Humans

Having studied chimps and bonobos for decades, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that variation in gender-typical behaviour is likely to be more common than we thought in humans

Humans

4 May 2022

By Rowan Hooper
Nabil Nezzar
WHERE once we thought of ape behaviour only in terms of sex and war, we now understand that our closest relatives live a much more nuanced life. A huge part of that understanding comes from the work of primatologist Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the past five decades, he has shown that cooperation is at least as important as competition in explaining primate behaviour and society. His work has revealed that the great apes might fight, but they also reconcile their differences. They have a capacity for empathy and a concept of fairness that de Waal proposes is the foundation of the human moral compass. He believes that chimps, bonobos and humans are simply different types of ape and that empathetic and cooperative behaviours are continuous between these species. Now, he has turned his attention to gender and identity in his new book Different: What apes can teach us about gender. We spoke to de Waal to find out what he has learned.
Rowan Hooper: You are well known for writing about the inner lives of chimpanzees and bonobos, but your new book is a bit different, because it discusses gender roles, gender identity and biological sex differences in both apes and us. What do we mean by gender in non-human primates?
Frans de Waal: Well, some people insist that we have genders and chimps and bonobos have sexes, and that is the end of the discussion. I think that is nonsense. Gender as a concept exists mainly because we are a sexually reproducing species. Sex is predominantly … More

By Sally Adee

Memories are subject to the same pressures as fashion in Glitterationurdongel/Getty Images
Eversion
Alastair Reynolds
GollanczAdvertisement

YOUR autobiographical memory can’t be trusted, and science has determined that this isn’t a bug, but a feature. The remembered stories from which we braid our identity bend and swerve to serve the narrative needs of our circumstances because our minds happily trade veracity for coherence and narrative. This strange space between recollection and construction is explored in two mesmerising books out this month.
Eversion by Alastair Reynolds concerns itself with how this constant process of layering and recasting can create meaning and purpose in the most desolate circumstances. The story starts on a ship dodging icebergs in the North Sea during the 17th century, and unfolds into a virtuoso genre-hopping puzzle.
It isn’t every day you get to experience a perfect collision of the Romantic macabre of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft with The Usual Suspects and 2001: A Space Odyssey. So much of the book’s joy is working out which bits are real and which are misdirection on the way to unlocking the final mystery. Trust me, you don’t want this spoiled by more plot details.
It is no spoiler to say that Reynolds shows how such stories can be moulded to make us better humans. But memories can also be weaponised to keep our identities in stupefied thrall to capitalism, and this darker aspect gets an ample airing in Oliver Langmead’s Glitterati.
The star of this speculative satire is Simone. He is a fashionite, a rarefied type of super influencer whose every whim is lavishly catered for and documented by magazines read only by fashionites. For example, during a brief hospitalisation, he spies a regular proletarian gown among the haute couture medical gowns available to him. He complains and the item is summarily burned.
Simone and his fabulous friends and enemies are suspended in a vicious, never-ending battle for status, fought through clothes, make-up and accessories, sometimes leaving literal fashion victims in their wake. This sense of dangerously pointy high stakes beneath the ruffles and froth recalls writers like Edith Wharton, whose stories dissect the mores of the very rich who lived and schemed during the so-called Gilded Age of the 19th-century US.
Beyond a deft, wicked skewering of influencer culture, Langmead inhabits his protagonists’ fetishistic delight with the material world. His deliciously sensory prose puts you inside that colossal closet, running your fingers through the gossamer folds of a spider-silk gown.
Glitterati starts like puff pastry, a comedy of manners stuffed with buffoonery and characters whose trivial, self-inflicted miseries you can chortle at with abandon. But it ends like a shot of Black Mirror.
Simone’s lifestyle isn’t without costs. Along with the right clothes, he needs the right memories. And that is when a darker reality emerges, showing why these fluffy idiots can’t care about anything more than matching their outrageously expensive outfits to their false eyelashes.
At this point, it becomes clear that rather than being privileged scions, people like Simone are just pretty cogs in a vast apparatus that grinds humanity into capital. The reader begins to sympathise and have a stake in Simone’s ability to escape – and perhaps also starts to wonder which forces bend our own (flawed) memories.
Sally also recommends…

The This
Adam Roberts
Gollancz

Memory also plays a starring role in The This by Adam Roberts, but the utility of an individual’s identity itself is called into question in this mash-up of the sum of Nick Bostrom’s worst fears in Superintelligence and the alien weirdness of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

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Findings from people running in the lab and in the real world show that men and women tend to run at a speed that minimises energetic costs, though men run faster

Humans

28 April 2022

By Alex Wilkins
When we run recreationally, we automatically pick the speed that is most energy efficientMoMo Productions/Getty Images
When people are exercising, they intuitively maintain the same running speed regardless of how many kilometres they cover, in order to be as energy efficient as possible.
In a race, people try to run as fast as they can for a given distance, which means someone might jog slowly during a marathon, but sprint at top speed during a 100-metre event.
But Jessica Selinger at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, and her colleagues found that recreational runners take a different approach. They analysed the running speeds over a variety of distances of more than 4645 runners, who wore wearable measurement devices during exercise outside. They also collected data in the lab, where they could use treadmills to control a runner’s speed while collecting and analysing the participant’s breath to establish the energy costs associated with running at each pace.Advertisement
From the outdoor runners, Selinger and her team found that, on average, women run at a speed of 2.74 metres per second while men run at 3.25 metres per second. The data collected in the lab showed that these paces are indistinguishable from the energy-optimal running speeds for men and women.

