Humans

Carlo Rovelli’s bestsellers saw him dubbed the poet of physics and showed a mind seeking knowledge for its own sake. His new book, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, reminds us why we need more minds like his

Space 28 October 2020
By Richard Webb

Victor Habbick Visions/Science Photo Library

I APPROACHED Carlo Rovelli’s latest book with trepidation, bordering on dread. The Italian quantum gravity researcher’s previous bestsellers – Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems, The Order of Time – have seen him playing on home territory, where his lucid, lyrical touch won him a reputation as “the poet of physics”.
But his new book’s title, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, suggested it might have gone … More

Thanks to virtual reality, we can run experiments that test what people will do in situations where lives are on the line. We often find people act against what they claim to regard as morally acceptable, says Sylvia Terbeck

Humans | Comment 28 October 2020
By Sylvia Terbeck

Michelle D’urbano

YOU probably aren’t as moral as you think. Philosophers have often asked people how they would act in a given situation when lives are on the line, but it is hard to test what they would do in practice. Now, thanks to virtual reality, we are starting to find out – and what people say doesn’t match up with what they do.
There are many thought experiments and dilemmas for breaking down ethical decisions, and perhaps none is more famous than the trolley problem. The scenario begins with a runaway trolley that is on course to … More

Why did a dying 19th-century robber want his skin to become a book cover? This Halloween, Anatomica and Dark Archives reveal our changing relationship with the body

Humans 28 October 2020
By Chris Stokel-Walker

THE human body can fascinate and enthral – but it can also appal. Two new books highlight our complex relationship with the body and, interestingly for the queasy 21st century, don’t blink at the facts.
Joanna Ebenstein co-founded the now closed Morbid Anatomy Museum in New York. She spent years studying how … More

The new Star Wars game puts you inside the cockpits of the iconic X-wing and TIE fighter spacecraft. It’s fun, but Star Wars: Squadrons is a good game rather than a great one, says Jacob Aron

Humans 28 October 2020
By Jacob Aron
In Star Wars: Squadrons, you move from escorting shuttles to bombing runs
EA Games

Star Wars: Squadrons
Motive Studios
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
WHILE the early 2000s were a dark time for Star Wars superfans, wounded by the disaster that was the prequel trilogy, they were actually a high point for me thanks to video games.
I was never that into Star Wars when I was younger, having missed the theatrical release of the original films by a good decade or so. Yet it is hard to resist the lure of the Force, and somehow I absorbed Obi-Wan … More

By Layal Liverpool
Failed behavioural interventions often have common features
cienpies

A study of interventions aimed at changing people’s behaviour suggests that those that fail have common features.
Identifying these features could help predict potential ways in which future interventions might fail and provide an opportunity to prevent this, says Magda Osman at Queen Mary University of London.
Osman and her colleagues analysed 65 articles published between 2008 and 2019 that identified failed behavioural interventions, including nudges – subtle suggestions aimed at influencing people’s behaviour.

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They found that behavioural interventions that relied on social comparisons and social norming, for instance encouraging people to adopt a behaviour by indicating that it is a common or normal behaviour in society, accounted for the majority – 40 per cent – of the failed interventions studied.
Other strategies that appeared among the failed interventions included those that delivered messages via letters or texts (24 per cent) or through labelling on products (12 per cent), and those that relied on defaults, such as opt-in or opt-out strategies (15 per cent).
The researchers also categorised various ways in which interventions failed, such as by producing no effect at all or by backfiring and producing an unwanted side effect. Considering both the type of behavioural intervention as well as potential ways interventions may fail in advance could help with the design of more successful interventions, says Osman.
Osman and her team are developing models that could help predict how a given behavioural intervention might perform, based on their analysis of failed interventions. “You can simulate different outcomes before you start running a behavioural intervention that might fail”, which could save time and money, she says.
Journal reference: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2020.09.009
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Covid-19 has highlighted huge weaknesses in our economic systems. New Scientist asked six leading economists how to redesign it to reduce inequality and save the planet

Humans 28 October 2020
By New Scientist

Roberto Cigna

THE coronavirus has unleashed an economic crisis of a kind never seen before. In just one month, from March to April, the US unemployment rate tripled to almost 15 per cent, and remains uncomfortably high. Elsewhere, only state intervention on a scale virtually unknown outside wartime has staved off the direst consequences. In the UK, gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of economic activity, fell by 20 per cent in the three months to June. To find another fall of that order, you must go back about 300 years.
The events of the past six months have brought to the boil arguments about the economy that have simmered since at least the 2008-09 financial crisis. While the size of the world’s economy has quadrupled since 1970, improving the material well-being of billions, the past decade has seen many people’s income stagnate and inequality rise (see “Failing system?”). During the covid-19 pandemic, it has become clear some of the most crucial jobs are being done by some of the lowest paid – people who are also among the most likely to die from the virus.
Meanwhile, the focus of conventional economics on growth at all costs is blamed for the ravaging of ecosystems that both made the pandemic more likely and its impact worse. All of this raises two questions: are our economic systems fit for the post-covid-19 era, and, if not, how must they change? New Scientist asked six leading economic thinkers for their take on how we got to where we are now, and how we might choose to do things differently.
PROFILES
Diane Coyle … More

By Shaoni Bhattacharya
A woman views the work Kaktovik, Alaska, US by Brian Adams, featuring at the Arctic: Culture and Climate exhibition at the British Museum
NEIL HALL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

An animated globe on the wall shows a lovely, generous white snow cap over the North Pole and the Arctic in 1979 that shrinks, then shrinks and shrinks again until by 2100 it is a mere fingerprint, skimming the top of Greenland and the farthest tip of the Canadian archipelago.
This apocalyptic introduction greets visitors at the start of the British Museum’s latest exhibition, Arctic: Culture and Climate. It is a clear and sobering reminder of the other imminent emergency we face, but this exhibition is more about the hope found in human resilience and adaptation, and cultural change in the face of disaster.
There is another message, too, for a world constrained by covid-19 and increasingly mediated by screens. After scant contact with the outside world for months, the show reminds visitors that they are still primarily physical beings – beings with the power to destroy the planet as much as to cherish it.

