Humans

By Laura Spinney

Rocio Montoya
YOU have probably seen the annual rankings of the world’s cities by “liveability” or “quality of life”. It is intriguing to discover which come out top – and which bottom. After all, most of us have skin in this game: more than half of people around the world live in urban environments, and that number is growing. But you may also have wondered what “quality of life” really means. Which qualities? Whose life?
These same questions occupy Anu Ramaswami. Trained initially as a chemical engineer, she is now a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the M. S. Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton University, New Jersey. Her research focuses on what we can do to improve the urban environment, and she works closely with US cities as well as with the United Nations and national governments. It is fiendishly difficult to compare cities, she says – or even, for that matter, to define them.
Ramaswami wants to persuade people that cities aren’t concrete jungles that stop abruptly at their official limits, but complex, dynamic systems that extend much further and, like living organisms, have their own metabolism. Only by thinking of them in this way can we start to make them more liveable, she says.
Laura Spinney: Urbanisation is accelerating as global population grows. Is that a good thing?
Anu Ramaswami: Many people point to cities as villains. I prefer a more nuanced narrative that says cities offer an opportunity for innovation. This typically generates more wealth and, to some extent, more well-being, but also inequality, which has its own implications for well-being. More than 90 … More

By Annalee Newitz

Helen Sessions/Alamy
IN LATE May, Amazon bought 97-year-old movie studio MGM for $8.45 billion. Although that is a huge amount of money, there is something almost routine about the transaction at this point. MGM owns some of the rights to James Bond and a few other popular franchises, so there is talk about how big tech is about to ruin more nice things.
Obviously, Amazon is trying to lure more customers to MGM’s catalogue, and sure, it is possible that Amazon will ruin our love for Agent 007 with a romcom about wacky high jinks when James Bond marries a surveillance drone. … More

By Simon Ings

FOR most of us, buildings are functional. We live, work and store things in them. They are as much a part of us as the nest is a part of a community of termites.
Were this all there was to say about buildings, architectural historian Barnabas Calder might have found his book easier to write. He is asking “how humanity’s access to energy has shaped the world’s buildings through history”.
Had his account remained so straightforward, we might have ended up with an eye-opening mathematical description of the increased energy available (derived from wood, charcoal and straw, then from coal and then from oil) and how it transformed and now, through global warming, threatens our civilisation.
But, of course, buildings are also aspirational acts of creative expression. However debased it seems, the most ordinary structure is the product of an artist of sorts, and to get built at all, it must be bankrolled by people who are (relatively) wealthy and powerful.
This was as true of Uruk – perhaps the first city, founded in the area now called Iraq around 3200 BC – as it is in Shenzhen, the Chinese former fishing hamlet that is now a city of nearly 13 million people.
While the economics of the built environment are crucial, they don’t make sense without sociology and even psychology. This is particularly the case when it comes to what Calder calls “the mutual stirring, the hysteria between architect and client” that gave us St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, the world’s biggest building by floor area.
Calder knows this: “What different societies chose to do with [their] energy surplus has produced endless variation and brilliance.” So if his account seems to wander, this is why: architecture isn’t a wholly economic activity, and certainly not a narrowly rational one.
At the end of an insightful, often impassioned journey through the history of buildings, Calder does his best to explain how architecture can address the climate emergency. But his advice and encouragement vanishes under the enormity of the crisis. The construction and running of buildings account for 39 per cent of human greenhouse gas emissions. Concrete is the most used material on Earth after water. And while there is plenty of sustainability talk in construction sectors, Calder finds precious little sign of real change. We demolish too often, build too often and use unsustainable materials.
There may be solutions, but we won’t find many clues in the archaeological record. As Calder points out, “entire traditions of impressive tent-like architecture are known mainly from pictures rather than physical remnants”. The remains of civilisation before the days of fossil fuel only offer a partial guide to future architecture. Perhaps we should look to existing temporary structures – even to some novel ones used in refugee camps.
Rather paradoxically, Calder’s love poem to buildings left me thinking about the Mongols, for whom a walled city was a symbol of bondage and barbarism. They would have no more settled in a fixed house than become enslaved. And their empire, which covered 23 million square kilometres, demolished more architecture than it raised.

