Humans

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Humans

29 December 2021

Josie Ford
Glowing reports
Happy new year, happy new year – may we all have a vision, now and then, of a world where every neighbour is a friend! You catch us having our annual bath, singing along to ABBA’s traditional Swedish seasonal carol and possibly still feeling the effects of one too many Tío Pepes. Well, what do you expect in a column dated 1 January?
We are put in a particularly good mood, however, by Tony Powers, who writes with a follow-up to an article last year about platypuses, those remarkable mammals that glow in UV light, produce venom and … More

By Sally Adee

The Unfamiliar Garden / The Sky Vault
Benjamin Percy
Hodder & StoughtonAdvertisement
Not one but two sequels to The Ninth Metal come out this year. A comet peppers Earth with a new metallic super-ore whose discovery changes everything. Out in January and August, respectively.

Goliath: A novel
Tochi Onyebuchi
Tordotcom
In the 2050s, space colonies offer refuge from a collapsing climate, but only for the rich. The rest have to figure out how to live in it. Out in January.

Mickey7
Edward Ashton
St Martin’s Press
Mickey7 is a disposable human who is sent to colonise dangerous new worlds, a job he is suited for because he can regenerate. After being lost, presumed dead, he meets his successor and they must team up to survive. Out in February.

The This
Adam Roberts
Gollancz
In the dystopian near future, smartphones have become sex toys and the hottest new social media platform grows directly into your brain. What could possibly go wrong? Out in February.

The Cartographers
Peng Shepherd
Hachette
In this dark fable, a young woman finds a strange map among her estranged father’s things after his untimely death. Deadly secrets and gothic-inflected speculative fiction ensue. Out in March.

Plutoshine
Lucy Kissick
Orion 
Lucy Kissick is a nuclear scientist with a PhD in planetary geochemistry. Her book about terraforming Pluto – even as native alien species are discovered – may put you in mind of Kim Stanley Robinson. Out in April.

Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak
Charlie Jane Anders (Titan)
Teenage geniuses in space. Book two of a fun, rompy, LGBTQ+ space opera series that blurs the line between young adult and science fiction. Out in April.

Eversion
Alastair Reynolds
Gollancz
Airships, steampunk, a mysterious artefact and expeditions that keep going wrong. It’s up to Dr Silas Coade to figure out why. Out in May.

Glitterati
Oliver Langmead
Titan
An influencer comedy of horrors billed as A Clockwork Orange meets RuPaul’s Drag Race. The fun kicks off when nosebleeds become a fashion trend – and it sparks a vicious fight for credit. Out in May.

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By Swapna Krishna
James Dimmock/CBS
The best films and TV
Towards the end of 2021, a glut of movies and shows that had been delayed by covid-19 finally hit the screens. Next year, that trend continues with a plethora of sci-fi offerings.
Paramount Plus (which is due to launch in the UK in 2022) has a double treat for fans of the Star Trek franchise. Patrick Stewart stars in a new series of Star Trek: Picard, which returns in early 2022. Later in the year, the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will bring back fan favourites such as Spock, Uhura and Number One.
Over in the Star Wars universe, Obi-Wan Kenobi starring Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen will premiere on Disney+. The streaming service will also bring back Diego Luna as Cassian Andor from Rogue One in Andor.Advertisement
Back on Paramount Plus, a new show, Halo, based on the hit video game series, will also be released in early 2022. Set in the 26th century, it will focus on a war between humans and aliens, with Pablo Schreiber set to play the legendary Master Chief.
From Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, comes a new high-concept series for Amazon Prime Video called The Peripheral, based on a book by William Gibson. It focuses on a detective (played by Chloë Grace Moretz) who believes that she witnessed a murder in cyberspace.
On the big screen, the threats are more tangible. February sees the release of Moonfall, in which Halle Berry stars as a NASA executive and former astronaut who must take action when the moon breaks its orbit and is set to collide with Earth.
Space thriller 65 is set for release in April. Few details have been released, except that the main character, played by Adam Driver, arrives on another planet to discover he isn’t alone.
On a lighter note, Disney Pixar’s Lightyear comes to cinemas in June. Set in the Toy Story universe, it traces the origins of Buzz Lightyear — the “real” astronaut that was immortalised as a children’s toy in the cartoons.
It is also a big year for long-awaited sequels. Avatar 2 finally arrives at the end of the year, more than 10 years after James Cameron introduced us to the world of Pandora. And Jurassic World: Dominion will roar onto big screens in June for one last adventure starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard.
Whatever else this year brings, we certainly won’t be short of entertainment.

