Humans

Horniman Museum and Gardens
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In the Air at London’s Wellcome Collection traces concerns about air quality back to the 17th century, revealing how the air we breathe influences well-being. The exhibition opens on 19 May.

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Chimpanzee Memoirs, edited by Stephen Ross and Lydia Hopper, tells the personal stories of chimpanzee experts and shows the effort that has gone into understanding and saving our chimp relatives in forests, sanctuaries and zoos.Advertisement
Shutterstock/Enna8982
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How the science of dogs changed the science of life captivates zoologist Jules Howard. His talk, which streams from London’s Royal Institution on 12 May at 7pm BST, explores what we know about dogs.

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Having studied chimps and bonobos for decades, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that variation in gender-typical behaviour is likely to be more common than we thought in humans

Humans

4 May 2022

By Rowan Hooper
Nabil Nezzar
WHERE once we thought of ape behaviour only in terms of sex and war, we now understand that our closest relatives live a much more nuanced life. A huge part of that understanding comes from the work of primatologist Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the past five decades, he has shown that cooperation is at least as important as competition in explaining primate behaviour and society. His work has revealed that the great apes might fight, but they also reconcile their differences. They have a capacity for empathy and a concept of fairness that de Waal proposes is the foundation of the human moral compass. He believes that chimps, bonobos and humans are simply different types of ape and that empathetic and cooperative behaviours are continuous between these species. Now, he has turned his attention to gender and identity in his new book Different: What apes can teach us about gender. We spoke to de Waal to find out what he has learned.
Rowan Hooper: You are well known for writing about the inner lives of chimpanzees and bonobos, but your new book is a bit different, because it discusses gender roles, gender identity and biological sex differences in both apes and us. What do we mean by gender in non-human primates?
Frans de Waal: Well, some people insist that we have genders and chimps and bonobos have sexes, and that is the end of the discussion. I think that is nonsense. Gender as a concept exists mainly because we are a sexually reproducing species. Sex is predominantly … More

By Sally Adee

Memories are subject to the same pressures as fashion in Glitterationurdongel/Getty Images
Eversion
Alastair Reynolds
GollanczAdvertisement

YOUR autobiographical memory can’t be trusted, and science has determined that this isn’t a bug, but a feature. The remembered stories from which we braid our identity bend and swerve to serve the narrative needs of our circumstances because our minds happily trade veracity for coherence and narrative. This strange space between recollection and construction is explored in two mesmerising books out this month.
Eversion by Alastair Reynolds concerns itself with how this constant process of layering and recasting can create meaning and purpose in the most desolate circumstances. The story starts on a ship dodging icebergs in the North Sea during the 17th century, and unfolds into a virtuoso genre-hopping puzzle.
It isn’t every day you get to experience a perfect collision of the Romantic macabre of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft with The Usual Suspects and 2001: A Space Odyssey. So much of the book’s joy is working out which bits are real and which are misdirection on the way to unlocking the final mystery. Trust me, you don’t want this spoiled by more plot details.
It is no spoiler to say that Reynolds shows how such stories can be moulded to make us better humans. But memories can also be weaponised to keep our identities in stupefied thrall to capitalism, and this darker aspect gets an ample airing in Oliver Langmead’s Glitterati.
The star of this speculative satire is Simone. He is a fashionite, a rarefied type of super influencer whose every whim is lavishly catered for and documented by magazines read only by fashionites. For example, during a brief hospitalisation, he spies a regular proletarian gown among the haute couture medical gowns available to him. He complains and the item is summarily burned.
Simone and his fabulous friends and enemies are suspended in a vicious, never-ending battle for status, fought through clothes, make-up and accessories, sometimes leaving literal fashion victims in their wake. This sense of dangerously pointy high stakes beneath the ruffles and froth recalls writers like Edith Wharton, whose stories dissect the mores of the very rich who lived and schemed during the so-called Gilded Age of the 19th-century US.
Beyond a deft, wicked skewering of influencer culture, Langmead inhabits his protagonists’ fetishistic delight with the material world. His deliciously sensory prose puts you inside that colossal closet, running your fingers through the gossamer folds of a spider-silk gown.
Glitterati starts like puff pastry, a comedy of manners stuffed with buffoonery and characters whose trivial, self-inflicted miseries you can chortle at with abandon. But it ends like a shot of Black Mirror.
Simone’s lifestyle isn’t without costs. Along with the right clothes, he needs the right memories. And that is when a darker reality emerges, showing why these fluffy idiots can’t care about anything more than matching their outrageously expensive outfits to their false eyelashes.
At this point, it becomes clear that rather than being privileged scions, people like Simone are just pretty cogs in a vast apparatus that grinds humanity into capital. The reader begins to sympathise and have a stake in Simone’s ability to escape – and perhaps also starts to wonder which forces bend our own (flawed) memories.
Sally also recommends…

