Humans

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.
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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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Big data’s power is revealed by two books covering a cold-war version of Cambridge Analytica that helped John F. Kennedy get elected-and how modern social media can rig votes today

Technology 21 October 2020
By Vijaysree Venkatraman
John F. Kennedy campaigning in Mayville, Wisconsin, in March 1960
Stan Wayman/The Life Picture Collection Via Getty Images

IN SEPTEMBER 2016, Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, told an audience in New York about the power of big data in global elections. Know the personality of the people you target, and “you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively” with … More

Pepe the Frog ended up as the darling of both anarchists and the alt-right. A documentary tells the surprising true story of the super-meme and its creator

Technology 21 October 2020
By Elle Hunt
Pepe the Frog has had many incarnations, from beatific to fascistic
Feel Good Man

Feels Good ManArthur JonesReady Fictions, streaming; BBC 4 Storyville, 26 October
OVER 25 years of the internet, memes have evolved from a one-note online sight gag – a dancing baby, say, or a cat with an irreverent caption in Impact font – to a muscular means of communication, capable of nuance and complex irony.
Yet no meme has had as strange and storied a journey as Pepe the Frog. The laid-back amphibian from cartoonist Matt Furie’s cult hit Boy’s Club was wrested from that context … More

Black Box is an intelligent and melancholy sci-fi film in which a man who loses his memory in a car crash takes extreme steps to get his life back, writes Simon Ings

Humans 21 October 2020
By Simon Ings
Nolan (Mamoudou Athie) turns to Lillian (Phylicia Rashad) for help
Courtesy of Amazon Studios

Black BoxEmmanuel Osei-Kuffour Amazon Prime
NOLAN is trying to put his life back together after a car accident robbed him of his wife and his memory. His daughter Ava has to steer him about, though she is barely old enough for school. She encourages him to reapply for his old job. She sets the satnav for the supermarket. Three times now, Nolan (Mamoudou Athie) has forgotten to pick Ava (Amanda Christine) up from school. It is more than possible that he sometimes forgets her … More

By Chelsea Whyte
Donald Trump signs an executive order on energy and infrastructure
Evan Vucci/AP/Shutterstock

AS US President Donald Trump prepares to face the ballot box in the hopes of winning a second term, his handling of the coronavirus pandemic will be at the forefront of voters’ minds. But Trump’s impact on health, space and environment policy during his time in office also warrants examining.
In the past four years, Trump has promised to reverse environmental regulations and climate change policy, to repeal and replace his predecessor Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare policy and to revive the fortunes of NASA. Has he succeeded?
A … More

By Donna Lu
Was Homo erectus driven extinct by climate change?
The Natural History Museum/Alamy

Sudden climatic changes may have been a significant driver of the extinction of early human species.
Pasquale Raia at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and his colleagues have used climate modelling and fossil records to determine the effect climate change had on the survival of the species in our Homo genus.
The researchers used a database of 2754 archaeological records of the remains of several species alive over the past 2.5 million years, including Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens.

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They cross-referenced these records with a climate emulator, which modelled temperature, rainfall and other weather data over the past 5 million years. The aim was to determine the climatic niche for each species – a range of conditions including temperature and precipitation that are optimal for survival – and how widely distributed the niche area was through time.
The team found that H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis all lost a significant portion of their climatic niche area just before they became extinct.

“Species are good at surviving when they have a large area at their disposal to live in,” says Raia. But when liveable areas decrease and the result is small patches that are geographically isolated from each other, species enter what is known as an extinction vortex.
The reductions in liveable area resulted from sudden climatic changes, the team found. H. erectus, for example, went extinct during the last glacial period, which began about 115,000 years ago. The researchers suggest this was the coldest period the species had ever experienced.
The team found that for the Neanderthals, competition with H. sapiens was also a factor, but that even without the presence of our species the effect of climate change alone may have been enough to lead to extinction. Even species with the ability to control their local environment – such as by wearing clothes or creating fires – were susceptible to the effects of climate change, says Raia.

But gaps in data may compromise the certainty of the conclusion that climate change was the primary extinction driver, say researchers who weren’t involved in the study.

Aside from Neanderthals, there is scarcely any fossil evidence for the other species studied, says Bernard Wood at George Washington University in Washington DC. “Individuals belonging to these taxa lived at times, and in places, not sampled by the existing fossil record,” he says.
“Plus, the first appearance date of a taxon almost certainly underestimates when a taxon appeared, and its last appearance date almost certainly underestimates when a taxon became extinct,” he says.
As species approach extinction, regardless of the cause – whether it be competition, being hunted or breeding problems – their range necessarily declines, says Corey Bradshaw at Flinders University in Australia. If a species’ range was already in decline, that could give the false impression that the climate niche area was also declining, he says.
“No species that we know of has ever gone extinct from a single mechanism. It’s always a combination,” says Bradshaw. “For example, in the case of many megafauna species in the late Pleistocene, it’s coming to light that there were a lot of interaction effects between human hunting and climate change.”
Journal reference: One Earth, DOI: 10.1016/j.oneear.2020.09.007
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