Humans

By Clare Wilson

Duncan Mcewan/naturepl.com
AS MOST of the UK recovers from a frigid April and a soggy May, its gardens are starting to perk up. That means so are caterpillars, aphids such as greenflies, and other plant-feeding invertebrates generally seen as the gardener’s foes.
A common reaction to seeing prized plants covered with bugs is to reach for the pesticide spray. But we should temper that instinct, says Andrew Salisbury, principal entomologist at the UK Royal Horticultural Society. Many invertebrate species in the UK and elsewhere are in decline, and gardens can be a haven – the UK’s home gardens collectively add up … More

Behavioural scientists Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony explain why “noise” in professional judgements harms everything from criminal justice to medical treatments

Humans

16 June 2021

By Graham Lawton

Siegfried Layda/Getty Images
If you have ever jumped to the wrong conclusion, made a terrible mistake thanks to your inbuilt biases or been subtly nudged back to your senses, then you are (a) human and (b) already on personal terms with the work of Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. Thanks to their academic and popular writing, the world is now very familiar with what are collectively called “cognitive biases” – systematic errors in human thinking – and ways to correct them.
Sunstein co-wrote the highly influential book Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness with Richard Thaler, while Kahneman popularised the work that won him the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 with his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Sibony is the author of You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake: How biases distort decision-making and what you can do to fight them.
You may think that, in no small part thanks to their efforts, the swamp of human fallibility has been well and truly drained by now. But that would be yet another mistake. Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein say there is an even more important source of warped decision-making. The three have banded together in a behavioural science supergroup to draw attention to what they call “noise” – persistent inconsistencies in professional judgements that lead to bad outcomes in all walks of life.
Kahneman and Sibony spoke to New Scientist about the group’s new book Noise: A flaw in human judgment (Little, Brown Spark in the UK; William Collins in the US). Sunstein was due to join the conversation, but was called away at the last minute by his … More

By Gregory Wakeman

(L-R) Lucius Hoyos as Noah, Gina Rodriguez as Jill, Ariana Greenblatt as MatildaPeter H. Stranks/NETFLIX
In the dystopian sci-fi movie Awake, everyone on Earth suddenly loses the ability to sleep, plunging the world into hysteria.
As scientists race to find a cure, ex-soldier Jill Adams (Gina Rodriguez) discovers that her young daughter Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt) might just possess the means to save mankind.
 Awake’s compelling premise is enough to make the opening of the film enjoyable. Director Mark Raso slowly cranks up the tension – there are some unsettling set pieces, and the film doesn’t waste time trying to explain the phenomenon. Instead, the slow reveal of information does enough to keep you hooked.Advertisement
Unfortunately, though, Awake soon goes off the rails. Raso is constantly trying to create the same mindset of those who are unable to sleep in the viewers, but it just makes things increasingly confusing.
It also doesn’t help that, by only following Jill’s relationship with Matilda and her son Noah (Lucius Hoyos), Awake is too contained. We learn very little about what’s going on across the world, so when symptoms suddenly escalate and humanity descends into anarchy, it has very little impact.
But what would actually happen if you suddenly couldn’t sleep?

Alastair McLean at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, who specialises in sleep deprivation, says its biggest impact is on interpersonal interactions, as people quickly become quite irritable.
“In terms of performance, one of the most obvious things that happens are microsleeps,” says McLean, in which people fall asleep for up to 30 seconds and can’t remember what happened. “They can occur after 24 hours.”
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There is also cognitive slowing, which sees people taking longer to make decisions, and cognitive rigidity, in which individuals can only think about things in one fixed way. Loss of motivation, paranoia, memory and balance issues, mood changes and visual problems can also occur, while some people experience hallucinations and even speech difficulties.
In 1963, 17-year-old Randy Gardner set the record for the longest time a human had gone without sleep, staying awake for 11 days and 25 minutes. Finland’s Toimi Soini and the UK’s Maureen Weston and Tony Wright have allegedly beaten this time, but none of them were studied as closely as Gardner.
Studies of sleep deprivation on animals have also proven to be revealing. “In 1989, Allan Rechtschaffen and his Chicago group studied rats that were sleep deprived. After two to three weeks, they started to die,” says McLean. “You saw the same pattern in all of them. They began to eat more and more as the sleep loss went on. Despite that, they had a fall in body weight.”

