Humans

This moving book sees neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo explore the effect on her cognitive functioning when she fell in love with a fellow scientist

Humans

13 April 2022

By Elle Hunt
Stephanie Ortigue and John T. Cacioppo tracked their burgeoning loveJoe Sterbenc/University of Chicago
Wired for Love: A neuroscientist’s journey through romance, loss and the essence of human connection
Stephanie CacioppoRobinson
SHE studied love, he researched loneliness – it was such a perfect match it could have been made in a lab. When Stephanie Ortigue met John T. Cacioppo at a neuroscience conference in Shanghai, both knew their whirlwind romance would be influenced by their research and inform it in turn.Advertisement
It was 2011. Stephanie was 36, and publishing papers on pair-bonding and romantic love, despite having never known it herself. “I assumed I would never experience romance outside the laboratory,” she writes. John was an expert on the dangers of loneliness to physical and mental well-being, and, at 60, was twice divorced, “not lonely, but by myself”, he said.
Both were self-avowed workaholics until they found love, and almost at first sight. “And once I did, my life and my research were changed forever,” writes Stephanie (who took her husband’s name). Now, in Wired for Love, Cacioppo moves away from case studies and turns her scientific attention onto her marriage. Her book is “both the story of my science, and the science behind my story”.
As a tale of romance, it is epic, culminating in a spur-of-the-moment wedding in the Luxembourg Garden in Paris and a profile in the popular Modern Love column in The New York Times. But what takes the Cacioppos’ story beyond a heart-warming reminder to never lose hope are their professional insights into our brains in love.
Through their courtship and marriage, Stephanie and John studied themselves, observing and noting “the intention, the subtext underlying every step we took as a fledgling couple” and its effect on cognitive functioning.
In Wired for Love, Cacioppo explores their findings with critical distance. What was behind their instant attraction? How could they feel so close when they were often oceans apart? Would they have fallen in love if they hadn’t found each other physically attractive? What part did their expectations play? And for two people who thought themselves in love with their work, how did the real thing compare?
Cacioppo, a psychiatrist and behavioural neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, enlarges her experience with studies (her own, and others) for the sake of non-scientific readers who may be seeking to understand and perhaps cultivate romantic connection themselves. The appetite for these scientific insights into our personal lives is evident in popular non-fiction such the recent Heartbreak: A personal and scientific journey by journalist Florence Williams. And it is even shown by the bashful requests by Cacioppo’s students to use her “love machine”, a patented computer test that aims to reveal their unconscious preferences of partner from their brain activity.
Yet Cacioppo – who became the first female president of the Society for Social Neuroscience – describes struggling to be taken seriously early in her research of romantic love, with most neuroscientists devoting themselves to the darker side of the emotional spectrum.
In the early 2000s, a male faculty adviser told her that to study love would be “career suicide”, that the subject was too lightweight to be the basis for academic research. She was first able to overcome that bias by substituting the word “love”, in a grant proposal, for “pair-bonding”.
And by studying the brain in love, we can see it as a complex and hardwired neurobiological phenomenon, suggesting to Cacioppo that “love is not merely a feeling but also a way of thinking”.
Her early career experience speaks to the snobbery and sexism at play in what is deemed worthy of study, as well as how much we don’t know about what might be considered a universal experience and an essential need.
As covid-19 laid bare, writes Cacioppo, “the need for love might be less immediate than the need to avoid danger, but it is by no means a luxury”. Indeed, John’s death from cancer in 2018 shows love’s potential to both devastate and endure. Cacioppo confronts her loss boldly, concluding that “love is a much more expansive concept than we give it credit for”, not all of which can, or should, be explained by chemistry.

