Humans

Josie Ford
No-vax’s good vibrations
“If you wish to understand the Universe, think of energy, frequency and vibration.” This quote, attributed to the visionary electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla, possibly in his distinctly odd late phase, has long been beloved of those with a vibrantly different understanding of the universe.
Feedback hesitates to use the word “fruitloopery”, particularly as we now encounter the quote on the website of QuantBioRes, a company whose blameless existence investigating alternative treatments for covid-19 has recently been disturbed by the revelation that its majority shareholder is world men’s tennis no. 1 and vaccine refusenik Novak Djokovic.
“At QuantBioRes, we work in utilizing unique and novel Resonant Recognition Model (RRM),” we read on the company’s website. “The RRM is a biophysical model based on findings that certain periodicities/frequencies within the distribution of energies of free electrons along the protein are critical for protein biological function and interaction with protein receptors and other targets.”Advertisement
Following the paper trail a little further, we discover that, in the case of covid-19, the crucial frequency is 0.3145. We aren’t entirely sure what units that is in for those inclined to try it at home. Sadly, clicking what we hoped were links to a battery of exciting tests already performed produces no vibration on the internet’s surface, so we are left none the wiser as to progress.
These things can take time. In the meantime, we point to the existence of highly effective vaccines, whatever your resonant frequency may be.
Champagne’s moment
David Myers writes from the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland – nice work if you can get it – asking us to sit down as we imbibe the revelation contained in an article from CNN that “No amount of alcohol is good for the heart”. We are unsure whether it is the message itself that he expects to give us the vapours, or the fact that the chair of the World Heart Federation advocacy committee that released the report is Beatriz Champagne. No cause for celebration either way.
Pussy galore
Our news report “Ancient Egyptians used bandages for medicine too” (15 January, p 20) caused ripples in our inbox. For Ian Gammie, it was our assertion that “until now, Egyptologists hadn’t found bandages used to dress the wounds of living ancient Egyptians”. As he points out, living ancient Egyptians are hard to come by these days.
Others were more exercised by the mention of a dressing placed over a “puss-filled wound”. This seems to imply a degree of veneration of the feline form beyond even that familiar from ancient Egypt. Ken Hawkins wonders whether it was discovered using a CAT scan, a line that we will file under “timeless”.
Fine words, buttered
Talking of which, Feedback had considered correspondence closed on the age-old conundrum of why toast lands buttered-side down – except perhaps when its polarity is reversed by being attached to the back of a falling cat. Not so, judging by our post since its reappearance in our Twisteddoodles cartoon on 4 December last year.
“Howdy Dr Feedback,” booms one missive from Heikki Henttonen in Espoo, Finland – a city where we seem to have quite a following, judging by our postbag – exhibiting both forthright charm and a suitable (and entirely justified) faith in our academic qualification. “How to make sure that your toast lands butter-side up,” he writes succinctly. “You should butter your toast on both sides.”
Sensible advice. Although we shouldn’t be at all surprised if a double-buttered slice would never hit the floor, but instead remain suspended slightly above it, permanently rotating, unsure of which way up to land. You might call that a physics-violating perpetual motion machine; we just call it resonance.
The universe against us
The last word on the toast thing – until the next one – goes to our mathematics guru Ian Stewart at the University of Warwick, UK. “As regards toast landing butter side down, you might be interested in the article ‘Tumbling toast’, Murphy’s Law and the fundamental constants’ by Robert Matthews in European Journal of Physics 16 (1995) 172-176,” he writes.
We most certainly would, since it contains the results of a model that applies Newton’s laws of motion with realistic parameters for the height of intelligent bipeds, the height of the tables they use and the nature of their toast to conclude that, if a slice of toast starts sitting butter-side up on a table, it will rotate more than 180 degrees but less than 360 degrees for any reasonable value for the initial speed at which it is nudged off, thus almost always landing buttered-side down.
Further expressing the relations in terms of eight fundamental constants, including the gravitational and electromagnetic fine-structure constants and the Bohr radius, leads to a stark conclusion: in any universe that supports intelligent bipeds, toast will almost always fall buttered-side down. “This is the opposite of cosmological fine tuning: there is no way to fine-tune a universe to prevent this outcome,” Ian writes. “I call this the Anthropomurphic Principle.” Also timeless.
Got a story for Feedback?Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TTConsideration of items sent in the post will be delayed
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By Layal Liverpool

