Humans

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

Seeing someone look at a mobile phone can encourage others to pick up theirs too Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images
When a person looks at their mobile phone, around half the people nearby will start checking their phones within 30 seconds.
Such a rapid, automatic response is probably due to people mimicking each other without realising it – what scientists call the “chameleon effect”. While such mimicry is thought to have evolved in human societies to help people bond with each other, mimicking mobile phone use might have the opposite effect, says Elisabetta Palagi at the University of Pisa, Italy.

Advertisement

“We have a need to follow the norms imposed on us by people around us, to [match] our actions with theirs in this automatic way,” she says. “But smartphones can increase social isolation through interference and disruption with real-life, ongoing activities.”
Worse, people without phones can’t even try to replicate the behaviour. “So these people can feel especially isolated.”
Palagi had already investigated the chameleon effect in humans – which can include facial expressions, hand movements, foot shaking, yawning and speech patterns. So when her student Veronica Maglieri noted how people – including herself – always seemed to pick up their phones when other people did, they decided to run an observational study.

The team watched 88 women and 96 men in 820 different situations in natural settings – parks, restaurants, public transportation, waiting rooms and dinner parties, for example – to see how many would look at their phones after someone else nearby did. These “trigger” individuals pushed buttons or swiped their screens for five seconds, either with or without looking at the lit-up screen.
The researchers found that 50 per cent of people looked at their phone within 30 seconds of the trigger touching and looking at his or her phone, but just 0.5 per cent of people did so when the trigger touched the phone without looking at it. “It’s paying attention to the phone that sets off the mimicry,” Palagi says.
The mimicking behaviour wasn’t just fast, but – at least anecdotally – it was also automatic and subconscious, adds Maglieri. “One woman who was sitting across from me in a waiting room saw me check my phone, and within seconds she took out her phone and called someone and said, ‘Hey, I just felt like calling you; I don’t know why,’” she says.
Response rates were the same across all groups, regardless of age, sex, or relationship to the trigger. The researchers themselves were usually the triggers, and the people they observed were strangers, acquaintances or friends and family in balanced groups. But none of the subjects knew their behaviour was being observed.
“Most people get infected by other people’s mobile phone behaviour, without even realising it,” says Palagi.
Journal reference: Journal of Ethology, DOI: 10.1007/s10164-021-00701-6

More on these topics: More

By Michael Marshall

Metal scraps from a late Bronze Age battlefield in northern GermanyVolker Minkus/Thomas Terberger
The first pan-European currency may have existed more than 2800 years ago in the Bronze Age. There were no coins yet and no central bank, but people across Europe used fragments of bronze – the majority of which were either a standard mass or a multiple of that.
“You can actually think of some monetary union in Europe without public institutions,” says Nicola Ialongo at the University of Göttingen in Germany.
Bronze is an alloy of copper and other metals, usually tin, that was used widely … More

By Clare Wilson

garfotos/Alamy
THE past year has made many people better appreciate the time they spend outside. But one kind of outdoor space has been on the decline in the UK for a few decades: front gardens.
A major factor in this downturn is the growing number of people who pave over their front gardens to create parking spaces, as well as new homes being built this way. According to a 2015 survey by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), about 28 per cent of all UK houses were entirely paved or gravelled over at the front, a proportion that had tripled over … More

Josie Ford
Blame Brexit
A wise old dog, a bit arthritic – not Feedback’s Tinder bio, but Peter Holness’s description of his companion Arby, who is getting a bit long in the canines. To lessen the pains of age, a “less sceptical” member of Peter’s family bought Arby a collar that incorporates a “powerful bipolar magnet”.
Enquiring with members of the customer services department of the company concerned about the possibility of a monopolar version, Peter was informed that one wasn’t available. They weren’t sure why, but it was possibly due to “Brexit-related supply issues”.
Feedback has been following the search for a magnetic north without a south, or vice versa, with interest for some years. Physicists hunting the elusive magnetic monopole within the Large Hadron Collider or inside exotic solids, take note: your quarry may be languishing in a warehouse in Felixstowe, or caught in a snarl-up on the approach to the port of Dover.

