Humans

Lack of diversity in genome studies means that treatments derived from them are leaving people of colour behind. Changing that isn’t only about justice – it could also lead to new therapies that would otherwise go undiscovered

Health 20 January 2021
By Layal Liverpool

Ruby Fressen

IF YOUR doctor suspects you might have type 2 diabetes, they will want to know your average blood sugar level, which typically means taking a glycated haemoglobin test. This method of diagnosis is recommended by the World Health Organization and used pretty much everywhere. The problem, as Deepti Gurdasani discovered in 2019, is that the test may not work for everyone.
Gurdasani and her colleagues found that a gene variant present in almost a quarter of people with sub-Saharan African ancestry alters the levels of glycated haemoglobin in their blood independent of blood sugar. This suggests they will be more likely to be falsely diagnosed with diabetes, she says.
Gurdasani’s discovery is just the latest in a growing list of medical injustices resulting from the fact that the vast majority of people who have had their DNA sequenced are of European descent. Again and again, people from under-represented backgrounds find that drugs and diagnostics based on research that makes connections between DNA and disease don’t work for them. The dearth of diversity in these studies also means that people in overlooked populations are more likely to get inaccurate results from tests that look at an individual’s genetic risk of developing a condition, excluding them from the much-vaunted promise of personalised medicine.
All of which explains why researchers like Gurdasani, a geneticist at Queen Mary, University of London, are sequencing the DNA of thousands of people from under-represented populations around the world. This isn’t just about justice: increasing the diversity of genetic studies could also uncover novel genetic variants associated with disease, providing targets for treatments that … 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

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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.

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The late Mike deGruy filmed iconic underwater footage that wowed audiences, drawing the admiration of David Attenborough and James Cameron. A fond documentary by his wife reveals the real man

Life 20 January 2021
By Elle Hunt
DeGruy exploring more than 117 metres below the surface in a diving suit
Adventure Entertainment

Diving Deep: The life and times of Mike deGruy
Mimi Armstrong deGruy
Streaming on Apple and Amazon Prime from 19 January

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IT SPEAKS volumes about the kind of person Mike deGruy was that, after he nearly lost his life in a shark attack, he not only continued diving, he returned to the scene to figure out where he had gone wrong.
The film-maker and biologist is the subject of Diving Deep, a documentary directed by his widow, fellow film-maker Mimi Armstrong deGruy, in the wake of his death. Mike DeGruy was killed in a helicopter crash – along with Australian film-maker Andrew Wight – while on assignment in Australia in 2012.
The film takes a fond look at his adventurous and compassionate life, leaving no doubt that he lived it to the fullest and what he would want his legacy to be.
In 30 years of marine film-making, deGruy gained a reputation for both his stubborn pursuit of the shot, often in unprecedented conditions, and his passion: he was remembered at his funeral as a “human exclamation mark”.
In 1986, deGruy filmed a volcano eruption in Hawaii as experienced underwater, pushing his bodyboard straight into the oncoming lava. Later, he put himself in the path of hunting orcas, capturing the first film of them seizing sea lion pups from the water’s edge – footage that is now iconic in nature film-making.

David Attenborough – who voiced deGruy’s footage for many years, including on the Emmy and Bafta-winning The Blue Planet – recalls it causing “a sensation” at the BBC: “Everybody was talking about it… Those pioneering sequences hold their place in the history of discovery.”
Between archival footage and fond recollections from family and collaborators, deGruy is an engaging person to get to know. His life’s story is one that might inspire you to make more of yours, if only through the sheer force of his enthusiasm.
DeGruy was a risk-taker, but an informed one. His fearlessness in the face of sharks was rooted in an understanding of them and their behaviour, so when one took off part of his right arm while he was filming in the Marshall Islands in 1978, requiring 11 operations, deGruy’s response was to make a film exploring why.
“When a shark took off part of his arm while shooting, deGruy’s response was to make a film exploring why”
He later campaigned, as a shark-attack survivor, for shark conservation and used his clout as a fixture on cult TV show Shark Week to push back against sensationalist treatment of them. This led him to be identified on television news as a victim of “Sharkholm syndrome”.
But it wasn’t until the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where deGruy had grown up learning to freedive, that he really embraced activism. The devastation he documented at the scene, and the reluctance from many quarters to accept responsibility for it, drew out a new and urgent purpose to his film-making.
Footage of deGruy rallying against the disparity between polluters’ profits and funding for science was what prompted his widow to put together Diving Deep.
Today, more than a decade later, the full impact of Deepwater Horizon is still unclear because so much of the ocean is undocumented, especially at depth. “We were in some ways working in the dark,” says Charles Fisher, a marine biologist at Pennsylvania State University.
As the technology evolved to take him to greater and greater depths, DeGruy was drawn to uncover the mysteries of the deep and what lessons they might hold for humanity. He had been due to join James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenge, venturing into the Mariana Trench, when he died.
Paying tribute to deGruy in the film, Cameron offers a theory for the lack of impetus and investment in deep-sea exploration compared with that for outer space. The space race, he says, represents man’s desire to conquer his environment, but you don’t conquer the ocean, he says. “You understand the ocean, you become intimate with the ocean, you let it teach you.”
DeGruy’s life stands as a testament to the possibilities of that approach. It is demonstrated in the film’s opening sequence as he ventures more than 117 metres deep in a diving suit, an underwater astronaut wearing a blissful smile, a man completely immersed.
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From Now, created by Rhys Wakefield and William Day Frank, is podcast company QCode’s drama about brothers reunited across space and time. Brian Cox and Richard Madden play identical twins, set at loggerheads by relativity.

