Humans

Katie Yu
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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.

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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

In Dying Light 2, a variant of a virus has turned people into zombiesTechland
Dying Light 2 Stay Human
Techland
PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/SAdvertisement
IN APRIL 2020, soon after the UK entered its first lockdown, I reviewed the zombie-packed Resident Evil 3, describing it as noticeably “pre-pandemic fiction”. Two years on, the pandemic is still going, and I am still playing zombie games. This time, it is Dying Light 2 Stay Human, and it is interesting to look at the game as a work of post-pandemic (mid-pandemic?) fiction.
It is a sequel to the 2015 game Dying Light, which saw a viral outbreak in the fictional Middle Eastern city of Harran turn people into zombies. The end of the game promised a cure to the disease, but as the introduction of Dying Light 2 explains – and stop me if you have heard this before – a new variant of the virus emerged in 2021 and spread rapidly. The zombies took over and civilisation collapsed. Cheery stuff.
The game picks up the story in 2036, where you play as a survivor called Aiden Caldwell. After being bitten by a zombie, you enter one of the last remaining outposts of society, known only as the City. There, you discover that all of the other survivors are also infected, but use a variety of tools to avoid zombification – hence the “Stay Human” part of the game’s title.
Full zombies can’t survive in sunlight, so City folk have set up ultraviolet lamps to hold back the infection. One of your early goals in the game is to acquire a wristband that provides an alert when you need a top-up of UV. Owning one of these wristbands is a condition of living in the City, perhaps a nod to the various covid passes that have been implemented around the world.
“Aiden has expert parkour skills that allow him to scale buildings and dodge undesirable characters”
With a wristband secured, the game settles into a rhythm. By day, you are more or less safe from zombies outside (though not from roving bandits), although it is risky to enter derelict buildings, where the undead tend to gather. Then, at night, the zombies hit the streets, so it is tricky to get around outside, but easier to explore within. Dodging zombies has its rewards: you get bonus experience points, which you can use to upgrade your abilities, handy for venturing out at night and for surviving a zombie chase.
For reasons that are never properly explained, Aiden has expert parkour skills that allow him to scale buildings, jump across rooftops and generally dodge undesirable characters. In a strange game design decision, features that would usually be part of the basic move set in this kind of game (such as the ability to slide) require unlocking upgrades, so it takes a while to accumulate the full set of skills.
That is a shame, because this freedom of movement is probably the best thing about the game. I had great fun racing through the city, but beyond the obvious covid-19 links, the meat of the game is nothing you haven’t seen before. Everything boils down to: go here, get this thing, kill these zombies, repeat.
As you explore the city, you get the opportunity to claim various locations, such as a water tower, for one of three factions: the slightly fascist Peacekeepers, the anarchic Renegades or the ordinary survivors. You get to pick a side, and Techland, the game’s developer, goes big on the idea that which you choose matters to the (entirely forgettable) storyline. But two years into the pandemic, I was more inclined to stick with the ordinary survivors. It is hard not to sympathise with people who have lived through a world-altering disaster and are just trying their best to carry on existing.
Jacob also recommends… More

Shop-bought strawberries can taste disappointing, but home grown ones are delicious. Here’s how to succeed in growing these delicate fruits, says Clare Wilson

Humans

2 March 2022

By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Julia Boulton
THERE are plenty of reasons people grow their own fruit and vegetables: it is a satisfying outdoor hobby, it gets you some exercise and the produce has low food miles, usually making it good for the planet too.
Another reason is that many home-grown fruits and vegetables taste better than the ones on sale in shops. The difference is particularly noticeable for some types of produce, such as new potatoes, asparagus, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.
There can be several explanations. One is that the varieties grown by farmers are often different to those sold for home growing. Farmers use … More

The sarsen stones of the Stonehenge monument could have been designed as a calendar to track a solar year, with each of the stones in the large sarsen circle representing a day within a month