Advertisement

Two’s company…
Due diligence on the preceding leads us to a breakthrough in our own quest for eternal youth, as we land on the website of Bioflow magnetic collars. Bioflow’s products, we learn, work via a “Central Reverse Polarity field – a strong, multi-directional force of magnetism. Unlike standard and competitor’s magnets, Bioflow’s Central Reverse Polarity magnet has three poles.”
Strong stuff. We don’t wonder that “when blood passes under this multi-directional field, cells experience an agitating effect”. If readers should detect a certain jumpiness in our prose this week, for once it isn’t the office coffee – we can’t get this darn thing off.
Flame-grilling
Social media site for the short of attention Twitter was lightly smouldering last week as US thin-sliced frozen steaks manufacturer The Steak-Umm Company reignited a long-standing beef, of uncertain provenance, it has with pronouncements made by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Responding to Tyson’s tweet (“The good thing about Science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it”), the company’s official account reacted first with a succinct “log off bro”, followed 5 minutes later by a clarificatory tweet: “nope. science itself isn’t “true” it’s a constantly refining process used to uncover truths based in material reality and that process is still full of misteaks. neil just posts ridiculous sound bites like this for clout and he has no respect for epistemology”.
Which, as far as the meat of the matter goes, isn’t wrong. As Twitter user David Vienna put it: “We have reached the point in our collective human evolution at which I nod in agreement with a sandwich meat company as they take a swipe at a celebrated astrophysicist.”
Many strings
To this day, Feedback much treasures an enraged letter sent by a reader following our publication of an article by University of Warwick mathematics professor Ian Stewart, on the mathematics of electoral systems, in the run-up to the 2010 UK general election (1 May 2010, p 28). How dare we, it asked, be giving a party-political platform to the Conservative candidate for the constituency of Milton Keynes South?
That turned out to be the subtly variant Iain Stewart. Since then, however, we have taken it as a vaguely amusing axiom that all instances of the same name map to the same person. Thus physicist Brian Cox, for instance, has led a busy life not just as a keyboard player for the band D:Ream, but also as the first actor to play Hannibal Lecter on film, while goalkeeping for Huddersfield Town.
So we were tickled to see, while rummaging around in the arXiv preprint server for something we had mislaid, the publication list attributed to David Politzer, co-winner of the 2004 Nobel prize in physics for his work on the theory of quantum chromodynamics – 14 papers on the physics of the banjo.
Except, chuckling self-satisfiedly, we then discovered a webpage hosted by the California Insititute of Technology with links both to “Banjo Physics 411” and a public lecture delivered in Stockholm in 2004 “as per the will of Alfred Nobel”. So, as far as our theorem goes, QED. Or perhaps in Politzer’s case, QCD. That’s a physics joke.
Human measures
Last week, The Sun newspaper invented a newly perplexing way of measuring things (Feedbacks passim), Adrian Bell notes: the exactly equivalent explicatory unit. It reported the birth of a very large baby boy, “almost 24 inches long, that’s two footlong Subway sandwiches for perspective”.
That said, Feedback remembers Subway once responding to a customer complaint about an 11-inch “Footlong” by asserting that the name was “not intended to be a measurement of length”. Suffice it to say: it was a big baby.
Mayday, mayday
Many thanks to the readers who responded retrocausally to our item mentioning language not being about rules, but efficient communication (17 April) by pointing out our solecism in ending an item with “Over and out” (3 April). In radio comms, “Over” invites a response, while “out” is a contradictory indication that communication has ended. We apologise for any confusion. Out and over.
Got a story for Feedback?Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ESConsideration of items sent in the post will be delayed
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

Lockdown is affecting how millions of people grieve. We need to be mindful of that when restrictions ease, says Dean Burnett

Humans

| Comment

21 April 2021

By Dean Burnett

Michelle D’urbano
A YEAR ago, my 58-year-old otherwise healthy father contracted covid-19. He eventually succumbed to it, and died. And I have been dealing with the grief ever since, while under lockdown.
If you go by how it is portrayed in mainstream fiction, grief is very predictable. You go through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Once through all these stages, you can move on with your life.
But reality is far more complex. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who came up with the five-stage idea, regretted writing it in such a way that led to its simplistic portrayal. The stages reflect the sort of reactions people can have, but they don’t form a rigid road map.

