Humans

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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By Michael Marshall

A shepherd and a herd of goats and rams near Ardabil, IranShutterstock/MAVRITSINA IRINA
Goats were domesticated as early as 10,000 years ago in the area around the Zagros mountains in what is now western Iran. The finding suggests goats were one of the first animals to be domesticated, with only dogs unambiguously preceding them.
“By 10,000 years ago, we have this lining up of archaeological and genetic data that seems to suggest that we have the first population of managed goats,” says Kevin Daly at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.
Goats are known to have been domesticated in western Asia or eastern Europe. Archaeological evidence suggested this was underway by 8000 BC. At some sites, male goats were being selectively killed at a young age, suggesting they were being kept in pens rather than hunted in the wild. At Aşıklı Höyük in what is now Turkey, goat urine left chemical traces in the soil where the animals were kept.Advertisement
Daly and his colleagues examined goat fossils preserved from two sites in the Zagros mountains: Ganj Dareh and Tepe Abdul Hosein, which have been excavated on and off for decades. They were inhabited between about 8200 and 7600 BC.

The researchers obtained DNA from preserved goat parts from both sites: 14 nuclear genomes, as well as 32 mitochondrial genomes that were only inherited from the animals’ mothers.
Daly and his team found that the goats formed two distinct groups – one was closely related to modern domestic goats, the other to modern wild goats. This means domestication had proceeded beyond the goats simply being kept. “The process of genetic domestication had already begun,” says Daly. Meanwhile, the wild-type goats were probably hunted.
“This is the earliest genetic evidence of goat domestication,” says Daly. “It’s looking more and more like the domestication of goats was probably primarily in or near the Zagros region.”
Dogs were domesticated thousands of years earlier, at least 14,000 years ago. Sheep were domesticated at around the same time as goats, but slightly further west, perhaps in what is now Turkey. Cattle and pigs were domesticated later.
Daly suggests that sheep and goats preceded cattle and pigs because they are smaller and thus easier to restrain. “Cattle are obviously much larger and more dangerous,” he says, as are wild boar.
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2100901118
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By Karina Shah

Some students struggle with morning lecturesBarry Lewis/Alamy
University students tend to get lower grades if their classes and lectures begin early in the morning.
Attending classes and sleeping well are both associated with increased engagement and performance at university – but a course with lectures scheduled early in the morning might compromise students’ ability to do both.
To investigate, Joshua Gooley at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore and his colleagues analysed the grades of 27,281 undergraduates enrolled at the National University of Singapore. The students were attending classes between 2018 and 2020, … More

Josie Ford
A high bar
Breaking news in the world of post. Raffi Katz writes perplexed at the UK Royal Mail’s announcement that it will be withdrawing all parcel products that “do not carry a 2D barcoded label”. Further mystifying those who assumed that labels were by their nature 2D, it goes on to say that this includes not only unbarcoded parcels, but also “1D barcoded product variants… (that use the multi-peel flash labels)”.
We can imagine the 1D labels are a bit fiddly to work with, so it is probably not before time. But of course, it is barcodes with bars that are, to a first approximation, 1D that are to be done away with. A 2D barcode is a blobby affair akin to a QR code that can be read in two directions. A barcode without bars, then. That this is now called a 2D barcode strikes Feedback as a prime example of the human tendency, noted by researchers recently, of finding fixes by adding complexity, rather than taking it away (17 April, p 19).
More examples of such linguistic redundancy through technological progress gratefully received. Meanwhile, Raffi notes that the Royal Mail doesn’t mention any timescale for the change, this presumably being a dimension or three more than they are used to working in.Advertisement
Head in the clouds
“They said money doesn’t grow on trees. We’re here to tell you, THEY were wrong.” So begins an email sent to Jeff Hecht, introducing what its subject line claims to be the “First EVER game to grow digital weed NFTs + earn crypto — influencer and celeb backed”.
“What if, by playing a game akin to Farmville and Roblox, users could use the power of Cannabis to build virtual farms, grow weed and make money?”, it asks. What if, indeed. Having confronted the uniquely self-important confluence of the cryptocurrency and art worlds a few weeks ago (1 May), we now find ourselves forced to consider this new fusion, “created by industry veterans in the Blockchain and Cannabis space, inspired by the future where users can all live, play, and make a living in the metaverse”.
At least the question of what they are smoking answers itself. But does virtual weed have the same effect? Possibly in the metaverse. All in all, our understanding of what this amounts to is a little hazy. But we are unpersuaded that it equates to a proof that THEY were wrong about the money and trees thing. Ah well, at least when the bubble bursts, it will help to be high.
Unforeseen circs
In evidence that reality sometimes doesn’t shy away from validating the best — that is, oldest — jokes, word comes from New South Wales that, having been postponed last year due to the south coast fires, Braidwood’s Good Earth Psychic Fair has been cancelled this year, apparently due to lack of interest. Thanks to Ken McLeod for that one.
A great fall
Dear readers, you rightly demand that every element of New Scientist’s output should be subject to the highest standards of accuracy and rigour. So we are grateful — truly grateful — to the many of you who wrote in querying our cartoonist Tom Gauld’s formula for the difficulty of putting Humpty Dumpty together again (22 May, p 55).
This was D = G/(x–y), where G is the greatness of the fall, x the number of king’s men and ythe number of king’s horses. The literary purists among you pointed out that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men who couldn’t put Humpty together again were involved in the rescue effort, so surely the denominator should be (x+y). Others accepted the equation’s implication that the presence of horses would probably hinder the rescue effort, but critiqued that the difficulty tends to infinity in the likely condition x = y, where each of the king’s men has exactly one horse.
Confused, perplexed and surrounded by pieces of paper covered in scribbled-out graphs and equations, we think this might be just the point, given that Humpty Dumpty remained, in the end, scrambled. But we are tempted to give credence to the behavioural science approach championed by Steve Powell and Helen Percy. Too many cooks spoil the broth, after all: perhaps “the general shape of this formula should be for the difficulty to decrease rapidly as the number of men increases from one to some optimum number and thereafter to increase slowly as more men are involved”.
We recall C. Northcote Parkinson’s contention — he of Parkinson’s law fame, that work expands to fill the time available for its completion — that more than about 20 people working on a single task would never agree or achieve anything, and subsequent academic work that backs this up. How Tom’s equation might adequately reflect that is an exercise left for the reader. To quote another pair of great humourists, do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.
Friendly wave
A special shout-out to Joseph Thomas at the International and Alumni Relations Office at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras for writing in on that last topic. This is purely because Joseph says he has been angling for a mention ever since starting to read New Scientist as a junior researcher in 1982. A request we can’t Chennai. Ahem.
Got a story for Feedback?Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES Consideration of items sent in the post will be delayed More

