Humans

In The Cartographers, Peng Shepherd’s latest work of magical realist speculative fiction, the characters have a habit of asking “what makes a map?”. The answer, it becomes clear, is its purpose, finds Sally Adee

Humans

9 March 2022

By Sally Adee

Shutterstock/vikas31
The Cartographers
Peng Shepherd
Orion Books (17 March)Advertisement

MAPS can seem such dry, factual objects: blueprints of reality that are useful to get from A to B, but instantly forgettable when you get there. Three new science-fiction books, released this month, challenge this view, showing that maps are more than the objective depictions we take them to be.
In The Cartographers, Peng Shepherd’s latest work of magical realist speculative fiction, the characters have a habit of asking “what makes a map?”. The answer, it becomes clear, is its purpose. From political maps to resource maps and road maps, the main purpose of cartography is to create a shared version of reality: one that suits the map-maker’s ideals.
Shepherd’s protagonist, a young cartographer named Nell, finds this out to her cost when she inherits a mysterious map after the death of her estranged father. The power of maps to make visible what the map-makers want you to see, and to hide what they would rather you didn’t, is revealed when Nell discovers a shady cartel that has killed a lot of people to keep this particular map secret.
First and foremost, The Cartographers is a love letter to maps and the secrets they hide. It is also a Luddite’s cri du coeur against Google and other tech giants, whose maps are stripped of cultural and historical perspective.
As speculative fiction, it works well, but the book also drifts into vignettes about dramas between student cartographers in an academic hothouse that recall scenes from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The book ultimately sags under the weight of so many competing ambitions, but overall, the plot is strong enough to carry you through to the end.
“If maps shape our expectations of reality, what happens when reality contradicts those expectations?”
If maps shape our expectations of reality, what happens when reality contradicts those expectations? Lucy Kissick explores this in Plutoshine, which follows the quest to terraform Pluto into a habitable water world for humans. This requires some suspension of disbelief given that the ambient temperature is -240°C, methanol and nitrogen freeze solid and it isn’t easy to pick out the sun in the murky “daytime” sky.
It is undeniably science fiction, but there is a heavy emphasis on science. From astrophysics to cosmochemistry, there is a lot to learn, including about the various isotopes of hydrogen.
Science lessons aside, Plutoshine is worth the admission fee for the fantastical depictions of Pluto alone, with its jewelled ice slopes in a rainbow of different colours of frozen elements. And also for the point at which it transpires that mapping technology missed what is hiding under all that ice.
What drives us to map such wild, uncharted terrain at all is the central question of Sweep of Stars, Maurice Broaddus’s beautiful new Afrofuturist vision. In Broaddus’s world, space exploration is driven not by the whims of billionaires, but by people who have been pushed to create empires where others fear to tread. The Muungano Empire is the diaspora of Black people on Earth who fled to escape their oppressors. The elders must chart their expansion while keeping their peoples’ histories alive. Not easy, when they are pursued by their enemies, who spout the eerily-familiar motto: “Earth first”. Broaddus’s characters are as captivating as those in Game of Thrones, and the story is as big as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
All three books provide a timely reminder not only to look more closely at maps, but to question who created them and why.

Sally also recommends…
Until the Last of Me
Sylvain Neuvel
Michael Joseph
Book two of the Take Them to the Stars series, about an ancient matrilineal society whose goal is to get humanity into space. Catch up by reading the previous book, A History of What Comes Next, which takes place in an alternative version of the 1960s space race.

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Shutterstock/Romolo Tavani
SOMETIMES it pays to take the long view. Look at the past half-century of cosmology, as UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees does in our interview, and it is plain how far we have come.
The story of the universe’s origin in a big bang – an idea not especially favoured when Rees started as a researcher in the 1960s – is now as close to an established fact as science permits. We have also elucidated the properties and phenomena of an unimaginably vast cosmos with ever more acuity. It is a privilege to live in an age when, for the first time, we have a convincing story of most of the grand sweep of cosmic evolution.
“If so many planets are out there, how come intelligent life hasn’t come our way?”Advertisement
These are truly thrilling developments, albeit ones that have, in the nature of science, thrown up more holes in our understanding – holes that instruments such as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope are designed to plug.
Yet this progress also gives reason for introspection. Many researchers like Rees find themselves drawn to questions of humanity’s future. The discovery of thousands of exoplanets circling other stars, and the realisation that even icy moons in the outer solar system might harbour warm and wet environments, boosts the belief that if life exists on one tiny blue dot, it might exist elsewhere, too.
So why hasn’t intelligent life elsewhere made itself known to us? Perhaps because hubristic missteps give technological civilisations a limited lifespan – and perhaps also because, as we have learned, space is an unforgiving environment. It is a half-century now since the last person walked on the moon and, as Rees warns, while billionaires such as Elon Musk battle it out to return there, it is folly to think “space tourism” will ever be the norm for our species. Any vestiges of humanity that leave our solar system will probably be very different to us, and most likely the progeny of the pioneers who establish a future beyond Earth, on Mars for example.
For the rest of us, our planet is all there is. The problems we face, not least the tragedy currently unfolding in Ukraine, are a reminder that progress can just as easily be undone. All the more reason to apply our common humanity to solving the problems of the here and now. More

