Humans

Demelza Kooij
Visit
And Say the Animal Responded? at FACT in Liverpool, UK, from 12 August looks at the world from a non-human perspective. The exhibition will immerse visitors in animal communication through film, art and technology.
Read
Stuck: How vaccine rumors start – and why they don’t go away sees anthropologist Heidi Larson share her radical ideas on how we restore public confidence in vaccines. It is a globe-spanning account of how people perceive risk.
Watch
Project Power is a Netflix blockbuster starring Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, available from 14 August. A new pill gives the user a superpower for 5 minutes. All they have to do is work out what it is – and avoid dying.
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If you like old fashioned sci-fi of the multistranded, multidimensional epic variety, The Expanse could be for you, says Emily Wilson

Humans 5 August 2020
By Emily Wilson
Shohreh Aghdashloo plays a high-powered politician in The Expanse
Amazon Prime Video

The Expanse
Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby
Available on Amazon Prime Video

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This review contains as few spoilers as is humanly possible.
WHEN the Syfy channel pulled the plug on The Expanse three seasons in, that looked to be it for the sprawling TV show. But then Amazon picked it up for a fourth season, the show went on and a fifth season could come out at any time. What we have now is a really ambitious programme with legs – one that all sci-fi fans should at least consider.
If you haven’t tried it yet, The Expanse deliberately starts rather mid-sentence, but then makes perhaps too few concessions to people who haven’t read the source books by James S. A. Corey.
Your heart slumps a bit at how much exposition you have to swallow, at the tendency of some of the characters to talk in a grating fake patois, and at yet another scene of people you don’t recognise in dark spaces (on ships, in asteroids etc.) cutting away to a scene of other people you don’t recognise in other dark spaces. But press on, brave TV soldier! All will be starlight-clear soon enough.
The Expanse is 100 per cent old-fashioned proper sci-fi of the sprawling, spaceship-studded, multistranded, multidimensional epic variety.

It is a future vision of the solar system in which a horribly polluted Earth has become horribly divided between the vastly rich and the occupation-less poor. Then there is colonised Mars, its citizens extremely militarised and dressed in absolutely killer space armour when out-ship and otter-sleek uniforms when on ship. And then there is the rough asteroid mining belt, reminiscent of Blade Runner in its aesthetics, that is home to the annoying patois.
We join the action as a rich young woman goes missing somewhere out in the belt. A belter detective is tasked with finding her and so begins a story that will take us to the edges of the solar system and beyond. There is also a strange, glowing plant-thing… but of that I should say no more.
The ideas are wonderful, the effects and action fantastic and the writing – while nothing can be perfect – good enough. But the reason I stuck with The Expanse, and will continue to do so, is, predictably, because the characters work, whether stuck on different planets or, if we are lucky, thrown together on ships hurtling this way or that.
On paper, the show’s chief hero is Earther-turned-belter ship’s officer James Holden, played by Steven Strait, and he actually holds his end up fine given that everyone around him is given a lot more room to have fun with their parts.
Of those given more room, my favourite is the furiously patriotic Martian marine Bobbie Draper, played by Frankie Adams. Whether sweetly agonising over her loyalty to Mars or abruptly bursting into ultraviolence, she is totally convincing. Need anyone to take back a hijacked spaceship or similar? Definitely call for Bobbie!
My second favourite is the politician Chrisjen Avasarala, played by Shohreh Aghdashloo. Early on, her arch-manipulator-of-worlds character seems rather implausible, but the amazing Aghdashloo soon has you eating out of her jewel-encrusted hand.
It’s not yet clear where season five will take us in terms of new ideas or even new galaxies. And we still don’t know when it will be released given the pandemic. But that makes this an excellent time to sit back and get bang up to date with the Expanse-verse, ready for whatever our heroes face next.
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Hugging has benefits for our health that might make it worth doing despite coronavirus risks – here’s how to reduce the chance you’ll pass on the virus

Health 5 August 2020
By Linda Geddes
Hugs are less hazardous if they are brief and people wear face coverings
Jesus Merida/SOPA Images/SIPA USA/PA Images

IF THE pandemic has left you craving a cuddle, you aren’t alone. Some 60 per cent of people in the US reported feeling touch-deprived during the first month of lockdown, suggests a new study, even though only a fifth of those surveyed lived alone.
Tiffany Field at the University of Miami in Florida and her colleagues surveyed 260 adults and found that those reporting touch deprivation scored higher on scales measuring anxiety, depression, fatigue, sleep issues and post-traumatic stress.
Touch deprivation was more common in people living alone, but also affected those living with family or friends. “Only 33 per cent of people said they were touching their partner a lot, and as many as 37 per cent said they weren’t touching them at all,” says Field (Medical Research Archives, in press).