Advertisement

Grief during lockdown is even more complex. I say this as someone who, like millions of other people, has endured months of it, cut off from friends and family. I fear this is causing genuine problems that are going unrecognised or unacknowledged.
Neurologically, emotions are a complex and unpredictable mess. The brain areas involved are intertwined with practically every other neurological function. This is why emotional experiences can affect us so potently and take so long to process.
Our brains learn and develop based on our experiences and understanding of the world around us. So, even if inaccurate or oversimplified, the cultural consensus about grief informs our expectations. We “know” that when you lose someone, you have a funeral and wake to say goodbye to or celebrate the departed. These accepted parts of the grieving process are thrown out of whack by lockdown.
And while well intentioned, socially distanced funerals may do more harm than good. Among other things, rituals give the bereaved a sense of control over events, something important for well-being, and something that, at present, is drastically reduced following the loss of a loved one.
My father was a widely beloved individual. Ordinarily, there would have been hundreds at his funeral. To have it limited to 14 next of kin? Nobody wanted that. What are the consequences for well-being if a funeral makes you feel less in control, rather than more?
Lockdowns have also made it difficult to adjust to my father’s absence. For months, everyone has been absent. It is the law.
Delayed grief, where the effects hit later, or complex grief, where someone has disruptive reactions to a loss beyond what is deemed normal, are conditions recognised by medical science. It could be that these problems arise because the experience of grief doesn’t match the expectations our brains have formulated.
Maybe I will experience the full effects of grief long after my father’s passing, when lockdown in the UK finally fully ends and my father not being there becomes “real”. Will this make me, and everyone else in the same situation, mentally unwell? I would argue not. But it is something that could harm the mental health of millions of people, long after the initial cause has occurred.
As understandable as it is, from my perspective as both a grieving relative and a neuroscientist, the current “Hooray, no more lockdown!” attitude of much of the UK media and general public only throws the enduring grief of many into stark relief.
While it is fine to embrace the improving situation regarding the pandemic in the UK, we should be in no rush to “move on” and pretend it never happened, or to condemn or sideline those still feeling the effects of what it took from them. That could make a bad situation worse.
They say that time heals all wounds. But if it is time spent in lockdown, it could mean healing is delayed. In situations like that, wounds can often get worse. We should recognise that.

More on these topics: More

Researchers are developing medicines that replicate the health benefits of exercise. In the process, they’re gaining insights into how to treat currently untreatable diseases

Humans

21 April 2021

By Jo Marchant

Martin Leon Barreto
RONALD EVANS never intended to kick off a performance-enhancing drug craze, but that is what happened. Despite a ban on its use in sports, the substance he has long been studying has now been detected in doping tests of cyclists and boxers, while runners and bodybuilders share stories online about how it makes them leaner and stronger nonetheless.
The story begins in 2002, when Evans, a biologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, performed some experiments involving mice and exercise wheels. He fed a drug known as GW1516 to unfit mice, expecting to see modest effects on their fat metabolism. But tests showed that mice which had been given the drug could run twice as far on their wheels as ones that hadn’t. “It was an amazing moment,” says Evans. Couch-potato mice had been transformed into endurance runners. Ever since, he has been chasing a dream with ramifications not just for elite athletes, but all of us.
We know that exercise truly is the best medicine. Get your body moving, even a modest amount, and the rewards range from stronger bones to a sharper mind. But what if you could use a pill to mimic those benefits without having to do any training at all? That question – and Evans’s promising work – have sparked a drug-discovery movement. As the first fruits of this work edge closer to the clinic, there is an increasingly heated debate about how these kinds of therapies should be used. All agree, however, that a healthcare revolution is on the way.
Many of us turn to exercise as a means of … More

Hulu
Watch
The Handmaid’s Tale is back for a fourth season in April on US streaming service Hulu and the UK’s Channel 4 later this year. This season of the hit sci-fi drama has June (pictured) on the run as the resistance grows in Gilead.