The This
Adam Roberts
Gollancz

Memory also plays a starring role in The This by Adam Roberts, but the utility of an individual’s identity itself is called into question in this mash-up of the sum of Nick Bostrom’s worst fears in Superintelligence and the alien weirdness of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

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Findings from people running in the lab and in the real world show that men and women tend to run at a speed that minimises energetic costs, though men run faster

Humans

28 April 2022

By Alex Wilkins
When we run recreationally, we automatically pick the speed that is most energy efficientMoMo Productions/Getty Images
When people are exercising, they intuitively maintain the same running speed regardless of how many kilometres they cover, in order to be as energy efficient as possible.
In a race, people try to run as fast as they can for a given distance, which means someone might jog slowly during a marathon, but sprint at top speed during a 100-metre event.
But Jessica Selinger at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and her colleagues found that recreational runners take a different approach. They analysed the running speeds over a variety of distances of more than 4645 runners, who wore wearable measurement devices during exercise outside. They also collected data in the lab, where they could use treadmills to control a runner’s speed while collecting and analysing the participant’s breath to establish the energy costs associated with running at each pace.Advertisement
From the outdoor runners, Selinger and her team found that, on average, women run at a speed of 2.74 metres per second while men run at 3.25 metres per second. The data collected in the lab showed that these paces are indistinguishable from the energy-optimal running speeds for men and women.

“People have this strong preference for a particular speed, regardless of what distance they’re running,” says Selinger. “And that speed is in fact energy optimal. It’s the speed that’s the most economical that you could choose.”
The runners that Selinger and her team analysed in the lab were limited to younger, fit individuals. “In the future, it would be really nice to have the lab-based energetic measures for a broader swathe of the population,” says Selinger.
The finding isn’t surprising when examined from a biological perspective, says Andrew Jones at the University of Exeter, UK. “When people go out for an easy or steady run, typically over 3 to 5 miles… they’ll typically fall into a fixed, comfortable speed that is below the lactate threshold [when lactate can build up in the muscles and cause fatigue] and allows a steady state in oxygen uptake.”
Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.03.076

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Analysis of pollen preserved in peat at Slieveanorra in the Antrim hills reveals the resilience of a rural community through environmental changes

Humans

27 April 2022

By Michael Marshall
The peat-covered uplands of the north of Ireland were once wooded and farmedHelen Essell, CC-BY 4.0
A rural Irish community survived a succession of climate shifts and other threats over the past 1000 years, a study of pollen preserved in peat has revealed. The finding suggests that societies can endure despite environmental changes, if they are flexible enough to adapt their way of life.
People in Ireland have experienced multiple upheavals over the past millennium. These include the European famine of 1315-17, the Black Death of 1348-49 and the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-52. There were also climatic shifts, notably the transition from the relatively warm Medieval climate anomaly to the marginally cooler Little Ice Age.
To find out more about how people handled these events, Gill Plunkett and Graeme Swindles at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK studied an archaeological site called Slieveanorra in the Antrim hills, now part of Northern Ireland. It is a bog in the uplands, surrounded on three sides by ridges.Advertisement
“If you go up today, it’s deserted,” says Plunkett, but there are abandoned houses and indications of farming.
Plunkett and Swindles studied pollen from a peat core from Slieveanorra to find out what plants grew there over the past 1000 years. They found evidence of human interference throughout, such as fewer trees than would be expected, more pasture plants plus cereal crops.

The team also saw pollen from plants in the cannabis family, which includes hemp. “I think we’ve probably got hemp being produced and flax as well,” says Plunkett, perhaps for the textile industry.
The little community weathered multiple crises. The famine and plague of the 1300s were associated with increased land use, suggesting that any reduction in the population was temporary. The only time the site was possibly abandoned was during a wet period in the mid-1400s, for a generation or two, but after that farming resumed and even increased.
Only in the early 1900s did farming cease. Plunkett thinks that was because people saw better opportunities elsewhere, rather than the area becoming uninhabitable.
It isn’t clear why the Slieveanorra community was so resilient, but Plunkett says one reason may be that there was no landlord or owner, at least until the late 1800s. This meant the people living there were free to change their lifestyle, for example doing more hunting when crops grew poorly – instead of having to send a certain quantity of grain to a feudal lord.
Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266680

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Archaeological work at Blick Mead, a site near Stonehenge, reveals that people were visiting the site thousands of years before the monument was built

Humans

27 April 2022

By Michael Marshall
The region around Stonehenge in the UK may have been important to people long before the monument was builtShutterstock / Steffen.E
The area surrounding Stonehenge, UK, may have acquired enormous significance for Stone Age humans thousands of years before the famous monument was built, suggest archaeologists working at a nearby site called Blick Mead.
The Stonehenge monument was built between 3000 and 2000 BC. It is a ring of standing stones, surrounded by an earth bank and ditch.
Lying more than a kilometre to the east of Stonehenge is Blick Mead, the … More

