Humans

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Unknown Origins sees a murderer recreate superhero origin stories in an entertaining caper set in Madrid. During production, comic fans mobbed its comic-book store set, thinking it was real. On Netflix from 28 August.
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Terra Incognita by Ian Goldin and Robert Muggah features “100 maps to survive the next 100 years”, showing how people, cities, wars, climates and technology are changing Earth.

Leonardo Santamaria for NPR

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Invisibilia tells sumptuously produced tales of scientific wonder as Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin explore the hidden forces shaping our behaviours, ideas and beliefs in this NPR podcast.
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A film about electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla makes interesting creative choices, such as imagining an alternative future. But it spends too much time focusing on Thomas Edison

Humans 19 August 2020
By Bethan Ackerley
Tesla leaves you more interested in Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan)
IFC FILMS

Tesla
Michael Almereyda
Out 21 August

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TO MANY, Nikola Tesla is a folk hero. He is a steady fixture in science fiction, and his role in the war over whether alternating or direct current should be used to transmit electricity in the late 19th century has cemented him in the popular imagination as a slayer of giants. Take that, Thomas Edison.
In Tesla, director Michael Almereyda makes hay out of that war and other events from the visionary inventor’s life, but not without including a few fantastical turns of his own.
The film begins with Tesla (Ethan Hawke) working at Edison Machine Works, where he butts heads with his employer over funding. Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) is bullish and xenophobic, asking Tesla, who was born in what is now Croatia, if he has ever eaten human flesh.
The depictions of Edison’s attempts to discredit alternating current, from using it to kill animals in public demonstrations to the botched electrocution of a prisoner, is well-trodden ground for people familiar with his ruthlessness.
Yet the film achieves more nuance in its brief flashes of Edison’s personal life than it ever does with Tesla’s. A biopic that leaves you more interested in the subject’s rival has gone wrong somewhere.

Part of this failure comes from the moments that the film prioritises. Tesla’s poverty after leaving Edison’s firm and being swindled by his own business partners is mentioned only briefly, for instance, in favour of repetitive demonstrations of his induction motor that have none of the visual dynamism such a revolutionary invention deserves. “No sparks,” one observer notes.
“Tesla’s poverty after leaving Edison’s firm and being swindled is mentioned only briefly”
The story is periodically interrupted by Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), the daughter of one of Edison’s principal investors, who sits with a laptop and offers up pithy, fourth-wall-breaking context.
The film is also peppered with farcical metaphors, including ice-cream fights, rollerblading accidents and even an anachronistic rendition of Everybody Wants To Rule The World.
While these choices confuse as often as they delight, it is fitting for a Tesla biopic to take risks and display such imagination. One poignant scene asks us to envisage a world in which Edison apologises to Tesla and suggests a partnership. What could Tesla have achieved with the commercial guidance of “an enlightened hustler” like Edison?
Hawke plays Tesla as a morose workaholic, bristling with social discomfort. Though there is a degree of truth in that portrayal, Tesla was reportedly well-liked when he did socialise and had a variety of interests, with one contemporary describing him as “a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink”.
Such qualities are barely touched on, save for a sequence in which he is deeply moved by actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan), who becomes a figure of fascination. It is in his interactions with her that Hawke is finally given something to do; Bernhardt witnesses Tesla’s humiliation at the hands of Edison and the shame breaks through his taciturn shell.
Ultimately, the film rarely finds the will to be interested in the man Tesla actually was. Coupled with its incoherent – if striking – aesthetic, this means Tesla too often feels like an empty frame, or a motor without the power to keep it running.
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What do we risk by expanding recklessly into the multiverse? Stephen Baxter’s World Engines series is gripping but frustrating, says Sally Adee

Humans 19 August 2020
By Sally Adee
Why do we risk so much in the hope of colonising space?
Gorodenkoff/Getty Images