Read
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence sees the US tech entrepreneur and pioneering researcher Erik Larson explain why he thinks computers can’t think the way we do, and why this actually makes them so much more exciting and useful for our future.

Read
Maths on the Back of an Envelope, packed with anecdotes and quizzes, is author and New Scientist puzzle-setter Rob Eastaway’s reminder that we will all understand numbers best when we decide to ditch our calculators. More

Sci-fi film Chaos Walking, featuring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, is a disconcerting little masterpiece of sensitive acting and well-judged world-building, says Simon Ings

Humans

21 April 2021

By Simon Ings

Viola (Daisy Ridley) and Todd (Tom Holland) flee a dangerous settlementMurray Close/Lionsgate
Chaos Walking
Directed by Doug Liman

Advertisement

Amazon Prime Video
IN Chaos Walking, Todd Hewitt (Tom Holland) is learning to be a man – and in Prentisstown, ostensibly the only settlement to survive humanity’s arrival on the planet New World, this means keeping your thoughts to yourself.
Something about the planet makes men’s consciousness audible and visible to others. As such, they must constantly hide their thoughts by focusing on something else, rehearsing daily chores or even just reciting their own names again and again. Women were unaffected, apparently, but rarely glimpsed aliens called the Spackle killed them all years ago, condemning the settlement to eventual extinction.
If this account of things seems a little off, imagine it delivered by an especially troubled-looking Mads Mikkelsen, who plays Prentisstown’s mysterious, eponymous mayor. Watching his settlement’s secrets come to light, one by one, is one of this film’s chief pleasures.
Newly arrived, Viola (Daisy Ridley) is scouting ahead of a second wave of settlers when her landing craft all but burns up, leaving her at the mercy of the men of Prentisstown. You might think they would be glad of her arrival – but you would be wrong.
Chaos Walking debuts under something of a cloud. To begin with, no one could settle on a script they liked. Charlie Kaufman (of Being John Malkovich fame) got the first bite of the writerly cherry, before the project was passed from pillar to post and ended up being crafted by Christopher Ford (writer of Spider-Man: Homecoming) and Patrick Ness, author of the young adult sci-fi trilogy on which this film is based.
“Chaos Walking should have ended up a mess. But while it isn’t a blockbuster, it is a real accomplishment”
By all measures, then, Chaos Walking should have ended up a mess. But while it isn’t a blockbuster, it is, nonetheless, a real accomplishment: a disconcerting little masterpiece of sensitive acting and well-judged world-building.
In this film, men quite literally cannot shut up, and in her very first conversation with Mayor Prentiss, it dawns on Viola that this gives her huge advantages. She is the only person here who can lie and keep secrets, crucial points made almost entirely in dialogue-free reaction shots.
Todd is a naif who must save Viola and get her to a nearby settlement that he never even realised existed. He is the model of what a man must be in New World: polite, honest and circumspect. His bid to “be a man” in such circumstances is anything but straightforward, but Holland keeps our sympathy and attention.
Indeed, the great strength of Chaos Walking is that it interrogates gender roles by creating genuine difficulties for its characters. Even Prentisstown’s misogynist preacher Aaron (surely David Oyelowo’s least rewarding role yet) turns out to make a certain amount of dreadful sense.
No gender truly benefits from the strange, telepathic gifts granted to the settlers of New World. Only good will and superhuman patience prevent human society going up like a powder keg. This has happened once in Prentisstown, and – given the stalled settlement of the planet – it has almost certainly occurred elsewhere.
Chaos Walking isn’t, in any easy sense, a feminist fable. The film is about people’s struggles in unreasonable circumstances – and for all the angst bound up in its premise, it becomes, by the end, a charming and uplifting film about love and reconciliation.

Simon recommends…
Book
Dying Inside
Robert Silverberg
Before he drank the sword-and-sorcery Kool-Aid, boy could Silverberg write! For years, New Yorker David Selig has been using his telepathic abilities for his own convenience. Now his gift is fading, and with it his grip on reality.
The Demolished Man
Alfred Bester
The book that won the first ever Hugo award for best novel. Ben Reich plans to kill a rival under the noses of a telepathic police force. If he is caught, he will be taken apart, thought by thought.

More on these topics: More