Humans

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

16 February 2022

Josie Ford
Sleep, perchance to diet
That April is the cruellest month has yet to pass peer review, but there is little doubt February is the shortest. Feedback considers this just as well. Some of our more southerly readers may be sunning themselves on the beach, but in our pre-Arctic stationery cupboard hole, we are just waiting for the winter murk to clear.
It is at this time of year, when we are thinking about getting fit for the bikini season and doing nothing about it, that we want to read, and not question too deeply, headlines such as our own “Getting enough sleep may lower the amount of calories you eat”. The study in question, from a team at the University of Chicago Sleep Research Center, found that an extra hour’s sleep at night allowed participants to cut their energy intake by 270 calories a day – “the equivalent of around three chocolate digestive biscuits”, as the Press Association helpfully put it in its story on the research.
Why stop there? A comforting graph swims into our head of a rising line of hours not consuming calories, crossing over a falling line of calories consumed. The most effective weight-loss mechanism is surely to never get out of bed at all.Advertisement
Getting up the nose
As we take some horizontal exercise, a PR puff is popped our way by a svelte, overslept-looking colleague with a straw hanging from their nose. “To inspire those who struggle to reach their recommended daily intake of water, air up is a world first in food technology that utilises retronasal smell to provide a zero-calorie, zero sugar, zero additive way to drink 100% pure water which tastes flavoured,” we read.
Flavours “from Lime and Orange-Passionfruit to Cola and Iced Coffee” are created by using a special widget to inject bubbles of scented air into the previously 100 per cent blameless water. “We’ve revolutionised the way we drink water. You still have to use your mouth, but the taste has changed!” the company’s website continues. A welcome release for those of us who had been attempting to discover flavour by snorting our water.
Smell my cheese
We note merely in passing a press conference held on 7 February by New York City’s new mayor, Eric Adams, in which he claimed that people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between “someone hooked on heroin” and “someone hooked on cheese”.
Entirely our experience too. Meanwhile, Adams’s own claim that he eats a vegan diet has been called into question after he was seen eating fish. Given that phylogenetically there is no such thing as a fish, we can’t rule out a plant-based variety. As to the cheese thing, as Twitter user Tyler Conway remarked, “let he who has not snorted grated parmesan off the countertop cast the first stone”.
Sperm waving
If not cheese, SpermTree – “a species-level database of sperm morphology spanning the animal tree of life”, recently described in the journal Scientific Data-promises some real, hard science.
What researchers get up to with descriptions of more than 4700 types of sperm, we hardly need to know. We are busy following an atavistic impulse by downloading the spreadsheet and reordering in descending order of sperm length.
Top of the list by some margin is the fruit fly Drosophila bifurca, with sperm over 5.8 centimetres in length when fully unfurled. This strikes us as a mite exhausting for an insect just a few millimetres long. We aren’t surprised to learn elsewhere that this limits its output to a few hundred cells in its lifetime, an apparent limitation on its reproductive chances that has been dubbed the “big sperm paradox”. This is clearly a sticky problem. Still, we are pleased to learn via a graph in the SpermTree paper that publications on sperm morphology are on the up and up.
Toast’s flip side
“Dear Professor Feedback,” Jonty Rix writes, warming the cockles of our heart. “As a social scientist,” he continues, chilling our blood again, “I am perplexed (and a little disappointed) by the failure of your discussions about the landing outcomes of ‘toast’ to fully consider socio-cultural or post-materialist understandings of the possibilities.”
We are beginning to regret reopening correspondence on the fate of falling buttered toast (8 January). But pray continue. “For example, the nature of upness seems a fundamental problem, as does a lack of a rich consideration of the numerous spaces in which toast is experienced, and of course our underlying definitions of toast and butter and the power relations inherent in their production and usage.”
We nod uneasily, wary of saying the wrong thing. We hope some opening into this whole new metalevel of debate is given by Toby Bateson. He disagrees with our assertion, backed up with references, that toast will always land butter-side down in any universe that supports intelligent bipeds (29 January). “By simply making the toast twice as long it will rotate at half the speed and so will land butter side up,” he writes. “The problem arises due to a fundamental flaw in the proportions of toast which can be adapted to solve the problem in any universe, regardless of table height and the intelligence of the bipeds who made the toast.”
We’re off to have a lie-down and burn some calories.
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Dan Bradica
Visit
A New Nature at White Cube Bermondsey in London spotlights the work of the late Isamu Noguchi, whose sculptures in galvanised steel and other industrial materials explore the fundamental structures of nature.
Chris Reardon/EPIX EntertainmentAdvertisement
Watch
From is a new sci-fi horror show made by the executive producers of Lost. It sees unfortunate travellers trapped in a small town in Middle America, terrorised by strange creatures that only come out at night. The series streams on Epix from 20 February.