REID MALENFANT wakes up from a cryogenic coma in the year 2469. It was 2019 when he crashed a space shuttle and entered medical deep freeze, just as Earth’s citizens were taking their first steps to colonise the solar system. The world he wakes in 450 years later is unrecognisable. We burned all our fossil fuels for the space race and the consequences are in full bloom: London, New York, Florida and many coastal areas are drowned, and the planet is tropical.
Those are just the cosmetic changes in World Engines: Destroyer, the first in Stephen Baxter’s series. The human project has ended – we retreated from the solar system, recognising our inability to thrive outside our biosphere. We retreated on Earth too, with a population fallen below 100 million, both as a result of centuries-long destruction and as a way to let nature heal.
As Malenfant digs deeper, though, he discovers another contributing factor. A solar system-rending cataclysm has been foreseen in about 1000 years, so Earth is in a period of managed decline. It isn’t a bad existence for the people. There is no pollution and no waste, with every car, cup and plate made to last generations. Universal basic income (UBI) means no one is poor. People still have children. But there is no drive to do more than exist in this Eden.
“In one universe, Richard Nixon created a Star Trek-like programme that had boots on Mars by 2005”
Yet the 25th century woke up Malenfant for a reason, of course. That reason takes him to the Martian moon Phobos, which has been displaying idiosyncracies that turn out to be a hatch to other universes. By the end of the first book, Malenfant has set out to discover who built the portal and what kind of entities play snooker with entire solar systems.
It is these questions that are addressed in the second book, World Engines: Creator, and their answers leave deeper questions about humanity’s relentless obsession with expansion. What do we risk by embarking recklessly into the solar system, the universe or even the multiverse? What is this impulse to colonise? Are the only choices eternal expansion or managed decline?
Many readers may have given up on the first book after some 200 pages because of Malenfant, a jerk ripped straight from the pages of 1960s sci-fi at its most toxically masculine. But the clue is in the name. Soldier on and it is clear that Baxter has written Malenfant to reflect our current condition as a species: selfish, greedy and full of toxic individualism.
As Malenfant begins to evolve, the books hit their stride, asking questions that telescope out into brain-exploding territory. Baxter has an encyclopedic knowledge of early space and military history that he remixes into delightful mash-ups. In one universe, instead of sinking in the Watergate scandal, US president Richard Nixon set up UBI, leading the world to follow suit – and to the creation of a Star Trek-like space programme that had boots on Mars by 2005.

In another, Winston Churchill is ousted by his opposition rival, Neville Chamberlain. This creates a British-led dominance of space in steampunk space behemoths, spreading diamond-cut accents and Victorian repression.
Other books have grappled with our place in the multiverse, but few have Baxter’s vision and ability to work at very different scales. World Engines: Creator isn’t always evenly paced, gets bogged down in science pedantry and can be exasperatingly opaque at times, but I am crossing my fingers for a third book.

Sally also recommends…
Book/Comic
The Space Between Worlds
Micaiah Johnson’s stunning debut is impossible to put down. It nails the stakes of the multiverse and employs a beautiful character transformation arc.
The Number of the Beast
Robert A. Heinlein’s book is the first and best in this genre.
Infinite Vacation
Nick Spencer’s comic world puts alternate versions of you up for sale. You choose the version you prefer that day, but there is always a price.

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While keen surfers take to the waves around Fukushima, plans are under way to dump contaminated water from the damaged nuclear power plant into the sea

Humans 19 August 2020
By Gege Li

Laura Liverani

PhotographerLaura Liverani
Agency Prospekt Photographers

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THIS surfer is one of many hoping to catch the waves at Kitaizumi beach in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture. The coastal spot was once hailed as a surfer’s paradise thanks to its high waves and sandy shores. Yet it has been almost a decade since it has been able to enjoy that status.
In 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant – situated around 25 kilometres from the beach – was the site of the worst nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, after it was hit by a devastating tsunami. Kitaizumi reopened to the public in 2019 after a huge decontamination effort, and surfers are keen to see people return to the beach.
Taken by photographer Laura Liverani as part of a series called Fukushima Surfers, the image shows how the sport is making a comeback in the area. Though the building in the background is the Haramachi coal power station, not Fukushima Daiichi, the legacy of the nuclear plant still lingers.
Due to a lack of space, Japan plans to tip 1 million tonnes of contaminated water stored from the disaster – a combination of recovered groundwater and deliberately injected cooling waters – into the Pacific Ocean after it is treated. Managed properly, this shouldn’t release any harmful radioactive particles that could pass into marine sediment and fish or threaten surfers’ safe return to the sea.
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By Michael Le Page
The Border cave in South Africa
A. Kruger

