Humans

By Krista Charles

Charred remains of millet, a cereal grain, found in the Eastern AlpsHeiss et al, 2021, PLOS ONE
People working on mining sites in the Eastern Alps during the Bronze Age had cooked, bread-based meals delivered to them during the day.
Andreas Heiss at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and his colleagues studied cooked food remains, including refined cereals and finely ground grains, obtained from Prigglitz-Gasteil in the Eastern Alps, a copper mine that was active between 1100 and 900 BC, during the Late Bronze Age.

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These types of cereal-based food require preparation to make them edible, including separating grains from husks and then cooking them, but the team found no signs of this kind of work being done at the mine. There was also no evidence of harvesting nearby, suggesting the food must have come from elsewhere.

“All the early stages from processing were entirely missing and this is usually a good indicator for a consumer habit that people did not produce themselves, but they received stuff that was already pre-processed,” says Heiss.
Since wet ingredients like milk weren’t preserved, the researchers can’t say exactly which dishes the miners were being served, but they were likely to be bread based. Previous research has shown that these miners had pork delivered to them, but the new findings suggest that plant-based foods were a major part of their diet too.
Lara González Carretero at the Museum of London Archaeology says this isn’t surprising. “It would be very time-consuming and there would be clear logistical issues for them to be able to cook their own meals in such a work setting.”
Journal reference: PLOS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248287
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The Neanderthals, Denisovans and many others once shared Earth with us. What happened – and where are they now? Archaeologist Tom Higham has written a great insider account

Humans

24 March 2021

By Michael Marshall

Archaeologist Tom Higham, with a skull from a modern humanMark Hardy
The World Before Us
Tom Higham

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Viking
ASK any well-informed human living up to 40,000 years or so ago if they were the only intelligent being around, and they would have answered, “No”. That is because at that (geologically) recent time, our ancestors would still have been sharing Earth with several other human groups. In a very real sense, we were not alone.
Today we are. The Neanderthals who roamed Europe and western Asia are long gone. So are the Denisovans of east Asia, the “hobbits” of Flores Island in Indonesia and many more. Who were they? What were they like? What happened to them?
Archaeologist Tom Higham at the University of Oxford tackles these questions in his first book for a popular audience, The World Before Us: How science is revealing a new story of our human origins. It is a slightly misleading main title because Higham barely discusses the world before Homo sapiens emerged about 300,000 years ago: you won’t find Lucy or any other ape-like australopithecines. But he does deliver on the subtitle, with a fascinating insight into groups belonging to the same Homo genus as us that lived alongside us for much of their existence.
Higham has been involved in many of the biggest discoveries in human evolution in recent decades. A specialist in dating methods, he helped trace the Neanderthal extinction, studied the mysterious Denisovans, who are mostly known from DNA extracted from bone fragments, and helped push back the date H. sapiens arrived in the Americas.
“When it comes to what happened to groups like the Neanderthals, Higham wisely embraces nuance”
The book gets off to a shaky start, as the opening chapters are overstuffed with unnecessary detail that isn’t immediately explained. For example, Higham repeatedly mentions nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, but doesn’t explain them until chapter 5 – although at one point there is an apologetic footnote directing readers to that part.
However, once past these bumps the book settles into a lively groove. Higham devotes whole chapters, sometimes multiple chapters, to each extinct hominin group. He packs in startling discoveries, impressive insights and the occasional debunking of a foolish idea.
Higham’s personal involvement means he has lots of good stories. He vividly describes Denisova cave in Siberia, Russia – where the first traces of Denisovans were found – along with its adjacent field camp.
There are also thumbnail portraits of the scientists involved. A highlight is Higham’s account of the discovery of Denny, a girl who lived in or around Denisova cave, with a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. One of Higham’s students, Samantha Brown (now at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Germany), spent weeks testing bone fragments before identifying one that belonged to a hominin.
Higham reproduces the flurry of excited, expletive-ridden texts he sent after being told the news. The reader gets a real sense of what it is like to “do” science as Higham emphasises Brown’s boring, reward-free slog before she finally struck pay dirt.
When it comes to the perennial question of what happened to groups like the Neanderthals, Higham wisely embraces nuance and complexity. It is unlikely there is a single explanation for the extinction of such a group as widespread and adaptable as the Neanderthals – and conservation biologists tend to find that species experience a multitude of threats.
For groups like the Denisovans, of whom we have barely any remains, he refuses to commit himself at all. He knows it is too early to make a big claim about what happened when we don’t even know the extent of their range or what they looked like.
In any case, many of them haven’t entirely gone. Thanks to interbreeding, the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans lives on. In our genes, at least, we still share the world with them.