“People have this strong preference for a particular speed, regardless of what distance they’re running,” says Selinger. “And that speed is in fact energy optimal. It’s the speed that’s the most economical that you could choose.”
The runners that Selinger and her team analysed in the lab were limited to younger, fit individuals. “In the future, it would be really nice to have the lab-based energetic measures for a broader swathe of the population,” says Selinger.
The finding isn’t surprising when examined from a biological perspective, says Andrew Jones at the University of Exeter, UK. “When people go out for an easy or steady run, typically over 3 to 5 miles… they’ll typically fall into a fixed, comfortable speed that is below the lactate threshold [when lactate can build up in the muscles and cause fatigue] and allows a steady state in oxygen uptake.”
Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.03.076

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Analysis of pollen preserved in peat at Slieveanorra in the Antrim hills reveals the resilience of a rural community through environmental changes

Humans

27 April 2022

By Michael Marshall
The peat-covered uplands of the north of Ireland were once wooded and farmedHelen Essell, CC-BY 4.0
A rural Irish community survived a succession of climate shifts and other threats over the past 1000 years, a study of pollen preserved in peat has revealed. The finding suggests that societies can endure despite environmental changes, if they are flexible enough to adapt their way of life.
People in Ireland have experienced multiple upheavals over the past millennium. These include the European famine of 1315-17, the Black Death of 1348-49 and the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-52. There were also climatic shifts, notably the transition from the relatively warm Medieval climate anomaly to the marginally cooler Little Ice Age.
To find out more about how people handled these events, Gill Plunkett and Graeme Swindles at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK studied an archaeological site called Slieveanorra in the Antrim hills, now part of Northern Ireland. It is a bog in the uplands, surrounded on three sides by ridges.Advertisement
“If you go up today, it’s deserted,” says Plunkett, but there are abandoned houses and indications of farming.
Plunkett and Swindles studied pollen from a peat core from Slieveanorra to find out what plants grew there over the past 1000 years. They found evidence of human interference throughout, such as fewer trees than would be expected, more pasture plants plus cereal crops.

The team also saw pollen from plants in the cannabis family, which includes hemp. “I think we’ve probably got hemp being produced and flax as well,” says Plunkett, perhaps for the textile industry.
The little community weathered multiple crises. The famine and plague of the 1300s were associated with increased land use, suggesting that any reduction in the population was temporary. The only time the site was possibly abandoned was during a wet period in the mid-1400s, for a generation or two, but after that farming resumed and even increased.
Only in the early 1900s did farming cease. Plunkett thinks that was because people saw better opportunities elsewhere, rather than the area becoming uninhabitable.
It isn’t clear why the Slieveanorra community was so resilient, but Plunkett says one reason may be that there was no landlord or owner, at least until the late 1800s. This meant the people living there were free to change their lifestyle, for example doing more hunting when crops grew poorly – instead of having to send a certain quantity of grain to a feudal lord.
Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266680

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Archaeological work at Blick Mead, a site near Stonehenge, reveals that people were visiting the site thousands of years before the monument was built

Humans

27 April 2022

By Michael Marshall
The region around Stonehenge in the UK may have been important to people long before the monument was builtShutterstock / Steffen.E
The area surrounding Stonehenge, UK, may have acquired enormous significance for Stone Age humans thousands of years before the famous monument was built, suggest archaeologists working at a nearby site called Blick Mead.
The Stonehenge monument was built between 3000 and 2000 BC. It is a ring of standing stones, surrounded by an earth bank and ditch.
Lying more than a kilometre to the east of Stonehenge is Blick Mead, the … More

Elisabeth Moss is after a killer who is defying all known laws of reality in Shining Girls, an unsettling Apple TV+ adaptation of Lauren Beukes’s science-fiction thriller

Humans

27 April 2022

By Bethan Ackerley
Filing clerk Kirby (Elisabeth Moss) finds her sense of reality starting to shift as she looks for a killerAPPLE TV+
Shining Girls
Silka Luisa
Apple TV+Advertisement

