increasingly willing to pay good money for. And also bitcoin.
One possible disadvantage of algorithmic art – or advantage, if you are one of those tiresomely logical types who finds the descriptions in exhibition catalogues to be largely mystifying agglomerations of words – is the inability to glean from the artists themselves what their intentions were in creating the piece.
Step forward Ai-Da, the android artist whose self-portraits are currently featuring in an exhibition at the Design Museum in London, and who is now artist-in-residence at the Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, south-west England.Advertisement
In interviews with the BBC and The Guardian, Ai-Da’s answers might be regarded as formulaic – they are an artist because they “like to be creative”, apparently – but at least they reveal a robust attitude to the agonies of the creative process. How long does a self-portrait take? “Between 45 minutes and one hour 15,” says Ai-Da.
What the meaning of a self-portrait is when the portraitist has no self is a question apparently no one has yet put to Ai-Da. The time to get really unnerved is when an AI comes up with a better answer to that than a human can.
Renaissance values
Moving to art in a different space and time, Renee Colwell writes from New York City with “a novel unit of measure for the true Renaissance man”, as she describes it.
Discussing the resting place of Queen Nefertari, first of the great royal wives of Ramses the Great (the Ancient Egyptians did titles as well as pyramids), in the Valley of the Queens near Luxor, an episode of the TV series Unearthed sped through a cultural wormhole to emerge at the pronouncement “her tomb is covered with over 5000 square feet of paintings and spells, equivalent to over 1000 Mona Lisas in area”.
Feedback likes this style, not least because it gives us a handle on another fun fact for free: the size of the Mona Lisa. As anyone who has battled the crowds in the Louvre (the one in Paris, best-beloved subeditors) can testify, this comes out as “smaller than you think”.
In fact, it is smaller even than you would think given that comparison. The Mona Lisa measures 21 by 30 inches according to our best information, so that second “over” is doing quite a bit of overtime by our calculation. Exactly how much we leave as an exercise in pre-revolutionary units for the reader.
Is it a… ?
Reports are coming in that the city of Harbin in China is testing a new autonomous train that doesn’t need traditional tracks, but runs on roads on a “virtual track”. Having viewed the video many times, Feedback comes to the conclusion that this is neither a train nor, given the lack of tracks, a tram – much though it superficially resembles one.
No, what we have here is a bus. A very long bus, to be sure – it resembles a still-further-extended version of the articulated sort that, when briefly introduced onto London’s roads, were famed for getting stuck going round corners – but a bus nonetheless.
Whether autonomous control makes its driving any less erratic we assume only testing will tell. The video shows some impressive lane wiggling. But judging by a brief but clear escapade up the wrong side of a multi-lane highway shown in another video, the answer to that is a no, too.
Bleak, very bleak
We are grateful, for some value of grateful, to Michael Zehse for drawing our attention to the music of Nænøĉÿbbœrğ VbëřřћōlöKäävsŧ. We discover, as the extensive use of röck döts was perhaps inviting us to conclude, that this is “an extremely underground band that plays a dank, bleak, light-void music commonly referred to as either ‘ambient cosmic extreme funeral drone doom metal’ or ‘post-noise’.”
Having begun listening to one track, 10^100 Gs of Artificial Gravity, from their album The Ultimate Fate of the Universe, we can’t confirm the accuracy of the first description, but the second seems pretty fair.
The “windy, staticy” tone was achieved by the two band members, researchers who describe themselves as having met while studying carnivorous Antarctic predators, loading a bass, an amp and a laptop onto a dog sled to sample at the precise geographic South Pole during a long winter. Whatever we think of the outcome, this is true dedication to art. Rëspëkt.
Birdbrained 2
Many of you write in bafflement at our recent story mentioning the intention of councillors in the town of Hungerford in southern England to transport their incontinent feral pigeons to Whitby, 400 kilometres north, and release them there (15 May).
A popular suggestion seems to be that the denizens of Whitby should respond in like manner by arranging the transport of their notoriously aggressive gulls southwards. That’s one way of giving them the bird, we suppose. But this represents a levelling-down agenda of the type most definitely not espoused by the UK government.
Got a story for Feedback?
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

Some people seem to possess unlimited get-up-and-go, while others can barely muster enough drive to leave the couch. Here’s what science tells us about motivation – and how to cultivate it

Health

26 May 2021

By Amelia Tait

Antonio Sortino
I’VE had three weeks to write the words you are about to read, but they were written at the last possible minute. Why? I wasn’t busy exercising – I haven’t done that in months. My time wasn’t spent at my book club or calligraphy class, because I’m not involved in anything of the sort. Nor did I procrastinate by mastering the ultimate sourdough loaf – just the thought of it makes me want to lie down. Quite simply, I waited until the last minute because I couldn’t be arsed.
My condition is what’s known colloquially among my generation as “The CBAs” – the “can’t be arseds”. In my case, it is chronic. I can’t be arsed to go on a run. I can’t be arsed to cook. I can’t be arsed to reply to my emails.
I’m not alone. According to a December 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, 42 per cent of people in the US aged between 18 and 49 say they have struggled to find the motivation to work since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic. That still leaves half of the population who are fine, who get up and get on. Then there are those people who wake at 6 am and run 10 kilometres before work. People who write their memoirs. People who wash their curtains.
What are their secrets? Why do some people have so much drive and others, like me, so little? And is it possible for me to become a go-getter? To find out, I mustered the motivation to ask a few of the scientists who might know.
Motivation is what drives much … More