A rising global population has led to a resurgence of eugenics-based ideasBen Edwards/Getty Images
Control: The dark history and troubling present of eugenics
Adam Rutherford
Weidenfeld & NicolsonAdvertisement

WHAT does the word “eugenics” bring to mind? For many, it is Nazi Germany and the atrocities that were committed in its name, not least the murder and involuntary sterilisation of people that they deemed unworthy of reproducing. But eugenics didn’t begin or end with the Nazis. In fact, writes geneticist Adam Rutherford in his new book Control, “the idea persisted – and persists”.
Eugenics didn’t begin with Francis Galton either, even though he coined the term in the 1800s and was responsible for spreading the idea around the world. More than 30 countries, including Germany and the US, had formal eugenics policies in the 20th century, with awful consequences.
In fact, as Rutherford points out, notions of eugenics and population control date back much further in human society to the 4th century BC, when the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato outlined in books V and VI of Republic a detailed plan to control the reproduction of the people in a utopian city-state. “Children born with defects would be hidden away, which may well have been a euphemism for killed,” writes Rutherford. Plato’s plan was never enacted, he adds, but infanticide has been a constant feature in human societies throughout history and around the world.
Eugenics became a dirty word after the horrors of the 20th century, yet some of its ideas survived in science and medicine, says Rutherford. Eugenics formed the basis for the modern field of human genetics, with many eugenicists rebranding themselves as geneticists after the second world war, he argues.
Some of the language and phrases of the 20th-century eugenics movement remain in general use today, although their meanings have evolved. “Today’s casual insults such as ‘imbecile’, ‘moron’ or ‘idiot’ carried specific psychiatric significance a century ago, and… could warrant enforced institutionalisation and, in hundreds of thousands of cases, involuntary sterilisation,” writes Rutherford.
Unfortunately, the drive to restrict reproduction to those deemed by some to be the most “suitable” still exists. In 2020, there were reports that up to 20 women were involuntarily sterilised in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centres in the US. And in Canada, a class action lawsuit in response to the coerced sterilisation of hundreds of Indigenous women as recently as 2018 is ongoing. Meanwhile, sex-selective abortion practices continue to skew sex-ratios in India and China, the most populous countries in the world.
Embedded in all of these practices are dangerous notions of inferiority and superiority that are unscientific and laced with prejudice, says Rutherford. And, as the world reckons with climate change, discussions around the idea of population control are increasingly resurfacing.
“There is still a question mark over whether eugenics would even work, even if it weren’t morally offensive”
Control ‘s strength is that it provides not only much-needed guidance for these conversations by reminding us of the horrors of the past, but also uses scientific evidence to dismantle the viability of these ideas.
Rutherford makes it clear that there is still a question mark over whether eugenics would even work, which neatly demonstrates how limited our understanding of human genetics actually is and how ill-equipped we are to direct our species’ evolution, even if it weren’t morally offensive.
The 2018 births in China of Lulu and Nana, the first gene-edited humans, provide one example. He Jiankui used CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology on two fertilised human embryos in an attempt to introduce a naturally occurring genetic mutation associated with resistance to HIV infection. But, as Rutherford describes, the intended gene editing failed. In the embryo that became Lulu, 15 letters of DNA were deleted, while in the one that became Nana some DNA was added and other parts deleted.
Control ultimately exposes eugenics as “a pseudoscience that cannot deliver on its promise” and encourages us to instead focus on interventions that we know can improve people’s lives and the state of our planet, such as improved education, healthcare, equality of opportunities and protection of the environment.

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A partial skull from China represents the earliest human with a “modern” brain size. It could represent an unknown group of ancient humans, or perhaps one of the enigmatic Denisovans

Humans

26 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Fragments of a large ancient human skull known as Xujiayao 6Xiu-Jie Wu,Christopher J.Bae, Martin Friess, Song Xing, Sheela Athreya, Wu Liu
An ancient human that lived in China at least 160,000 years ago had an unusually large brain for the time – comparable to the brain size of people alive today. The find is more evidence that hominin evolution went in many different directions, rather than taking a straight line from small brains to large ones.
It is also possible that the skull belonged to a mysterious kind of hominin called a Denisovan. Very few Denisovan bones are known, so … More

