Humans

Demand for rare metals can only increase in the move to a zero-carbon economy. The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron lays out the terrifying cost

Humans 27 January 2021
By Simon Ings
A man working at a rare earth metals mine in Nancheng county, China
REUTERS/Stringer

The Rare Metals War
Guillaume Pitron (translator Biana Jacobsohn)
Scribe

Advertisement

WE REAP seven times as much energy from the wind and 44 times as much energy from the sun as we did a decade ago. Is this good news? Guillaume Pitron, a French journalist and documentary maker, isn’t sure.
He is neither a climate sceptic nor a fan of inaction. But as the world moves to adopt a target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, Pitron worries about the costs. The figures in his book The Rare Metals War are stark. Changing the energy model means doubling the production of rare metals about every 15 years, mostly to satisfy demand for non-ferrous magnets and lithium-ion batteries. “At this rate,” writes Pitron, “over the next 30 years we… will need to mine more mineral ores than humans have extracted over the last 70,000 years.”
Before the Renaissance, humans had found uses for seven metals. During the industrial revolution, this increased to a mere dozen. Today, we have found uses for all 90-odd of them, and some are very rare. Neodymium and gallium, for instance, are found in iron ore, but there is 1200 times less neodymium and up to 2650 times less gallium than there is iron.
Zipping from an abandoned mine in the Mojave desert to the toxic lakes and cancer-afflicted areas of Baotou in China, Pitron weighs the awful price of refining the materials, ably blending investigative journalism with insights from science, politics and business.
There are two sides to Pitron’s story, woven seamlessly together. First, there is the economic story of how China worked to dominate the energy and digital transition. It now controls 95 per cent of the rare earth metals market, making between 80 and 90 per cent of the batteries for electric vehicles, says Pitron, and more than half the magnets in wind turbines and electric motors.

Then there is the ecological story of the lengths China took to succeed. Today, 10 per cent of its arable land is contaminated by heavy metals, 80 per cent of its groundwater isn’t fit for consumption and air pollution contributes to around 1.6 million deaths a year there, according to Pitron (a recent paper in The Lancet says 1.24 million deaths in China a year are attributable to air pollution – but let’s not quibble).
China freely entered into this Faustian bargain. Yet it wouldn’t have been possible had the Western world not outsourced its own industrial activities, creating a planet divided, as Pitron memorably describes it, “between the dirty and those who pretend to be clean”.
The West’s comeuppance is at hand, as its manufacturers, starved of rare metals, must take their technologies to China. It should have seen how its reliance on Chinese raw materials would quickly morph into a dependence on China for the technologies of the energy and digital transition.
By 2040, in our pursuit of ever-greater connectivity and a cleaner atmosphere, we will need to mine three times more rare earth metals, five times more tellurium, 12 times more cobalt and 16 times more lithium than we do now. China’s ecological ruination and global technological dominance advance in lockstep, unstoppably, unless the West and others start to mine for rare metals in Brazil, the US, Russia, Turkey, South Africa, Thailand and Pitron’s native France.
Better that the West attains some shred of supply security by mining some of its own land, says Pitron. At least there consumers can fight (and pay) for cleaner processes. Nothing will change if we don’t experience “the full cost of attaining our standard of happiness”, he says.

More on these topics: More

Last and First Men tracks the beginning and end of humanity. It is a film that ranks with Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey and it may even break your heart, says Simon Ings

Humans 27 January 2021
By Simon Ings
Last and First Men uses eerie architectural shots to explore humanity’s end
Sturla Brandth Grovlen

