Humans

New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans 3 February 2021
NASA on Unsplash

Watch
Earth, But Not As We Know It is a free online event by London’s Science Museum on 13 February, bringing James Lovelock and his peers into a conversation about his controversial idea that Earth acts like a living organism.

Zoonar GmbH/Alamy

Explore
Manchester Science Festival returns from 12 February with an online programme on our changing climate and ideas for a better future. There are photography exhibitions and talks on everything from improving air quality to eco-anxiety.

Read
The Genes That Make Us by Edwin Kirk combines his experiences from lab work and clinical practice to present stories from a revolution in medicine — one that may ultimately change what it means to be human.
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State-of-the-art special effects combined with a compelling story makes Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian viewing to be savoured on Disney+

Humans 3 February 2021
By Bethan Ackerley

The Mandalorian
Created by Jon Favreau
Disney+

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WHEN George Lucas set out to create Star Wars, he wanted to use special effects that had never been seen before. Over the course of the franchise’s history, that dream has been pursued relentlessly with mixed results.
The original Star Wars trilogy was brought to life by Lucas’s visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) through a groundbreaking combination of blue screens, miniatures, puppets and camera trickery. The prequel films (released between 1999 and 2005) were ambitious too, pioneering the use of digital film and fully computer-generated characters, but relied heavily on digital effects that didn’t always stand up to scrutiny. Since 2015, the latest Star Wars films have showcased some stunning effects, but it is now in TV show The Mandalorian that the series’ most exciting technological developments are taking place.
Set five years after Return of the Jedi, The Mandalorian follows a bounty hunter tasked with finding The Child (a pointy-eared alien better known to fans as Baby Yoda). Unable to surrender the infant to his nefarious client, the Mandalorian is forced to traverse the galaxy to protect his charge from remnants of the Empire.
So far, so Star Wars. Yet what makes The Mandalorian so special is how it builds on the successes and failures of every story in the franchise, especially when it comes to technology. Though you wouldn’t know it, the many alien worlds it features aren’t filmed in deserts and tundras around the world, but are instead realised by ILM on just one stage in Los Angeles, nicknamed “the Volume”.

“The many alien worlds of The Mandalorian are realised on a single stage in Los Angeles called ‘the Volume’”
This cavernous set is encircled by LED panels on its 6-metre walls and ceiling. Instead of shooting actors against green screens and adding a virtual background later, environments – Tattooine’s desert plains, say – are projected onto the walls during filming, blending seamlessly with practical props.
The advantages of this approach are manifold. While shooting with green screens means lighting and reflections have to be tweaked in post-production – a difficult task and part of why the prequel trilogy was so maligned – the Volume accurately lights a scene while it is being filmed, so every world our hero steps onto (in his gleaming beskar armour, no less) feels like a real location.
Those alien planets can be edited on set, so the crew can quite literally move mountains. ILM also uses Unreal Engine from Epic Games, the firm behind Fortnite, to create 3D environments in real time in the Volume. The screens respond to positional data from a camera, so as it moves, the setting shifts to provide realistic changes in perspective.
Beyond the Volume, the show builds on the techniques of its predecessors, using puppetry and animatronics alongside actors to create believable aliens. You only have to look at fans’ reactions to The Child and to “Frog Lady”, season two’s amphibious breakout star, to see how successfully they have been realised. Even old-school miniatures are used.
The Mandalorian represents the next generation of technology in Star Wars, which is fitting for a brand so obsessed with lineage. That doesn’t mean it should be judged on this alone. It is also a compelling story about fatherhood and duty, albeit one with meandering side quests that sometimes divide viewers. Yet with a universe this beautifully realised, who wouldn’t stop to take in the view from time to time?

Bethan also recommends…
TV
Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian
Disney+
This fascinating series explores key elements of The Mandalorian. A highlight is the episode looking into how composer Ludwig Göransson built the cool soundtrack around giant recorders.
Film
Empire of Dreams: The story of the Star Wars trilogy (2004)
Ken Burns
The original Star Wars films were taken from the brink of disaster and made into a global phenomenon. This documentary tells the tale.

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As the coronavirus crisis goes on, an increasing number of us are feeling worn out and unable to cope. Here’s how you can tell if this is burnout, and what you can do to protect yourself

Health 3 February 2021
By Caroline Williams

Nathalie Lees

“I AM not just busy, I am being overwhelmed by an onslaught of requests like yours…”
There is a certain irony to the email I have just received: the pioneer of burnout research is feeling utterly swamped by work. Christina Maslach, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, spearheaded the study of burnout back in the 1970s and has been working on ways to tackle the problem ever since. Her expertise was already highly sought after even before the coronavirus pandemic. Now she can barely move under the weight of her inbox.
It is hardly surprising. In the year since the word lockdown became ubiquitous, it seems as if almost everyone has hit the wall at least once. But amid the emotional roller coaster of work stress, homeschooling, social isolation and the not inconsiderable fact that there is still a pandemic raging outside, how can you tell when you have reached the end of your tether? When does feeling understandably stressed in difficult times turn into an irretrievable case of burnout? And what can you do to protect yourself?
Thankfully, five decades of research means we have a fairly good idea of what burnout is and what causes it. According to Maslach’s Burnout Inventory, an assessment tool she co-developed, burnout arises when three factors coincide: an overwhelming feeling of emotional exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment and a feeling of lack of accomplishment. For those experiencing burnout, these criteria might manifest in feelings like being exhausted even after plenty of sleep, being emotionally distant from loved ones or no longer caring about jobs that need doing. … More