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By Robyn Chowdhury

A brain implant promises to boost multitasking in We Are Satellitesmetamorworks/Getty Images
We Are Satellites
Sarah Pinsker
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CAN we really trust a company seeking to put wires in our brains? And is it worth suspending any mistrust for the sake of our children’s futures? These are the deep, real-life questions posed by award-winning author Sarah Pinsker in her second sci-fi novel, We Are Satellites.
The story follows a family of four as they become increasingly entangled in the debate on a brain-boosting implant called the Pilot. Pinsker skilfully takes us on a journey that is about far more than mere technology as the Pilot becomes part of everyday life, from schools to government offices.
The novel excels at integrating questions about the medical technology industry with genuine representations of queer love and family life. Every twist and turn of the novel has family at its heart. The differing opinions of the parents, mothers Val and Julie, on the Pilot sets up a tense family dynamic, fraught with arguments and difficult conversations.
Unlike Elon Musk’s Neuralink or other brain stimulation devices that are designed to help people with disabilities, the Pilot has one core function: multitasking. It also claims to enhance the attention span of its users. Val and Julie have to consider whether they want their children Sophie and David to opt for this little-understood procedure.
The first part of the novel revolves around the anxieties of deciding whether or not you want your child to have an invasive procedure for the sake of keeping up with classmates. It touches on the theme of accessibility as Sophie has epilepsy, leaving her unable to have a Pilot implanted. The discussion of discrimination throughout the novel does well to address concerns that technology which could give some people an advantage might leave others behind.
The pace of the novel lends itself to character-building, with the first two parts spending time helping us understand each character’s motivations. Pinsker gives us a glimpse inside the minds of the characters, showing us how little they communicate their innermost thoughts and how this affects their family.
The technology in We Are Satellites is similar to an existing brain implant meant to enhance memory. Instead of enhancing memory, the Pilot works by stimulating the right temporoparietal junction in the brain, which is responsible for reorienting attention.
The focus of the novel isn’t how the technology works, however, but the implications it has for society. The Pilot’s popularity leaves those who don’t have it – because they can’t afford it, they object to having wires in their brain or they have a disability – at a disadvantage. No Pilot means less by way of job opportunities.
“We can never really be sure about the full ramifications of having wires and electrodes in the brain”
Far from being a doomy, dystopian novel about terrifying technology, We Are Satellites takes a balanced look at the pros and cons while maintaining healthy scepticism towards the medical technology sector. Through David, we are shown we can never really be sure about the ramifications of having wires and electrodes stuck in the brain – and how hard it can be to communicate exactly what is going on in your own head.
Sophie’s involvement in the anti-Pilot movement becomes another source of turmoil for the family as she embarks on a mission to discover the truth about the technology – no matter what the cost.
The story increases in pace during its third part, with several incredibly captivating chapters packed with action and tension as we begin to understand Sophie’s mistrust of the Pilot.
We Are Satellites is a story about technology with family at its heart. It’s not just about whether we trust scientists to stick things in our brain, or even what happens when technology goes wrong. It’s about what brain-enhancing could do for us, who it would exclude and what happens when a family becomes tangled up within the debate.