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Josie Ford
Hunt the exopet
‘Twas the season to be jolly’, by which we mean April Fool’s Day has been and gone again, before you get too feisty with your falalalalas. Particularly jolly, Feedback found, was a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server by members of the Astrobites collaboration, “First detections of exop(lan)ets: Observations and follow-ups of the floofiest transits on Zoom”.
“For more than two years, humanity has been examining new methods of adjusting to work-from-home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists have tried everything: whipped coffee, sourdough bread, and even questioning whether everything is made out of cake,” the astronomers write. They have possibly also spent too long on video-conferencing platforms, as they continue, “Over two years of casual observation, we noted occasional drops in the brightness of a Zoom image of our far-flung collaborators.”
But systematic observation brings its own challenges, not least that these transits are less regular than those of exoplanets over the face of their parent star, and – the bane of physicists’ lives everywhere – caused not by conveniently spherical objects, but entities irregular in both shape and colour.Advertisement
At this point, we should say that these are follow-up observations to those made last year of similar objects found rolling around in the local environment by Laura Mayorga and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in their paper “Detection of rotational variability in floofy objects at optical wavelengths”.
This new analysis of “exopets” inhabiting other homes brings us further, not least in pinning down difficulties observing rarer types, such as Sub-Neptunian Animal Keplerian Extended bodies (SNAKEs) and Dynamically Unstable Coplanar Kepler objects (DUCKs). We salute the creative impetus of lockdown ennui, while fearing this might continue as long as astronomers are trapped on Zoom.
Absolutely roasting
As Isaac Asimov wrote – not apropos April, but Shakespeare – the secret of the successful fool is that he is no fool at all. This must be why the US National Weather Service chose 1 April to announce on Twitter: “Big changes to our forecast pages! To avoid any confusion between °F and °C, we’ve converted all of our temperatures to Kelvin. Enjoy!”
Feedback is a fan of absolutism, at least in the scientific sense, and certainly the daily high and low quoted by the NWS at Indianapolis International Airport, 281 K and 273 K, provide a fairer reflection of the relative benignity of Earth’s surface temperature fluctuations. But we fear this won’t catch on. We ourselves remain fans of what we call the Standard British Mixed Temperature system, in which low temperatures are quoted in Celsius and high temperatures in Fahrenheit, resulting in a handy scale ranging from 0 for cold to 100 for hot. What this loses in logic, it gains in user-friendliness, as long as you don’t worry too much about what happens in the middle. Take an umbrella anyway.
News from the future
Feedback joins the world – or everyone in the UK of a certain age or under – in saluting Newsround, the BBC news programme for children that recently celebrated its 50th anniversary and remains for many of us the prime source of trusted news that tells it like it is.
Richard Glover has the grumps, however, about a story on the Newsround web page claiming that “quantum technology” could be used to charge electric car batteries “in seconds”. “I would have thought that this would be more likely to involve extra wiring and some clever switching, than anything quantum mechanical,” he says.
Delving into the paper trail so you don’t have to, we discover some enthusiastic press releases and a paper from Juyeon Kim and his colleagues at the Institute for Basic Science in Daejeon, South Korea. The good news is that, whereas the charging time of dull old classical batteries shrinks with the number of battery cells, the charging time of whizzo batteries in an entangled quantum state could decrease with the square of the number of cells. The bad news is that no one yet knows how to put a battery in an entangled quantum state.
We fear this might not have changed by 2030, when the UK government plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. Still, hats off to Newsround for knowing its audience and highlighting a technology that, a bit like nuclear fusion, could well be ready by the time we all grow up.
Lost and found
One area where we can already rely on whizzo quantum speed-ups is in algorithms for searching for things. We are put in mind of this by the happy story of the return to Cambridge University Library of two priceless manuscripts written by Charles Darwin, one containing his famous “tree of life” sketch, in a pink gift bag accompanied by a typed note: Librarian, Happy Easter, X.
Discovered to be missing in 2001, and with various searches of the library’s 10-million-odd items turning up nothing, the books were finally reported as stolen in 2020. This exceeds even the time periods we have spent fruitlessly searching for our keys. Sadly, a practical quantum computer that can ask “Well, where did you last have it?” is probably a good few years away too. Still, won’t the future be marvellous when it comes? And with that: Reader, Happy Easter, X.
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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

