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
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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

From the discovery of the first subatomic particle to the confirmation of the Higgs boson in 2012, Suzie Sheehy’s account of experiments that changed our world is detailed but lively

Humans

27 April 2022

By Elle Hunt

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, SwitzerlandMaximilien Brice/CERN
The Matter of Everything
Suzie Sheehy
BloomsburyAdvertisement

IN 1930, Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli set out to solve a mystery. The variability of energy values for beta particles, defying the basic scientific principles of conservation of energy and momentum, had been confounding physicists since the turn of the century.
Pauli – a physicist so rigorous in his approach that he had been called “the scourge of God” – seemed well-placed to address it. And yet, when he put his mind to finding a theoretical solution for the problem of beta decay, Pauli created only further ambiguity.
He proposed the existence of an entirely new, chargeless and near-massless particle that would allow for energy and momentum to be conserved, but would be almost impossible to find. “I have done a terrible thing,” he wrote. “I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.”
Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics, is one of many names to cross the pages of The Matter of Everything, Suzie Sheehy’s lively account of “experiments that changed our world”. Through 12 significant discoveries over the course of the 20th century, Sheehy shows how physics transformed the world and our understanding of it – in many cases, as a direct result of the curiosity and dedication of individuals.
Sheehy is an experimental physicist in the field of accelerator physics, based at the University of Oxford and the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her own expertise makes The Matter of Everything a more technical book than the framing of 12 experiments might suggest, and certainly more so than the average popular science title, but it is nonetheless accessible to the lay reader and vividly described.
From experiments with cathode rays in a German lab in 1895, leading to the detection of X-rays and to the discovery of the first subatomic particle, to the confirmation of the Higgs boson in 2012, The Matter of Everything is an opportunity to learn not just about individual success stories, but the nature of physics itself.
Sheehy does well to set out the questions that these scientists wanted to answer and what lay at stake with their discoveries, on the macro level as well as the micro one, showing how physics not only helped us to understand the world, but shaped it. These early “firsts” came from small-scale experiments, with researchers operating their own equipment and even building it from scratch.
The Matter of Everything also highlights those whose contributions might have historically been overlooked, such as Lise Meitner, dubbed the “German Marie Curie” by Albert Einstein. Her work on nuclear fission went unacknowledged for some 50 years after her colleague Otto Hahn was solely awarded the Nobel prize in 1944.
The commitment and collaboration of physicists and engineers through the second world war showed what was possible – for good and evil. Sheehy describes how the development of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki awakened a social conscience in the field, paving the way to the international cooperation we see today, such as on the Large Hadron Collider.
United behind a common goal, and with cross-government support, answers that had never before seemed possible suddenly appeared within grasp. To Sheehy, this is evidence of the potential for physics to overcome the challenges that face science and society now – from the nature of dark matter to tackling the climate crisis.
At the start of the 20th century, she points out, it was said that we knew everything there was to know about the universe; by the end of the century, the world had changed beyond recognition.
The terrible particles Pauli proposed – which he called neutrons, but we now know as neutrinos – were finally confirmed in 1956. His response was quietly triumphant: “Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.”
A sweeping but detailed and pacy account of 100 years of scientific advancement, The Matter of Everything has a cheering takeaway. What such leaps lie ahead? What questions seem intractable now that we won’t give a thought to in the future?
Sheehy mounts the case that – with persistence, curiosity and collaboration – we may yet overcome challenges that now seem impossible.

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Keeping science and politics socially distanced from each other is the best way to ensure government spin doesn’t damage trust in the former, says Fiona Fox

Humans

| Comment

27 April 2022

By Fiona Fox
Michelle D’urbano
WHEN the BSE crisis deepened in the 1990s, John Gummer, then minister of agriculture, invited the press to photograph him trying to feed a beefburger to his 4-year-old daughter, claiming that scientists had advised it was perfectly safe to eat the meat. In fact, they had said there was a low but “theoretical” risk of getting BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a neurological disease of cattle.
But this more nuanced take didn’t reach the UK public at the time because the scientists giving it were hidden from view, just as they were during later crises, such as the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland or the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. Gummer was glossing over the scientific uncertainties to deliver a clear “message” that was convenient for the UK beef trade. As a result, the public were misled and trust in science suffered.
To avoid this in the future, there needs to be a clearer separation between science communication and government communication, so the public can hear science directly from those doing it.Advertisement
One of the few positives in the pandemic was seeing so many leading scientists on our TV screens. While the UK prime minister Boris Johnson used the Downing Street press conferences to deliver key policy decisions and “messaging”, he was flanked by chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance and chief medical officer Chris Whitty who summarised new data and answered media and public questions on the science. This was science communication at its best when most needed and it was a hit with the public. Trust in scientists topped 90 per cent at times as the pandemic unfolded.
Despite this, when the government spin machine got too involved, things got less sciency and more political. As head of the Science Media Centre, an independent organisation promoting scientific literacy in reporting, I lost count of the times I lined up briefings on pandemic-related findings with a panel of great researchers only to turn on a news broadcast and hear ministers announce those findings early. The result: coverage by political journalists with little science but often with government spin.
That wasn’t the only problem during the pandemic. Ministers got a rebuke from regulators for announcing major developments that would impact us all without making scientific data they relied on available for others to assess.
Even more worryingly, in a revealing essay about behind-the-scenes government strategy, Lee Cain, Johnson’s former director of communications, called for a more centralised structure to ensure clear single “messaging” on issues like covid-19. That comms officers are desperate to control the “narrative” in a national crisis is nothing new. But such calls only bolster the case for ensuring science is presented independent of government announcements.
Luckily, we have a precedent. After years of complaints about the way official UK statistics on everything from crime to unemployment were being spun by politicians, campaigners finally convinced the government to address this in the 2017 Code of Practice for Statistics. The result is that figures about our national life are first published as raw data by organisations like the Office for National Statistics. Politicians can comment on these figures like the rest of us, but taking the initial communication away from ministers means we see the numbers without political spin.
Applying this idea more widely would be good for all of us. Critically, the system would also establish the principle that science needs to be impartial and free from politicisation.
The loss of control might be painful for government, but the benefits in terms of public trust in science would be worth it. As the pandemic has shown, that really can be a matter of life and death.
Fiona Fox is head of the Science Media Centre and author of Beyond the Hype

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