Last and First Men
Jóhann Jóhannsson
Streaming on BFI Player

Advertisement

“IT’S a big ask for people to sit for 70 minutes and look at concrete,” mused Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson about his only feature-length film. He was still working on Last and First Men when he died, aged 48, in 2018.
Admired for his keening orchestral pieces, Jóhannsson was well known for his film work: Prisoners and Sicario were made strange by his sometimes terrifying, thumping soundtracks.
Last and First Men is, by contrast, contemplative and surreal. It uses a series of zooms and tracking shots set against eerie architectural forms, shot in monochrome 16-millimetre film by Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen.
The film draws its inspiration and script (a haunting, sometimes chilly, off-screen monologue performed by Tilda Swinton) from Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 novel of the same name. His day job at the time of writing – lecturing on politics and ethics at the University of Liverpool, UK – seems of little moment now, but his sci-fi novels have barely been out of print and still set a dauntingly high bar.
Last and First Men is a 2-billion-year history, detailing the dreams, aspirations, achievements and failings of 17 different kinds of future humans (Homo sapiens is first). In the light of an ageing sun, they evolve, blossom, speciate, die; the film is set in the moment of extinction.

Stapledon’s book isn’t a drama. There are no actors or action. It isn’t really a novel, more a haunting academic paper from the beyond. The idea to use the book came late in Jóhannsson’s project, which began life as a film essay on Spomeniks, the huge, brutalist war memorials erected in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between the 1960s and the 1980s by dictator Jozip Broz Tito.
“Who knew that staring at concrete and listening to the end of humanity could wet the watcher’s eye?”
In 2017, the film, with a live performance of an early score, was screened at the Manchester International Festival. Jóhannsson told the audience how Tito thought he was building a utopian experimental state that would unite Slavic nations. Because there were so many different religions, the architects looked to Mayan and Sumerian art, rather than religious icons. “That’s why they [spomeniks] look so alien and otherworldly,” he explained.
Swinton’s regretful monologue proves an ideal foil for the film’s explorations, lifting what would be a stunning but slight piece into dizzying, speculative territory: the last living human, contemplating the leavings of 2 billion years.
Last and First Men was left unfinished. The film was cut and Swinton had recorded the monologue by the time the film was presented at the Manchester International Festival. As far as Jóhannsson was concerned, there was still a lot to be done to finish the score. On his death, Yair Elazar Glotman was brought on board to arrange his notes and come up with a final performance for the soundtrack. No one hearing how the film was put together would imagine it could amount to more than a tribute, but sometimes the gods are kind. It is hugely successful, wholly deserving of a place beside Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Who knew that staring at concrete and listening to the end of humanity could wet the watcher’s eye and break their heart? It is tragic that Jóhannsson didn’t live to see that, in his own words, “we’ve taken all these elements and made something beautiful and poignant. Something like a requiem.”

Simon also recommends…
Film
La Jetée (1962)
Directed by Chris Marker
This short black-and-white film, assembled mostly from stills, is a masterful tale of love, apocalypse and time travel. The story inspired Terry Gilliam’s 1995 thriller 12 Monkeys.
Book
Summa Technologiae
Stanislaw Lem
The Polish parodist and sci-fi writer’s only full-length philosophical work projects humanity into the future and explains why we are doomed to mess it up.

More on these topics: More

An overzealous push for breastfeeding is affecting availability of baby formula in food banks, worsening problems for the poorest people, writes Clare Wilson

Health | Comment 27 January 2021
By Clare Wilson

Michelle D’urbano

WITH many people enduring extreme hardship because of the covid-19 pandemic, food banks in the UK are providing a more important function than ever. These vital institutions, funded mainly through public donations, act as a safety net so those in financial crisis at least don’t go hungry.
But there is one section of society who cannot always benefit from their support, and they are among the most vulnerable group of all: infants. In the UK, most babies are entirely or mainly dependent on formula milk.
Baby milk takes up a hefty chunk of a low-income family’s food budget. It can cost up to £30 a week and most food banks don’t stock formula milk because it is seen as clashing with breastfeeding promotion.