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Beyond the headline breakthroughs, artificial intelligence is a global industrial complex. Having explored its political and social implications, Kate Crawford at Microsoft Research is now focusing on the infrastructure underpinning AI

Technology

24 March 2021

By Timothy Revell

Rocio Montoya
ARTIFICIAL intelligence is everywhere these days, from the Alexa virtual assistant in your kitchen to the algorithms that decide on your suitability for a job or a mortgage. But what exactly is it? The definition matters because to a great extent it dictates how we think about AI’s impact.
If AI is something that outperforms humans by definition, it seems logical to trust it to identify people who should be stopped and searched via facial recognition, say, or to make judgements on which offenders should get probation. If it is solely about algorithms, it becomes a lot easier to sweep aside issues of bias and injustice as mere technical issues.
Kate Crawford takes a broader view. Co-founder of the AI Now Institute at New York University and a researcher at Microsoft Research and the école Normale Supérieure in Paris, she has spent the best part of two decades investigating the political and social implications of AI. In her new book, Atlas of AI, she also looks at the global infrastructure that underpins the rise of this technology.
She argues that AI, far from being something abstract and objective, is both material and intrinsically linked to power structures. The way it is made involves extracting resources from people and the planet, and the way it is used reflects the beliefs and biases of those who wield it. Only when we come to terms with this, says Crawford, will we be able to chart a just and sustainable future with AI.
Timothy Revell: What is AI?
Kate Crawford: I think of it in three ways. Technically speaking, it is … More

Read
The Best of World SF: Volume 1 contains 26 sci-fi stories, some celebrated and others new, representing 21 countries and five continents. Edited by writer Lavie Tidhar, the collection is a celebration of a truly global genre.

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Overloaded is science writer Ginny Smith’s exploration of how our lives are influenced by neurotransmitters, the brain chemicals behind everything, from what we remember and who we love to basic drives such as hunger, fear and sleep.
Pixabay
Watch
Our Future Planet: Global greenhouse gas removal, the latest in the climate talk series from the UK-based Science Museum Group sees scientists and engineers discuss carbon capture. Watch online at 7.30 pm BST on 31 March.

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By Michael Marshall

Water being pumped out of the gate chamber housing an ancient well in EgyptM. Woźniak
Ancient Egyptians abandoned one of their coastal cities more than 2000 years ago, when the supply of fresh water dried up. The cause may have been a major volcanic eruption, possibly on the other side of the world, that triggered a severe drought.
Archaeologists have been excavating the city of Berenike on Egypt’s Red Sea coast on and off since 1994. Berenike was founded between 275 and 260 BC, but was temporarily abandoned sometime between 220 and 200 BC, before being repopulated for many centuries. After Egypt was annexed by the Roman Empire in 30 BC, Berenike became the empire’s southernmost port.

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Berenike was “a kind of combination of city and military base”, says Marek Woźniak at the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures in Warsaw, Poland.
Since 2014, Woźniak has been excavating the remains of a gate and tower in the fortress wall. With James Harrell at the University of Toledo in Ohio, he has now described a well sunk into the floor of the building. The well still accumulates water today. “It tastes pretty good, although actually a bit salty,” says Woźniak.