Humans

2 March 2022

By Alison George
Stonehenge – an ancient calendar?nagelestock.com / Alamy
Stonehenge has long been thought to be an ancient calendar due to its alignment with the summer and winter solstices, but exactly how the calendar system worked was a mystery. Now a new analysis shows that it could have functioned like the solar calendar used in ancient Egypt, based on a year of 365.25 days, with each of the stones of the large sarsen circle representing a day within a month.
“It’s a perpetual calendar that recalibrates every winter solstice sunset,” says Tim Darvill of Bournemouth University, UK, who carried out the analysis. This would have enabled the ancient people who lived near the monument in what is now Wiltshire, UK, to keep track of days and months of the year.
The key to unlocking this calendar system came from the discovery in 2020 that most of the sarsen stones were quarried from the same location 25 kilometres away, and were placed at Stonehenge at around the same time.Advertisement
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“All except two of the sarsens at Stonehenge come from that single source, so the message to me was that they’ve got a unity to them,” says Darvill. This indicates that they were intended for a common purpose. To find out what, he looked for clues in the numbers.
The sarsens were arranged in three different formations at Stonehenge around 2500 BC: 30 formed the large stone circle that dominates the monument, 4 “station stones” were placed in a rectangular formation outside this circle, and the rest were constructed into 5 trilithons – consisting of two vertical stones with a third stone laid horizontally across the top like a lintel – located inside the stone circle.
“30, 5 and 4 are interesting numbers in a calendrical kind of sense,” says Darvill. “Those 30 uprights around the main sarsen ring at Stonehenge would fit very nicely as days of the month,” he says. “Multiply that by 12 and you get 360, add on another 5 from the central trilithons you get 365.” To adjust the calendar to match a solar year, the addition of one extra leap day every four years is needed, and Darvill thinks that the four station stones may have been used to keep track of this. In this system, the summer and winter solstice would be framed every year by the same pair of stones.
This Stonehenge calendar system “makes a lot of sense,” says David Nash at the University of Brighton, UK.  “I like the elegant simplicity of it.”
Others are not so sure. “It’s certainly intriguing but ultimately it fails to convince,” says Mike Parker Pearson of University College London, UK.” The numbers don’t really add up – why should two uprights of a trilithon equal one upright of the sarsen circle to represent 1 day? There’s selective use of evidence to try to make the numbers fit.”

Although a calendar with 30-days months and an extra “intercalary” month of five days might not be familiar to us today, such a system was used in ancient Egypt from around 2700 BC and other solar calendars had been developed in the eastern Mediterranean region at around that time.
In the Egyptian calendar these five extra days were “very significant, religiously speaking,” says Sacha Stern, an expert in ancient calendars at University College London. This has led Darvill to think that the five trilithon structures at Stonehenge might have marked a five-day mid-winter celebration, an idea bolstered by the fact that the tallest stone at the monument, part of one of the trilithons, points to the sunrise on the midwinter solstice.
The similarity between the Stonehenge calendar and that used in ancient Egypt hints that the idea for the Stonehenge system may have come from afar. Recent archaeological finds support the idea of long-distance travel and trade around that time. Isotope analysis of the body of the Amesbury Archer, who was buried 5 kilometres from Stonehenge around 2300 BC, revealed that he was born in the Alps and came to Britain as a teenager, and a red glass bead found 2km from the monument appears to have been made in Egypt around 2000 BC.
However, Stern is not convinced by the argument that the Stonehenge calendar system originated elsewhere. “I wonder if you need to invoke the Egyptians. Why can’t we just imagine that [the people who built Stonehenge] created the whole system by themselves? They certainly knew when the solstice was, and from that point onwards you just have to count the days, and it won’t take long to figure out how many days you need in the year.”
Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2022.5

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hasn’t gone to plan and has led to an economic backlash from the West. If Russian president Vladimir Putin feels backed into a corner, there is a real possibility he could use a nuclear weapon in an attempt to show strength, say analysts

Humans

| Analysis

28 February 2022

By Matthew Sparkes
Vladimir Putin may feel increasingly isolatedRussian Look Ltd. / Alamy
Nuclear conflict is a distinct but remote possibility as global tensions are ratcheted up by Russia’s faltering invasion of Ukraine, warn analysts. Russian president Vladimir Putin is in a vulnerable and unpredictable position as he contends with a lacklustre economy, increasing dissent among his citizens and, now, the potential for military defeat.
On 27 February, Putin raised Russia’s nuclear readiness system level by ordering his forces to take a “special regime of combat duty”. Patrick Bury at the University of Bath, UK, says this announcement was unusually vague, counter to the typical nuclear deterrence strategy of acting clearly and transparently as a warning to others. He and fellow academics and analysts assumed that the country would have been at level 2 of Russia’s four-level system already, given the situation in Ukraine.
But Putin’s announcement is being widely interpreted as a move from level 1 (stood down) to level 2 (ready to accept an order to fire). Bury believes we are closer to nuclear conflict now than at any point since the cold war tension of the 1980s. “Putin has poked a sleeping giant,” he says. “The West has responded massively.”Advertisement
This response included Western nations sending weapons and aid to Ukraine, while stronger-than-expected economic sanctions from around the world are piling on the pressure against Putin. If Russia’s invasion now fails, he could be removed from power or even killed in a coup, which Bury warns is a situation that backs Putin into a corner.
Bury puts the odds of a nuclear detonation as a result of this crisis at between 20 per cent and 30 per cent, but points out that it need not lead to all-out nuclear war. Instead, we could see a low-yield device used against the military in Ukraine, or even a large device detonated at sea simply as a show of force.
David Galbreath at the University of Bath says that the conflict is about more than Ukraine: it is a flexing of Russian muscles against what Putin sees as the growing threat of cooperation in the European Union and the NATO military alliance.