Read
A Little Book About the Big Bang by Tony Rothman, a former editor at Scientific American, explores arguably the most evidenced – and at the same time most mysterious – idea in modern cosmology.

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Petrov’s Flu is an ode to Russian sci-fi and absurdist artSergey Ponomarev/Sovereign Films
Petrov’s Flu
Kirill Serebrennikov
In UK cinemas nowAdvertisement
PETROV (Semyon Serzin) is riding a trolleybus home across the snowbound city of Yekaterinburg when a fellow passenger mutters that the rich deserve to be shot. Seconds later, the bus stops, Petrov is pulled onto the street and a rifle is pressed into his hands. Street executions follow. Then, he is back on the bus and it is unclear how much of that actually happened.
Petrov’s Flu is an ambitious, mischievous film, one that is rich in allusions to Russian history, literature and cinema. It is also a painfully precise, gut-wrenching depiction of what it is like to run a high fever. Seeing everything from Petrov’s sick, disjointed point of view, we find the real world sliding away again and again, often into violent absurdity.
Petrov’s fever gradually breaks over the course of the film, but it is a while before we can be confident about what is real and what isn’t: whether his friend, the drunken mischief-maker Igor (Yuri Kolokolnikov), is real and whether Sergey (Ivan Dorn), the struggling writer who browbeats poor Petrov on every point, is a figment of Petrov’s febrile imagination.
At the start, Petrov’s Flu is very much a sci-fi movie. The city is languishing under an epidemic that arrived accompanied by lights in the sky; Petrova (Chulpan Khamatova), Petrov’s estranged wife, is possessed by a demonic alien force during a library poetry reading; UFO-themed street graffiti comes to life and wiggles across the screen.
As reality and hallucination part company, however, it becomes something different: a film about parents and children; about creative work, pretension and ambition; and also, strongly, about Russia’s love of science fiction.
“Petrov’s fever gradually breaks, but it is a while before we can be confident about what is real and what isn’t”
At its birth, Western science fiction, and especially US science fiction, celebrated adventure and exploration. Russian sci-fi has always been more about finding and building homes in a hostile environment. It is also strongly religious in spirit, and was indeed for many years one of Russia’s very few outlets for spiritual expression.
The aliens in Russian science fiction invariably offer some form of redemption to a struggling humanity, and Petrov’s Flu is no exception. One of the most affecting scenes in the film is when Petrov, overcome with fear, dashes with his son to a local hospital, only for the pair to be intercepted by a kindly UFO.
Such are Petrov’s fever dreams, coloured by his space-loving childhood and his adult career drawing comic books. At one point, he remembers his mum and dad decorating a Christmas tree with festive plastic astronauts; at another, Petrova goes on a murderous rampage among the climbing-frame rockets and spaceships of a dilapidated playground.
Fans of Andrei Tarkovsky, director of 1970s science-fiction classics Solaris and Stalker, will enjoy the nods to key moments in those films. But it would be a mistake, I think, to watch this film for the sci-fi in-jokes. True, Petrov’s Flu is a shocking and funny contribution to Russia’s centuries-old tradition of absurdist art. But it is also a film about people, not to mention an extraordinary evocation of febrile delirium and its assault on the mind.
In the end, as fantasy and reality separate, what might have seemed to be a disconnected bag of bits (some tender, some shocking, all horribly entertaining) turns out to be a puzzle that, once complete, leaves us exhausted but satisfied. More

By Sam Wong
StockFood
WHEN cooking food, we need heat to diffuse from the outside to its centre. If we want food to be evenly cooked throughout, this can be a problem: by the time heat reaches the centre, the outside may be overcooked. But in some cases, we can use the slow diffusion of heat to our advantage, to create foods with a surprise in the middle.
One example is a molten chocolate cake, aka a chocolate fondant. Essentially, this is an undercooked cake. The key is to bake it just long enough so that the outside is firm while the centre … More

As sea levels rise due to climate change, heritage sites all around the African coast will come under increasing risk of flood damage – including Carthage and sites linked to the Ancient Egyptian civilisation