People living in the Border cave in southern Africa slept on grass bedding 227,000 years ago – by far the oldest discovery of its kind.
“That’s quite close to the origin of our species,” says Lyn Wadley at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Her team has been excavating Border cave in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, which was inhabited on and off during prehistory. The peoples who lived there left many layers of deposits that have been preserved by the very dry conditions.

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Wadley’s team has found grass bedding in many of these layers, made from several species including Panicum maximum, which still grows outside the cave. The oldest layers containing the bedding are between 227,000 and 183,000 years old.
This grass bedding was often on top of ash layers. In some places these ashes are of burned grasses, suggesting people burned their old, pest-infested bedding and placed new bedding on top.

In other places, the ashes are of burned wood, suggesting ashes from wood fires were spread out and grass placed on top. This means people were deliberately putting grass bedding on ashes to deter crawling insects, says Wadley.
The team also found burned bits of camphor wood – camphor is still used as an insect repellent today. “Maybe it was burned for the smoke it creates that would repel flying insects,” says Wadley.
She has no doubt that the grasses were used for bedding. They are found only towards the sheltered rear of the cave, and often near to fireplaces. In fact, sometimes the edges of the bedding are singed.

Shards of rock mixed in with some bedding suggest people sat on the bedding as they made stone tools.
There are even bits of ochre powder in the bedding that might have rubbed off people’s skin as they slept. However, there is ochre in the roof of the cave, so the team cannot be sure it didn’t fall from the roof.
Before this discovery, the oldest-known bedding was 77,000 years old. Wadley found it at Sibudu cave, also in KwaZulu-Natal.

Her team has also found evidence of people roasting vegetables as long ago as 170,000 years. “If you want to get to the nitty-gritty of everyday life, look at plants,” says Wadley.
Her team presumes the people living in Border cave 227,000 years ago were modern humans – Homo sapiens – but cannot be sure it wasn’t another species such as Homo naledi.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abc7239

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By Michael Marshall
These cremated bones are 9000 years old
Bocquentin et al, 2020 (PLOS ONE, CC BY)

Stone Age people were cremating their dead in fire pits about 9000 years ago, in what is now Israel. The development of cremation may have been linked to a shift in their religious beliefs, away from worship of ancestors.
For tens of thousands of years, people tended to bury their dead, says Fanny Bocquentin at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris. There is also evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead about 70,000 years ago. Cremation, in which the body is intentionally burned, is a relatively recent invention.
Bocquentin and her colleagues have excavated a Stone Age village called Beisamoun in Israel. It was occupied between at least 7200 and 6400 BC.

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During the dig, they discovered a U-shaped pit, 80 centimetres across and 60 centimetres deep. The sides of the pit had been plastered with wet mud, similar to that used elsewhere in the village to make mud bricks. In the middle of the pit, the team found a large quantity of ash, which contained 355 fragments of charred human bone.
The bones all seem to belong to one individual: a young adult, whose sex couldn’t be determined. The remains have been dated to between 7030 and 6700 BC.

It isn’t clear how the person died. There was a projectile point embedded in the left shoulder blade, indicating the person had been injured, but this had healed. “It was a clean wound, no infection,” says Bocquentin.
The ash was the remains of wood that had been stacked into a pyre and burned. It isn’t clear if the body was on top of the pyre, inside it or under it.
Previous burial practices were occasionally elaborate. In some instances, people would bury a body, then they would return, dig it up and remove the skull – which they reburied in a new pit with other skulls. Sometimes they plastered the skull with lime plaster or mud, creating a new face. “It’s long funeral practices in several steps,” says Bocquentin. “You are taking care of the dead for a long period of time.” In the Stone Age village of Çatalhöyük in Turkey, bodies were buried under the floors of houses. This all indicates a reverence for ancestors and a desire to be close to them, says Bocquentin.

