Humans

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

A letter from Marie Antoinette to Axel von Fersen, dated 4 January 1792, that has been partially redactedCRC
During the throes of the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette expressed her love for Swedish count Axel von Fersen through words that are finally readable 230 years later.
Modern scanning technology has successfully distinguished the ill-fated French queen’s ink from that of von Fersen, who scribbled over her text in what was probably an effort to protect his close friend and probable lover, says Anne Michelin at Sorbonne University in Paris.
She and her colleagues recently investigated 15 letters exchanged between Antoinette and von Fersen from 1791 to 1792 at the request of the French National Archives. While the majority of each letter was readable, certain words or sections had been hidden under heavily penned loops and random letters – Js, Ls, and Ts mostly – intended to censor the document. Forensic units of the French National Police made an unsuccessful attempt to uncover the hidden words in the 1990s, but the technology of the time was lacking, says Michelin.Advertisement
This year, Michelin’s team used X-ray fluorescence scanning to hone in on the compositions of metallic elements like copper, iron and zinc in the letters’ ink. Because the various inks used in the letters contained different ratios of these elements, the researchers were able to customise their scanning techniques to decipher original words buried under the layers of looping ink – sometimes needing to adjust their methods even for a single word, which could take several hours to scan.

Their analyses also resolved the mystery of who had censored the letters. By comparing the compositions of the ink used for scribbling out words and that used for von Forsen’s own writing, the researchers confirmed that von Fersen himself had done the redacting.
“There were probably political reasons for keeping the letters,” says Michelin, adding that they might have been intended to present a more favourable public image of the queen, who was ultimately beheaded by guillotine in 1793. “But von Fersen could have just been very attached to these letters, as well.”
Marie Antoinette wrote to von Fersen at lengths about political concerns of the time, including how the royal family was coping with the revolution, says Michelin. Her censored writing, however, featured more romantic vocabulary – terms like “beloved” and “adore” and intimate phrases like “No, not without you” and “you, whom I love and will continue to love until my…”.
Extramarital relationships were commonplace throughout the history of French royalty, so a romance between Marie Antoinette and von Fersen wouldn’t be surprising, says Michelin. Even so, the newly discovered words don’t confirm that they were lovers.
“Correspondence is always just one part of the whole story,” she says. “We write, but we don’t necessarily write what we think. And what we write can be exacerbated by dramatic situations, like a revolution. The queen was no longer free to move around, so of course that would exacerbate her emotions. You can really feel that in her writing.”
Unfortunately, the researchers’ scanning techniques still weren’t advanced enough to discriminate the buried words in seven of the letters, which remain a mystery, says Michelin.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg4266

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Three decades spent working as a psychotherapist with the most violent offenders has convinced Gwen Adshead that they aren’t the monsters we portray them as

Humans

29 September 2021

By Rowan Hooper

Jennie Edwards
HOW do people come to commit violent and life-threatening acts? Some think such people are innately bad, calling them “monsters” or “evil”. It is a view that William Shakespeare encapsulated in The Tempest when Prospero says of Caliban that he is “a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick”. But Gwen Adshead doesn’t accept that view. She has spent her career working as a psychotherapist with offenders in prisons and secure psychiatric hospitals, including Broadmoor Hospital, where some of the UK’s most notorious criminals are detained. Rather than seeing violent offenders as being innately evil, she thinks of her patients as survivors … More

By Annalee Newitz

traveler111/iStockphoto
LAST year, High Country News published an online, interactive map that helped me understand 200 years of US history in about 10 minutes. At first glance, it looks like one of those airline maps that show flight paths: blue and red lines arc over the nation, linking east to west. But when the map is fully loaded, there are so many lines that they blur into a cocoon swaddling the skies over North America. This isn’t a map of connection after all, it is a chronicle of property theft, done in the name of education.
Anyone familiar with the … More

Read
Latitude is geographer Nicholas Crane’s account of the first international scientific expedition, in 1735, to discover the planet’s shape, a journey beset by egos, disease, mutiny and murder.
Anti-Body by Alexander Whiteley Dance Company, Photo by Sodium
Visit
Anti-Body on 8 October at DanceEast in Ipswich, UK, sees dancers reacting to motion-responsive visuals in Alexander Whitley’s latest experiment in performance and new media. A tour follows.Advertisement

Watch
Five Patterns That Explain the Universe are explored by Brian Clegg on 7 October at 18.00 BST. This New Scientist event unpacks the shapes, from Feynman diagrams to the DNA double helix, on which reality depends. 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 Davide Abbatescianni

Inheriting mining rights on Arrakis is a poisoned chalice for Paul (right)Chiabella James/Warner Bros
FilmDuneIn UK cinemas from 22 October

ONE of the most anticipated flicks at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is the first chapter of a new two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel.
The story begins in AD 10,191 in a universe ruled by an interstellar empire in which noble houses fight to control planetary fiefs.Advertisement
The Atreides family, led by Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) is tasked with administering Arrakis, an inhospitable desert planet abundant in “spice”, a mind-altering substance that is crucial for interstellar travel. Neither the planet’s previous rulers, the Harkonnens, nor its hardy citizens, the Fremen, are pleased to see them – and mining spice is made treacherous by the presence of gigantic, territorial sandworms.
The first part of the film depicts the transition of power after the family’s arrival on Arrakis, and establishes the relationships that the Duke’s son Paul (Timothée Chalamet) has with his mother, the mystical Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and his two mentors, weapons master Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) and swordmaster Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa).
This set-up is effective: we learn that Paul fears his future as the next Duke, that he dedicates himself to intellectual and physical training and that he can count on his parents who, despite their institutional roles, are generally supportive.
As Dune progresses, however, the focus shifts from family drama towards politics and the turbulent relations with the Fremen. This transforms the remaining two-thirds of the film into a dull space opera, where the serious and the overly solemn tone starts to impinge on the excitement and mystery. Meanwhile, the story descends into cliché-filled dialogues about strength, courage and honour, the likes of which are all too common in the sci-fi and superhero genres.
Villeneuve takes spectacular visuals to the next level – the Harkonnens’ attack on Arrakis is a prime example, as is the scene in which Idaho manages to dispatch half a dozen enemies with relative ease despite a serious stab wound to the chest.
While the movie is packed with tension, majestic heroism and countless mortal dangers, it is sadly let down by the mediocre quality of the writing and the varying levels of performance among the cast.
Chalamet successfully embodies a young man hesitantly embracing the perils and the responsibilities of adulthood. Stellan Skarsgård brilliantly portrays Baron Vladimir Harkonnen’s greed and pure evil, and it is a shame that his character wasn’t more present throughout. Ferguson, however, fails to provide the complexity of her tripartite role of wife, mystic and mother. She opts for a strange neutrality of expression that struggles to prompt any particular sympathy or antipathy.
Chani, the Fremen warrior portrayed by Zendaya, is reduced to someone bathed by the setting sun, and who occasionally shows up in Paul’s visions. Later, she makes a short, clichéd “tough-girl” appearance, before taking part in one of the most banal endings in the history of sci-fi.
Overall, the adrenaline-filled scenes teamed with Hans Zimmer’s omnipresent, bombastic score make the 155-minute viewing time a rather tiring experience. Unfortunately, the visually astonishing cinematography by Greig Fraser, the star-studded cast and the industrial quantities of special effects don’t save the day.
Dune fails to deliver the ecological, anti-colonialist spirit of the original novel, nor does it provide an urgent, fresh take that would justify retelling its epic vicissitudes. In short: too much action, not nearly enough heart. More