Humans

10 February 2022

By Michael Marshall
Sabratha, an ancient Roman town in what is now LibyaSklifas Steven/Alamy Stock Photo
Rising seas will more than triple the number of African heritage sites exposed to the risk of dangerous coastal floods.
By 2050, over 190 of these locations could be in peril. They include the ancient remains of Carthage in Tunisia – which was the capital of the powerful Carthaginian civilisation in the first millennium BC – and a region of the Egyptian Mediterranean coast rich in archaeological sites connected to the Ancient Egyptian civilisation as well as to the Greeks and Romans.
“Understanding climate risk to heritage is critical,” says Nicholas Simpson at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.Advertisement
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Simpson and his colleagues mapped 213 natural sites and 71 cultural sites on the African coast, which were recognised by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre or the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance. “We didn’t know the spatial extent, the actual boundaries of most African heritage sites, believe it or not,” he says.
The team then combined this with a state-of-the-art model of sea level rise, which is one of the main consequences of climate change as warming seawater expands and ice sheets melt. Higher seas mean that major coastal floods, when they come, go higher and reach further inland.

At the moment, 56 of the 284 coastal heritage sites the team mapped would be in danger if a once-in-a-century flood struck. However, by 2050 that number will rise dramatically. Under a moderate emissions scenario, 191 will be at risk, and higher emissions will put 198 in danger.
The threatened sites also include Sabratha, a former Roman town in Libya with a spectacular open-air theatre that the Beatles considered as a venue for their final concert, and Kunta Kinteh Island in the Gambia, which has the remains of a fort used by British slave traders.
Elsewhere, up to 44 per cent of the area of the Curral Velho wetland in Cape Verde could be exposed by 2100, under a high-emissions scenario.
The obvious solution is “hard protection strategies” like concrete sea walls, but these may not be the best approach, says Simpson. In some cases, a better tactic would be “hybrid protections” that rely on wildlife, “so just restoring the broader ecology of the area, restoring salt marshes, seagrasses, mangroves”. Buffer zones around the heritage sites are also an option, he says, as is “recognising the local and indigenous knowledge systems that are there”.
It may not be possible to protect everything, says Simpson, but it is essential to try. “I believe there are solutions to climate change if we think hard enough and work hard enough.”
Journal reference: Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/s41558-022-01280-1

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About 10,000 years before modern humans colonised Europe, a small group of them moved into a cave in southern France that had just been abandoned by Neanderthals – but they only stayed there for about 40 years

Humans

9 February 2022

By Michael Marshall
Excavations at the entrance of Grotte Mandrin Slimak-Metz
A small group of modern humans moved into what is now France about 54,000 years ago – which is 10,000 years before our species began spreading across Europe in earnest. The pioneering group only managed to survive in the area for about 40 years, before disappearing.
“It’s not just one wave of modern humans arriving and colonising all Europe, there are probably several attempts,” says Clément Zanolli at the University of Bordeaux in France. “What we have found… is probably one of those attempts, and there are probably other attempts that we did not find yet.”
It isn’t clear why this incursion into Europe was unsuccessful. “Did they go back to where they came from?” asks Zanolli. “Or did they just die there and not survive more than a few decades? It’s impossible to say.”Advertisement
Zanolli is part of a team that has been excavating at Grotte Mandrin in southern France since 1990. It is a small cave on a hill, overlooking the Rhône valley. Over the years, the team has found nearly 60,000 stone artefacts and more than 70,000 animal remains. Crucially, there are also nine hominin teeth, from at least seven individuals.
The team has used these artefacts, along with dating techniques, to reconstruct which hominins lived at Mandrin. The earliest known inhabitants were Neanderthals, who lived throughout Europe for hundreds of thousands of years until their extinction about 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals lived at Mandrin from more than 80,000 years ago until about 54,000 years ago.
However, one of the teeth belonged to a modern human. It was a baby or “deciduous” tooth, so it belonged to a child. The layer of sediment in which it was found was dated to between 56,800 and 51,700 years ago – probably about 54,000 years ago. The stone artefacts found in this layer were different from those associated with the Neanderthals, and resembled those made by modern humans elsewhere.

In younger layers of sediments, the team again found Neanderthal remains. Signs that the cave was being used by modern humans reappeared after 44,100 years ago. That is about when modern humans entered Europe in a big way.
The first switch from Neanderthals to modern humans happened quickly, says co-author Ludovic Slimak of the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès in France.
“Between the last fire in the cave by Neanderthals and the first fire in the cave by Homo sapiens, it’s something like a year maximum time.” The team could tell because they studied pieces of soot from fires, on which layers of calcite had formed that could be precisely dated. The soot and calcite evidence also helped to pin down the length of time the cave was occupied by modern humans to roughly 40 years.
The results are “convincing”, says Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Although the fossil evidence for modern humans consists of a single isolated deciduous tooth, dental remains, including deciduous teeth, have been shown to be highly diagnostic.”
In 2019, Harvati’s team presented evidence of modern humans living in Greece 210,000 years ago. This remains the earliest reported instance of Homo sapiens in Europe, far earlier than the Mandrin population.
Such studies show “the complexity of the process of dispersal and contact”, says Harvati. Instead of a simple story of modern humans entering Europe in one wave and replacing Neanderthals, there were “alternating occupations of geographical regions, occasional  contact and periods of isolation”.
Zanolli’s team found no evidence of cultural exchange between the groups – the later Neanderthals didn’t start making human-style artefacts, for example. Yet given that the two groups were in Mandrin in successive years, “it’s very likely that they met”, says Zanolli.