By Elle Hunt

Kirsten and her close friend August stick together to surviveHBO Max/Warner Media
TV
Station Eleven
Created by Patrick SomervilleAdvertisement

EARLY in the covid-19 pandemic, as people struggled to make sense of the unfolding global crisis, many turned to stories almost as often as the latest news and science.
In January 2020, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion entered the top 10 of the UK iTunes movie rental charts nearly a decade after its release. And much to the bemusement of its author, Emily St John Mandel, the 2014 dystopian novel Station Eleven – in which the “Georgia flu” kills most of the world’s population – suddenly gained a new audience. “I don’t know who in their right mind would want to read Station Eleven during a pandemic,” Mandel said at the time.
The book has since been adapted into a 10-part miniseries by screenwriter Patrick Somerville, who also wrote for The Leftovers, another critically acclaimed drama about the collapse of civilisation. His adaptation of Station Eleven was released to rave reviews in the US and Australia.
Station Eleven follows Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis), first as a child actor (Matilda Lawler) orphaned by the Georgia flu in present-day Chicago and then 20 years in the future, where she makes a living as a roving performer in a theatre troupe called the Travelling Symphony. She and her friends tour the settlements of the Great Lakes performing music and Shakespeare plays to survivors, lifting their spirits and sharing their motto (originally from Star Trek: Voyager): “Survival is insufficient”.
These two timelines, year zero and year 20, blur and merge with Kirsten’s fears for the future and recollections of her traumatic past, both of which intrude on her present. In particular, her thoughts return to Jeevan (Himesh Patel) and his brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), who took her in during the first weeks of the pandemic. Kirsten also repeatedly returns to a graphic novel, called Station Eleven, which she clung to as a child, and which takes on totemic importance in the post-pandemic world.
“The episodes in year zero show a world unsettlingly like 2020, with cities emptied and aircraft grounded”
Most of the characters we meet have some connection to the graphic novel and, in the series, its spaceman protagonist Doctor Eleven takes on a comforting presence, watching over Kirsten and her friends like a sort of benevolent god. The connections between characters are gradually revealed as the series slides back and forth in time. Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler) is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel, while her ex-husband Arthur (Gael García Bernal) is a movie star who was acting alongside young Kirsten in King Lear in the “before”. He dies on stage from Georgia flu.
Though the pandemic of the TV show is a near-extinction event, the episodes set in year zero show a world unsettlingly like 2020, with supermarket shelves stripped bare, cities emptied and aircraft grounded. It also captures the lockdown surge in creativity as Kirsten, Jeevan and Frank find purpose and unity in making music and plays as the end of the world unfolds around them.
By year 20, the parallels with our covid-19 pandemic are minimal. There is even a generation of “post-pans”: 20-somethings who never saw the world as we know it and who press Kirsten for stories of smartphones and Uber as if they were fairy tales. They weren’t that great, she reassures them.
Not everyone is at peace in the post-pandemic world, as Kirsten and her friends discover with often devastating results. However, without shying away from confronting the turmoil and trauma of massive societal change, Station Eleven paints a surprisingly uplifting picture of the future, showing how civilisation might be rebuilt with art and community at its centre. It is a comforting vision as we ease into year three of living with covid-19.
Mandel recently said she felt “profoundly uncomfortable” that her novel dealing with a fictional pandemic was being boosted by a real-world life-or-death one. But as these uncertain times continue, Station Eleven‘s vision of the future – where humanity endures, and beauty is cherished – is a reassuring one to share in.