However, the well dried up between 220 and 200 BC, and sand was blown into it by the wind. This sand is preserved in the well, and contains two bronze coins dating from the decades before 199 BC. Elsewhere in the fortress, there are few artefacts from that time, suggesting Berenike was abandoned.
There must have been a drought lasting several years to cause the well to dry up, says Woźniak. He says the most likely cause is a volcanic eruption. In line with this, a 2017 study led by Jennifer Marlon at Yale University found that, in 209 BC, a volcanic eruption released lots of sulphate aerosols into Earth’s atmosphere. This caused the summer rains over the Nile headwaters to fail. The lack of rain could explain the well drying out, which perhaps helped encourage inhabitants to abandon the city.
It is unclear which volcano would have been responsible. Woźniak and Harrell suggest four possibilities: Popocatéptl in Mexico, Pelée on the island of Martinique in the Lesser Antilles, Tsurumi or Hakusan, both of which are in Japan.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2021.16 More

The compelling story of how Elon Musk’s relentless quest to get humans to Mars helped SpaceX succeed against the odds makes great reading in Eric Berger’s book, Liftoff

Space

17 March 2021

By Paul Marks

Crew Dragon in spacedcphoto/Alamy
Liftoff: Elon Musk and the desperate early days that launched SpaceX
Eric Berger

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William Collins
IN THE autumn of 2008, a Falcon 1 rocket built by a maverick start-up called SpaceX lifted off from Kwajalein Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean and made it all the way to Earth orbit. After three earlier attempts had failed, it meant Elon Musk‘s 6-year-old firm suddenly moved from being a mere wannabe to a space-flight player to be reckoned with.
But it had been a close run thing. In Lift Off, Eric Berger’s compelling history of SpaceX’s early days, we discover what few knew at the time: if that fourth flight of the Falcon 1 had also failed, the company could easily have gone bust.
It was vital that the rocket reached orbit because it was powered by SpaceX’s home-grown, ultra-efficient kerosene/oxygen Merlin rocket motor. Nine of these would be needed for the much larger rocket that cash-rich clients like NASA wanted to use to send cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) – and, later, crewed missions. If Falcon 1 hadn’t shown that the motor could power a rocket to orbit, there might not have been a Falcon 9, the rocket that has become the backbone of SpaceX’s business.
Berger chronicles the amazing human and technological struggles that led to the success of the launch. To be convincing, he needed unprecedented access to Musk and, perhaps more crucially, to the key propulsion, avionics, structural and launch engineers behind Falcon 1.
After tracking them all down, Berger captured their entertaining warts-and-all stories of potentially avoidable foul-ups, the details of which make this book an essential, unofficial reference text for what to do (and not do) as space flight goes commercial.
What drives SpaceX, Berger writes, is Musk’s relentless quest to get humans to Mars as soon as possible. That means two things: a laser-like focus on hiring the smartest engineers, and adopting ultra-fast engineering techniques.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket explodingSpaceX/UPI/Shutterstock
Musk comes across as a fiercely demanding boss, and the lengths he goes to hand-pick talent are revealing. On one occasion, he called Google co-founder Larry Page to ask if a senior Google staffer could work from a Los Angeles office instead of a Silicon Valley one so that the staffer’s spouse could work for SpaceX. Page agreed. When an academic found that five of his 10 students had gone to work at SpaceX, Musk is said to have got in touch – not to explain, but to find out where the other five went.
Engineering rockets faster, however, means eschewing traditional aerospace processes in which design engineers can spend careers “creating stacks of paperwork without ever touching hardware”, says Berger. Musk’s approach involves testing systems early, designing out flaws so each version becomes more reliable.
“At the time of writing, three prototypes of the firm’s Starship Mars rocket have exploded spectacularly”
It also means not being afraid to fail – and fail SpaceX has. From running out of liquid oxygen on the launchpad – which boiled off, as it took too long to fix software-related shutdown bugs on the launchpad – to fuel lines leaking due to salt corrosion in the tropical air of Kwajalein, the company has experienced a litany of errors.
But SpaceX has gone on to shake up the industry by cutting the cost of launching satellites threefold, developing a staggering ability to land rocket stages that its competitors still ditch, as well as flying astronauts to the ISS from US soil on its Crew Dragon for the first time since the space shuttle retired.
The firm’s army of online fans seems to be getting used to its “go fast, break things and fix them” process. Attempts to land Falcon 9 rocket stages failed many times before success dawned. At the time of writing, three prototypes of the firm’s Starship moon and Mars rocket have exploded spectacularly. All of which makes it a particularly good time to publish Liftoff, the fascinating backstory of why SpaceX does it this way.

