Humans

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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Invincible, available from 26 March on Amazon Prime Video, animates Robert Kirkman’s long-running comic about an ordinary teenager whose father just happens to be Omni-Man, the world’s most powerful superhero.

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Rob Dunn, co-author of the new book Delicious with Monica Sanchez, speaks about the deep history of flavour and the role it has played in human evolution. Online from the Royal Institution in London at 7 pm GMT on 23 March.

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A Thousand Brains: A new theory of intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, inventor and neuroscientist, explains how the brain builds not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know.

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Amazon Prime Video
Watch
Invincible, available from 26 March on Amazon Prime Video, animates Robert Kirkman’s long-running comic about an ordinary teenager whose father just happens to be Omni-Man, the world’s most powerful superhero.

Watch
Rob Dunn, co-author of the new book Delicious with Monica Sanchez, speaks about the deep history of flavour and the role it has played in human evolution. Online from the Royal Institution in London at 7 pm GMT on 23 March.

Read
A Thousand Brains: A new theory of intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, inventor and neuroscientist, explains how the brain builds not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know.

More on these topics: More

How old you feel matters for how long you will live. Here’s how you can reduce your psychological age

Health

17 March 2021

By Graham Lawton

People who feel younger than their years tend to live longerskynesher/Getty Images
“AGE is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
This nugget of wisdom, often attributed to Mark Twain, has been turned into many an inspirational internet meme over the years. As a 51-year-old who is starting to feel the gathering momentum of the inevitable slide, it strikes me as little more than a platitude that makes people feel better about getting old.
But according to a growing body of research, there is more to it than that. Subjective age – how old we feel – has a very real impact on health and longevity. People who feel younger than their years often actually are, in terms of how long they have left to live.
The question of what controls our subjective age, and whether we can change it, has always been tricky to address scientifically. Now, research is revealing some surprising answers. The good news is that many of the factors that help determine how old we feel are things that we can control to add years to our lives –and life to our years.
We have known for a while now that simply counting the number of years someone has been alive isn’t necessarily the most accurate way of gauging longevity. Biological “ageing clocks” measure various markers in the body to see how far along the physical ageing process we are (see “Old bones?“). But we also know that physical ageing is not the be-all and end-all. Gerontologists recognise that just as we can make generalisations about the ways that physical ageing affects our bodies – a … More

By Krista Charles

When you fall, your leg muscles activate differently to try to keep you balancedJustin Paget/Getty Images
Miss a step when walking down the stairs and your legs will attempt to recover your balance after the unexpected fall – but how? The key to remaining upright seems to be in the way our calf and foot muscles are activated.
“One of the things we know about human locomotion is our ability to stay on our feet, upright, is pretty remarkable, but we don’t understand a lot about how we achieve this,” says Taylor Dick at the University of Queensland in Australia.

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To find out more, she and her colleagues conducted an experiment that involved attempting to make people fall over. The researchers had 10 people jump in place on top of platforms that were sitting on a device measuring the forces exerted by each foot individually. They then removed the platforms without warning.
As participants tried to retain their balance, the researchers used electromyography and ultrasound sensors on their legs to track muscle activity and changes in muscle length.

They determined that experiencing an unexpected drop automatically increases the timing between when the muscles in our legs and feet first activate and when they reach their shortest length.
This in turn enables the foot muscles to absorb and dissipate energy more effectively, allowing us to recover from the drop.
The team also found that while opposing muscles normally contract in turn when walking, both groups of muscles contract at the same time during an unexpected drop.
In cases where you aren’t able to successfully recover and end up falling, Dick says it may be because a different strategy is used, one that relies on signals travelling from your leg muscles to your brain and then back to your leg muscles. This may take more time than it does to travel the distance to the new “lower” ground.
She hopes that this research can inform the design of lower limb assistive devices, such as prostheses and exoskeletons, that can help people navigate staircases and move over uneven terrain.
Homayoon Kazerooni at the University of California, Berkeley, says that the insights into the timing changes of human muscle activation could lead to better exoskeleton designs, including control algorithms that offer better stability over unpredictable terrain, or at least help with recovering from a fall.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2021.0201

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By Donna Lu

A large grave in Rennes probably contains soldiers from the French Royal armyColleter et al.
Remains buried in two mass graves in the same cemetery in France have been identified as medieval soldiers belonging to opposing armies.
Rozenn Colleter at the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research and her colleagues have identified the skeletons as belonging to soldiers who fought in the Siege of Rennes in 1491. The skeletons were found buried in a cemetery outside the Jacobin Convent in Rennes.
The researchers identified the skeletons by combining historical information with archaeological techniques, including genetic analysis. They found that … More

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
There are nerve endings in fingerprint ridges that help us feel things
Leonardo Carneiro de Almeida / Getty
Our fingertips have an extraordinarily high sensitivity to touch – and now it looks like that sensitivity might be largely confined to the ridges of our fingerprints.
“They really help us get very detailed information about what we touch,” says Ewa Jarocka at Umeå University in Sweden.

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Scientists have suspected that our circular, winding fingerprints might have evolved to improve our ability to grip objects by creating better friction, says Jarocka. But she says others have suggested they might contribute to our “very refined sense of touch”.
Because current models can’t explain the high levels of sensitivity people have shown in past scientific studies, Jarocka and her colleagues decided to investigate.
They asked six men and six women between the ages of 20 and 30 to lie comfortably in a dentist chair while their fingers were held in place. The researchers then ran a card covered in tiny, flat-tipped cones, each less than half a millimetre high, over their fingertips at different speeds and in different directions. Meanwhile, they recorded electrical activity of a single nerve cell using tungsten electrodes inserted into a main nerve in each participant’s upper arm.

The results allowed the researchers to map out exactly where on the fingertips the information that was sent to the nerve was collected. These sensitivity hotspots turned out to be very small, each only about 0.4 millimetres wide.
What’s more, these hotspots followed specific patterns on the fingertips – the same ones as the fingerprint ridges. Regardless of how the researchers moved the dotted card over a finger, its hotspot map stayed the same, suggesting the sensitivity zones were “anchored in the very stable structure” of the ridges themselves, says Jarocka.
“We have all those multiple hotspots, and each one responds to the details of 0.4 millimetres, which is the approximate width of the [fingerprint] ridge,” she says. “Then our brain receives all that information. This really offers an explanation to how it’s possible that we’re so dexterous and have such a high sensitivity in our fingertips.”

This doesn’t mean fingerprints might not have other functions as well, however – perhaps including improving grip, says Jarocka. But it does reveal the important role that the ridges play in touch.
“Now that we know that the single neuron can be so sensitive on such a [precise] scale, we can finally explain how people can be so detail-sensitive,” she says.
Journal reference: JNeurosci, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1716-20.2021 More

By Michael Marshall
The way ancient humans hunted may have influenced their evolution
Shutterstock / Gorodenkoff
Our ancestors’ diets changed dramatically over the course of the past 2.5 million years, and one research team thinks that profoundly affected our evolution.
According to a team including Miki Ben-Dor and Ran Barkai at Tel Aviv University in Israel, hominin diets were once so dominated by meat from massive animals that the hunters caused some of those species to go extinct. This, in turn, forced our ancestors to develop more sophisticated hunting techniques to bring down smaller, more elusive prey, leading to greater intelligence and the … More