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Amenhotep I ruled Egypt from around 1525 to 1504 BC and his pristine mummy has never been unwrapped, but CT scans have now allowed us to peer inside

Humans

28 December 2021

By Alex Wilkins
Face mask of the never-before unwrapped mummy of pharaoh Amenhotep IS. Saleem and Z. Hawass
One of the last remaining unwrapped royal Egyptian mummies has been scanned in detail for the first time.
Amenhotep I, who ruled Egypt from around 1525 to 1504 BC in an era known as the New Kingdom, was found in 1881 by a French Egyptologist. But the king’s mummy was left untouched due to a highly preserved wrapping and ornate face mask. It has remained sealed in its sarcophagus ever since.
Now, Sahar Saleem and Zahi Hawass at the University of Cairo in Egypt have “digitally unwrapped” Amenhotep I’s mummy with computed tomography (CT), using hundreds of high resolution X-ray slices to map out the ancient king’s skeleton and soft tissue.Advertisement
“Royal mummies of the New Kingdom were the most well-preserved ancient bodies ever found, so these mummies are considered a time capsule,” says Saleem.
“They can tell us about what the ancient kings and queens looked like, their health, ancient diseases, mummification techniques and manufacturing methods of funerary objects.”
Amenhotep I’s mummy has been examined using simple X-ray scans in the past, but the detailed CT scan reveals several new facts: his bone structure indicates that he was 35 years old and 168.5 centimetres tall when he died.
Left: the pharaoh’s skull. Right: the pharaoh’s mummy, showing his skull and skeleton within the bandagesS. Saleem and Z. Nuwass
The study also seems to answer a long-standing mystery: previous scans had revealed that Amenhotep I had been embalmed by Egyptian priests for a second time 300 years after he was first entombed, after graverobbers apparently plundered his coffin. Saleem had theorised that the priests used this occasion to pilfer precious jewels placed on the body and in the bandages for themselves before re-embalming him.
But the plentiful jewellery revealed in the scan  reveals that the priests “lovingly” re-embalmed Amenhotep I, according to Saleem. It was because the priests’ handiwork was so impressive and the mummy’s appearance was so pristine more than 3000 years later that 19th century archaeologists were convinced to leave him permanently unwrapped.
Journal reference: Frontiers in Medicine, DOI: 10.3389/fmed.2021.778498

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Academics in Afghanistan were thriving before the shock takeover by the Taliban this year, which saw many researchers leave the country and universities closed

Humans

24 December 2021 More

Analysis of ancient DNA reveals a mass migration of people from what is now France to England and Wales between 1000 and 875 BC

Humans

22 December 2021

By Carissa Wong
Illustration of a Celtic hill fort in the Iron AgeHeritage Image Partnership Ltd /Alamy
The largest analysis of ancient DNA to date has revealed a mass migration of people from what is now France into England and Wales during the late Bronze Age, which may have spread Celtic languages to Britain.
Two large migrations of people into Britain were previously known, the first taking place around 6000 years ago. The ancestry of these people came mostly from a group known to archaeogeneticists as Early European Farmers, with around 20 per cent from another group called Western European Hunter-Gatherers. This migration led to the replacement of most of the existing local hunter-gatherer ancestry.
Around 4500 years ago, at the start of the Bronze Age, there was a second migration that consisted of descendents of livestock farmers from the Pontic-Caspian steppe – grassland that spans from present-day Bulgaria to Kazakhstan. Ancestry from this group eventually formed at least 90 per cent of the genetic make-up in Scotland, England and Wales.Advertisement
People living in England and Wales today have more ancestry from Early European Farmers than people in the early Bronze Age did, suggesting a third migration from Europe may have occurred more recently.
Ian Armit at the University of York in the UK and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of nearly 800 individuals from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age whose remains were found at archaeological sites in Britain and in western and central Europe. They looked at the proportion of Early European Farmer ancestry in these ancient people over time.