An AI tool developed by DeepMind can help historians restore ancient Greek texts with 72 per cent accuracy, and date inscriptions to within 30 years of their true age

Humans

9 March 2022

By Carissa Wong
The Celsus Library in the ancient city of Ephesus, TurkeyMazur Travel/Shutterstock
An artificial intelligence algorithm developed as part of a collaboration between historians and UK-based AI firm DeepMind can help restore ancient Greek texts with 72 per cent accuracy.
The AI can also predict where in the ancient Mediterranean world the texts were originally written with more than 70 per cent accuracy and date them to within a few decades of their agreed-upon date of creation. All of this marks an improvement upon an earlier version of the AI that could only restore ancient texts.
“Inscriptions provide evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilisations,” says Thea Sommerschield at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Italy. “But most surviving inscriptions have been damaged over the centuries, so their texts are now fragmentary or illegible. They may also have been moved or trafficked far from their original location.”Advertisement
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When recovering ancient texts, historians are usually interested in achieving three major goals: restoring the text, and working out exactly when and where it was written. To do this, they look for distinctive features and patterns in the style of writing and compare them to those of ancient texts that have already been found and dated.
“However, it’s really difficult for a human to harness all existing relevant data, and to discover underlying patterns every time,” says Sommerschield.
Sommerschield and her colleagues worked with researchers at DeepMind to get the machine-learning AI – called Ithaca after a Greek island that is famous for being the home of the legendary figure Odysseus – to carry out all three tasks.
To train Ithaca, the team used around 60,000 ancient Greek texts from across the Mediterranean that are already well-studied and known to have been written between 700 BC and AD 500. The team masked some of the characters in the texts and then compared Ithaca’s predictions for this “missing” text with the actual inscriptions.
Next, the team used a data set of nearly 8000 inscriptions – again, already well-studied and understood – to test Ithaca’s performance alone, or in combination with two ancient historians. On its own, Ithaca could restore texts with 62 per cent accuracy, while ancient historians alone restored text with around 25 per cent accuracy.
However, the most accurate reconstructions involved Ithaca and historians working together. When historians took Ithaca’s top 20 most likely reconstructions for a given text and used them to inform their own work, they could restore the text with an accuracy even greater than Ithaca alone.
“When historians used Ithaca, their performance on the text restoration task actually tripled, to 72 per cent,” says Sommerschield.

Ithaca could also predict where in the Mediterranean a text was written 71 per cent of the time and it could date the texts to within 30 years of their true date of creation, as previously established by historians.
“It is clear that the authors’ work is important and groundbreaking. The ‘ancient historian and Ithaca’ method produces startlingly significant improvements in outcomes over traditional human-only methods,” says Tom Elliott at New York University. However, further testing with more historians is needed and people will need training and technical support to use the tool, he adds.
The team says the feedback from historians so far has been positive.
“We hope that the way we’ve designed it, it’s going to be easy for an ancient historian to use, because they will just type in the text [to an online interface] and then they will get all these visualisations that they can use,” says Yannis Assael at DeepMind in the UK, and an author of the study.
Ithaca’s design should also make it easily applicable to any ancient language and any written medium, says Sommerschield.
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04448-z

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Scientific monitoring of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is being affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Humans