Harvati agrees. “The co-existence of the two groups could have taken many forms and would not necessarily result in interbreeding or cultural exchange,” she says.
While we don’t know what happened to the modern human group, one possibility is that they were too few to survive on their own. Small groups moving into new areas often don’t survive. “Generally, you need to have social and genetic exchanges with the local population,” says Slimak. “If you don’t have genetic exchanges, you just disappear.”
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj9496
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A new book by ecologist Rebecca Nesbit argues that it’s time to stop being romantic about nature and make some rational decisions about what to save

Humans

9 February 2022

By Simon Ings

Would cutting down the last oak tree on Earth make you a bad person?Vandervelden/Getty Images
Tickets for the Ark
Rebecca Nesbit
Profile BooksAdvertisement

IMAGINE you are the last person on Earth. On your dying day, you cut down the only remaining oak tree, just because you can. Are you morally in the wrong?
Rebecca Nesbit would argue that you aren’t. A science writer and ecologist, she has form in tackling subjects where scientific rationalism and general intuition don’t necessarily line up. Her first book, Is That Fish in Your Tomato?, explored the pros and cons of genetically modified foods. In Tickets for the Ark, she turns her spotlight to the moral complexities of conservation.
She points out that, given we can’t save every species, we have some difficult decisions to make. For example, if push came to shove and their extinctions were imminent, should we choose to preserve bison or the Siberian larch; yellowhammers or Scottish crossbills; salmon or seals? And what criteria should we use to decide? Charisma, perhaps, or their edibility? Are native species more important than invasive ones? And is it morally acceptable to kill some animals to make room for others?
Working through these gnarly issues, Nesbit shows how complex and problematic conservation can be. In particular, she questions the way that efforts tend to focus on the preservation of species. This, she points out, is really us deciding to save what we can easily see. If our aim was to preserve the planet’s biodiversity, we could as easily focus on genes, individual strings of DNA or the general health of whole ecosystems, she argues.
At times, Tickets for the Ark reads as a catalogue of errors on the part of well-meaning conservationists. Many conservation projects are attempts to reverse human interference in nature – clearly an impossible task, considering we have been shaping the biosphere for at least 10,000 years.
Far from being a counsel of despair, though, Tickets for the Ark reveals the intellectual vistas that such blunders have opened up. Even supposing it ever existed, we know now that we can’t return Earth to some prelapsarian Eden. All we can do is learn how natural systems change – sometimes under human influence, sometimes not – and use this information to shape the future world according to our values and priorities.
In a sense, of course, we have always done this. What is agriculture, if not a way of moulding the land to our requirements? But now that we have learned to feed ourselves, perhaps it is time to think a little more broadly.
“If we accept that conservation is about the future not the past, the most troubling conundrums fall away”
To do that, we need to accept two things: one, that “nature” is a social construct, and two, that conservation is about the future, not the past. Then the most troubling conundrums in conservation fall away, writes Nesbit. The death of the last oak, at the hands of the last human, becomes merely the loss of a category (oak tree) that was defined and valued by humans – a loss that was inevitable at some point anyway. It is a conclusion that is counter-intuitive and feels uncomfortable, but Nesbit says that it should be liberating because it leaves us “free to discuss logically what we should save and why, and not just fight an anti-extinction battle that is doomed to failure”.
With this in mind, we can consider what conservation efforts will achieve for entire ecosystems and biodiversity as a whole without wasting our time agonising over whether, say, British white-clawed crayfish are natives, or if dingoes are a separate species from other wild dogs, or whether we are morally entitled to introduce bison to clear the steppe of Siberian larch. Larch is a native species, but it is also covering and warming ancient carbon-sequestering permafrost. In an era of potentially catastrophic climate change, Nesbit argues that we should keep our eyes on the bigger picture.
This is an ambitious and entertaining book, which foresees a dynamic and creative role for conservation in the future. Having freed ourselves of the idea that species belong in their original ranges, we may decide that it makes more sense to shepherd the most vulnerable species into new habitats where they have a better chance of survival. A brave proposal – but, as Nesbit points out, for some species, such drastic measures may be the only option.

