Humans

By Ian Morse
Foliage colour might help forensic researchers locate decomposing bodies
Evgenii Parilov / Alamy

Plants may be able to help investigators find dead bodies. Botanists believe the sudden flush of nutrients into the soil from decomposition may have an impact on nearby foliage. If scientists can understand those changes – for instance, the effect they have on leaf colour – they may be able to identify where remains are buried simply by studying foliage features in aerial images.
“If we’re able to use the plants as sensors, at least first as indicators or crude indicators, we can identify whether a missing body may … More

Most psychology studies involve people living in Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic societies. But the peculiarities of WEIRD thinking are far from universal

Humans 2 September 2020
By Dan Jones

Rocio Montoya

HOW does the culture we live in influence our psychology, motivation and decision making? Joe Henrich was a cultural anthropologist working in the Amazon when he first tried to find out. He pioneered the use of experimental cooperation games like the prisoner’s dilemma and the ultimatum game outside the lab. Later, he realised that his findings have big implications for psychological research, which tends to focus on students from Western backgrounds. In 2010, he introduced the “WEIRD” concept to describe the unusual psychology of the subjects in the vast majority of these studies. Now professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, he tells New Scientist about the origins of WEIRDness, its impact on history and its role in the modern world.
Dan Jones: When did you realise that you, your colleagues and most of the people you teach are WEIRD?
Joe Henrich: The WEIRD label emerged from a series of lunches I started having around 2006 with two cultural psychologists, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan. We had noticed that in the behavioural sciences and psychology in particular, about 96 per cent of study participants were from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic societies – and that they were often psychological outliers in comparison with other populations. WEIRD people tend to show greater trust in strangers and fairness towards anonymous others; think more analytically rather than holistically; make more use of intentions in moral judgements; are more concerned with personality, the self and the cultivation of personal attributes; they are more individualistic and less loyal to their group; and they are more likely to judge the behaviour of … More

Real-life accounts of International Space Station crew members Samantha Cristoforetti and Terry Virts capture the extraordinarily ordinary life of an astronaut

Space 2 September 2020
By David Silverberg
Samantha Cristoforetti went from being a fighter pilot to an ISS astronaut
ESA/NASA

FROM experiencing the sublime beauty of the blue planet through the porthole of a spacecraft to worrying about what happens if someone dies onboard, everyone wants to know what it is like to be an astronaut. It is, after all, quite literally like nothing on Earth.
New books by two fighter pilots who set out to discover how much of “the right … More

Watch
Away stars Hilary Swank as an astronaut leaving her husband and daughter to lead a mission to Mars. This Netflix sci-fi series is inspired by an article in Esquire about a mission of astronaut Scott Kelly.

Read
Written in Bone by forensic anthropologist Sue Black shows how the skeletons we leave behind us can be read for clues about virtually everything we eat and do, and everywhere we travel. Every bone has a tale to tell.

Advertisement

Myriam Ménard/Ars Electronica

Visit
In Kepler’s Gardens is Ars Electronica’s bullish response to the covid-19 lockdown: a festival “measuring the new world” online and (where possible) in real life at 120 global locations, from Tokyo to Los Angeles.
More on these topics: More

So Hot Right Now podcast looks to David Attenborough and Ellie Goulding in bid to make climate crisis more real for millions and push it up the media agenda

Humans 2 September 2020
By Anna Turns
Hosts Lucy Siegle and Tom Mustill talk to influential guests on climate
Zoë Law

Podcast
So Hot Right Now
12 episodes, all podcast providers

Advertisement

THE way that we communicate the climate crisis needs a rethink, from the language used in daily conversations to the frequency it makes front page headlines.
The So Hot Right Now podcast goes to the heart of the issue. Far from detailing climate science, species extinctions or innovative technical fixes, the show questions the status quo and shares refreshing insight from experts, campaigners and front-line presenters.
“We tend to focus on gaps in our climate science knowledge and there’s so much to learn, but what people are less alert to is this massive gap in coverage and that’s hampering our chances of mainstreaming these topics. We need more airtime, more screen time for climate and nature,” says co-host, journalist Lucy Siegle. “We’re pushing the agenda, uncovering the barriers and exploring why the gatekeepers are not opening the gates, but also speaking to some of our heroes and asking them ‘what should we do?’.”
Siegle and wildlife film-maker Tom Mustill interview A-list guests such as Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, UN climate negotiator Christiana Figueres and singer Ellie Goulding, who believes activism jeopardises her job. “I lose followers [on social media] every time I post about climate change. I lose at least a thousand followers,” says Goulding during a podcast. She continues to speak up regardless.
In the first episode, David Attenborough says he has no idea why Blue Planet II sparked such an extreme public reaction to plastic pollution when he had been “plugging away” at the issue for years. “Suddenly, there was an unprecedented response, possibly down to the scheduling or the mood of the nation. Audiences are very hard to predict,” he says.