8 March 2022

By Matthew Sparkes
Damage to infrastructure at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology neutron sourceState Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine
Scientists monitoring radiation levels at Chernobyl are unable to access their laboratories and instruments because Russian troops control the plant, warns a worker who escaped the facility when it was captured by Russian forces on 24 February. Other staff still running the working power plants on the site are reportedly being held in poor conditions without the chance to take breaks away from the facility to rest.
“We continue scientific monitoring as much as possible,” says the nuclear expert from the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “This is very far from [the] usual volume [of testing] because [my colleagues] have no access to our labs and instruments in Chernobyl, but we do our best in monitoring important values, sometimes by indirect data.”
The scientist tells New Scientist that all of his team were able to escape the facility and leave the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone on the first day of the invasion. Despite this, some of those staff are now caught in areas of intense fighting.Advertisement
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He says his team advises staff at the working part of the nuclear power plant and adds that they remain in contact. But it has now been almost two weeks since Russia seized the plant and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) director general Rafael Mariano Grossi says that the 210 staff on site have still not been able to leave for rest, something he stressed is important for them to carry out their jobs safely.
The anonymous scientist says that workers at the plant are “heroes” for continuing to ensure nuclear and radiation safety under those conditions.
The IAEA has now listed a series of incidents at nuclear power plants that it says present a risk to safety, although there are no signs or evidence of radiation leaks.
“We cannot go on like this, there has to be clear understandings, clear commitments not to go anywhere near a nuclear facility when it comes to military operations,” said Grossi at a press conference yesterday.
On the first day of the invasion there were radiation spikes at the Chernobyl plant which the State Inspectorate for Nuclear Regulation of Ukraine put down to Russian military vehicles stirring up radioactive dust.
On 26 February, an electrical transformer at a radioactive waste disposal facility near Kharkiv was damaged, and the following day missiles hit the site of a similar facility in Kyiv. No radiation leaks were detected after these attacks.
On 4 March a fire was started by missiles targeted at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. The blaze was later put out, but reports suggest that firefighters initially came under fire from Russian forces.
A neutron generator at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology used for scientific research has also been destroyed by shelling, says Grossi, and there are also concerns about a lack of communication from staff at an oncology centre in Mariupol that has radioactive materials.

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Goose bones from Stone Age China suggest the birds were being domesticated there 7000 years ago, which could mean they were domesticated before chickens

Humans

7 March 2022

By Michael Marshall
Chinese geese (Anser cygnoides f. domestica)blickwinkel/AGAMI/M. Guyt/Alamy
Geese may have been domesticated as early as 7000 years ago in what is now China, according to a study of preserved goose bones. That may make them the first bird to be domesticated, before chickens – although the timing of chicken domestication is uncertain.
The finding extends the history of goose domestication and potentially the history of domestic poultry as a whole, says Masaki Eda at Hokkaido University Museum in Sapporo, Japan.
Eda is part of a team that has excavated an archaeological site in east China called Tianluoshan, which was a Stone Age village between about 7000 and 5500 years ago. Its inhabitants “were basically hunter-gatherers”, says Eda, but they also grew rice in paddy fields.Advertisement
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The researchers have identified 232 goose bones at Tianluoshan and say there are multiple lines of evidence that some of the geese were at least partially domesticated.
Four of the bones belonged to immature geese that were less than 16 weeks old, with the youngest probably less than eight weeks old. This implies they must have hatched at Tianluoshan, says Eda, because they were too young to have flown in from elsewhere. However, no wild geese breed in the area today and it is unlikely they did so 7000 years ago, he says.
Some of the adult geese also seem to have been locally bred, based on the chemical make-up of their bones, which reflects the water they drank. These locally bred birds were all roughly the same size, indicating captive breeding. Finally, the researchers carbon-dated the bones and found that the locally bred geese lived about 7000 years ago.
Taken together, the findings suggest the geese were at an early stage of domestication, says Eda.

“It’s a major study in our understanding of poultry domestication,” says Ophélie Lebrasseur at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France. “They’ve been very thorough.”
“The main thing that stood out for me is the fact they actually did radiocarbon dating on the bird bones,” says Julia Best at Cardiff University in the UK. This makes the dating much more reliable than if they had simply dated the surrounding sediment.
If geese were domesticated 7000 years ago, that would make them the first bird to be domesticated, says Eda. The other candidate is chickens, but there has been a dispute over when and where this first happened.
Chickens were probably domesticated from wild birds called red junglefowl, which live in southern Asia. However, genetics has complicated the story, revealing that domestic chickens subsequently interbred with other birds like the grey junglefowl.
A study published in 2014 reported that chickens were domesticated in northern China as early as 10,000 years ago, based on DNA from bones. However, it isn’t clear that red junglefowl ever lived that far north, says Lebrasseur. Furthermore, the bones weren’t directly dated and “a lot of the things they claimed were chickens were pheasants”, says Best. Firm evidence of domestic chickens only appears from around 5000 years ago, she says.
This implies geese were domesticated before chickens, says Lebrasseur. “With the evidence we currently have, I think it is true,” she says. But she adds that bird domestications are understudied compared with those of mammals like dogs and cows, so the story could well change as more evidence emerges.
It is very difficult to say why the geese were domesticated, says Eda. Meat, eggs, feathers and bone tools are all possibilities, and they may have been used in ritual ceremonies. “One of the things we see with chickens is they’re often held in high esteem when they’re first domesticated,” says Best.
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2117064119