Advertisement

Some local authorities and health boards explicitly tell food banks not to supply it, often citing recent UN guidelines on the issue, according to a recent report from Feed, a Scottish-based charity that aims to provide impartial advice on infant feeding.
The resistance to providing formula milk stems from a long-running dispute over infant feeding. In the past, some manufacturers wrongly claimed that their formula milk was the healthiest choice. Today, we know that breast milk contains a range of beneficial substances like antibodies that fight off microbes and there is some evidence that breastfed babies have fewer infections in their first year of life.
But many of the broader claims about the benefits that breastfeeding can lead to in later life, like protecting against obesity and asthma, and raising IQ, may not be true. Studies suggest that these apparent correlations arise because, in high-income countries like the UK, breastfeeding is more common among better-off families.
Child health organisations tend to say that if families have a baby that they can’t feed, they need specialist help, which is best given by referring them to health or social services. This can take time, however, and people are resorting to watering down formula or giving unsuitable milk alternatives, which risks babies’ health, Feed’s investigation has found.

It isn’t as if families can simply switch from formula milk to breastfeeding if financial circumstances change. When someone stops breastfeeding, or doesn’t start, milk production ceases. So saying that someone ought to breastfeed when they are unable to is about as helpful as saying someone ought not to be poor.
Health benefits aside, not everyone can breastfeed. For example, a woman may not make enough milk or be on medication that would be harmful for their baby if they did breastfeed.
Breastfeeding can also be painful and take up a lot of time and effort. It is often said that breastfeeding is free, but that is only the case if you view women’s time and labour as financially worthless.
In other words, breast isn’t always best, and only the people involved can decide if the health benefits outweigh any toll to well-being to make that decision.
In the past decade or so, breastfeeding promotion has been overzealous, making some who use formula milk feel so guilty it threatens their mental health. It has triggered a backlash from groups, such as Fed is Best, that say the health system shouldn’t try to control people’s bodies in this way.
People who have so little money that they need handouts of food may be in no position to argue with health workers over their personal autonomy – but it is a disgrace that the often unscientific debate over breast milk versus baby formula is harming the most vulnerable. It has to stop.
More on these topics: More

Sputnik/Science Photo Library
THE human story only becomes more intricate and fascinating. For hundreds of thousands of years, a mysterious group known as the Denisovans lived in the east of Asia – even as our species was emerging in Africa and beginning to spread around the world. Their homeland spanned thousands of kilometres and they existed as a group longer than we have as a species. Yet they were utterly unknown until 2010, when they were identified from DNA preserved in a bone fragment.
A decade later, the Denisovans remain enigmatic. We know they were a sister group to the Neanderthals, … More

By Ibrahim Sawal
Hand gestures affect the way people hear you
Getty Images/Westend61

Making simple up and down hand movements while speaking may influence the way people hear what you are saying.
We often use meaningless movements, such as flicking or waving our hands, known as beat gestures when speaking face to face. These typically align with prominent words in speech.
“Politicians use these gestures all the time to get their message across,” says Hans Rutger Bosker at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Advertisement

Bosker and his colleagues tested how important these movements are in influencing sound recognition. They presented Dutch participants with videos of Bosker saying Dutch words that have two meanings depending on which syllables are stressed – an example in English would be the difference between object and object. Bosker paired each word with a beat gesture either on the first syllable or the second syllable.
The team found that participants were on average 20 per cent more likely to hear stress on a syllable if there was a beat gesture on it. Mismatched beat gestures also biased what they heard, with 40 per cent of participants hearing the wrong sound.

“The timing of even the simplest hand movement is vital to face-to-face communication,” says Bosker. “We’ve shown how multimodal speech perception really is,” he says.
This could be a learned association, but there could be an evolutionary reason behind it says Wim Pouw at Radboud University in Nijmegen, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Manual gestures, like those with a beat quality, interact with the vocal system by using muscles that can increase lung pressure. This affects vocal qualities associated with stressed speech,” says Pouw. He suggests that observing these gestures helps us to perceive these changes in vocal qualities.
Although only tested in Dutch, Bosker says similar effects may be seen in other similar languages such as English, and may even be present in all languages. “This effect could be generalised to much more than just Dutch, but this is highly speculative,” he says.

