Humans

A suspense-filled documentary sees Free Solo’s Alex Honnold and 80-year-old ecologist Bruce Means set out to climb a remote table-top mountain deep in Guyana’s Amazon rainforest

Humans

20 April 2022

By Gregory Wakeman
Federico Pisani, part of the documentary team, on the cliff face of Weiassipu in GuyanaNational Geographic/Renan Ozturk
Explorer: The Last Tepui
Renan Ozturk, Drew Pulley, Taylor Rees
Disney+Advertisement
THOSE of you who have seen the astounding National Geographic documentary Free Solo will know just how mesmerising it can be to watch a professional climber scale the side of a mountain.
A new documentary, Explorer: The Last Tepui, shares a lot with Free Solo, which won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Not only does it also star rock climber Alex Honnold, it shows him dangling off the side of a mountain in precarious positions that will make your stomach drop in terror.
While his athletic feats are astounding, Honnold isn’t the most captivating character in the film. That honour goes to Bruce Means, who has spent his academic career finding and cataloguing new species throughout South America to prove to the world and its governments that the area is a biodiversity hotspot to be protected at all costs.
In Explorer: The Last Tepui, the 80-year-old ecologist and conservationist is intent on climbing the 300-plus metres to the peak of a remote table-top mountain, or tepui, deep in Guyana’s Amazon rainforest.
Means, Honnold, expedition leader Mark Synnott and a world-class team of climbers have to hike 56 kilometres over 10 days across increasingly treacherous terrain to reach the base of the tepui. This is a very big deal because Means has problems just bending his knees.
Once at the tepui, team members plan to climb to the top and then pull Means up, which will allow him to explore the cliff wall for novel animal and plant species.
Directors Taylor Rees, Renan Ozturk and Drew Pulley do a superb job of setting up the aim of the expedition, as well as the myriad difficulties that could blight it. Fully aware of the extraordinary visuals and fascinating characters that they have at their disposal, they take a step back and allow the majesty of the rainforest to take over, while giving the highly intelligent and passionate specialists room to describe what makes it so special.
Some of the shots that Matthew Irving, director of photography, captures are awe-inspiring, and the directors also provide plenty of long, lingering views of mountains, creatures, streams and waterfalls, which allow viewers to soak up the natural beauty, listen to the sounds of the animals and get lost in the frame.
What makes the documentary so riveting is Means’s detailed explanations as he walks with the team through the forest, which is dense with trees and vegetation. The ecologist’s positive and self-deprecating nature makes him instantly likeable, while his endless knowledge and devotion to nature and science are so contagious that they will make viewers of all ages appreciate the diversity of our environment.
His efforts are made all the more valiant by his admission that if he makes it to the summit, it will be the culmination of his life’s work. Unsurprisingly, because of the unforgiving terrain they must cross to reach the tepui, various major obstacles soon get in the way of the party. Means’s strain at holding up the expedition because of his age and health doesn’t just make him more lovable, it injects real suspense into the documentary, which will debut on Disney+ on 22 April for Earth Day.
The constantly changing viewpoints and potentially life-threatening issues ensure that Explorer: The Last Tepui remains compelling to the very last frame. Even though it is just 54 minutes long, you will still feel utterly exhausted, as well as inspired, by the time it is over.

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Ending a relationship by disappearing without explanation, known as “ghosting”, seems to be a distinct form of social rejection – and psychologists are discovering why it is so painful