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Josie Ford
The order of not things
Cambridge – of Cambridgeshire, not Massachusetts, before anyone jumps in – is famed as the academic home of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, three philosophers who did much to elucidate, not to say obfuscate, language, logic and meaning. It is very much in their spirit, we assume, that Cambridge City Council recently advertised an extra rubbish bin collection following staff absences, stating “bins will be collected in the order in which they were previously not collected”.
“Is it quantum mechanics then that enables us to determine the order in which things don’t happen?” asks Alison Litherland, we imagine hovering indecisively over her bins. Quite possibly. Our starting point must be the following question: if a bin isn’t collected, but no one sees it not collected, has it been not collected at all?
In purely practical terms, the only way of finding out is by looking in the bin, making this a particularly pure instantiation of Erwin Schrödinger’s cat paradox. Maybe Schrödinger’s trash didn’t have quite the same ring to it. As far as your problem goes, Alison, we fear that repeated measurement of identical bins may allow you to build up a picture of when it wasn’t collected, but this will only have statistical validity.Advertisement
Poet didn’t know it
Feedback is delighted to find, while searching for something else, that the physicist James Clerk Maxwell (died 1879) is listed as an author on the New Scientist website (born circa 1996).
Further investigation reveals a series of poems published by Maxwell in these pages in 2011. We are somewhat lacking context, but his Valentine By a Telegraph Clerk (Male) to a Telegraph Clerk (Female) bears rereading, with its culminating verse: “Through many a volt the weber flew,/And clicked this answer back to me;/I am thy farad staunch and true,/Charged to a volt with love for thee.”
Sweet, if of its time. Following our musings on how old the internet thinks you can be (26 February), at 180, we may have found our oldest contributor.
Standard elephants
Metrologists at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris may still be basking in the replacement, in 2019, of the international prototype kilogram – a platinum-iridium hulk that would feel exactly like 1 kilogram if dropped on your foot – by a fancy-schmantzy definition in terms of various physical constants. But as regular Feedback readers know, they are missing the… in the room. The elephant is well-established as the actual international standard unit of mass.
Proof positive, a report from The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario, Canada, sent in by Doug Thomson. A clean-up after storms there in January required the removal of “145,000 tonnes of snow – about 20,000 large, frozen elephants worth”. We can only imagine the difficulties of dealing with these homesick and discomfited beasts. The icing on the elephants clearly adds something to their weight, as we conventionally take an adult male African bush elephant to weigh about 6 tonnes.
Even as we hear calls for a standard prototype elephant kept under glass somewhere growing louder, news reaches us of a breakaway movement in New South Wales, Australia. Many of you highlight news of the seizure of 9.7 hectares’ worth of illicitly grown tobacco at Koraleigh “weighing the equivalent of 13 bulldozers”.
How many bulldozers of tobacco fit into Sydney Harbour, we wonder. Meanwhile, Brian Horton consults the delightful website “What Things Weigh” to find bulldozers range from a baby 8 (good old non-metric) tons to a fully grown 180 tons. Suffice to say, the amount of tobacco seized at Koraleigh was some 42 standard elephants.
His mummy’s voice
The interwebs have delighted themselves recently at a story first reported by New Scientist in 2020, that researchers have recreated the voice of an Egyptian mummy held at Leeds City Museum, UK.
The experience is slightly hard to reproduce on the printed page, but oddly, in some of the clips now circulating, the mummy is clearly saying “UUUUGRHH”, whereas two years ago it was a far more refined “EEEEERGH”. Mummies could presumably have made more than one sound, says a colleague – not unreasonably, with the qualification “when alive”. “This is the replication crisis writ large,” says another, damningly.
Vive la résistance!
Much as we try to stop buttered toast falling on our pages, right side up or no, still it rains down. But we are in a philosophical frame of mind, so we are grateful to J. Feralco for the reminder of a corollary to Murphy’s Law, first established by humorist Paul Jennings in the 1940s: “The chance of the bread falling with the buttered side down is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.”
This came as part of his Report on Resistentialism, a school of philosophy encapsulated by the phrase “Les choses sont contre nous” – “things are against us” – established on Paris’s Left Bank by “bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed” thinker Pierre-Marie Ventre. Resistentialism holds that there are limits to the sway humans can hold in a world of largely hostile, uncooperative things. It is worth rummaging around for the whole essay online as a parable for These Uncertain Times.
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The new slapstick sci-fi offering by French directorial royalty Jean-Pierre Jeunet is plagued by predictable innuendo