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A separate study of more than 1000 US adults found that those who frequently hugged, kissed or met up with friends and family in lockdown were 26 per cent less likely to report symptoms of depression and 28 per cent less likely to report loneliness, regardless of whether they were married or cohabiting. Regular video chats didn’t show the same benefits (medRxiv, doi.org/d5hf).
“We saw stronger mental health benefits from types of contact that involved touch, which aligns well with the benefits we know come from close touching, like decreased heart rate, higher levels of oxytocin and lower levels of cortisol,” says Molly Rosenberg at the Indiana School of Public Health in Bloomington, who led the work.
Given these benefits, is a quick hug out of the question? Rosenberg stresses the importance of limiting contact with non-household members to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and most governments continue to advise people to maintain a distance of at least 1 metre from others.
But proximity isn’t the only factor. “Because most hugs are just a brief encounter – and the short time is really key here – I think there are ways to lower the risks to what is, to me, an acceptable level, especially given the benefits of hugging,” says Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
Avoiding face-to-face contact is key. Marr recommends face coverings, pointing faces in opposite directions and not touching the other person’s face or clothing with your face. “This is not a spontaneous act: you have to plan, and you should ask consent,” she says.

“Most hugs are just a brief encounter, and there are ways to lower the risks”
“It would also be prudent to wash your hands before and after you hug, and maybe not exhale,” says Margaret Hosie at the University of Glasgow, UK.
Experts emphasise hugging isn’t risk free and shouldn’t be routine. It should also be avoided by those in high risk groups or showing any symptoms of illness. Even so, “I believe we are at a stage of the pandemic in which we should all be able to make our own risk assessment, based on what is now known about the virus and its transmission patterns, and then act accordingly”, says David Heymann at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
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By Michael Marshall
A hunting kit used by the San people and thought to be 150 years old
Marlize Lombard (with permission

Hunter-gatherers in Africa may have been using poison-tipped arrows for more than 70,000 years, according to a new analysis of ancient arrowheads.
This would be the oldest known use of poison arrows in the world, says Marlize Lombard of the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.
In southern Africa, Kalahari San people have used poison-tipped arrows to hunt for thousands of years. They often obtain poisons from the intestines of the larvae of Diamphidia leaf beetles. But it isn’t … More

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Some early European farmers seem to have been much better off than others
Chelsea Budd/Umeå University

A wealth gap may have existed far earlier than we thought, providing insight into the lives of some of Europe’s earliest farmers.
Chelsea Budd at Umeå University in Sweden and her colleagues analysed the 6600-year-old grave sites of the Osłonki community in Poland, to try to determine whether wealth inequality existed in these ancient societies.
The team first found that a quarter of the population was buried with expensive copper beads, pendants and headbands. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that these people were richer during their lifetimes.

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“The items could simply have been a performance by the surviving family members,” says Budd. “It could be used to mitigate the processes surrounding death or even to promote their own social status.”
Budd and her colleagues therefore analysed the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in bones from the graves, which can give an insight into the quality of diet during life. “The human skeleton is an independent archive,” says Budd. “It can’t be influenced.”

The team examined the bones of 30 people who lived within 200 years of each other, looking at 29 adults – aged between 18 and 45 – and one child. About 80 per cent of the bones found in the area belonged to cattle, and the group analysed those too.
Those buried with copper had a distinctive balance of carbon isotope ratios in their bones. The researchers found that this unusual balance was also seen in a subset of cattle bones found in the area, which suggests that the people buried with copper ate meat from these animals.
Budd’s team speculate that the cattle in question may have grazed on productive, brightly lit open pastures, because plants growing in such pastures would have similarly enriched carbon isotope values. This isotopic balance isn’t seen in plants that grow in less productive tree-shaded pastures. This suggests people buried with copper had access to lands and livestock that their counterparts didn’t.

Budd speculates that this could be linked to different levels of land ownership and wealth. Moreover, because these isotopic shifts were found in multiple generations and farming land is often inherited, Budd suggests the wealth gap may have been passed down.
“We’ve never found such inequalities in this period before,” she says.
“Rich graves do not necessarily mean rich people in any time period,” says Mark Pearce at the University of Nottingham, UK. “But this method provides an excellent proxy way of demonstrating the existence of social differences.”
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.102
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By Jason Arunn Murugesu
The box was discovered in Lake Titicaca
Helder Hugo

This 500-year-old stone box of Inca offerings was found by divers in the Bolivian half of Lake Titicaca. It contains a miniature llama made from mollusc shell and a cylindrical gold foil thought to be a tiny version of an Incan bracelet.
Christophe Delaere at Free University of Brussels in Belgium and his colleagues think the box and its contents were part of a human sacrifice offering to the lake, as similar pairings of objects have been found in areas associated with Incan sacrifices. “This discovery extends the concept of ‘sacrality’ to the entire lake,” says Delaere.
The Incas ruled large parts of South America from the early 13th century until the Spanish invaded in the late 1500s. Underwater offerings were mentioned in books by Spanish colonisers, but no intact artefacts have been found until now.
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2020.121
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By Donna Lu
We finally know where most of Stonehenge’s sarsen stones came from
Andre Pattenden (English Heritag

The origins of the giant boulders at Stonehenge have long been a mystery – but now we have uncovered where they came from.
David Nash at the University of Brighton in the UK and his colleagues have identified the source of 50 of the 52 large boulders, known as sarsens, that make up the monument’s iconic stone circle.
By analysing the stones’ chemical composition, the team has traced their origins to 25 kilometres away from the monument, in the West Woods in Wiltshire.