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Josie Ford
Guess the planet
Feedback has always been mildly sceptical of, not to say narked by, requests to click on pictures of bicycles and fire hydrants to prove we aren’t a robot. True, no one has ever seen an algorithm riding a bicycle, but when the shape-shifting terminator bots finally arrive, they will probably take on innocent forms such as fire hydrants. It might take one to know one.
At least they won’t be able to get social security benefits in Spain. Genís Cardona from Solsona, Catalonia, reports accessing an official Spanish government portal for tax and welfare services and being requested to answer a quiz question: “Which of the following is a planet? A. Banana; B. Pluto; C. Scissors; D. Bee”.
A decade and a half on, Pluto’s controversial demotion from planethood clearly still rankles in some quarters. Like Genís, we appreciate the spirit of this open defiance of the International Astronomical Union’s edicts. Come to think of it, though, does anyone know which side the robots are on?Advertisement
Flipping bird
Our mention of “New Zealand’s most annoying tūī” (1 January) prompts Matthew Arozian to write from Baltimore, Maryland, with the heartfelt insight that the Carolina wren – Thryothorus ludovicianus, we savour on our tongue – weighs approximately 18 to 22 grams yet produces calls that can reach 110 decibels.
He asks us to imagine the cacophonous circus of a brood being taught to fly just outside his home-office window. We close our eyes, rapidly open them again and sympathise. Mind you, the transcendent benefits for our well-being of being within and bonded to nature are well known, Matthew. Call it home delivery.
Polly the pickled parrot
Staying with our feathered frenemies, our Australasia correspondent Alice Klein provides an addendum to our item last week about alcoholic overindulgence in the animal kingdom with the story of Broome Veterinary Hospital in Kimberley, Australia, which ABC News reported in December was treating a spate of red-winged parrots apparently boozed up on fermenting mangoes.
As Michael Considine, a biologist at the University of Western Australia, pointed out, volatile compounds released by the fermentation of fallen mangoes attract the birds, encouraging them to propagate the plant’s seeds – even if, by whumping into windows, falling over and generally sitting around dazed and vulnerable to predators, the parrots’ own chances of survival aren’t exactly enhanced.
Evolution in the raw, and a reminder to the rest of us not to drink and fly.
Can’t find the words
The Guardian reports rage and distress at copycat app versions of the online word game Wordle that assault the original’s innocent ethos of freedom from both charge and data hoovering. For those who haven’t yet fallen down this rabbit hole, Wordle confronts its players with a blank series of five letters to fill in, giving them six attempts to arrive at the actual five-letter word that the computer was thinking of, once told whether their letters appear in that word.
As Fields medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers has highlighted, this gamifies entropy in an information theory sense, as the information required to specify a given object. This makes it Solid Science, but Feedback has now fallen down the rabbit hole at the bottom of the rabbit hole with Sweardle, a game that does the same thing with a more limited set of four-letter words, and Letterle, which gives a maximum of 26 goes to guess a single letter. We know all of this is contributing to the heat death of the universe, but we can’t stop now.
Tin lid on it
Of which, many thanks to those of you who wrote in varying degrees of delight and distress over our fiendishly difficult holiday word search featuring the names of all the known fundamental particles, the chemical elements and the amino acids that make up life’s proteins (18/25 December 2021, p 43). We are treating it as a slow-burning abvent calendar – a term we just invented, and we expect letters about – finding one a day as Christmas recedes.
For those of you whose year is off to an even slower start, we forward Bob Ladd’s query, which we take as expressing both delight and distress, asking how you might design the same word search with no accidental instances of TIN – apart from those required in TIN and ASTATINE, say. That sounds like a case for the entropy theory of information to us. And in response to Mike Clark’s query, we don’t know whether it is SULPHUR or SULFUR yet, either.
Whale units
Still in holiday mode, Harry Lagoussis writes from Athens concerning our statement that a lump of ambergris, or ancient whale poo, the size of a human head “could fetch you £50,000 or more” (18/25 December 2021, p 56).
“Does that make the ‘shithead’ the standard unit of ambergris volume? And, perhaps more importantly, if 1 shithead = £50,000, does that justify the use of the selfsame unit when discussing the global financial system, celebrity net worth etc.?” he asks. At a punt, it’s no and no, but we will ask our ever-vigilant subeditors. And with that, we tiptoe out of the room.
Got a story for Feedback?
Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TTConsideration of items sent in the post will be delayed
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Our life satisfaction is shaped by many things including our genes and relative wealth, but there is now good evidence that you can boost your basic happiness with these key psychological strategies