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Josie Ford
Concrete lunacy
Feedback was delighted to see the spirit of 1950s sci-fi alive and well in our news section last week with a story about building concrete towers that could stretch many tens of kilometres high on the moon.
We are far from disputing the conclusions of the team from Harvard University, that the relative lack of things such as gravity, wind, seismic motions and planning permission on the moon would allow such huge edifices. Still, we look forward to the lively debate a few decades after the towers’ erection on the merits of lunar brutalism as an architectural style. At least if the decision were eventually made to blow them up again, towers on the moon would presumably just float away.
We are slightly nonplussed by another aspect of the story, however. The main purpose of the towers would be to hang solar panels off to generate energy for a lunar base. But with a 17-kilometre-high tower requiring a million tonnes of concrete, we rather wonder where the energy comes from to make the concrete. A smaller tower?

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Appropriate units
We apologise to any readers left perplexed by our failure to express anything in that last snippet in multiples of Burj Khalifa[s]. After all, reader Gregg Mitchell points out, this is now the go-to unit for largeness in any number of areas: height, mass, volume, hubris.
He cites the example of the controversial Site C hydroelectric dam being constructed in his neck of the woods in British Columbia, Canada, reported by a local newspaper to have used 6 Burj Khalifas of concrete. Site C’s price tag – as Gregg points out, we can only imagine sardonically – has also doubled from 5BK to 10BK.
Rather more homely and human-scale, almost, is the Sky News headline “Iceberg size of Bedfordshire breaks off from Antarctica“. Ceri Brown writes in from Haverfordwest, Wales, presumably in a fit of pique, to ask how many Bedfordshires there are in a Wales. About 16.8, Ceri – do you need that in Burj Khalifas?
Spreading the seed
In considering blowing up concrete towers on the moon, we hadn’t quite considered the full range of uses they might have been put to.
A paper submitted to a virtual session of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Aerospace Conference, “Lunar Pits and Lava Tubes for a Modern Ark”, points out that life on Earth faces potential existential inconveniences, from asteroid impacts to nuclear war. Our response, it suggests, should be to construct a lunar repository of reproductive cells from humans and other species, from which we might reseed Earth after the balloon’s gone up.
Having now reached the relevant point in the presentation, we see that the proposal is to establish the lunar sperm bank not in a tower, but in a natural hollow space beneath the moon’s surface. So do carry on.
Don’t stop moving
“The perpetual motion machine returns!”, Don Simpson shouts joyously. He brings news of the TRIAD power cube, a game-changer in the world of generators whose “zero back-EMF technology allows for unimaginable efficiencies to be obtained”.
Feedback has a rule of thumb for imaginable power efficiencies: start at 100 per cent and then subtract some, because thermodynamics. At least the makers of the TRIAD power cube are upfront about not being 100 per cent sure how their device achieves “Efficiencies in excess of 400% >”, besides negating the law of magnetic induction.
Sadly, the device, a snip at just £5999.99 – keep the penny, thanks – is only available on pre-order pending full development. Don’t call them, they’ll call you.
Shoe boot other foot
An even more joyous throng forms in our inbox at the widely reported news last week that Terry Boot has replaced Peter Foot as finance director of UK retailer Shoe Zone. Other media having exhausted the various permutative puns the story afforded, we note quietly that Foot only joined the company in July 2020. This suggests that, while perhaps good for a bit of publicity, our old frenemy nominative determinism might have its limits as a commercial strategy.
We can only hope that Boot puts his best foot forward and avoids quickly getting the… now, stop it. Thanks to our friends on four continents who sent that one in. Definitely a case of don’t call us – oh, you have.
Mouths of babes
In the UK, Census Day fast approaches – or, should you be reading this after 21 March, has hurtled straight past. Roger Morgan from Presteigne, Wales, is impressed with the confidence that the UK Office for National Statistics shows in the educational attainment of the nation’s youth.
Its “What you need to know” guide sets out questions that those under the ages of 5, 3 and 1 need not answer. The under-3s, for example, are exempted from the question “How well do you speak English?” – or indeed Welsh – although they are, presumably, expected to at least understand it well enough to know they need not answer it. Particularly consequential is the instruction “those under one year old do not need to answer question 13”. Question 13 is “One year ago, what was your usual address?”.
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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