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The sarsens comprise Stonehenge’s outer circle as well as a horseshoe-shaped inner ring. Many are in trilithons: two vertical stones topped with a horizontal lintel.
Stonehenge also contains smaller rocks, known as bluestones, near its centre, the origins of which have previously been traced to Wales.
The researchers analysed the chemistry of the sarsens via a technique called portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, essentially a handheld X-ray gun. With this, they took five readings at different positions for each stone.

This revealed that 50 sarsens shared a common chemistry, containing more than 99 per cent silica, with trace elements including aluminium, calcium and iron.
“Two, much to our surprise, were different to that main cluster, but also different to each other,” says Nash. This suggests they have two separate origins.

Next, the researchers analysed a fragment of stone, taken from a collapsed sarsen when it was re-erected in 1958, to obtain a geochemical breakdown of the rock. They used this to sample areas of similar stone across southern Britain.
The site in the West Woods, one of six the team sampled in the Marlborough Downs, turned up with a match. “We didn’t expect we would ever find the original source area,” says Nash.
Identifying the origins of the sarsens opens up the possibility of future archaeological research into the routes they may have been transported to Stonehenge, says Nash.
The origins of the other two sarsens have yet to be identified.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abc0133
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Alice Winocour’s new film Proxima shows the difficulties of balancing family life with a career as an astronaut, finds Simon Ings

Humans 29 July 2020
By Simon Ings
Astronaut Sarah Loreau (Eva Green) prepares to leave Earth in Proxima
Dharamsala & Darius films

Proxima
Alice Winocour

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In UK cinemas from 31 July
THE year before Apollo 11’s successful mission to the moon, Robert Altman directed James Caan and Robert Duvall in Countdown. The 1968 film stuck to the technology of its day, pumping up the drama with a somewhat outlandish mission plan: astronaut Lee Stegler and his shelter pod are sent to the moon’s surface on separate flights and Stegler must find the shelter once he lands if he is to survive.
The film played host to characters you might conceivably bump into at the supermarket: the astronauts, engineers and bureaucrats have families and everyday troubles not so very different from your own.
Proxima is Countdown for the 21st century. Sarah Loreau, an astronaut played brilliantly by Eva Green, is given a last-minute opportunity to join a Mars precursor mission to the International Space Station. Loreau’s training and preparation are impressively captured on location at European Space Agency facilities in Cologne, Germany – with a cameo from French astronaut Thomas Pesquet – and in Star City, the complex outside Moscow that is home to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center. She is ultimately headed to launch from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.
Comparing Proxima with Countdown shows how much both cinema and the space community have changed in the past half-century. There are archaeological traces of action-hero melodramatics in Proxima, but they are the least satisfying parts of the movie. Eva Green is a credible astronaut and a good mother, pushed to extremes on both fronts and painfully aware that she chose this course for herself. She can’t be all things to all people all of the time and, as she learns, there is no such thing as perfect.

Because Proxima is arriving late – its launch was delayed by the covid-19 lockdown – advances in space technology have already somewhat gazzumped Georges Lechaptois’s metliculous location cinematography. I came to the film still reeling from watching the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour lift off from Kennedy Space Center on 20 May.
That crewed launch was the first of its kind from US soil since NASA’s space shuttle was retired in 2011 and looked, from the comfort of my sofa, about as eventful as a ride in an airport shuttle bus. So it was hard to take seriously those moments in Proxima when taking off from our planet’s surface is made the occasion for an existential crisis. “You’re leaving Earth!” exclaims family psychologist Wendy (Sandra Hüller) at one point, thoroughly earning the look of contempt that Loreau shoots at her.
Proxima‘s end credits include endearing shots of real-life female astronauts with their very young children – which does raise a bit of a problem. The plot largely focuses on the impact of bringing your child to work when you spend half your day in a spacesuit at the bottom of a swimming pool. “Cut the cord!” cries the absurdly chauvinistic NASA astronaut Mike Shannon (Matt Dillon) when Loreau has to go chasing after her young daughter.
Yet here is photographic evidence that suggests Loreau’s real-life counterparts – Yelena Kondakova, Ellen Ochoa, Cady Coleman and Naoko Yamazaki – managed perfectly well on multiple missions without all of Proxima‘s turmoil. Wouldn’t we have been better off seeing the realities they faced rather than watching Loreau, in the film’s final moments, break Baikonur’s safety protocols in order to steal a feel-good, audience-pandering mother-daughter moment?
For half a century, movies have struggled to keep up with the rapidly changing realities of the space sector. Proxima, though interesting and boasting a tremendous central performance from Green, proves to be no more relevant than its forebears.
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