Humans

By Michael Le Page
The human population of Santiago Island is evolving rapidly
Peter Adams/Getty Images

Yes, we are still evolving. And one of the strongest examples of recent evolution in people has been found on the Cape Verde islands in the Atlantic, where a gene variant conferring a form of malaria resistance has become more common.
Portuguese voyagers settled the uninhabited islands in 1462, bringing slaves from Africa with them. Most of the archipelago’s half a million inhabitants are descended from these peoples.
Most people of West African origin have a variant in a gene called DARC that protects against … More

By Douglas Heingartner
Emergency sirens and wolf howls are acoustically alike
Glenn Nagel / Alamy

There is an uncanny similarity between wolf howls and emergency sirens. The sound of a siren might be effective because we evolved to be alerted by howls, suggest researchers.
Hynek Burda at the Czech University of Life Sciences and his colleagues compared several dozen recordings of wolf howls with the sounds made by various emergency sirens, such as those on ambulances and in tornado-warning systems. Their analysis looked at the most important acoustic components of these sounds – for example their initial and closing frequencies or how … More

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How to Make the World Add Up has economist and broadcaster Tim Harford delve into the misuse of numbers in politics, journalism and PR in a live-streamed talk from the Royal Institution. Tune in at 7pm BST on 22 September.

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The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy sees University of Cambridge scientist Arik Kershenbaum explore how we can learn more about the possibilities for life and culture in unexpected corners of the universe by observing animals closer to home.

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mckinsey-live Sustainable Fashion is one of a series of webinars organised by consulting … More

A harmful political conspiracy theory is now embracing science denial. Combating it is important, but it won’t be easy, writes Graham Lawton

Humans | Comment 16 September 2020
By Graham Lawton

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

AS THE weeks and months of covid-19 drag on, I have found myself dragged into an increasingly bewildering and frightening conspiracy theory. I am no conspiracy theorist myself, unless you count the belief that much of the world is currently run by buffoons. When I first heard of QAnon, I filed it alongside “flat Earth” as an infuriating but essentially harmless fringe belief. But the more I learn about it, the more worried I become that it could kill off any chance we have of emerging from the pandemic into a greener, more enlightened world. … More

Ratched review: Netflix show fails with stereotypes of mental health Netflix’s thriller about Nurse Ratched does well to remove much of the misogyny present in the book and film that created her, but it also peddles harmful stereotypes about mental health

Humans 16 September 2020
By Bethan Ackerley
Nurse Ratched (Sarah Paulson) setting out on a path to villainy
Courtesy of Netflix

Ratched
Evan Romansky
Netflix
“SHE likes a rigged game,” says Randle McMurphy, the belligerent anti-hero of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. McMurphy is talking about his nemesis, Nurse Ratched, the sadistic overseer of a psychiatric hospital ward – and one of fiction’s most terrifying villains.
Netflix’s new TV series Ratched is a prequel to that iconic 1975 film, which was based on a 1960s novel by Ken Kesey. It promises to delve into the eponymous nurse’s psyche to explore the origins of … More

Your walk is as unique as your fingerprint and harder to hide than your face. Now governments and companies are waking up to the power of gait analysis

Technology 16 September 2020
By David Adam

Science History Images/Alamy

LIAM GALLAGHER, formerly of the band Oasis, tends to stroll with a roll to his shoulders. John Wayne’s slow swagger has been linked to everything from a misaligned leg to small feet. Some say Vladimir Putin’s distinctive shuffle is thanks to KGB weapons training that encouraged operatives to dampen the swing of one arm to keep it closer to their gun.
Considering that walking is such an everyday function of a bipedal species, it is incredible that we find so many different ways to do it. Perhaps that’s why our gaits – and what they say about us – are so fascinating. It takes dozens of muscles working together throughout the body to put one foot in front of the other. These subtle patterns of muscular flexes and strains are highly distinctive, so much so that scientists who study gait increasingly believe they are as unique to you as your fingerprint.
Gait analysis has been around for years, but now it is going mainstream. China is using it to track its citizens. Transport companies want to use it to identify ticket holders. Doctors say an analysis of your strides might provide an early hint of health problems. But is this technology on a solid footing? And is it offering a step in the right direction or is it merely another worrisome invasion of our biometric privacy?
We have watched other people walk for centuries. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to pay attention, but no one was more obsessed with the subject than the 19th-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac. He peppered his books … More

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Your brain determines your perception of time
YANDONG LIU / Alamy

Time may sometimes seem slower than it is because part of our brain becomes fatigued.
“One might have experienced this manipulation after hearing music with fast tempo,” says Masamichi Hayashi at Osaka University in Japan. “The next song with a slightly slower tempo will feel even slower.”
Using a similar method of manipulation, Hayashi and his colleagues wanted to determine if there was a neural basis for our subjective sense of time. They focused their efforts on the brain’s supramarginal gyrus (SMG) after reading reports on how … More

We can’t extract DNA from some of the most perplexing ancient human fossils. But ancient proteins sometimes survive better, and they are finally starting to give up their secrets

Life 9 September 2020
By Colin Barras

Marina Loeb

IT WAS an astonishing discovery: a chamber deep underground, packed full of ancient human remains. The excavators who uncovered the fossils at South Africa’s Rising Star cave in 2013 described the experience as “breathtaking” and “emotional”. Then they took a proper look at the bones, and exhilaration gave way to bewilderment. This new species of ancient human, which the researchers called Homo naledi, had such an odd combination of primitive and modern features that it was impossible to know how it was related to other ancient humans and, ultimately, to us.
About 20 years ago, it looked like the human evolutionary tree was coming into focus. Then palaeontologists started finding ancient humans, like H. naledi, that are so strange, it is as if they had walked off the pages of a Tolkien fantasy. We can’t expect ancient DNA to help resolve their place in the human family tree because most of these misfit cousins were found in places too warm for genetic material to survive. The trail seemed to have gone cold.
In the past few years, however, we have learned to read the signals in other organic molecules that tend to survive longer than DNA and persist even in warm environments. Researchers have already analysed samples of proteins extracted from ancient bones and teeth to reveal relationships between ancient mammals. Now, some think they could reveal how archaic humans like H. naledi evolved and interacted. “I’m confident that it will be possible to put some of these very unusual hominins on the [family] tree,” says Matthew Collins at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
Human hybrids … More