Stuart Clarke

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Climate Change: Why should we care? features mathematician Hannah Fry and luminaries including conservationist Jane Goodall (pictured), at London’s Science Museum on 28 January. Join in online to discover the difference that climate efforts make.

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Small Gases, Big Effect: This is climate change by David Nelles and Christian Serrer explains climate change with the help of more than 100 scientists, presenting complex science in a way that everyone will find easy to understand.
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By Chris Stokel-Walker
People from ethnic minority backgrounds in Switzerland were less likely to be contacted about jobs
Yagi Studio/Getty Images

People from ethnic minority groups are less likely to be contacted by job recruiters than people from the majority group, according to an analysis of users on a Swiss public employment website.
Dominik Hangartner of ETH Zurich in Switzerland and colleagues studied the actions of more than 43,000 recruiters who conducted 450,000 searches of 17.4 million jobseekers’ profiles between March and December 2017. They tracked every click to see how recruiters interacted with the profiles, which include information on ethnicity, age and nationality inserted by case workers at the Swiss national employment agency, similar to Job Centre Plus in the UK.
How often Swiss nationals born in the country and from the majority ethnic group were contacted by recruiters was used as the baseline for the analysis, with the probability of recruiters clicking a button to contact job applicants based on ethnicity calculated relative to that. The team found that people from immigrant and ethnic minority groups were up to 19 per cent less likely to be contacted.

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Recruiters spent only 0.3 seconds less, on average, on profiles of ethnic minority jobseekers, which the researchers say means the result cannot be entirely explained by recruiters consciously discriminating against people based on ethnicity.
But the time recruiters spent on a person’s profile varied depending on the time of day: between 9am and 10am, they spent 10.5 seconds on average per profile, and 12 per cent less time on those from jobseekers from minority ethnic backgrounds. Between 5pm and 6pm, they spent 9.5 seconds on the average profile, and 14.7 per cent less on ethnic minority accounts. Similar variations are found just before lunch breaks. The team found no significant difference based on the gender of applicants for the average job.

“Around 20 per cent of the anti-[ethnic minority] discrimination we see is driven by the time of day, when arguably recruiters are more exhausted and tired,” says Hangartner. The discrimination is calculated by monitoring the amount of time spent on individual profiles, and the likelihood of being contacted by recruiters. He thinks the rest of the discrimination may be unconscious bias that particularly rears its head when users are tired.
“This is the kind of data analysis that shows us racial discrimination is still a deeply entrenched practice,” says Safiya Umoja Noble of the University of California, Los Angeles. “What we need is rigorous monitoring of systems to ensure such systems do not make discrimination even more opaque.”
Hangartner hopes the data can be used to redesign such websites to mitigate the impact of implicit bias against people from ethnic minority groups.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03136-0

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Stress levels of burned-out parents can be higher than those of people in extreme pain, according to research by Moira Mikolajczak. She tells New Scientist why the pandemic has brought new urgency to her work

Humans 20 January 2021
By Jessica Hamzelou

Rocio Montoya

“A STATE of vital exhaustion.” This is a surprisingly poetic description of burnout by the World Health Organization. Burnout – severe exhaustion caused by uncontrolled chronic stress – is increasingly becoming the focus of health research. It was originally identified as a work-related phenomenon, but now a form that affects parents is coming under the spotlight.
Any parent can relate to the fatigue associated with looking after a child. But for some parents, that tiredness can tip into harmful exhaustion, leaving them physically unwell and damaging their relationships with their children and partners.
Moïra Mikolajczak at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) in Belgium has been at the forefront of research into parental burnout. Over the past five years, she and her colleagues have found that it isn’t something that just affects parents of ill children – it can affect any parent, although it is more likely to affect highly educated people who are perfectionists and put too much pressure on themselves.
Since Mikolajczak began studying the phenomenon, the field has expanded. A consortium of researchers she launched a few years ago to investigate parental burnout now has 90 members. The advent of covid-19 lockdowns, which have led to many parents juggling childcare with homeworking, has made the research more relevant and the need to understand this condition more urgent, says Mikolajczak. She tells New Scientist which factors can tip parents over the edge and how all parents can help protect themselves from extreme exhaustion.
Jessica Hamzelou: What is parental burnout?
Moïra Mikolajczak: Parental burnout is like any burnout. It’s an exhaustion disorder, but takes place in the parental … More

The forces fighting climate science have not been defeated, just changed tactics. But Michael Mann, a key figure in the fightback, argues for hope in his new book