Humans

20 April 2022

By Amelia Tait
Offwhite
IT WAS 2015 when Jennice Vilhauer’s clients started telling her ghost stories. The Los Angeles-based psychotherapist had more than 10 years of experience helping people with their depression, anxiety and relationship issues – but suddenly, clients began telling her about a new problem, one that left them extremely distressed.
They were victims of ghosting, where one person ends all communication with another, disappearing like a phantom. Messages are ignored and just like that, the person you had a connection with – typically a romantic partner, but sometimes a friend or colleague – chooses to disengage with no explanation. But when Vilhauer searched for more information, she found little research on this phenomenon. So she started publishing her own observations online and was soon inundated with emails from people who had been ghosted. “There’s been an enormous explosion of interest in this because it’s happening so frequently,” she says.
Which begs the question, what is uniquely painful about ghosting? After all, it nearly always hurts when a relationship ends. Is being ghosted any more distressing in the information age than, say, in the Wild West, when your lover hopped on their horse and left you in a trail of dust without so much as a forwarding address? We are now beginning to find out, as well as building a picture of why people ghost, how quirks of the brain can make it feel worse than it ought to and how, counter-intuitively, ghosting may be getting less painful.
Unexpected disappearance
Back in 2015, ghosting hurt so badly because it was completely unexpected, says Vilhauer – it wasn’t something people mentally prepared for when entering a … More

New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

20 April 2022

Watch
The Velvet Queen herself – the snow leopard – comes to selected UK and Irish cinemas on 29 April, accompanied by wolves, bears, yaks, birds and the fabulous and untouched landscapes of the Tibetan plateau.

Read
Wild by Design by environmental historian Laura Martin examines how we ended up casting ourselves as the “managers” of wild spaces, and goes on to ask whether we can design natural places without destroying wildness.

Watch
The philosophy and science of the disrupted mind are explored by philosopher Noga Arikha and neuroscientist Katerina Fotopoulou in this online talk by The Royal Institution at 7pm BST on 26 April.Advertisement More

The new science fiction novel from Station Eleven’s author is mostly set centuries into the future – but also contains scary glimpses of a pandemic-strewn past

Humans

20 April 2022

By Clare Wilson
Time travel isn’t all fun and games in Sea of TranquilityShutterstock/Tomertu
Sea of Tranquility
Emily St John Mandel
Picador
IT SAYS a lot about Emily St John Mandel’s imagination that while there are multiple instances of time travel in her new book, Sea of Tranquility, this is only one of several intriguing plot strands.
The novel, Mandel’s sixth, is a welcome return to science fiction after her contemporary outing, The Glass Hotel. Her highly successful fourth novel, Station Eleven, is set 20 years after a deadly pandemic, and … More

In 12 psychological experiments with a total of 942 participants, 82 per cent overestimated the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups

Humans

14 April 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
A stock image of a group of people of a range of ethnicitiesShutterstock/Rawpixel.com
People may subconsciously overestimate the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups, even if they belong to those groups, which could create illusions of diversity within populations.
“Individuals from the minority group are by definition less frequent,” says Rasha Kardosh at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. “Therefore, we are more likely to notice them and so are more likely to remember their presence, and so we end up overestimating their presence.”
Previous studies suggest people in … More

The earliest evidence of calendar use by the Maya may have been found in the remains of an ancient temple in Guatemala

Humans

13 April 2022

By Carissa Wong
An ancient fragment of a Maya calendarHeather Hurst/Skidmore College/Saratoga Springs
Two pieces of an ancient wall may preserve the earliest evidence of the Maya calendar. The fragments are decorated with a dot and line above a deer head – representing one of the dates from the 260-day calendar – and they are from a temple built between 2300 and 2200 years ago in what is now Guatemala in central America.
Several ancient communities living across the Americas – including the Aztecs, Maya, Mixtecs and Zapotecs – tracked the time using cycles of 13 days denoted by numbers, alongside cycles of 20 days named after gods. In this calendar, a specific day is assigned both a number and a name, producing 260 unique days before the cycle repeats. It is thought that people used the calendar to decide when to hold ceremonies, to mark important dates or to attempt to predict future events.
Until now, most previous early evidence for calendar use by these ancient people had been found on stone monuments dating to around 100 BC. David Stuart at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues have now found evidence that the Maya people may have used this calendar over a century earlier.Advertisement
The team previously discovered the San Bartolo archaeological site, which includes a pyramid called Las Pinturas – meaning “the paintings” – back in 2001. Excavations then revealed that the Maya completed several phases of construction, with earlier structures eventually knocked down to form the foundations of the pyramid.
When the researchers were sorting through pieces of plaster collected from the pyramid’s foundations, they realised that two pieces fit perfectly together to form a date symbol.
“That was a stunner – we believe that this is the earliest example of the use of the Maya calendar, showing the day seven Deer,” says Stuart.