A 2020 study by researchers at Harvard Medical School on sleep deprivation in fruit flies also provided the same outcome. The more they didn’t sleep, the greater the increase in a molecule in the gut known as reactive oxidative species.
“If they gave the fruit flies materials to offset the effects of this, they didn’t die,” says McLean. “We’ve been looking for the effects of sleep deprivation in the brain. It looks, though, that it’s the gut that may be critical when it comes to survival.”
Based on the trailer for Awake, McLean agrees that it looks accurate in its use of disorientation and even hallucinations, but says it appears to exaggerate the problems and even speed up the timeframe in which they occur.
By doing just, that Awake strains to repeat the success of thrillers like A Quiet Place and Bird Box. But not only does it lack the ingenuity, tension and star power of these films, it is too aimless, meandering and lacking in heart to come close.
Awake is now available on Netflix .

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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 Vijaysree Venkatraman

Hakeem Oluseyi, speaking at NASA’s Earth Day event in 2017NASA/Joel Kowsky
A Quantum Life: My unlikely journey from the street to the stars
Hakeem Oluseyi and Joshua Horwitz
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THEY called him “the professor” because, by the age of 10, he was already reading every book he could lay his hands on. In the sixth grade, he scored 162 on an IQ test at school. Still, by the time he was in his teens, the certified genius was dealing weed and carrying a gun for protection.
“If anyone had told me I’d grow up to be an actual professor at MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Cape Town, I wouldn’t have believed them,” writes astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi in his inspiring memoir A Quantum Life. The book follows his “unlikely journey from the street to the stars”.
Born James Edward Plummer Jr, Oluseyi was often uprooted as a child, and learned to survive in some of the toughest urban neighbourhoods across the US. He also lived in rural Mississippi, a state where older African American people still addressed white people, including children, as “ma’am” and “sir”.
“Albert Einstein and I would have been friends,” he recalls thinking when he read about the scientist. Einstein, too, was told to “stop staring into space”, and his family moved often. He also featured when Oluseyi taught himself to program at high school. He coded concepts of Einstein’s theory of special relativity into a game and won first place in physics in the Mississippi State Science Fair.
To fund college, he joined the navy. But after two years, he was discharged with atopic dermatitis, which barred him from serving on ships. An old friend encouraged him to enrol at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. The pair sold drugs there and dropped out, but Oluseyi re-enrolled.
This time, David Teal, a white, Harvard-educated professor in the historically Black college, took an interest in Oluseyi, urging him to attend a meeting of African American physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The experience felt like an “alien abduction”, writes Oluseyi, but it gave him a clear goal: to apply to graduate programmes.
“Every year,” he writes, “the Stanford physics department took in one student like me – a diversity admission who wasn’t at the same level of academic preparation as the rest of the class.” It would take a lot more than hard work alone to earn his PhD there, but he was up for the challenge (and later a change of name).
“It would take a lot more than hard work to earn his PhD, but Hakeem Oluseyi was up for the challenge”
Besides, his doctoral adviser was Arthur B. C. Walker. The African American astrophysicist, whose telescopes gave unprecedented views of the sun, had mentored students from under-represented groups in physics. Sally Ride, the first US woman in space, was his first doctoral student.
Walker told Oluseyi that some still believed that while Black scientists could build ingenious gadgets, they weren’t gifted enough to make insights in pure physics or in the analyses of data and observations. While Walker got credit for his novel technology to study the sun, doubters said he had few pure science publications. Oluseyi worked with his mentor to seal his legacy before Walker died in 2001.
Today, Oluseyi is one of a handful of Black astrophysicists, but he has been working to change that. In 2008, he received a grant from the Kellogg Foundation to set up a mentoring programme for Black astronomy students in South Africa. They were brilliant, but felt second-class at university, says Oluseyi. He shared his struggles as he taught the students advanced topics. They passed in the top 20 per cent of the class.
South Africa will eventually co-host the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the world’s most powerful radio telescope cluster. Four of Oluseyi’s students are in the front row of a SKA team photo. He wasn’t there, but says “believe me, I’m standing tall and proud… next to them”.
Vijaysree Venkatraman is a Boston-based science journalist

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The Art Of Data is explored by statistician David Spiegelhalter and data artist Stefanie Posavec at Cheltenham Science Festival, in a talk that will be live-streamed on YouTube on 13 June at 9.15pm BST.

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The Glitter in the Green catches the eye of naturalist Jon Dunn, who writes about his travels the length and breadth of the Americas in search of hummingbirds, from woodlands to deserts, mangrove swamps to sub-polar islands.Advertisement
The National Museum of Computing
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The Polish Cyclometer, an Enigma-cracking machine built by Polish mathematicians, is the subject of a virtual talk by Jerry McCarthy at the UK’s National Museum of Computing on 13 June at 5pm BST and 14 June at 11am BST. More