Remote working might sound enticing, but a two-tier system is emerging, in which it is valued less by employers. This division is only set to grow, says Annalee Newitz

Humans

| Columnist

27 April 2022

By Annalee Newitz
Shutterstock/DimaBerlin
HERE in the US, stay-at-home orders evaporated long ago, and many companies are demanding that workers return to the office. Yet we are still being inundated with news about people who are lucky enough to continue working remotely. Books, articles and software packages promise to help us navigate a new era of “hybrid offices”. It sounds enticing. No more commutes and foul office smells! But the future of working from home may be a lot darker than anyone realises.
I am not worried about what is going to happen to remote working over the next year or two. Many white-collar workers and techies have been doing it for years now – I haven’t had a job that requires me to go into the office for nearly 15 years. In the noughties, I communicated with colleagues via group chat apps and email lists; in the teens, we used Campfire and Slack. Now we use Zoom and other video chat systems. The only thing that has changed since the pandemic is that my outlier experience has become the norm for certain groups of workers.
Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, Square and Slack have all announced that they will allow employees to work from home permanently. But for all their talk of boosting productivity and creating a better work-life balance, the move to hybrid work can come with a cost – literally. Facebook and Twitter will pay less for certain work-at-home staff, and Google could slash their salaries by up to 25 per cent.Advertisement
Along with such pay cuts comes a new generation of home surveillance software, which tracks employees’ online activities, while sometimes using live video feeds to measure how long they sit at their desks. And you can forget about organising a union in a virtual workplace where every private message you send can be read by your boss.
So far, these companies haven’t received much pushback, because most employees think of remote working as a perk. In one survey, nearly half of workers said they would accept a pay cut if they never had to go into the office again. Tayo Bero has pointed out in The Guardian that this isn’t just because people hate to commute: “For Black women, staying at home has meant a reprieve from some of the microaggressions that they would typically face in an in-person work environment.”
Still, we are witnessing the emergence of a two-tiered system, where working from home is valued less by employers. I suspect that the class divisions here will only grow more stark as the years go by, especially when you consider that a great deal of remote working is done by people who are picking up micro-jobs from TaskRabbit, Fiverr and dozens of other sites where you can do 5-minute jobs for pennies.
These gigs can be horrifying: a lot of content moderation is done by home workers who have to evaluate reams of violent videos and hateful comments. Frequently, these micro-tasks take longer than the time allotted. If you spend 10 minutes doing a supposedly 5-minute task, you won’t get paid extra – and your ranking will sink, making it harder to get another micro-job.
How long before Twitter or Spotify start to carve up their cosy work-at-home jobs into micro-tasks for gig workers? And consider what else may soon be expected of home workers. In 20 years, employers may want staff to come with their own computer purpose-built for work, along with a virtual reality rig, 3D printer and perhaps even a drone set-up for delivering prototypes.
But, you might protest, that would never happen to a fancy front-end designer or architect. Their work will always be valuable, even if they get paid less and have to buy more equipment than their in-office colleagues. Will it, though?
There is a persistent bias against work done in the home. Domestic tasks such as cleaning and childcare have been unpaid for centuries. As Rachele Dini at the University of Roehampton, UK, noted recently on the BBC’s Arts & Ideas programme, it has been nearly impossible to gain public support for the idea that homemakers should be compensated for their work. Even when people do it for money, domestic work is consistently undervalued.
This is partly the result of prejudice: women and immigrants tend to do most domestic work. But it is also a function of what cognitive scientists call “distance bias”, in which managers place more value on work done by people in closer proximity to them. Remote workers are out of sight, out of mind. Even if they pop up on Zoom, their work will be consistently devalued as time goes on, just as housework has been.
I am not saying that we should embrace going into an office every day. But we should be wary when companies use our desire to work from home as a trick to get us to accept second-class status.

Annalee’s week
What I’m reading
“All-Electric” Narratives by Rachele Dini. All about homemakers who paid for expensive appliances to do unpaid labour!
What I’m watching
Abbott Elementary, a charming sitcom about teachers trying to get by at a US school with no funding.
What I’m working on
A story set in the early universe, when stars were just starting to form.

This column appears monthly. Up next week: Beronda L. Montgomery

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By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Jonathan Buckley
ANYONE who is just starting to grow their own vegetables might want to consider sweetcorn, especially if they are keen to get children involved. It is, for the most part, easy to grow and the end result of corn on the cob is usually appreciated by all, no matter their age.
At first, I tried the “three sisters” companion planting method, developed by Indigenous groups in North America. This means growing sweetcorn with two other types of plants, squash and beans, and they help each other thrive.
Beans improve soil fertility because, as a legume (like peas and lentils), they … More