The fragments came from the remains of a long platform that was probably built to track astronomical events as well as the time. “This platform may have acted as an observatory for looking at the rising sun or other astronomical bodies in the sky, or for just keeping track of time. Like a kind of architectural clock,” says Stuart.
By radiocarbon dating charcoal found alongside the fragments, the team dated the symbols to between 300 and 200 BC. Stuart believes the symbols may have been used to denote the date of a new year, but they may also have been used to reference a person or deity.
However, some archaeologists question whether this is really the earliest evidence of the 260-day calendar. Mary Pohl at Florida State University believes that a previously discovered roller stamp from Tabasco in Mexico shows this date notation was used in 500 BC. But Stuart thinks the symbols on the stamp from 500 BC aren’t necessarily a form of date notation comparable to the Maya system.
“Early evidence of the… calendar has been debated, but in this study they present clear evidence of the 260-day calendar use. This is very important work,” says Takeshi Inomata at the University of Arizona.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abl9290
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An analysis of bones from about 500 individuals who died between 1830 and 1867 in Middenbeemster suggests women in the dairy farming community did not breastfeed

Health

13 April 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Engraving from From The Five Senses by Fredrick Bloemaert, after Abraham Bloemaert, 1632-1670F. Bloemaert/A. Bloemaert/N. Visscherimage/Rijks Museum/Public Domain
Women from a 19th-century farming community in the Netherlands probably didn’t breastfeed their babies because they were too busy working. It is the first time that widespread artificial feeding has been discovered in a farming community from this period.
Andrea Waters-Rist at Western University in Canada and her colleagues analysed the bones of about 500 individuals who died between 1830 and 1867 in Middenbeemster, a rural village in the north of the Netherlands.
The remains were dug up because a church was expanding into the cemetery, and Waters-Rist and her team were offered the chance to analyse them. They also had death certificates for about half the people. “It’s really rare to have such a large sample size and to have all this amazing archival information,” she says.Advertisement
The researchers wanted to find out more about the diets of the women and children in this village, which mainly consisted of dairy farmers at this time. “One of the main reasons behind this type of research is to rectify the historical record about the lives of women and children,” says Waters-Rist. “Traditional archaeology has focused on what adult males were doing and women were just seen as passive actors.”
The team was able to determine whether the children were breastfed by analysing the chemical isotopes in their bones. Children who are breastfed have different carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios to their mothers.

Out of 20 children who had died before the age of 1, 15 showed no evidence of breastfeeding. “Even the five who did show some sign – it did not seem like they were breastfed for long,” says Waters-Rist.
And out of 35 children aged between 1 and 6, 29 showed no signs of breastfeeding in their bones. The team believes this was probably due to the fact that women predominantly worked the farms in this community, milking and raising the cows.
“We think it’s a sign of how hard the women were working and that they were just really busy,” she says. “Also, there was always fresh cow’s milk.”
Waters-Rist says this has never been seen among farmers from this period before. “We’ve only seen this behaviour in really large cities where women were working in factories and couldn’t take their babies with them,” she says.
“The findings of this study are intriguing for an agricultural community where mothers and infants would not have spent long periods apart,” says Ellen Kendall at Durham University in the UK. But she says the results may be skewed by only looking at children who died before the age of six – it could be that children who weren’t breastfed were more likely to die early.
Journal reference: PLOS One, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265821

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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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