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By Abigail Beall

John Chumack/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
IN THE northern hemisphere, summer nights are marked by an asterism (a pattern of stars that isn’t an official constellation) called the summer triangle. Despite the name, the three stars that make it up aren’t just visible in this season: many stargazers in the southern hemisphere also get a glimpse of them in their winter months too.
The summer triangle is a vivid asterism, made up of the brightest stars from the constellations Aquila, Lyra and Cygnus. Altair, a star from Aquila, is the twelfth brightest in the night sky. Lyra’s Vega is only 25 light years away from us, … More

Ilka & Franz/Getty Images
ALMOST every month, a new piece of research emerges linking diets high in processed “junk” foods with obesity and poor health. It isn’t yet clear if the relationship is causal, and if so, what the mechanisms behind it may be. But insights are starting to emerge from trials that compare diets that are based on either ultra-processed foods or wholefoods, yet are carefully matched for nutrients in all other ways.
The links need investigating as a matter of urgency. If these processed foods really do carry intrinsic health risks, it could mean that official advice about healthy eating has been … More

By Clare Wilson

Fun, cheap and tasty, but perhaps not the healthiest optionSharon Pruitt/EyeEm/Getty Images
CUT down on fatty food. No, sugar. Aim for a Mediterranean diet. And remember to eat more plants…
The variability of healthy eating advice has become a cliché in itself. Yet despite all the contradictions, there is one thing that many agree on: we should avoid junk food. Until recently though, no one could give you a decent reason why. Gastronomic snobbery aside, science lacked an agreed definition of what junk food actually is, and that has made it difficult to know whether we should be avoiding it and, if so, why.
It has long been assumed that processed junk foods are bad because they tend to contain too much fat, salt and sugar. Recent studies, though, suggest that other mechanisms could be at work to make these foods harmful to our health. Getting to grips with what these are could help us not only make healthier choices, but also persuade the food industry to come up with healthier ways of giving us what we like to eat.
One thing’s for sure: we certainly do like it. Factory-made food makes up between 50 and 60 per cent of the average person’s calorie intake in the UK, and around 60 per cent in the US. But while junk food has a bad name among many food lovers, dietary health research and the public health advice that stems from it have so far concentrated either on individual food groups, like meat and dairy products, or the relative amounts of the three macronutrients … More

By Karina Shah

Consumers shop differently when they buy from online supermarketsMaskot/Getty Images
Consumers in the US spend more money when grocery shopping online, but spend less on sweets and desserts than when they shop in store.
In recent years, online grocery shopping has grown massively. Since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, the amount that consumers spend through online shopping has more than doubled in the US.
Laura Zatz at Harvard University and her colleagues have investigated how people’s habits change when they are spending in store versus shopping online. They recruited 137 participants from two supermarkets of the same chain in the US state of Maine. Each participant was the key shopper for their household, and they also had experience shopping both online and in-store.Advertisement
The researchers studied each participant for a total of 44 non-consecutive weeks and tracked what items they purchased between 2015 to 2017. They collected data from a total of 5573 transactions, 1062 of which were made online and 4511 in store.
“We found differences in both the quantity of foods that people purchased and the types of foods that people purchase when they’re shopping online versus in store,” says Zatz.
People spent more money on sweets and desserts when shopping in store, spending on average $2.50 more per transaction. However, there was no difference in spending on sugary drinks or salty snacks, such as crisps.

“They purchase more items [when shopping online], both in terms of overall number of items but also a greater variety of unique items,” says Zatz. On average, participants spend 44 per cent more per transaction when shopping online than in store.
It seems that in-store shopping entices shoppers to unhealthier food choices. “When you are in store, you are exposed to all sorts of stimuli that could encourage you to buy unhealthy impulse-sensitive food groups when you might not have otherwise planned to,” says Zatz. Unhealthy food choices are often displayed in supermarkets at the end of aisles and at checkouts to encourage unplanned purchases.
The findings could help to inform us about how to encourage healthier food purchasing choices, especially as sophisticated marketing is coming online, says Zatz.
Charles Spence at the University of Oxford is surprised there was no difference in the purchases of “olfactorily-tempting foods”, such as freshly baked bread and coffee. “[They did not] suffer in the online environment, given the absence of smell,” says Spence.
Journal reference: Journal of Nutrition Education and Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.jneb.2021.03.001

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