Successful communication hinges on finding new avenues of storytelling that connect us to the natural world. As BBC Springwatch presenter Gillian Burke concludes in a later episode: “I’m really starting to play with the language, storytelling, identity and labels. If we’re looking at the climate crisis through the lens of an Aboriginal person in Australia, how will that story be different? Language for me is a gateway to revealing more about the way we see the world.”
Nuance exists in every word we use, suggests Siegle: “If language is too comfortable, it can minimise threat and the need for action, it can sometimes be downright dismissive or it can be too technical, forgetting that we respond to emotion, or it can be too emotional and not precise enough.” Or, as Mustill adds, “it can be really boring. Part of the aim of communication is surely to entertain. No one wants to be a climate bore.”
With a curious yet informal tone, some episodes last more than an hour and might work better as shorter, more finely tuned pieces. But there are no set rules and So Hot Right Now embraces the freedom to be experimental.
At times, the hosts seem starstruck (David Attenborough is thanked repeatedly for all he has done to inspire generations) but, generally, Siegle and Mustill enthusiastically arm listeners with a toolkit of useful strategies to articulate big ideas about climate and trigger more discussions.
Whether you are addressing world leaders about the environment, connecting with social media followers about the issue or arguing with relatives about it, So Hot Right Now is well worth a listen.
More on these topics: More

Star Trek, which began in 1966, is experiencing an extraordinary renaissance in the year 2020. Is this a golden age for the show, asks Emily Wilson

Humans 2 September 2020
By Emily Wilson
Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Spock (Ethan Peck) in Star Trek: Discovery
Jan Thijs/CBS

Star Trek
Various

Advertisement

THE very first episode of Star Trek, entitled The Man Trap, aired on 8 September 1966. Right from the start, all the key ingredients of Star Trek were there: an alien planet with air that was perfectly OK to breathe and strange lumps of rock on its surface that are good to hide behind in a firefight; very closely fitted colour-blocked uniforms; a key gang of ship’s officers, including the captain, the Vulcan and the ship’s doctor; and, of course, a really big spaceship, with that lift leading down from the bridge to the other decks.
There are a few things in that first show that have since disappeared, such as female crew members wearing skirts so short they barely covered their bottoms. But all the elements of Star Trek‘s success were present in that story about an alien that killed people because it was badly short of salt.
What no one working on the show back then could possibly have imagined is that 54 years later, and in a very different world, Star Trek would not only still be in production, but that it would be thriving and, indeed, multiplying. Whether or not this is a new golden age of Star Trek is for each fan to decide for themselves, but it is certainly an exciting period of renaissance.
“Star Trek: Lower Decks, I’m informed by a US colleague, is ‘being watched by all the cool people’”
My personal favourite of the crop of new series is Star Trek: Discovery, which kicked off in 2017. Discovery was the first new Star Trek TV series since Star Trek: Enterprise ended in 2005. It centres around science specialist Michael Burnham, played brilliantly by Sonequa Martin-Green. Burnham is largely sombre and angst-ridden, and yet you end up not only rooting for her but caring about her.

The rest of the show is rammed full of great ideas as well as other strong characters, including the fabulous Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou in a role that warps in very interesting ways as the show goes on. The second season came out late last year, and the third is due to be released this October, and if that happens, hurray!
Elsewhere in this renaissance is Star Trek: Picard, which was released in January, with Patrick Stewart reprising the role he played in Star Trek: The Next Generation (a hugely popular iteration of the franchise that ended in 1994). Picard is a slower show than Discovery and, in my view, is less successful as a piece of storytelling, but it isn’t without its pleasures. A second and third season are on their way.
Then there is Star Trek: Lower Decks, an adult animated series that is only available to watch in North America right now. I am informed by a US colleague that it is “being watched by all the cool people”.
These three are only one part of the new wave of Star Trek, though. So much more is coming, including, apparently, a live-action show based around Yeoh’s rumbustious character in Discovery that is tentatively titled Section 31.
All these new shows harness the very best modern effects and all the narrative tricks learned from the masters of binge-watchable TV, and the Star Trek franchise has definitely come a long way since The Man Trap.
But the latest shows remain, indubitably, Star Trek. At their heart, there is still a bunch of people in tight uniforms, on a big spaceship, visiting alien worlds and taking with them Star Trek‘s particular brand of tolerance and hope. What’s not to like about that?

