Humans

By Douglas Heingartner
In the DESIGMA-Advanced test, a respondent must work out which shape logically comes next in several series like the ones shown here
Benedikt Schneider

People who are given instructions on how to succeed at a widely used type of IQ test end up with far higher scores than those who take the test without learning these tips beforehand – throwing into question the validity of these kinds of tests and contributing to critiques of IQ tests in general.
That’s the main finding of a study that looked at “progressive matrices”, a kind of IQ test that displays a series of changing … More

The systems of science are perpetuating bias, hype, negligence and fraud – and this means far too many findings are worthless, says psychologist Stuart Ritchie

Humans 19 August 2020
By Graham Lawton

Rocio Montoya

WHEN Stuart Ritchie was a graduate student in Edinburgh, UK, in 2011, he was involved in an incident that shook his faith in science. With two colleagues, he tried and failed to replicate a famous experiment on precognition, the ability to see the future. They sent their results to the journal that published the original research and received an immediate rejection on the grounds that the journal didn’t accept studies that repeated previous experiments.
Ritchie remained a scientist – he is a psychologist at King’s College London with a focus on studying human intelligence – but ever since that rejection, he has been on a crusade to air science’s dirty laundry. His latest book is Science Fictions, in which he shows how, all too often, we can’t rely on the facts that science provides.
Graham Lawton: The grand and scary claim of your book is that something is rotten in the kingdom of science.
Stuart Ritchie: Absolutely. We think of science as being this objective thing that tells us facts about the world and produces all these scientific papers, which are almost sacred things. But a lot of people don’t see how the sausage is made. I think if they had more of an idea of how the process happens, they would question the truth status of those papers much more. In a lot of cases, the science is useless, not worth the paper it is written on.
You identify four main causes of rot.
First there’s fraud, when people deliberately alter or make up results to try to get a paper published. That’s rare, but not as rare … More

Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes explains how modern techniques are helping us to better understand Neanderthals, as well as where we fit in to the family tree

Humans 19 August 2020
By Simon Ings
Neanderthal art in Spain, painted between 43,000 and 65,000 years ago
Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images

Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Bloomsbury Sigma

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HOW we began to unpick our species’ ancient past in the late 19th century is an astounding story, but not always a pretty one. As well as attaining tremendous insights into the age of Earth and how life evolved, scholars also entertained astonishingly bad ideas about superiority.
Some of these continue today. Why do we assume that Neanderthals, who flourished for 400,000 years, were somehow inferior to Homo sapiens or less fit to survive?
In Kindred, a history of our understanding of Neanderthals, Rebecca Wragg Sykes separates perfectly valid and reasonable questions – for example, “why aren’t Neanderthals around any more?” – from the thinking that casts our ancient relatives as “dullard losers on a withered branch of the family tree”.
As an archaeologist with a special interest in the cognitive aspects of stone tool technologies, Wragg Sykes paints a fascinating picture of a field transformed almost beyond recognition over the past 30 years.
Artefacts at well-preserved sites are no longer merely dug and brushed: they are scanned. High-powered optical microscopes pick out slice and chop marks, electron beams trace the cross-sections of scratches at the nano-scale and rapid collagen identification techniques can determine an animal from even tiny bone fragments.
The risk with any new tool is that, in our excitement, we over-interpret the results it throws up. For example, while Neanderthals may have performed some funerary activity, they may not have thrown flowers on their loved ones’ graves as we once thought.
Other stories continue to accumulate a weight of circumstantial evidence. We have known for a few years that some Neanderthals tanned leather; now it seems they may also have spun thread.
“The significance of Neanderthal art may simply be that Neanderthals had fun making it”

An exciting aspect of this book is the way it refreshes our ideas about our own place in hominin evolution.
Rather than congratulating other species when they behave like us, Wragg Sykes shows that it is much more fruitful to see how human talents are related to behaviours exhibited by other species.
Take art. We tend to ask questions like: were the circular stone assemblies discovered in a cave near Bruniquel in southern France in 2016 meant by their Neanderthal creators as monuments? What is the significance of the Neanderthal handprints and ladder designs painted on the walls of three caves in Spain?
In both cases, we would be asking the wrong questions, says Sykes. While striking, Neanderthal art “might not be a massive cognitive leap for hominins who probably already understood the idea of representation”.
Animal footprints are effectively symbols and tracking prey this way “requires an ‘idealised’ form to be kept in mind”, she writes.
Human infants, given painting materials, enjoy colouring and marking surfaces, though they aren’t in the least bit invested in the end result of their labours. The same is also true of captive chimpanzees. Why, then, should we see Neanderthal art with any significance, beyond the possibility that Neanderthals had fun making it?
Neanderthal DNA contains glimmers of encounters between them and other hominin species. Recent research suggests that interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans, as well as Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, was effectively the norm. Like modern cattle and yaks, we were closely related species that varied in bodies and behaviours, yet could also reproduce.
Neanderthals were part of our family, and though we carry some part of them inside us, we will never see their like again.
Who were the Neanderthals?Hear Rebecca Wragg Sykes talk about our ancient cousinsFor details about this virtual event visit newscientist.com/events
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Watch
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.
Read
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

Listen
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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