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Today, nearly 400,000 Indigenous People still live within the Arctic. Over the past 30,000 years, their ancestors survived extreme and rapidly changing conditions, including the end of the last glacial maximum and the effects of colonialism.

Amber Lincoln, the exhibition’s lead curator at the British Museum, wants visitors to come away with a fresh appreciation for the people who live in the Arctic and for their stories – going beyond the statistics to lives that are being affected by climate change.
The show’s historical artefacts, artworks, starkly beautiful photographs and immersive videos combine seamlessly to tell their stories. All this is set against a very effective light and soundscape, which creates the changing light and sound of the Arctic year – each month lasts 2 minutes and fades into the next so the scene appears to be in a state of constant change.
When the Arctic shrinks
Indigenous communities are found across the Arctic, from the northern reaches of Scandinavia and Siberia to Greenland and the northern vistas of Canada and Alaska. Their way of life now faces even greater upheaval as the Arctic has lost 75 per cent of its sea ice in the past 50 years, and the permafrost that acts as bedrock has started to melt.
One photo shows an underground ice cellar deep in the permafrost, which is used by the Inupiat of northern Alaska to preserve whale meat. Once the permafrost melts, such underground fridges may no longer be available.

Elsewhere, a 19th-century belt, a knife and hanging bags for amulets and tobacco that would have belonged to reindeer herders such as the Khanty or Nenets of Russia are springboards to talk about the less expected effects of climate change on the region. It isn’t only shrinking Arctic ecosystems: in 2016, some 2350 reindeer on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia died after eating anthrax spores released by the melting permafrost.
Even one of the most beautiful exhibits – a commissioned work by Sakha artist Fedor Markow to show the spring solstice celebrations of the Sakha people of north-east Russia – resonates with the theme of changing weather and its importance in the Arctic.
The miniature model, drawing on traditional carvings, is exquisitely chiselled from mammoth ivory (with special permission, of course). Ivory from woolly mammoths is becoming more available as Arctic ground melts and releases its frozen treasures.
Most striking is the incredible sustainability and respect for nature of the communities – something long lost elsewhere in the world. While caribou, walruses, seals and whales are still hunted, every scrap of flesh, bone, baleen, sinew and skin is used for something.

An astonishing whaling suit that belonged to a Kalaallit hunter in Greenland in the early 19th century – the only one of its kind – shows what people could do with sealskin. Waterproof and inflatable, it would have provided warmth and buoyancy to the wearer, jumping from his boat directly onto a sleeping whale to harpoon it, according to the caption.
Another sustainable highlight is a bag made of fish skin. As Lincoln asks: “Who would have thought salmon skin could be so durable and beautiful?”
Arctic: Culture and Climate is a great exhibition, but some of my enjoyment comes from a rare opportunity to experience the wonderful corporeality of life unmediated by a screen. For a short while, I could feel something of Arctic life, through the sounds of an ice-bound world, light like nowhere else – and just marvel at some incredibly clever clothes fashioned from sealskin and fur.
The exhibition has clear lessons about the mindset of people working with nature: everything, from animals to the ice itself, becomes a living, connected part of the daily world, not a separated-off area of entitlement and exploitation.
In a world where so much human experience has been forced online, such shows are the more valuable for reminding us about our physical nature and that there is a real world to fight for.
Shaoni Bhattacharya is a consultant for New Scientist based in London
Arctic: Culture and Climate  is at the British Museum from 22 October 2020 to 21 February 2021
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By Michael Marshall

Lidio Valdez

The remains of five llamas that may have been ritually sacrificed by Incas have been found in Peru. It isn’t clear how the animals were killed, but it may have been a slow death.
“I have no way to prove it, but I think they were buried alive,” says Lidio Valdez at the University of Calgary in Canada. He says the llamas don’t have injuries like knife wounds to their throats, which would point to different methods of killing.
The Inca Empire dominated western regions of South America for several hundred years, until Spain invaded in the 1500s. Llamas were central to the success of this advanced society. “They were the single most important animal,” says Valdez, providing transport, skin, fibre, fertiliser and meat. “In addition to that, the Incas believed llamas were sacred animals.”

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Spanish people who came into contact with the Inca reported that they regularly killed hundreds of llamas, either for feasts or for ritual sacrifices to deities. However, while archaeologists have found many examples of llamas that were killed and then eaten, llamas that were ritually sacrificed haven’t been found before.

Valdez and his colleagues found five such llamas in an Inca settlement called Tambo Viejo in the Acari Valley, near the coast of Peru. The site had previously been looted, so Valdez suspects there were originally more.
The llamas had no injuries, but their legs were securely tied together. Valdez suspects this was done to keep them under control while they were buried alive.
He says this method of sacrifice fits with what we know about Inca practices. “Incas used to sacrifice children, and it is said some of the children were buried alive,” says Valdez, referring to written accounts from Spanish conquistadors. “If they did that with children, I’m sure they would have done the same thing with llamas.”
A piece of charcoal found next to one of the llamas was radiocarbon-dated to between 1432 and 1459. Tambo Viejo was annexed by the Inca Empire around this time, and the sacrifices, combined with feasting, may have been a way to cement the new social order, says Valdez.

Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.183
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