Galbreath says it was obvious in the build-up to the invasion that the types of personnel and weapons amassing at the border were the type one would deploy to quickly strike Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, oust Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and install a puppet leader – not those needed to occupy a country.
If this was the plan, it has already failed. And therefore we may now see the use of stronger military options that are available to Putin, such as electronic warfare that can cripple enemy surveillance and vehicles, and sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles that would prevent Ukraine from defending its airspace – currently it is still able to launch its aircraft and dogfights with Russian aircraft continue. Nuclear weapons are also a possibility, but only as a last resort, says Galbreath.
“In terms of military action, I think what we’ve seen so far is fairly limited. I think they’re going to get heavy next. And I think we need to prepare for far worse casualties,” says Kenton White at the University of Reading, UK.
White points to Russia’s military tactic of maskirovka, or disinformation, which the country has already used during the invasion. In an extreme case, White says this could stretch to a false-flag operation, such as the detonation of a small nuclear bomb outside Ukraine’s border, which is blamed on NATO.
“There’s a lot of talk about rationality of action when you’re discussing nuclear deterrence,” says White. “Well, President Putin has a rationality all of his own.”

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By Michael Marshall
A visualisation of relationships between ancestors and descendants in the genealogy of modern and ancient genomesWohns et al. (2022)
Meet your relatives. A family tree of humanity has been constructed using genetic data from thousands of modern and prehistoric people. The tree gives a view of 2 million years of prehistory and evolution.
“Humans are all ultimately related to each other,” says Gil McVean at the University of Oxford. “What I’ve long wanted to do is to be able to represent the totality of what we can learn about human history through this genealogy.”
The new family tree suggests that our earliest roots were in north-east Africa. It also offers clues that people reached Papua New Guinea and the Americas tens of thousands of years earlier than the archaeological record implies, hinting at early migrations that haven’t yet been discovered. However, both these ideas would need to be confirmed by archaeologists.Advertisement
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Geneticists have been reading people’s entire genomes for the past two decades. McVean and his colleagues compiled 3609 complete genomes, almost all of which belonged to our species, Homo sapiens, except for three Neanderthals and one from the Denisovan group, which may be a subspecies of H. sapiens or a separate species.
Putting them together into a tree was challenging. “The different data sets have been produced over time, using different technologies, analysed in different ways,” says McVean.
The team focused on bits of DNA that vary from person to person. They identified 6,412,717 variants and tried to figure out when and where each one arose. To do this, they also looked at an additional 3589 samples of ancient DNA that weren’t good enough to include in the tree, but did shed light on when the variants emerged.
Variants that emerged before 72,000 years ago were most common in north-east Africa, and the oldest 100 variants were also from there, specifically in what is now Sudan. Those oldest variants are about 2 million years old, so they long predate our species, which emerged around 300,000 years ago. Instead, the variants date to the earliest members of our genus, Homo.
The simplistic interpretation of this is that humanity first evolved in that region, but it is likely that subsequent migrations have interfered with the data. “I would definitely not take the naive and immediate answer,” says Jennifer Raff at the University of Kansas.
The earliest H. sapiens fossils are from the north and east of Africa, but few have been discovered, so we don’t know our species’ early range with any certainty. The oldest known specimens are from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, in north Africa, and are perhaps 315,000 years old. The next oldest are those from Omo-Kibish in Ethiopia, in the east. They were thought to be 197,000 years old, but a paper published in January presented evidence that they are more like 233,000 years old.
Many anthropologists now think there were multiple populations spread across Africa, which were sometimes separated and sometimes interbred. If that is correct, humanity doesn’t have a central origin point. “Our findings are certainly perfectly compatible with that,” says McVean. “There’s a lot of very deep lineages within Africa, which are suggestive of that notion of there being multiple source populations, very deeply diverged, representing really ancient splits.”