The wild scheme of Ross Ulbricht, a young physics grad who set up a massive online illegal drugs market, keeps us hooked to the bitter end in Silk Road, a fictionalised version of his story

Humans

17 March 2021

By Linda Marric

Nick Robinson as Ross Ulbricht, founder of the dark web marketplace Silk RoadVertigo Releasing
Silk Road
Tiller Russell

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Vertigo Releasing,
streaming from 22 March
IN OCTOBER 2013, Ross Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI and charged with money laundering, conspiracy to commit computer hacking and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. Two years earlier, Ulbricht had launched the Silk Road, the first modern dark web market, known for selling drugs that are illegal in the US.
Suddenly, users could order any illicit substance they wanted from dealers online and have it delivered, no questions asked, to their homes by the US Postal Service the very next day.
Ulbricht’s site operated as a Tor hidden service, making it easier for its users to browse it anonymously and conduct all their transactions using untraceable cryptocurrencies. Within a few months, Ross had amassed a huge following under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts (a reference to The Princess Bride movie) and a small fortune in bitcoin thanks to an article about the site, which appeared in the now defunct Gawker blog.
But what was the route that took a twentysomething, middle-class physics graduate from Texas to the FBI’s most-wanted list?
In Silk Road, the movie version of the story, writer-director Tiller Russell (whose catalogue includes Night Stalker: The hunt for a serial killer, a four-part exploration of the crimes of Richard Ramirez) maps out Ulbricht’s trajectory from law-abiding citizen to drug player in this flawed crime story. It is based on “Dead End On Silk Road: Internet crime kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s big fall”, a Rolling Stone article written about Ulbricht by David Kushner.
The film opens at a branch of the San Francisco Public Library in 2013, where Ulbricht (Nick Robinson) is being trailed by undercover federal agents hoping to catch him red-handed logging onto his site. Then it flashes back to a couple of years before that, to a Texas bar where gaudy libertarian show-off Ulbricht is attempting to smooth-talk his way out of an awkward political exchange with Julia (Alexandra Shipp).
Soon the two become inseparable, and when he jokingly suggests launching a website from which dealers can easily sell drugs, both Julia and Ulbricht’s best friend Max (Daniel David Stewart) are happy to go along with his wild scheme.
Although we are cheekily warned from the start that “this story is true. Except for what we made up or changed”, there are clearly some aspects of the tale that are simply there to pad out an otherwise stale and meandering screenplay. For example, a subplot featuring a brilliant turn from Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) as crooked cybercrime agent Rick Bowden often feels superfluous.
Robinson gives a suitably nervy and understated performance as the anti-hero you wish you could root for. It is this moral ambiguity that gives the film the edge it needed, but it is a shame that more isn’t made of this by Russell. Elsewhere, Paul Walter Hauser (I, Tonya and Richard Jewell) gives another scene-stealing turn as hapless Utah hacker Curtis Clark Green, Ulbricht’s employee.
Overall, Silk Road often seems unsure where its sympathies lie, and this is its main problem. Having said that, there is just enough here to keep those who are unfamiliar with the story hooked till the bitter end. Just don’t go expecting anything as good or full of cracking dialogue as David Fincher’s The Social Network or you will be sorely disappointed.

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