Humans 19 January 2021
By Richard Schiffman

MOST people accept that climate change is happening, but that doesn’t mean the war against climate science is over. The denialists have just changed their tactics, argues Michael Mann in his book The New Climate War.
Mann should know. A climatologist at Penn State University, he has been a target since his “hockey stick” graph was published in 1999. The graph shows the rapid rise in temperature globally since industrialisation caused heat-trapping carbon dioxide to spew into the atmosphere.
This dramatic visual, featured in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, earned Mann decades of harassment and death threats. This was part of a war against climate research that has been waged since the 1970s, first to cover up and then to contest the growing evidence that shows our planet is warming.
However, as data about rising sea levels, higher temperatures and megafires mounted, the climate sceptics shifted to “a kinder, gentler form of denialism”, says Mann. They now mostly concede that, yes, there is some warming and human activity plays some role, but it’s not nearly as bad as those “alarmist” scientists say.
This new effort (bankrolled by the same polluting interests that funded the old one) no longer disputes climate change, but tries to block the action needed to move towards a low-carbon future. It is being fought by the successors to climate change denialists, who Mann calls the “inactivists”. They lobby against effective carbon pricing programmes and subsidies for renewable energy that would imperil big energy’s bottom lines.

According to Mann, central to this strategy is a campaign to shift culpability for climate change from the corporations selling fossil fuels to those who use them. Fossil fuel companies aren’t to blame, “it’s the way people are living their lives”, Chevron argued in court in 2018.
“Doomism and the loss of hope can lead people down the very same path of inaction as outright denial”
Some environmentalists have bought into this argument. While Mann agrees it is good to eat less meat, travel less and recycle more, such actions alone aren’t enough. We need to decarbonise the economy, he says. Focusing on personal responsibility takes our eyes off that prize.
Another thing inactivists do, Mann says, is to support divisive films like Michael Moore’s recent documentary Planet of the Humans that purported to show that renewable energy is ineffective and polluting.
The film was condemned by environmental activists and climate scientists. But the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Alliance spent thousands to promote a film it hoped would take the wind out of the sails of the push for clean energy.
“Doomism and the loss of hope,” writes Mann “can lead people down the very same path of inaction as outright denial. And Michael Moore plays right into it.” Despair is counterproductive.
Fossil fuel interests also cynically push “non-solution solutions” like natural gas, carbon capture and geoengineering, whose inadequacies Mann details. Again, the effort is to distract from the real task of weaning the world off fossil fuels.
But in the end, Mann says he is optimistic, heartened by the upswell of youth activism and the rapid development of green technologies. Even investors are beginning to flee from fossil fuels. Moreover, botched responses to covid-19 underline the peril of ignoring science and failing to act.
With the major COP26 UN climate summit due to be held later this year in Glasgow, UK, Mann’s call to get serious about climate change couldn’t be more timely. Let’s hope he is right that the tide is finally about to turn.
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By Ibrahim Sawal
An ancient picture showing three pigs may be the oldest drawing of animals in the world
AA Oktaviana

Stunning cave paintings discovered in Indonesia include what might be the oldest known depictions of animals on the planet, dating back at least 45,000 years.
The paintings of three pigs, alongside several hand stencils, were discovered in the limestone cave of Leang Tedongnge on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Even local people were unaware of the cave sites’ existence until their discovery in 2017 by Adam Brumm at Griffith University, Australia, and his team.
“I was struck dumb,” says Brumm. “It’s one of the most spectacular and well-preserved figurative animal paintings known from the whole region and it just immediately blew me away.”

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Sulawesi is known to contain some of the world’s oldest cave art, but the new paintings may predate all other examples so far discovered on the island.

Brumm and his colleagues used a technique called uranium-series dating to analyse a mineral formation that overlapped part of the image, and that must have formed after the cave art was produced. The mineral formation is at least 45,500 years old, suggesting the artwork itself could be much older.
“It adds to the evidence that the first modern human cave art traditions did not arise in ice age Europe, as long assumed, but at an earlier point in the human journey,” says Brumm.
Each of the three pigs is more than a metre long. The images were all painted using a red ochre pigment. They appear to be Sulawesi warty pigs (Sus celebensis), a short-legged wild boar that is endemic to the island and is characterised by its distinctive facial warts. “This species was of great importance to early hunter-gatherers in Sulawesi,” says Brumm.

These pigs appear in younger cave art across the region, and archaeological digs show that they were the most commonly hunted game species on Sulawesi for thousands of years. “The frequent portrayal of these wild pigs in art offers hints at a long-term human interest in the behavioural ecology of this local species, and perhaps its spiritual values in the hunting culture,” says Brumm.

Paul Pettitt at Durham University, UK, agrees that the discovery adds to evidence of human presence in the islands of south-east Asia. Early humans presumably crossed these islands to reach Australia – perhaps as early as 65,000 years ago – after migrating out of Africa.
But Pettitt says: “Given the insufficient amount of human fossils in the region at this time, we cannot, of course, rule out authorship by another human species, like the Neanderthals [that] were producing non-figurative art in Europe.”
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd4648
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