Neuroscientists have figured out what interior design choices, from flooring to lighting, can help create homes that improve our mental health, decrease stress and fatigue, and even spark creativity

Humans

13 April 2022

By David Robson
Leonie Bos
YOU might recognise the sensation from visits to a friend’s house – the feeling that a space is good for you. Perhaps it is a sense of profound relaxation, as if you left your worries at the door. Or you may have found the perfect office space that leaves you buzzing with creative ideas. Yet try to explain why you felt that way, or recreate those effects at home, and you fall short.
According to the ancient Chinese practice of feng shui, there are rules of harmonious living that affect the flow of energy through your body, and many modern design gurus take a similar line, dishing out guidance in lifestyle magazines and Instagram accounts. They advise on the shape of rooms, materials in furnishings, colours on walls and organisation of books – it may make your home look good, but does it make you feel good?
While there is nothing wrong with going with your gut when it comes to decor, there could be a better way to make design choices. A growing number of neuroscientists are collaborating with architects and interior designers. With carefully controlled experiments using objective physiological and psychological measures, they are starting to systematically test the influence of design elements on brain and body.
The work couldn’t be timelier. The rise of remote working has meant more time at home for many. Whether you want to boost your mood, lower your blood pressure, decrease your bad habits or ease the burden of dementia, this research can provide evidence-based strategies to optimise your living space for your physical and mental health.
The roots of this work lie in … More

Amit Katwala’s thorough history of the lie detector test looks at its inventors and some of its earliest cases, placing it, warts and all, in its historical and scientific context

Humans

13 April 2022

By Chris Stokel-Walker
The polygraph test looked scientific because it was based on physiological readingsPeter Dazeley/Getty Images
Tremors in the Blood
Amit Katwala
MudlarkAdvertisement
THE polygraph test has been used in criminal prosecutions for decades – a silver bullet for police and prosecutors alike. Measuring heart rate, breathing speed and the conductivity of skin, it is supposedly infallible and given the respectable veneer of science in a courtroom. Someone who flunks the test must be lying, their body’s tell-tale signs betraying their deepest secrets.
Yet that is far from reality. “There is no single tell-tale sign of deception that holds true for everyone – no Pinocchio’s nose,” writes Amit Katwala in Tremors in the Blood. A misfiring test has real ramifications: the US-based National Registry of Exonerations holds records of more than 200 people who failed a polygraph test, were convicted of a crime and imprisoned, but were later found to be innocent.
Katwala’s book traces the test’s history, looking at the early adopters of the technology and some of its earliest cases. The book goes back a century, telling the story of John Larson and Leonarde Keeler, co-inventors of the polygraph (called the emotograph by Keeler), and August Vollmer – all three key to its adoption by US police forces and later worldwide.
Larson was a complex character, breathed back to life by Katwala’s meticulous research. A bookish, morally driven individual, Larson joined the Californian police force in the early 1920s. Unlike the high school dropouts and extortionists who filled the force’s ranks then, Larson was the only police officer in the US with a PhD, in physiology. He would work in university labs by day and police the streets at night.
Larson’s master’s thesis had been on the relatively new technology of fingerprint identification, which had recently become admissible in court. He thought there were still more ways of catching criminals. He was lucky to work under a police chief, Vollmer, who was more bookish than he liked to let on.
Vollmer was equally driven to do the right thing, and was constantly trying to improve policing. In 1921, after reading an academic paper by a psychologist and lawyer who had tested whether his friends were lying based on their blood pressure readings, Vollmer asked Larson to develop a machine that could do the same. The result was mocked by fellow officers, and described in newspapers as looking like a combination of radio, gas stove, stethoscope, dentist’s drill, barometer, wind gauge, time ball (an old form of clock) and watch – but it appeared to work.
Katwala vividly portrays those heady early days when the polygraph seemed to catch out liars. Then, he deftly delivers the twist in the tale: 40-odd years after cobbling together the first machine, Larson forswore his invention because of the way it was used. It was “nothing more than a psychological third degree aimed at extorting confessions, as the old physical beatings were”, he said in an interview – far removed from his meticulous scientific approach.
The book captures the wonder of scientific breakthrough – and what happens as the story becomes more complex. In 1965, the year Larson died, the US House Committee on Government Operations warned that the world had been hoodwinked by “a myth that a metal box in the hands of an investigator can detect truth or falsehood”.
Yet the polygraph is still being used. In 2021, the UK began polygraph testing people convicted of terrorism offences and, later that year, convicted domestic abusers, despite the fact there are serious doubts about whether it works.
Why has the polygraph remained on its pedestal? Perhaps because no one, until now, has placed it, warts and all, in its historical and scientific context.