By Vijaysree Venkatraman

‘Drinking together may help make us more creativeAlbum/Alamy
Drunk: How we sipped, danced, and stumbled our way to civilization
Edward Slingerland
Little, Brown SparkAdvertisement

SOME years ago, when author Edward Slingerland gave a talk at a Google campus, his hosts ushered him into an impressive room. This is where coders pop in for liquid inspiration when they run into a creative wall, they told him. It wasn’t a place to get drunk alone.
In his engrossing book, Drunk, Slingerland writes that such spaces, which allow for both face-to-face communication and easy access to alcohol, can act as incubators for collective creativity. The boost that alcohol provides to individual creativity, he emphasises, is enhanced when people get drunk in groups.
For millennia, people have used alcohol and other mind-altering substances to get high. Some archaeologists even suggest that the first farmers were driven by a desire for beer, not bread.
If intoxicants were merely hijacking pleasure centres in the brain by triggering the release of “reward” chemicals, or if they were once adaptive but are vices now, then evolution would have put the kibosh on our taste for these chemicals, says the author. So, what is going on?
Slingerland, a philosopher at the University of British Columbia in Canada, has a novel thesis, arguing that by causing humans “to become, at least temporarily, more creative, cultural, and communal… intoxicants provided the spark that allowed us to form truly large-scale groups”. In short, without them, civilisation might not have been possible.
This may seem an audacious claim, but Slingerland draws on history, anthropology, cognitive science, social psychology, genetics and literature, including alcohol-fuelled classical poetry, for evidence. He is an entertaining writer, synthesising a wide array of studies to make a convincing case.
Without a science-based understanding of intoxicants, we cannot decide what role they can and should play, he stresses. In small doses, alcohol can make us happy and sociable. But still, consuming any amount of intoxicant can seem stupid, he concedes, because the chemical targets the prefrontal cortex. This late-maturing brain region is the seat of abstract reasoning, which also governs our behaviour and ability to remain on task. Research suggests small children are very creative because their prefrontal cortex is barely developed.
“A childlike state of mind in an adult is key to cultural innovation – intoxicants allow us to access that state”
A childlike state of mind in an adult is key to cultural innovation, argues the author. Intoxicants provide an efficient route to that state by temporarily taking the prefrontal cortex offline, he says.
Slingerland cites research using the US prohibition movement to test the idea that the communal consumption of alcohol can drive innovation. Prohibition has a long history, with local bans dating to the early 1800s. Using state-level imposition of alcohol prohibition as a starting point, researchers compared counties that had been “dry” for a long time to counties that had been “wet,” but which were suddenly forced to close their communal drinking venues. State-wide bans saw a 15 per cent drop in the number of new patents annually in previously wet counties compared with counties with existing bans.
The last chapter looks at alternatives to alcohol, which don’t produce hangovers, liver damage or risk of addiction. In some centres of innovation, he finds microdoses of purified psychedelics becoming popular.
After exploring the stress-busting, trust-building, creativity-boosting, pleasure-inducing aspects of alcohol, Slingerland dwells on its darker side. From drink-driving to violence, he finds there are many kinks to be ironed out before we can use alcohol as a force for good. That, I imagine, will take some doing. This heady book is, ultimately, an ode to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, and is best savoured as a fresh take on a contentious topic.
Vijaysree Venkatraman is a science journalist based in Boston

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