Bosker says that his research is even more important during the current coronavirus pandemic. “With people wearing face masks, we can’t lip read. Our data explains how much communication can be improved if we gesture along,” he says.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2020.2419
More on these topics: More

The existence of the Denisovans was discovered just a decade ago through DNA alone. Now we’re starting to uncover fossils and artefacts revealing what these early humans were like

Humans 27 January 2021
By Michael Marshall

Brian Stauffer

TODAY, there is only one species of human alive on the planet. But it wasn’t always so. For millions of years, and until surprisingly recently, there were many types of human-like groups, or “hominins”. They coexisted, perhaps they fought, and they interbred. It would be fascinating to know how these others lived, but understanding who they were and what they were like is extremely challenging. We cannot put ourselves into their minds, and we have only fragmentary clues from fossils and artefacts they left behind to reconstruct their lives.
That challenge is especially daunting for one of these extinct groups, the Denisovans. Discovered just a decade ago, the Denisovans have left us scant physical evidence. Instead, our knowledge of them comes almost entirely from their preserved DNA. It tells us that they are a sister group to the Neanderthals, that they lived in Asia for hundreds of thousands of years and that they interbred with our species. But we don’t know what they looked like, how they walked or if they could speak.
Now, that is changing. In the past few years, archaeologists have alighted on a few fossils that seem to be Denisovan. They have also unearthed treasure troves of artefacts, including tools, jewellery and even art, that they think were created by these mysterious people. These interpretations are potentially explosive, so it is hardly surprising that some dispute them. Nevertheless, we are starting to piece together a picture of the Denisovans, one of our closest cousins, and a group that still lives on in the DNA of many people today.
The discovery of the Denisovans … More

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
Extroverts seem to find it easier than introverts to improve their dog’s behaviour
Kevin Kozicki/Image Source/Getty Images

Dogs with certain kinds of behavioural problems are more likely to show improvement during training if their owners are extroverts and open-minded.
After comparing human personalities and the success of behavioural training, scientists have found that introversion, close-mindedness and even conscientiousness are linked to fewer changes in some types of undesirable dog behaviour, including aggression and fearfulness.
The information could help veterinarians identify dog-owner pairs that might need more help during training, says Lauren Powell at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, who co-led the study.

Advertisement

Over a six-month period, Powell and her colleagues followed 131 dogs and their owners attending training sessions with a University of Pennsylvania veterinarian, who performed an initial behaviour assessment of each dog. The dogs had various issues, such as aggression towards people or dogs, chasing cars or animals, general fearfulness, separation anxiety, excessive barking and fear of being touched.

Owners underwent personality testing and provided information about their dogs through a global canine research database called C-BARQ. The researchers also used a survey to evaluate how attached each dog and owner were to one another.
The most important factor affecting success was how bad the dog’s behaviour was to start with, Powell says. Those with the worst behaviour improved the most over six months – possibly because they had so much to gain from the training.
Confirming previous studies, the group also noted that younger dogs improved more than older dogs, and that the stronger the pair’s attachment, the more successful the training was.
However, their research also revealed that human personality plays a role in corrective training for some kinds of unwanted behaviour.

For example, dogs that were generally fearful or afraid of being touched made more progress during therapy if their owners were extroverted. And people who were open to new experiences tended to have dogs that became gradually less fearful towards other dogs – perhaps because these owners were more willing to adopt the vet’s recommendations, says Powell.