In line with this, a second study published this week obtained ancient DNA from six sub-Saharan African people who lived within the past 18,000 years. They carried DNA from three distinct lineages that originated in the distant past, from eastern, central and southern Africa. These groups began interbreeding more around 50,000 years ago, but by 20,000 years ago this largely stopped.
The new genealogy also contains hints of early journeys. It suggests that people were living in Papua New Guinea 140,000 years ago, almost 100,000 years before the earliest documented inhabitants. Similarly, it indicates that people were in the Americas 56,000 years ago, despite many archaeologists having settled on 18,000 years ago as the earliest entrance.
The idea of people in the Americas earlier than this is controversial because, prior to that, great ice sheets covered the northern regions, blocking migration. Nevertheless, a study from September 2021 described footprints from White Sands National Park in New Mexico, which suggest humans were in the Americas between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago. There is also disputed evidence of humans living in Chiquihuite cave in Mexico as much as 33,000 years ago. But 56,000 years ago is still a big reach.
“I think there are three possible explanations,” says McVean. “One is, we’re wrong.” The second is that people really were in these places very early.
The third option is a more complex scenario. The first people to live in the Americas came from eastern Asia, and it may be that the population from which they came has died out in Asia. This would mean the oldest American-looking genetic variants are actually from people who lived in Asia – but the only living people with those variants today are in America, throwing off the analysis. A similar story could have played out for Papua New Guinea.
“It’s very common in our genetic data that there are ancient lineages which don’t persist throughout time,” says Raff. “That’s completely plausible.”
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.abi8264
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Almost 200 people died in the German floods of 2021 because experts couldn’t convince them of impending danger. We must rethink how to get through to the public, says hydrologist Hannah Cloke

Humans

| Comment

23 February 2022

By Hannah Cloke
Simone Rotella
IMAGINATION is one of those powerful human traits that sets us apart from other animals. By reading the word “circus”, your brain automatically conjures up a rich tableau of images and ideas. But you don’t need to be daydreaming of clowns to know that imagination plays a vital role in science.
The advancement of this domain intrinsically requires the birth of new ideas. Einstein famously claimed that imagination was more important than knowledge in the formulation of his theories. When researchers test ideas against reality, imagination is hardwired into the process: the point of science is that it allows you to see the future, to look round corners, to extend the capability of human insight. In that sense, imagination in science is alive and well.
But in another sense, it has an imagination problem. I recently gave evidence to two state-level inquiries in Germany into the July 2021 floods in the west of the country. Both inquiries are exploring why almost 200 people died there in a deluge that was forecast accurately several days in advance. It is a complicated question that will probably yield many answers. I believe a lack of imagination may be partly behind this.Advertisement
The scientists couldn’t imagine that their forecasts, delivered in good time and with accuracy, could be ignored. Municipal authorities couldn’t imagine that such dire forecasts might be correct. And many of the people living in harm’s way just couldn’t imagine what a 9-metre wall of water would do, or how badly they would be affected.
The best scientists use many of their human abilities – imagination and creativity, collaboration, communication and empathy – to make discoveries and reach new insights. Yet when it comes to telling people about them, we can turn into robots, unable to deliver important messages.
All of the most compelling ideas are those conveyed to us in ways that we can see and picture and feel. The big bang is a conceptual theory that no one needs to grasp to stay alive, yet it fundamentally changed the understanding of our existence. If physicists were able to describe it only to other physicists, humanity would be all the poorer.
Putting a human face on non-human phenomena can work too. There is good evidence that naming storms leads people to take action to protect themselves. In the UK, we have had plenty of exposure to this recently. The prospect of Corrie, Dudley or Eunice smashing into your home, as opposed to just seeing a generic warning of “gusts greater than 80mph”, engages your brain in a way that encourages a response.
If naming storms works, then how about naming floods? Would people be more or less likely to respond to a warning and move to higher ground if a rising river was renamed Flood Dave? Such a label may be less accurate to hydrologists, perhaps, than saying that a rise in river levels of 5 metres will lead to flooding with a return period of 20 years. But probably more useful to everybody else.
As with the comet-spotting astronomers in the film Don’t Look Up, or the real-life climate scientists that it is based on, it is a tragedy to see danger ahead when no-one acts to avoid it. The most advanced supercomputers running complex simulations are useless if nobody understands the risks that they foretell.
By ignoring imagination when we convey science, we are shirking our responsibility as scientists. If communicating our findings is important – and sometimes, lives depend on it – then we have a responsibility to undertake the task with as much flair, creativity and passion as we use when we do our research. Logic and reason is fine. But when we can’t move beyond the facts, people may die.

