Humans

We are relying on specialist knowledge to guide us through the coronavirus pandemic – so it is more important than ever to grasp what expertise is and where it comes from, says Roger Kneebone, author of a new book on the subject

Humans 3 February 2021
By Richard Webb

Rocio Montoya

IF ROGER KNEEBONE is an expert, he has spread his expertise widely. Trained as a medical doctor, he spent many years working as a trauma surgeon in the township of Soweto in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the height of apartheid, before returning to the UK to become a general practitioner in rural Wiltshire.
Now in his third career as a professor of surgical education at Imperial College London, he has been at the forefront of many innovations aimed at widening the scope of influences that students are exposed to. These include setting up a Centre for Performance Science with the neighbouring Royal College of Music and helping to devise the Chemical Kitchen project, which exposes chemistry undergraduates to lab skills through the “non-threatening” parallel of cooking.
Kneebone has also tried his hand at many extracurricular activities, from flying light aeroplanes and learning to juggle to building harpsichords – with varying degrees of success, he freely admits. He recently wrote a book, Expert: Understanding the path to mastery. Drawing on the experiences of people from musicians to magicians and tailors to taxidermists – and some scientific and medical experts for good measure – it examines the ubiquitous, but understudied, process of becoming an expert.
Richard Webb: Experts are very much in the public eye at the moment.
Roger Kneebone: I finished writing the book just before the UK’s March covid-19 lockdown began. But now more than ever we need to think about how we make use of the most valuable aspect of expertise – the wisdom based on experience that allows people to give sensible guidance about what to do … More

What have covid-19 closures done to art galleries and museums? From virtual tours of mothballed shows to advanced tech like lidar, they are finding new, more personal ways to wow audiences

Humans 3 February 2021
By Simon Ings
Curious Alice is a VR experience created by the V&A and HTC Vive Arts
Kristjana S Williams, 2020

Exhibitions
IN NOVEMBER, the International Council of Museums estimated that 6.1 per cent of museums globally were resigned to permanent closure due to the pandemic. The figure was welcomed with enthusiasm: in May, it had reported nearly 13 per cent faced demise.
Something is changing for the better. This isn’t a story about how galleries and museums have used technology to save themselves during lockdowns (many didn’t try; many couldn’t afford to try; many tried and failed). But it is a story of how they weathered lockdowns and ongoing restrictions by using tech to future-proof themselves.

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One key tool turned out to be virtual tours. Before 2020, they were under-resourced novelties; quickly, they became one of the few ways for galleries and museums to engage with the public. The best is arguably one through the Tomb of Pharaoh Ramses VI, by the Egyptian Tourism Authority and Cairo-based studio VRTEEK.
And while interfaces remain clunky, they improved throughout the year, as exhibition-goers can see in the 360-degree virtual tour created by the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent in Belgium to draw people through its otherwise-mothballed Van Eyck exhibition.
The past year has also forced the hands of curators, pushing them into uncharted territory where the distinctions between the real and the virtual become progressively more ambiguous.
With uncanny timing, the V&A in London had chosen Lewis Carroll’s Alice books for its 2020 summer show. Forced into the virtual realm by covid-19 restrictions, the V&A, working with HTC Vive Arts, created a VR game based in Wonderland, where people can follow their own White Rabbit, solve the caterpillar’s mind-bending riddles, visit the Queen of Hearts’ croquet garden and more. Curious Alice is available through Viveport; the real-world show is slated to open on 27 March.
Will museums grow their online experiences into commercial offerings? Almost all such tours are free at the moment, or are used to build community. If this format is really going to make an impact, it will probably have to develop a consolidated subscription service – a sort of arts Netflix or Spotify.

What the price point should be is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t help for institutions to muddy the waters by calling their video tours virtual tours.
But the advantages are obvious. The crowded conditions in galleries and museums have been miserable for years – witness the Mona Lisa, imprisoned behind bulletproof glass under low-level diffuse lighting and protected by barricades. Art isn’t “available” in any real sense when you can only spend 10 seconds with a piece. I can’t be alone in having staggered out of some exhibitions with no clear idea of what I had seen or why. Imagine if that was your first experience of fine art.
Why do we go to museums and galleries expecting to see originals? The Victorians didn’t. They knew the value of copies and reproductions. In the US in particular, museums lacked “real” antiquities, and plaster casts were highly valued. The casts aren’t indistinguishable from the original, but what if we produced copies that were exact in information as well as appearance? As British art critic Jonathan Jones says: “This is not a new age of fakery. It’s a new era of knowledge.”
With lidar, photogrammetry and new printing techniques, great statues, frescoes and chapels can be recreated anywhere. This promises to spread the crowds and give local museums and galleries a new lease of life. At last, they can become places where we think about art – not merely gawp at it.
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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