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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

13 April 2022

Visit
Don’t Adjust Your Mindset by artist Pete McKee welcomes you to a futuristic Great(ish) Britain of lockdown, climate change and digital dependence. Running from 22 April at London’s Hoxton Arches.
COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Watch
Russian Doll returns to Netflix on 20 April for a second season. The highly successful series stars co-creator Natasha Lyonne as Nadia, a woman facing an unusual existential crisis: she is trapped in a time loop on a subway train in Manhattan.Advertisement

Read
The Sloth Lemur’s Song haunts Alison Richards’s account, fuelled by more than 50 years of research, of Madagascar’s deep past and uncertain present. This island microcosm is a bellwether for the whole planet. More

CT scans of humans, chimpanzees and macaques reveal that human collarbones slow their growth rate in the final months of pregnancy, perhaps to make it easier for babies to squeeze through the pelvis

Humans

11 April 2022

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
Collarbones may grow more slowly in the run-up to birthMartins Rudzitis/Getty Images
The collarbones of a human fetus grow more slowly just before birth, with growth then speeding up again during early childhood – probably an evolutionary compromise that allows humans’ relatively wide shoulders to fit through the pelvis.
Broad shoulders may help us with our balance and our ability to throw, and might even help us breathe more effectively. But a fetus with broad shoulders poses a problem during childbirth, because our upright posture has led humans to develop a relatively narrow pelvis.
The newly discovered slow-down-then-catch-up-later growth pattern in human clavicles – collarbones – around the time of birth appears to resolve this “shoulder mystery”, says Naoki Morimoto at Kyoto University in Japan.Advertisement
“There are two things that make human childbirth difficult: a big head and wide shoulders,” he says. “Since [difficult birth] is dangerous… it is sensible to think that humans evolved some ways to ease the problem.”
Previous studies have shown that the heads of human fetuses grow at fast rates in the uterus and then slow down just before birth, he says, which is a trend seen in other primates too – although human heads start to slow down their growth very late compared with other primates.

Curious to know whether the shoulders grow in a similar way, Morimoto and his colleagues examined CT scans of 81 humans (Homo sapiens), 64 chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and 31 Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata). About half of these subjects were fetuses at various stages of development starting from about the beginning of the second trimester. The others were infants and adults.
The team measured the lengths of various bones in the skull, shoulders, upper arm, pelvis, thigh and vertebral column. Generally speaking, the vertebral column’s growth isn’t affected by birth constraints, so it serves as a good basis of comparison for the growth rates of the other bones, says Morimoto.
The researchers confirmed that the growth rate of the skull in all three species reduced just before birth, says Morimoto. Other bones, such as the arms and pelvis, had steady growth in the uterus, but then picked up speed after birth.
As for the collarbones, chimpanzees showed a fairly steady growth rate from before to after birth, he says. The macaques’ collarbones grew steadily before birth and then more slowly after birth.
The human collarbones, however, showed a standout growth pattern, he says. They slowed down about two months before birth and then sped up again over the next five years – creating what the researchers call a “growth depression” that lines up perfectly with when the shoulders need to fit through the pelvis.
“Currently, we simply do not know why this specific pattern in the shoulder – and not other ways like [a slower, steadier growth] – was selected in humans as a means to ease the difficult childbirth,” says co-author Mikaze Kawada, also at Kyoto University. “We need to wait for further studies.”
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2114935119
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The Antikythera mechanism, often called the world’s first computer could calculate the timing of cosmic events – and now we may know the date it was calibrated to