CAN a bee live without its wings? And what does it mean to survive against all odds? It is unlikely that the sadistic serial killer in Shining Girls, a new sci-fi thriller from Apple TV+, had considered these questions before mutilating a young girl’s pet bee in the series’ opening scene. What is clear, though, is that he sees the women he attacks as broken-winged, robbed of their perfection – and that this misconception will be his downfall.
Shining Girls stars Elisabeth Moss as Kirby Mazrachi, a filing clerk at a Chicago newspaper in 1992 who is still recovering from a horrific assault six years earlier. Her assailant was never caught, but when the body of a young woman is found with similar injuries, Kirby enlists strung-out reporter Dan Velazquez (Wagner Moura) to help her track down the murderer.
Their investigation is complicated by Kirby’s ever-shifting sense of reality: first, small things change, like whether she owns a cat or a dog. Then, in the blink of an eye, she finds she has been married for years and her rock-star mother is a born-again Christian.
As the bodies stack up, Kirby and Dan learn that the timeline of the killings can’t possibly make sense. While investigating the murder of a woman in 1972, they discover she had a locker key from 1992 in her possession. The more they uncover about the connections between the victims, the more impossible the killings seem.
Fans of The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes’s 2013 novel on which the show is based, should note that the series is considerably different. It largely eschews the grisliness of its source material, which devoted much of its narrative to the killer’s perspective. Instead, it has been transformed into a cerebral, mind-bending puzzle, with the murderer (Jamie Bell) and his methods left a cipher. All we know is that he is a clean-cut man with an almost omnipotent level of control over his victims – the “shining girls” – to the point where he seems to defy all known laws of reality.
For the most part, this restraint is wise: TV is hardly in need of more gruesome depictions of violence against women, after all. But losing the jagged mastery of the novel draws attention to the series’ deficiencies. The violence in the book was extreme but never gratuitous, designed to paint a picture of the noirish world Kirby inhabits. By contrast, aside from a few vivid montages, Shining Girls is often lacking in visual flair. And while many details of the other women’s murders have been expunged, so have the stories of their lives and dreams – only Kirby and a couple of other “shining girls” are fleshed out.
What can’t be faulted, though, are the performances of the show’s three leads. As Kirby, Moss really does shine. She is fragile and furious by turns, taking the increasingly large shifts in her reality in her stride. Moura, too, is hugely charismatic, making Dan’s aptitude for reporting clear even as his dependency on alcohol worsens.
And despite the dearth of information about his character, the killer avoids feeling one-note thanks to Bell. Shining Girls is careful to show the smaller-scale ways in which he harasses and demeans his victims before killing them. In this sense, he is a garden-variety misogynist, and Bell skilfully conveys how these small seeds could have grown and put him on a path to murder.
The first four episodes of Shining Girls set up a satisfying mystery, filled with unsettling twists that pull at the edges of reality. But it is the themes of trauma and renewal – at once more mundane and more remarkable than any sci-fi conceit could hope to be – that make the series worth watching. Far from a broken-winged bee, Kirby is so much more than a single reality could ever capture.

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These detailed images from photographer Roland Miller’s new book Orbital Planes offer a privileged peek inside NASA’s space shuttle programme

Humans

27 April 2022

By Gege Li
Roland Miller
Photographer Roland Miller
THESE intimate and detailed photos of space shuttles and the International Space Station (ISS) offer a privileged peek inside one of the biggest programmes in space flight.
Roland MillerAdvertisement
They come from the new book Orbital Planes: A personal vision of the space shuttle by photographer Roland Miller (see cover below), published by Damiani Editore. It depicts spacecraft from NASA’s space shuttle programme, which flew 135 crewed missions from 1981 to 2011 using five spacecraft: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour.
Roland Miller
The space shuttles were designed to provide backup for space travel and maintenance, including building the ISS, transporting cargo and launching, recovering and repairing satellites.
Roland Miller
Miller started work on Orbital Planes as the craft were being decommissioned. The image above shows the launch of the STS-133 mission in February 2011, in which Discovery docked with the ISS. The trio of smaller images show: the airlock and hatch of the ISS as seen from Discovery, the ceramic tiles lining the exterior of Atlantis (to protect the shuttle from the heat of re-entry), and the commander’s console on board Endeavour.

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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

27 April 2022

Eyes as Big as Plates #Sinikka (Norway 2019) ? Karoline Hjorth & Riitta Ikonen
Visit
Our Time on Earth at London’s Barbican Centre combines art, science, design and music to reveal how technology can connect us to the beauty and complexity of the natural world. From 5 May.

Read
Travels with Trilobites by palaeontologist Andy Secher explains how this versatile undersea arthropod came to dominate the oceans for more than 270 million years, and features hundreds of photos of unique fossilised specimens.Advertisement
Serpentine and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Visit
Alienarium 5, now at London’s Serpentine South Gallery, is artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s vision of what life would be like if first contact with aliens went superbly well – an “anti-War of the Worlds vision”, in her words.

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