Emily also recommends…
TV
Stargate SG-1
Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner
The Stargate franchise has a central simplicity to it that is quite Star Trek: humans going forth to strange new worlds to find and help others. It was kicked off by the 1994 film Stargate and now has a number of massive spin-off shows. For me, the 10 seasons of SG-1 are the main event. Aliens, jokes, great characters, pyramid ships, intergalactic narrative arcs – the show has everything.

More on these topics: More

Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX
Watch
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a time-looped psychological horror from cinema’s greatest living magician, Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). It will be on Netflix from 4 September.

Read
Net Zero: How we stop causing climate change sees economist Dieter Helm arguing that a carbon pricing system – one that applies to everything from flights to farming to food – is the only fair and sustainable way out of the climate crisis.
Listen
Science for the People, a long-running interview radio show and podcast, devotes a recent instalment to Eva Holland discussing her book Nerve: Adventures in the science of fear, inspired by her own traumas and phobias.
More on these topics: More

John Was Trying to Contact Aliens is a 16-minute film that brilliantly captures the eccentric 1970s world of UFO hunter John Shepherd, who built kit to hunt aliens, playing jazz and reggae to lure them

Humans 26 August 2020
By Simon Ings
Beyond the UFO folk hero, Shepherd emerges as both sad and inspiring
Courtesy of Netflix

John Was Trying to Contact Aliens
Matthew Killip

Advertisement

Netflix
YOU have to admire Netflix’s ambition. As well as producing Oscar-winning short documentaries of its own (The White Helmets won in 2017; Period. End of Sentence. won in 2019), the streaming giant makes a regular effort to bring festival-winning factual films to a global audience.
The latest is John Was Trying to Contact Aliens by New York-based UK director Matthew Killip, which won the Jury Award for a non-fiction short film at this year’s Sundance festival in Utah. In little over 15 minutes, it manages to turn the story of John Shepherd, an eccentric inventor who spent 30 years trying to contact extraterrestrials by broadcasting music millions of kilometres into space, into a tear-jerker of epic (indeed, cosmological) proportions.
Never much cared for by his parents, Shepherd was brought up by adoptive grandparents in rural Michigan. A fan of classic science-fiction shows like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, Shepherd never could shake off the impression that a UFO sighting made on him as a child, and in 1972 the 21-year-old set about designing and constructing electronic equipment to launch a private search for extraterrestrial intelligence. His first set-up, built around an ultra-low frequency radio transmitter, soon expanded to fill over 100 square metres of his long-suffering grandparents’ home. It also acquired an acronym: Project STRAT – Special Telemetry Research And Tracking.
“In 1972, 21-year-old John Shepherd set about building equipment to hunt for extraterrestrials”

A two-storey high, 1000-watt, 60,000-volt, deep-space radio transmitter required a house extension – and all so Shepherd could beam jazz, reggae, Afro-pop and German electronica into the sky for hours every day, in the hope any passing aliens would be intrigued enough to come calling. He could also monitor any returning signals and UFOs.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Killip to play up Shepherd’s eccentricity. Until now, Shepherd has been a folk hero in UFO-hunting circles. His photo portrait, surrounded by bizarre broadcasting kit of his own design, appears in Douglas Curren’s In Advance of the Landing: Folk concepts of outer space – the book TV producer Chris Carter says he raided for the first six episodes of his series The X-Files.
Instead, Killip listens closely to Shepherd, discovers the romance, courage and loneliness of his life, and shapes it into a paean to our ability to out-imagine our circumstances and overreach our abilities. There is something heartbreakingly sad, as well as inspiring, about the way Killip pairs Shepherd’s lonely travails in snow-bound Michigan with footage, assembled by teams of who knows how many hundreds, from the archives of NASA.
Shepherd ran out of money for his project in 1998, and having failed to make a connection with ET, quickly found a life-changing connection much closer to home.
I won’t spoil the moment, but I can’t help but notice that, as a film-maker, Killip likes these sorts of structures. In one of his earlier works, The Lichenologist, about Kerry Knudsen, curator of lichens at the University of California, Riverside, Knudsen spends most of the movie staring at very small things before we are treated to the money shot: Knudsen perched on top of a mountain, whipped by the wind and explaining how his youthful psychedelic experiences inspired a lifetime of intense visual study. It is a shot that changes the meaning of the whole film.

Simon also recommends…
Films
The Diatomist (2014)
Matthew Killip
An introduction to Klaus Kemp, whose fascination with German microscopist J. D. Möller inspired him to recreate the Victorian art of arranging diatoms in extraordinary patterns.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Steven Spielberg
Ufology was a global phenomenon by the time this blockbuster arrived. Countless imitations followed, but none with the charm and sincerity of the original.

More on these topics: More