By Krista Charles
A diagram showing the difference between human and chimpanzee thumb muscles
Katerina Harvati, Alexandros Karakostis and Daniel Haeufle

Our thumbs allow us to use a variety of tools, from hammers to smartphones, and a new analysis suggests they have a long history. Researchers have found that some hominins started developing more dexterous thumbs about 2 million years ago, which could have allowed them to exploit more resources, eventually leading to the emergence of human culture.
Katerina Harvati at the University of Tübingen in Germany and her colleagues looked at thumb efficiency across different fossil human species. The researchers looked at the shape of thumb bones and soft tissue, which is occasionally preserved. They also created 3D meshes of thumb samples and calculated their torque.
“Levels of dexterity very similar to what we see in modern humans were already present 2 million years ago,” says Harvati.

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Previous research has suggested that Australopithecus, an earlier genus of hominin, may have been the earliest toolmakers, but the researchers found these fossils lacked the same dexterity found in Neanderthals and Homo naledi.

The researchers suggest that Australopithecus might have been capable of using tools without being adapted for it, whereas the Homo genus developed dexterous thumbs and became adapted for more efficient tool making.
“Regardless of whether stone tool use started before the genus Homo, it’s only after 2 million years ago that stone tool use might have been more efficient,” says team member Fotios Alexandros Karakostis, also at the University of Tübingen. “Therefore, this increased efficiency is likely the factor that led to the gradual emergence of human culture rather than stone tool use itself.”
“All Homo share a common morphology that allows for more dexterity than what came before. And that is brought into light and well supported by this multidisciplinary approach,” says Sandra Martelli at University College London.
Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.12.041
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From the right ratio of green and brown waste to regular aeration, here are some top tips for making compost, writes Clare Wilson

Humans 27 January 2021
By Clare Wilson

Annie Otzen/Getty Images

What you need
A compost bin
Kitchen waste
Plenty of waste low in nitrogen, such as cardboard or sawdust
WE ALL like to get something for nothing, and one way to do that in gardening is to make your own compost from kitchen and garden waste. If all goes well, you end up with an earthy, fine brown crumb within a couple of years, which adds nutrients and structure to your soil. But get things wrong, and it turns into a slimy, stinking mess. So what are the dos and don’ts of composting?
The process is all … More

By Matthew Sparkes
Conspiracy theory groups like QAnon find followerson social media sites
REUTERS/Patrick Fallon

CLAMPING down on conspiracy theories may not help tackle extremist views online, instead it might cause them to proliferate.
Shruti Phadke at the University of Washington in Seattle and her colleagues analysed 6 million posts from 60,000 people on social news aggregation site Reddit, as well as their memberships of user-created communities called subreddits, in an attempt to identify the roots of online radicalisation. All the people’s profiles were roughly similar, but half of them were members of at least one subreddit focused on discussing political and scientific … More

All of us are vulnerable to psychological manipulation, due to quirks in the way our brains create our perception of the world. Understanding how that happens can help strengthen our defences against gaslighting

Humans 27 January 2021
By Caroline Williams

Daniel Stolle

“It’s a really discombobulating thing to think, ‘I know you’re wrong, but you are now more confident in your lie than I am in the truth,’” comedian John Oliver told The Hollywood Reporter last year.
He was talking about a high-profile Twitter spat with Donald Trump, which began when Trump claimed that he had refused to appear on Oliver’s “very boring and low-rated show”. Oliver denied inviting Trump, who then upped the ante, claiming he had been asked several times and had repeatedly turned the show down. Trump was so adamant that Oliver wondered if he had forgotten something.
The argument has all the hallmarks of gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation in which one person undermines another person’s reality. When carried out over a long period of time, the target can begin to doubt their own thoughts and memories.
We might like to think that this couldn’t happen to us, but the bad news is that it definitely could. This is because of a handful of psychological quirks that come as part of the package of the human mind. Although usually beneficial, these aspects of the way we perceive the world can be exploited by a gaslighter to control our reality. The good news is that by understanding them, it is possible to resist attacks and restore your faith in your own thinking – and reality.
“It could happen to any of us. Aspects of the way we perceive the world can be exploited to control our reality”
Gaslighting became headline news in the UK in 2016 when a prominent storyline in BBC radio drama The … More

There’s a tendency among horticulturists to prefer native plant species, but we shouldn’t assume they are better, writes James Wong

Humans | Comment 27 January 2021
By James Wong

Oliver Dixon/Shutterstock

IT ISN’T an exaggeration to say that in the world of horticulture “native” is frequently used as a byword for “better”. Native plants are often considered easier to grow and better for wildlife, while also being less invasive and more resistant to pests.
This belief is so institutionalised that many local planning rules in the UK specify that a certain percentage of landscaping schemes must include native species. Indeed, this conviction runs so deep that some see sharing evidence to the contrary as being hugely controversial, even deeply irresponsible. But accuracy is what matters, so let’s explore … More