Cremation is much faster, says Bocquentin. “You don’t wait even for the decay process.”
This could reflect a shift in religious beliefs, suggests Bocquentin. “I would say the status of the dead and the relation between dead and living is totally different,” she says. “We might think that there are new beliefs, maybe that the dead are not as important as they were, and maybe a new kind of god appearing.”
The Beisamoun cremation is the oldest in south-west Asia, but not the oldest in the world. For instance, archaeologists have found the cremated remains of a child from 11,500 years ago in Alaska. It isn’t clear how many times cremation was independently invented, says Bocquentin.
Journal reference: PLoS One , DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0235386
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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans 12 August 2020
 

Josie Ford

Blackout drinking
Nobody can deny that for those in the right place at the right time, solar eclipses are awe-inspiring displays of nature’s majesty. Getting to that right place at that right time, however, is often easier said than done.
Most of the eclipses that Feedback can remember were obscured either by cloudy skies, excessive concern for retinal integrity or by being in the wrong country. Sometimes, possibly, all three at once.
That’s why NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ambassador Tony Rice (@rtphokie on Twitter) is getting his plans for the 2023 annular and 2024 total eclipse lined up early.

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Observing that the paths of the two eclipses intersected at a spot in Vanderpool, Texas, he dug a little deeper and discovered that the location almost exactly matched that of the Lost Maples Winery – an ideal oasis to wait out Earth’s troubles while enjoying the very best that astronomy has to offer.
“Just pointing this out, for planning purposes,” Rice tweeted. Feedback will see you there.
Honk honk
Depending on your interest in such matters, you may or may not have come across Untitled Goose Game, the sleeper video game hit of 2019. The premise is simple enough to explain.
To quote the game itself: “It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose.”
Over the course of various situations, the player is urged to control a malevolent goose as it causes small but keenly felt irritation to a broad range of local residents.

Feedback was reminded of the game when we read a story in the Mail Online about an electrician who lost his job after accidentally loudly playing the sound of pornography during a council meeting in Worcester, UK.
Modesty forbids us from going too deeply into the details, but suffice it to say that the man in question claimed that the noises originated from a video of a honking goose.
“Council bosses launched an investigation,” reports Mail Online, “but found that no members of staff said it sounded anything like a goose.”
Classic horrible goose behaviour there: making sounds that sound nothing like a goose in order to get somebody into trouble. Disgraceful.
Viva Las Vagus
Feedback is always partial to a good pun. Though let’s be honest, we aren’t averse to a bad pun now and again either, so long as it ups the word count and keeps our editor unhappy.
Which is why we are grateful to those colleagues of ours who sent through a recently published article in the Journal of Physiology all about the functioning of the vagal system and the cranial nerve that gives it its name.
If you would like to find out more about it yourself, look up “What happens in vagus, no longer stays in vagus” by Jordan B. Lee, Lucas J. Omazic and Muhammad Kathia.
Rossy posse
Another week, another chance for some nominative determinism. Come on, we cry, like a desperate parent dragging their child away from their mobile phone for a chance to spend some quality time together. It’ll be fun! Promise!
It’s off to Scotland this time, where football team Ross County has acquired a new player: goalkeeper Ross Doohan, on loan from Celtic. So far, so mildly mirthful. But, as @G4rve points out on Twitter, this isn’t the only goalkeeping Ross County Ross.
Doohan looks set to share the space between the uprights with Rosses Laidlaw and Munro – a 100 per cent Ross rate at the number 1 position.
As if that wasn’t enough, they will be joined by midfielder Ross Draper and striker Ross Stewart. Never mind their on-pitch exploits – as far as Feedback’s concerned, that roster’s going to take some beating.
Where there’s a weed
We couldn’t get through this week’s Feedback without casting an eye over recent appointments in the world of gardening.
Why, you ask? Because we know our readers. If we didn’t stop to mention the fact that the new president of the Royal Horticultural Society is Keith Weed, our inbox would undergo some sort of rupture.
The story, as reported in The Times, is a veritable raised bed of nominative determinism. “My dad was a Weed but my mother was a Hedges,” he said.
What’s more, runs the story, “two years ago the organisation discovered that one in eight of its staff had a name associated with nature, the outdoors or horticulture, such as Heather, Berry, Moss, Gardiner or Shears, and various permutations of Rose”.
It’s hardly surprising to Feedback that the gardening world is such a hotbed of appropriate names: our readers have been pointing this out to us for decades.
Just this week, for example, Peter Slessenger writes in to namecheck Gerard Clover, who is head of plant health at the Royal Horticultural Society, and Dorothy Giacomin points out Guy Shrubsole, a trees campaigner at Friends of the Earth, as well as her old plant sciences lecturer at King’s College London: Pete Moore.
Got a story for Feedback?You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