The findings make sense, says Charlotte Duranton, head of Ethodog, a canine behavioural research facility and clinic near Paris, since dogs and their owners tend to “synchronise” their behaviour with each other, especially in social settings.
“When dogs are confronted with a new stimulus – like an unfamiliar human, dog, or object – they’re going to watch the reaction of their owner to know how they themselves should behave,” says Duranton. As such, it is critical for professionals to keep this in mind during behaviour training. “The dog isn’t the only [partner] to consider,” she says.
As for the more conscientious people, Powell says her data showed that their dogs did not become particularly less aggressive towards strangers despite six months of retraining. But these results might be somewhat affected by the fact that the owners themselves were reporting on their dogs’ behaviour. “More conscientious people may just view their dogs’ behaviour differently than less conscientious people do,” she says.
Journal reference: Frontiers in Veterinary Science, DOI: 10.3389/fvets.2020.630931
More on these topics: More

Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control mixes West African folk tales with a sci-fi mystery in a futuristic version of Ghana, as a young girl finds a meteor and gains a deadly power

Humans 20 January 2021
By Layal Liverpool
In Remote Control, deadly mosquitoes fall victim to Sankofa’s lethal power
Getty Images

Remote Control
Nnedi Okorafor
Tor.com

Advertisement

WHAT if you could become invincible, resistant to everything from bullets to disease? Nnedi Okorafor explores this idea in her novella Remote Control, but with a dark twist: her protagonist’s invincibility comes at the cost of other human lives.
The story follows a child in Wulugu, a town in northern Ghana, whose life takes a drastic turn after she discovers a strange, green, glowing object that falls from the sky during a meteor shower. Fatima, once a sickly child who experienced regular bouts of malaria, is transformed into Sankofa – a girl who will soon become notorious far beyond her home town for her terrifying ability to evade death and take life.
As Sankofa starts discovering her power, the story temporarily feels light and playful. We are reminded that she is just a child and has no idea what she is wielding, like Peter Parker after he is bitten by a radioactive spider in the Spider-Man films. But Sankofa is soon perceived as more of a villain than a superhero.
Her first casualties are insects, like malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Her skin glows green and they die before they can bite her. Then she kills a wasp, egged-on by her brother. Their games soon reveal the terrible consequences of her power, leading Sankofa on a journey away from Wulugu as she tries to understand her unique ability and to gain control of it.
In the process, she faces profound loneliness, because people avoid her out of fear. We see Sankofa grow up and start to use her abilities to try to help people, as well as in self-defence. “I only take life when people ask me to, when people are sick and in too much pain to live. The word is euthanasia… or when people threaten my life,” she explains.

“Remote Control is thrilling and surprising. There is definitely room for the story to continue”
Okorafor imagines a futuristic Ghana, which Sankofa travels through as she comes to terms with herself and her power. In one part of the story, she passes through RoboTown, a place where intelligent robots called “robocops” guide traffic on the roads. Announcements are made in Twi, a group of dialects that is widely spoken in parts of Ghana, and mysterious, beetle-like drones hover overhead.
Sankofa soon realises that the drones are watching her. She starts to suspect it has something to do with her power, and with a US corporation called LifeGen that recently set up in Ghana. She and the reader soon learn she is part of something larger than herself.
To me, Remote Control felt like a combination of West African folklore and a sci-fi thriller. The colourful imagery of Ghana and the somewhat cautionary tale of Sankofa reminded me of the Anansi stories – Ghanaian folk tales about a trickster that could take the shape of a spider, which I recall from my childhood – but with a tantalising sci-fi mystery woven through it.
Sankofa is a Twi word that translates as “go back and get it”, which refers to learning from the past. That idea is also symbolised by a bird with its head turned backwards. In Remote Control, Sankofa must eventually return to her home town to find out more about her power and eventually use her strength to try to save the world from destruction.
I love a good mystery and Remote Control is thrilling and surprising all the way through. Even the book’s ending comes suddenly and unexpectedly. I think there is definitely room for the story to continue and I very much hope it does.

Layal also recommends…
Book series
The Murderbot Diaries
Martha Wells
Tor.com
I am enthralled by Martha Wells’s sci-fi series The Murderbot Diaries, which blurs the boundary between robot and human in an entertaining and thought-provoking way.

More on these topics: More