Humans

2 March 2022

By Gregory Wakeman

Romance can get complicated when you are locked in with a sex robot while the androids attackBruno Calvo/Netflix
Bigbug
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
NetflixAdvertisement

JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET is widely regarded as one of the finest French film-makers of the past 30 years, having overseen the likes of Delicatessen, A Very Long Engagement and the much adored 2001 romantic comedy Amélie.
Bigbug is Jeunet’s first feature film since 2013’s The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet and his first French-language film since 2009’s Micmacs. As fans of his work might expect, Bigbug, a futuristic sci-fi comedy, is downright bizarre.
Set in Paris in 2045, it takes place in a world where humans rely on robots to satisfy their every desire. Then four of Alice (Elsa Zylberstein)’s antiquated domestic robots decide to take her hostage, trapping her inside her home with her date Max (Stéphane de Groodt), his son Léo (Hélie Thonnat), her daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard), her ex-husband Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and his new girlfriend Jennifer (Claire Chust). Alice’s nosy neighbour Françoise (Isabelle Nanty), who happens to be visiting along with her sex robot Greg (Alban Lenoir), also gets locked in.
What starts off as a minor inconvenience soon gets real when it emerges that the latest generation of robots, the Yonyx (all played by François Levantal), is trying to take over the world. As the Yonyx get closer to Alice’s home, the humans start to turn against each other and the older robots, who may or may not be trying to keep them safe.
While Jeunet’s previous films are similarly quirky, in Bigbug, he plays for much bawdier laughs. Sometimes, it works. A robot’s analysis of why Max is lying to Alice at the start of the film, for instance, suggests that Jeunet might be about to explore artificial intelligence in a unique and irreverent way.
Unfortunately, though, that level of insight never materialises, and this early scene is about as funny as Bigbug gets. Sure, Victor’s increasing anger at being trapped inside is amusing to watch unfold, plus there are a handful of other slapstick moments that you can’t help but smile at. But in general, it is surprising how predictable most of the gags are.
Filming began in October 2020, and it seems that Jeunet has tried to channel the mental and emotional struggles of quarantine during covid-19 and to critique both the world’s reliance on technology and its infatuation with social media. Unfortunately, whatever message he is attempting to get across never really materialises. In its place are crude innuendos and sex jokes.
Some of Jeunet’s more unusual creative decisions also make Bigbug less successful than it should be. It is jarring that, despite the mighty financial backing of Netflix, the special effects look so cheap as to be genuinely off-putting. What’s more, while the characters are almost entirely motivated by sex and the film includes several scenes that are definitely not suitable for children, the world Jeunet has created looks and feels cartoonish.
Alice’s home, her clothes, her robots and even the flying cars all appear to have been inspired by The Jetsons, while the villainous Yonyx, who all look and act the same, could have been ripped straight from a 1970s comic book.
While these elements don’t come close to gelling, Jeunet’s light direction, bright colour palette and attractive set design do at least make Bigbug watchable. It helps that the script also takes some unexpected twists and turns that see the characters getting romantically entangled in ways that you might not initially expect.
But considering Jeunet’s past cinematic triumphs, and after so long away from the camera, Bigbug just doesn’t provide enough laughs or sufficient thematic depth to be anything other than disappointing.

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Katie Yu
Watch
Upload, a sci-fi comedy that satirises the idea of a digital afterlife, returns for a second season. Created by Greg Daniels (Parks and Recreation, Space Force), the series will be available on Amazon Prime Video from 11 March.

Visit
New Scientist Live will be at Manchester Central and online from 12 March. With talks from over 40 speakers across four stages, there are also live, hands-on demonstrations and exhibitions. 14 March is dedicated to schools and home learners.

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An Infinity of Worlds may exist in the universe. In this eye-opening account of cosmic inflation, physicist Will Kinney points out that if this were true, it would raise difficult questions about what the cosmos actually is. More