Space

7 April 2022

By Leah Crane
A functional model of the Antikythera mechanismA. Voulgaris
We may have figured out the date from which an ancient device often described as the first computer began its calculations. This device, called the Antikythera mechanism, was built sometime between the years 200 BC and 60 BC, and it was used to track time and predict the motions of celestial bodies.
A spiral shape inset in the back of the mechanism depicts a 223-month cycle called a Saros, which is based on the amount of time it takes for the sun, moon and … More

A tsunami 3800 years ago devastated the coastline of Chile and encouraged hunter-gatherers to move inland, where they stayed for the next 1000 years

Humans

6 April 2022

By Michael Marshall
The Atacama desert in ChileShutterstock/tjalex
An earthquake as large as any in recorded history struck the coast of Chile about 3800 years ago, triggering a tsunami that caused devastation along 1000 kilometres of coastline. In the wake of the tsunami, local hunter-gatherers began spending less time near the coast and moved cemeteries further inland, staying there for 1000 years or more, despite not having a system of writing to convey information about the disaster. 
It is a remarkable example of a society transforming itself to handle natural threats, say the researchers who studied the event.
The team, led by Gabriel Easton at the University of Chile in Santiago, spent years in the Atacama desert on the west coast of South America, gathering evidence of an ancient tsunami.Advertisement
At multiple sites, they found a layer of distinctive sediment dumped by a tsunami. Radiocarbon dates from charcoal and shells in archaeological deposits directly overlying the tsunami sediment suggest it happened about 3800 years ago.
It is impressive that the team has found evidence over such a wide area, says Eugenia Gayo, director of Millennium Nucleus Upwell in Concepción, Chile. “It’s robust.”

The coast of Chile lies on a subduction zone, where one of the tectonic plates that make up Earth’s surface is being forced under another. As a result, the region is prone to large earthquakes. However, the written record in this region is quite short, so it is unclear how big the quakes can be and how often the biggest ones occur.
“We propose that this earthquake was similar to the Valdivia earthquake that occurred in 1960 in southern Chile,” says Easton. “This is the largest earthquake ever recorded in history.” The Valdivia quake had a magnitude of about 9.5, and Easton’s team says the tremor 3800 years ago was similar.
In theory, the Valdivia quake could have been a one-off caused by a very rare combination of circumstances, says Easton. But if a similar quake happened within the past 5000 years, that can’t be true. “This is our proposal, that this area in northern Chile is capable to produce earthquakes of this size,” he says.
Other subduction zones may also have been underestimated, says Easton. He points to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, which caused devastation in Japan. Many seismologists thought the region could only produce earthquakes of about magnitude 8.3, but the Tōhoku quake was 9.0 or 9.1.

People have lived in the Atacama for more than 12,000 years. Although the desert gets little rainfall, the marine ecosystems along the coast are rich so hunter-gatherer societies have thrived.
However, Easton and his team documented major shifts that occurred around 3800 years ago. Archaeological sites near the coast show less evidence of habitation, suggesting people stopped going there or at least spent less time there.
Furthermore, cemeteries were moved inland and uphill. The local people mummified their relatives’ bodies and placed great value on having their dead ancestors nearby – a practice that continues to this day in communities in the Andes. “The most important thing that the families and the communities had at that time were their parents,” says Easton, and they took great care to protect them.
This new pattern of behaviour lasted a long time, with many sites only being reoccupied between 1500 and 1000 years ago. “This is kind of surprising, because people usually have a short memory for this kind of event,” says Gayo. Even maintaining the behaviour for 1000 years would have meant sustaining it for 40 generations. “That is a lot.”
It isn’t clear how the memory was preserved. Easton says the message may have been passed on orally, and perhaps through pictures on stone.
For Gayo, the lesson is that sometimes it is necessary to make big changes to adapt to natural hazards. That includes modern societies, which are threatened by growing climate extremes and rising seas. “You need to transform radically,” she says.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2996
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