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Josie Ford
The eyes have it
Valentine’s Day fast approaches – indeed, given the state of many postal services, you may thankfully already be hearing its Doppler-shifted whoosh to lower frequencies.
This can only mean the world is agog for the latest top tips on love and dating from Feedback’s stationery cupboard-cum-boudoir. Giving us all hope in these uncertain times is a paper from Farid Pazhoohi and Alan Kingstone at the University of British Columbia in Canada, thrust through our door by an attractively half-masked colleague, entitled “Unattractive faces are more attractive when the bottom-half is masked, an effect that reverses when the top-half is concealed”.
Feedback likes papers with titles that say it like it is. We delve further only to confirm that mask-wearing doesn’t enhance the attractiveness of faces already deemed highly appealing. Given beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we can only wonder why we didn’t all seize the evolutionary benefits of mask-wearing long ago. We can only surmise that, if inclined to act on any impulses, masks would start getting in the way at some point.Advertisement
A nice touch is that wearing a mask on the top part of your face, covering your eyes, makes highly attractive faces less attractive – but has no effect on the perceived attractiveness of less attractive faces. Noted, but we humbly submit that, as a mating strategy, this is both undesirable and impractical.
Love in the time of crypto
“Owning cryptocurrency may make you more desirable on the dating scene, study finds”, reports CNBC, meanwhile. Feedback also likes a good study that finds, especially when, for example, the study doing the finding that “33% of Americans said they would be more likely to go on a date with someone who mentioned crypto assets in their online dating profile” is sponsored by a cryptocurrency trading platform.
What’s more, “nearly 20% of singles would be more interested in you romantically if you set an NFT as your profile picture on a social platform or dating site”.
“Non-fungible token”, we helpfully supply. Rapid, snarky reactions on a social media site famed for rapid, snarky reactions included “In the metaverse tho…lmfao”. Of course, in the metaverse, we will all be wearing those eye masks, which may make things easier, or not.
Um-tiddly-um
Talking chemistry, Jim Ainsworth has been amusing himself by finding chemical elements that didn’t make it into the periodic table, and therefore our fiendishly difficult Christmas word search. It is an exhaustive, not to say exhausting list, encompassing, among many others, premium (a top element), superbium (even topper), tedium (long half-life), imodium (essential in some diets), pandemonium (unpredictable properties) and, verging dangerously on satire, putinium (few electrons, probably rigged) and trumpium (lacking a truth particle, capable of splitting a country down the middle). Thank you, Jim. Since you’ve got time on your hands, do try the word search.
CHEAP
Speaking of word games, the purchase of viral hit Wordle by The New York Times – they might not want your money, but they want your data – prompts Sarah Bossanyi to remind us of the low-budget version “Bulls and cows”, in which two players take it in turns to guess each other’s five-letter words. “HYENA” or “PHLOX”, she suggests, to which we counter “UVULA” or “WLONK”. The rules are freely available online, and a pen and paper are considerably cheaper than somewhere northwards of $10 million, as Sarah sensibly points out.
It never rains…
The weather-weirdening effects of climate change are brought sharply into focus by an article from ABC News sent in by several of you, reporting that Country Downs, a cattle station in the Kimberley, Western Australia, has recorded the highest daily rainfall total in that state in more than a century.
After just 17 millimetres of rain in all of December, 652.2 millimetres were recorded on 1 February, sending the Fitzroy river into unprecedented spate – “almost 500,000 megalitres a day” at Fitzroy Crossing, we are told. We imagine that is quite a lot in our favoured fluid scruples.
Fortunately, we need not leave it to our imagination. “Picture a Sydney Harbour going under that bridge in 24 hours,” the article says. With difficulty. This leaves us with a description from Michael Salinas, a hydrologist at the Bureau of Meteorology, of “3,000 Tesla Model 3s flowing every second”. The tesla being a unit of magnetism, we are now even more confused. We don’t know where these cars were swept away from, but we imagine somebody wants them back, which could possibly be achieved using a large magnet.
Stony-faced
Richard Hind writes from York, UK, under the subject line “A geek joke for you!”, reporting that he followed his dentist’s advice to purchase an electric toothbrush for removing calculus, but, having bought two to compare, he finds he can no longer differentiate. If our face seems impassive, it is only because of the mask permanently covering our visage for the mating season – although the words Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain spring to mind from somewhere.
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You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More