Humans

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Japan Sinks: 2020, streaming now on Netflix, brings Sakyo Komatsu’s hit 1973 science-fiction novel up to the present day. An ordinary family is put to the test as Japan is demolished in a series of massive earthquakes.
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X+Y: A mathematician’s manifesto for rethinking gender sees Eugenia Cheng apply maths to gender bias and inequality. Never mind identity politics, she says: thinking using mathematics can gift us a fairer world.

Ben Fisher

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Fons Americanus is artist Kara Walker’s 13-metre-tall classically inspired fountain, whose stay in London’s Tate Modern has now been extended. It didn’t cost the earth: it is made from an innovative carveable, acrylic composite.
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By Catherine De Lange
Understanding how people are helping others can ease children’s anxiety
James Veysey/Shutterstock

SINCE lockdown began in the UK, Cathy Creswell at the University of Oxford and her colleagues have been surveying thousands of families to find out how they are affected by the covid-19 pandemic. The Co-SPACE Study has now published its first findings from a longitudinal study that questioned people over several months.
What has your survey of families during lockdown shown?
More than 10,000 people have now taken part. Our first report was at the beginning of April, looking at the first 1500 people. What we … More

Our bodies evolved to take rest breaks, but sitting on chairs and couches can cause long-term damage. Here’s how to change the way you sit and boost your health

Health 15 July 2020
By Herman Pontzer and David Raichlen

Jason Raish

ANOTHER blistering afternoon in northern Tanzania, another high-stakes game of musical chairs. Stumbling back into camp to escape the sun, desperate for a seat, we glanced at each other and then at the single unoccupied camp chair. In the other, grinning, sat Onawasi, a respected elder with a mischievous bent. He seemed to be enjoying this.
We were spending our summer with the Hadza community, one of the last populations of hunter-gatherers on the planet. Hadza men and women manage to avoid heart disease and other diseases of the more industrialised world, and we wanted to understand why. Our small research team had come in two Land Cruisers loaded with tech to measure every movement made and calorie burned as Hadza men and women scoured the landscape every day for wild game, honey, tubers and berries.
After a long morning, we felt drained by the inescapable heat and humidity. All we wanted to do was sit. Onawasi seemed to feel the same way. He had spent the morning hunting, and certainly deserved the chair more than we did. But this was getting out of hand. Our precious camp chairs that we took into the bush despite their weight were Hadza magnets. Every visitor to our little research area seemed drawn to them like moths to a porch light.
We knew we had a lot to learn from the Hadza about staying physically active. It turns out they also had something important to teach us about resting. Together, over the next 10 years, we would come to understand why chairs are so irresistible, and why they seem to make … More

Ancient engravings etched into mammoth tusks discovered in Siberia reveal the oldest known images of camels in Asia. Images of two-humped camels have been found etched onto a 1.5-metre mammoth tusk discovered in the lower Tom River in western Siberia. The tusk is about 13,000 years old and also has an etching of what researchers […] More

In the film Archive, George Almore attempts to put his late wife’s memories into a machine. The project is far from a roaring success, finds Jon O’Brien

Humans 8 July 2020
By Jon O’Brien
J3 is George Almore’s third robotic attempt to resurrect his late wife
Courtesy of Vertical Entertainment

Film
Archive
Gavin Rothery

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Available on demand from 10 July
“HE WHO remains passive when overwhelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering elasticity of mind,” Charles Darwin once wrote.
Passiveness certainly isn’t a trait that can be attributed to Archive‘s leading man George Almore (Theo James). He is a bereaved researcher secretly attempting to resurrect his wife, played by Stacy Martin, using analogue memories and robotics.
We meet George in 2038, two years and two prototypes into his mission. He has produced J1, a boxy, WALL-E-esque figure that is slightly rigid and watches vintage cartoons, and V2, its more advanced “sister” with a jealous streak.
Holed up in an isolated facility deep in the heart of Japan’s snow-capped Yamanashi prefecture, George must care for these specimens of “deep-tiered machine learning and artificial intelligence” while keeping his project a secret.

Having lived through the road accident that killed his beloved, Almore cuts an enigmatic yet often sympathetic figure. He has genuine compassion for the robots, all too aware they are essentially failed experiments. And there is a palpable survivor’s guilt driving his mission.
Though the film is very much about Almore, there are other good characters too. Take the hard-nosed, hologrammed vice president (Rhona Mitra), for example, who is threatening to withdraw funding from the project providing Almore’s cover. There’s also Toby Jones’s inquisitive company representative, who suspects that the 200 hours of posthumous conversation data from Almore’s wife is being misused. Oh, and let’s not forget the gun-toting risk-assessor, played by Peter Ferdinando.
“Almore has genuine compassion for the robots, all too aware they are essentially failed experiments”
The film will inevitably be compared with an episode of Black Mirror called “Be Right Back”, in which a widow revives her partner, who died in a car crash, using a mail-ordered digital consciousness.
Archive, however, focuses just as much on the mechanics behind the concept as its implications. Version 3.0 of Almore’s robot wife turns out to be difficult for him to control. Her construction from confused, disembodied head and torso to fully realised ghost-white being is also remarkable, and sometimes very disturbing to observe.
This is a feature-length debut for writer and director Gavin Rothery. His only previous sci-fi work was a 2014 short called The Last Man, in which a soldier is awoken into a war-ravaged world. Rothery also supervised the visual effects on Moon, including parts of the eerie mining facility that the film is set in.
While it doesn’t quite hit all of the heights that it could, Archive is an entertaining watch. Its clever ruminations on free will, grief and immortality provide an immersive and visceral experience – one that, like its protagonist, is anything but passive.
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New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans 8 July 2020Read

Aimee Spinks/NETFLIX

Watch
The Old Guard sees Charlize Theron lead a cast of unkillable warriors on a winding route between CCTV cameras and other people’s cellphones in a desperate attempt to hide from the modern world. It is available on Netflix from 10 July.
Read
Axiom’s End features YouTuber Lindsay Ellis’s entertaining deconstructions of pop culture in an alternate history of 2007, the year we first encountered an alien species. Who will translate for the monsters?
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Audible podcast Exoplanets explores the hunt to find planets like our own outside our solar system. There are potentially millions of them out there, and more are found every day

Space 8 July 2020
By Chris Stokel-Walker

NASA/Ames Research Center/Daniel Rutter

Podcast
Exoplanets: The search for another Earth
Audible

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THE hunt to find exoplanets like our own has only just begun. In 1992, the first planets outside our solar system were discovered via a pulsar 2300 light years away that signalled at slightly odd intervals, indicating there were two worlds orbiting it. Now, we know there are potentially millions of them out there and more are found every day, says Danielle George, the host of Exoplanets, a six-part series on Audible.
George is an experienced guide to the galaxy: she has worked with Stephen Hawking on the search for far-off worlds, as well as NASA and the European Space Agency. With other researchers as guests, she tackles questions about the size of the universe and what kind of life may live within it.
Though it lacks drama at times, the series is an interesting look at the current state of exoplanet science. George, an optimist, believes there is another Earth-like planet out there somewhere. Any plans for humans to visit such a place should be shelved, however, as exoplanets are all very far away.
The thornier question, then, is: are we alone or could there be intelligent life on an exoplanet somewhere? The series comes to an answer – sort of. If there were other advanced societies out there, surely they would have attempted to detect us in search of another home? Perhaps they don’t need to, having taken better care of their home planet: a message that George says we need to take to heart.
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