Hannah Cloke is a hydrologist at the University of Reading in the UK (@hancloke)

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

Humans

23 February 2022

Josie Ford
First hands on the moon
Oh, what fun it must be to sit in a tank, and think! It is a thought that strikes Feedback with full vigour as we sit in our stationery cupboard tank – does anyone know how to drive this thing, etc. – surveying the recent paper from UK-based neoliberal think tank the Adam Smith Institute, “Space invaders: Property rights on the moon”.
Feedback isn’t one of those unkind partisans who reflexively associates the word “swivel-eyed” with the output of neoliberal think tanks. Nor are we so unnuanced as to say the paper advocates “privatising the moon”, as some more agitated commentators have. To privatise something, we assume it must be in public ownership first.
No, it primarily addresses the question of what a Lockean-type classical liberal rights-based approach to economic justice demands in terms of adjudicating problems of the individual ownership of land in space. It also argues that the current rules-based international order, based mainly on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, is no longer fit for purpose when various private and national interests are engaged in a new space race and “everyday space tourism is just around the corner”.Advertisement
That’s a mighty long corner, we’ll warrant. But if we are sceptical of the competitive tendering process to allocate land rights on the moon advocated by the institute, it is only because it also suggests a new international treaty underpinning it. This seems to us far too wet and statist. Several frothy free-enterprise outfits will already give you title to a parcel of the lunar surface for top dollar (3 April 2021).We suggest they could be awarded the contract for administering the scheme through some thrustingly free-and-easy “VIP lane” process.
Statistically thin ice
Russell Waugh writes from the Western Australian version of Perth bedazzled by the scoring system in the figure skating at the Beijing Winter Olympics. “The judges were able to add, and even subtract, points for good or poor execution of many different skills, with no common unit of measurement on any of the different skills (sometimes from a negative minimum point and a positive maximum point), add together all points given by seven or eight different judges, and then produce a final ‘measure’ to two decimal places,” he marvels.
We agree that statisticians would also wonder at the lack of any margin of error on the result. But then, that doesn’t appear to be the dodgiest thing going on at the figure skating this year.
However, we were more exercised by the margin of error on the final medal tally of the Great Britain team. We were pleased when, rather late in the day, that turned out not to be zero.
Carbon wormprint
Anyone who, like Feedback, has ever caught themselves wondering how large carbon emissions actually are should look no further than a communication from the Labour party in Hastings, UK, sent in by Gabriel Carlyle.
It celebrates an initiative of the local council to replace every light bulb in Hastings with low-energy LED bulbs. This will lead to an annual saving in just one town-centre car park of 1 tonne of carbon, “the equivalent of 300,000 worms. Layed [sic] end to end they would reach from Hastings to Eastbourne.”
We make that a distance of about 30 kilometres if the worms are laid out by road. This could be messy for all sorts of reasons. We are left wondering whether, if the worms are less than cooperative and just form a writhing ball in the centre of Hastings, that reduces the carbon savings in any way.
Long in the rings
We have a new benchmark in our occasional series on “how old the internet thinks you can be”. Natalie Roberts reports going to the Open University website to order a poster about plants accompanying the new BBC series The Green Planet and finding that the drop-down menu for date of birth allows options back to 1582.
Good for elderly tree sprites who have piled on the rings, we imagine, although it still excludes the most ancient of yews. Our vague concern, prompted by Natalie, about whether birth dates need to be in the Julian or Gregorian calendar leads us to the revelation that the papal bull advocating calendar reform was issued by Pope Gregory XIII in… 1582. We are now wondering whether this is a coincidence, a learned joke by computer elves at the Open University or has some other origin in the deep history of computer programming.
Quantum cat spin
Charles Warren wonders whether a physics-violating perpetual motion machine formed of a slice of falling buttered toast strapped to a cat’s back (29 January) would violate physics if the cat in question were Schrödinger’s cat.
Yes… no… maybe, Charles. We assume the premise of the cat always landing on its feet applies only to live cats. Introducing a potentially dead cat is possibly a new spin too far.
The usual…
It is only recent events that have made it at all notable that Douglas Jabs is the director of the Center for Clinical Trials and Evidence Synthesis at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. But many of you have now noted it, so we note it while on our way out of the room.
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