Humans

19 January 2022

By David Robson
Tara Moore/Getty Images; Matt Dartford
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY?
You probably know the type: those Pollyannas who seem to have a relentlessly sunny disposition. Are they simply born happy? Is it the product of their environment? Or does it come from their life decisions?
If you are familiar with genetics research, you will have guessed that it is a combination of all three. A 2018 study of 1516 Norwegian twins suggests that around 30 per cent of the variance in people’s life satisfaction is inherited. Much of this seems to be related to personality traits, such as neuroticism, which can leave people more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, and extraversion, which encourages more gregarious behaviour. Both traits are known to be influenced by a range of genes.
To put this in context, the heritability of IQ is thought to hover around 80 per cent, so environmental factors clearly play a role in our happiness. These include our physical health, the size and strength of our social network, job opportunities and income. The effect of income, in particular, is nuanced: it seems that the absolute value of our salary matters less than whether we feel richer than those around us, which may explain why the level of inequality predicts happiness better than GDP.
Interestingly, many important life choices have only a fleeting influence on our happiness. Consider marriage. A 2019 study found that, on average, life satisfaction does rise after the wedding, but the feeling of married bliss tends to fade over middle age. Needless to say, this depends on the quality of the relationship: marriage’s impact on well-being is about twice as large … More

By Gege Li

An artist’s impression of how Earth’s first multicellular animals looked on the sea floorMark Garlick/Science Photo Library
Book
Otherlands: A world in the making
Thomas HallidayAdvertisement

OUR planet has existed for some 4.5 billion years In that time, it has undergone extraordinary changes, with landscapes and life forms that would seem almost alien to us today. Yet clues to their existence and fate can be found buried deep within Earth’s layers.
Otherlands by palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday provides a unique portrait of these strange and remarkable environments and the species that inhabited them. Through rich, detailed descriptions of ancient organisms and geological processes that draw on the fossil record and his own imagination, Halliday transports us back through deep time, from the relatively recent – tens of thousands of years ago – to when complex life first emerged in the Ediacaran period hundreds of millions of years ago.
Each chapter spans a geological time period, focusing on a specific part of the world that stands out either for the quality of the fossil evidence or a notable event.
Halliday is careful to not only give attention to charismatic animals like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths, but also to plants, land masses and oceans, using the latest research to back up his conclusions.
In one chapter, we discover that giant penguins flourished in the then-rainforests of Antarctica during the Eocene. In another, how Jurassic seas in what is now Germany contained vast tropical reefs built by glass sponges that looked like “frozen lace”, as marine pterosaurs soared in the skies overhead. We also see how, during the Devonian period, Scotland was home to metres-high fungi that would have resembled “half-melted grey snowmen”.
As well as painting an intricate picture of the worlds that once existed, Halliday also highlights the fleeting existence of humanity. Our ancestors make the briefest splash onto the scene in the Pliocene around 4 million years ago, when early hominins appeared in the fossil record in what is now Kanapoi in Kenya.
If Earth’s history were squeezed into a single day, written human history would make up the last 2 thousandths of a second, Halliday points out. And yet “our species has an influence unlike almost any other biological force”. It is also far more destructive than the prominent natural disasters of the past.
Here, the book carries a clear message: that we must do something about the urgent climate situation we find ourselves in and the coming human-induced mass extinction. This, he argues, warrants a meticulous look back through Earth’s palaeontological record to understand how things might turn out in the future, and how we might take control of them.
This message is, by now, one we are used to hearing. For me, the most distinctive feature of the book is the way that Halliday chooses to describe the past. He encourages us to treat his writings like “a naturalist’s travel book, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space”. This provides a sense of adventure and exploration where we see “short willows write wordless calligraphy in the wind” 20,000 years ago, or walk across “centuries-old mattresses of conifer needles” 41 million years ago.
It is refreshing to come across a book on palaeontology and geology that doesn’t just state what we know and why. Instead, Halliday uses scientific information to provide insights into worlds long gone. He is appropriately lavish in his depiction of the variety and resilience of life, without compromising on scientific accuracy.
To read Otherlands is to marvel not only at these unfamiliar lands and creatures, but also that we have the science to bring them to life in such vivid detail.

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Read
The Weaponisation of Everything explores how old-style warfare has been replaced by disinformation, espionage, crime and subversion. According to security expert Mark Galeotti, this may turn out to be a good thing.

NETFLIXAdvertisement
Watch
The Orbital Children is a dizzying sci-fi anime series set in a future where AI has given people the freedom to travel through space. When a group of children get stranded on a space station they must fight to survive. On Netflix from 28 January.
Bassam Al-Sabah, I AM ERROR, 2021. Video HD, 28 min. Film still. Commissioned by Gasworks
Visit
I Am Error at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, UK, sees artist Bassam Al-Sabah weave together video, painting and sculpture to explore how masculinity is represented in computer games. From 30 January.

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