Computers are worse at recognising women and people of colour than white men. Documentary Coded Bias shows that the problems don’t stop there

Technology 12 August 2020
By Vijaysree Venkatraman
Face-recognition AI could only “see” Joy Buolamwini when she wore a white mask
7th Empire Media

Coded Bias
Shalini Kantayya
Ongoing film festival screenings

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IN HER first semester as a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, Joy Buolamwini encountered a peculiar problem. Commercial face-recognition software, which detected her light-skinned classmates just fine, couldn’t “see” her face. Until, that is, she donned a white plastic mask in frustration.
Coded Bias is a timely, thought-provoking documentary from director Shalini Kantayya. It follows Buolamwini’s journey to uncover racial and sexist bias in face-recognition software and other artificial intelligence systems. Such technology is increasingly used to make important decisions, but many of the algorithms are a black box.
“I hope this will be a kind of Inconvenient Truth of algorithmic justice, a film that explains the science and ethics around an issue of critical importance to the future of humanity,” Kantayya told New Scientist.
The documentary, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, sees a band of articulate scientists, scholars and authors do most of the talking. This cast primarily consists of women of colour, which is fitting because studies, including those by Buolamwini, reveal that face-recognition systems have much lower accuracy rates when identifying female and darker-skinned faces compared with white, male faces.
Recently, there has been a backlash against face recognition. IBM, Amazon and Microsoft have all halted or restricted sales of their technology. US cities, notably Boston and San Francisco, have banned government use of face recognition, recognising problems of racial bias.

People seem to have different experiences with the technology. The documentary shows a bemused pedestrian in London being fined for partially covering his face while passing a police surveillance van. On the streets of Hangzhou, China, we meet a skateboarder who says she appreciates face recognition’s convenience as it is used to grant her entry to train stations and her residential complex.
“If an AI suspects you are a gambler, you could be presented with ads for discount fares to Las Vegas”
The film also explores how decision-making algorithms can be susceptible to bias. In 2014, for example, Amazon developed an experimental tool for screening job applications for technology roles. The tool, which wasn’t designed to be sexist, discounted résumés that mentioned women’s colleges or groups, picking up on the gender imbalance in résumés submitted to the company. The tool was never used to evaluate actual job candidates.
AI systems can also build up a picture of people as they browse the internet, as the documentary investigates. They can suss out things we don’t disclose, says Zeynep Tufekci at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the film. Individuals can then be targeted by online advertisers. For instance, if an AI system suspects you are a compulsive gambler, you could be presented with discount fares to Las Vegas, she says.
In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation goes some way to giving people better control over their personal data, but there is no equivalent regulation in the US.
“Data protection is the unfinished work of the civil rights movement,” said Kantayya. The film argues that society should hold the makers of AI software accountable. It advocates a regulatory body to protect the public from its harms and biases.
At the end of the film, Buolamwini testifies in front of the US Congress to press the case for regulation. She wants people to support equity, transparency and accountability in the use of AI that governs our lives. She has now founded a group called the Algorithmic Justice League, which tries to highlight these issues.
Kantayya said she was inspired to make Coded Bias by Buolamwini and other brilliant and badass mathematicians and scientists. It is an eye-opening account of the dangers of invasive surveillance and bias in AI.
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