The team found evidence of a third mass migration into Britain from France that took place between 1000 BC and 875 BC, during which Early European Farmer ancestry increased from around 30 per cent to roughly 36 per cent on average in southern Britain by the late Bronze Age. In the Iron Age, this stabilised at nearly half of the ancestry in populations of England and Wales.
“We’ve always known this period of the middle and late Bronze Age was a period of tremendous connectivity between Britain and central and western Europe,” says Armit.
“Prior to this study, we would have thought of the movement in terms of individuals and small groups, traders and [people looking for metal]. But the results show society was far more mobile than we thought – large sectors of society were on the move. Societies were very interconnected across the English Channel in a manner we hadn’t really appreciated before,” he says.
The findings help shed light on a debate about when Celtic languages were first spoken in Britain. “The most established theory, based on the analysis of ancient object styles, is that Celtic languages came in during the Iron Age with Celtic speakers from continental Europe,” says Armit.
But the new evidence supports a competing idea, based on linguistic studies, that Celtic languages expanded into Britain earlier, in the middle to late Bronze Age. However, we can’t tell from someone’s DNA what language they spoke, says Armit.
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04287-4
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We used to think that European wine grapes were cultivated locally, independently of grape domestication in western Asia, but grape genetics suggests otherwise

Humans

21 December 2021

By Carissa Wong
Red grapes ready to be harvested in a vineyardalika/Shutterstock
Grapes used to make common European wines may have originated from grapevines that were first domesticated in the South Caucasus region of western Asia. As these domesticated grapes dispersed westwards during the Greek and Roman times, they interbred with local European wild populations, which helped the wine grapes adapt to different European climates.
The origins of grapes (Vitis vinifera) that are used in Europe and elsewhere to produce wines such as Merlot, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir have long been debated.
It has been proposed that European wine grapes arose from the cultivation of wild European populations (V. vinifera subspecies sylvestris), independently of the original domestication of grapes in western Asia around 7000 years ago.Advertisement
But a genetic analysis carried out by Gabriele Di Gaspero at the Institute of Applied Genomics in Udine, Italy, and his colleagues suggests that European wine grapes actually originated from domesticated grapes (V. vinifera subspecies sativa) that were initially grown for consumption as fresh fruit in western Asia.
The team sequenced the genomes of 204 wild and cultivated grape varieties – to cover the range of genetic diversity in cultivated grapes – and compared how similar their genetic sequences were to one another.
This revealed that as western Asian table grapes spread westwards across the Mediterranean and further inland into Europe, they interbred with wild European grape populations that grew nearby.

“The wild plants grew close to vineyards and interbred – this was unintentional. But the results of the breeding created adaptive traits that were likely selected by humans intentionally,” says Di Gaspero. “By bringing together this genetic evidence and existing historical evidence, the introductions in southern Europe and inland likely occurred in Greek and Roman times, although we don’t know more specific dates.”
By modelling how the ancestry of the grapes in different regions of Europe related to aspects of the local climate such as temperature and precipitation, the team discovered that European wild grapes probably contributed traits that enabled the ancestral grape vines to adapt to different regions as they moved westwards from Asia.
The team also found evidence of the effect that domestication had on grape genetics.
In wild grape varieties, a larger seed makes a larger berry because grape seeds produce a growth hormone called ethylene. But for human consumption, a larger berry-to-seed ratio is desirable. The team found that an enzyme not found in the berries of wild varieties was present in the berries of domesticated varieties. In other plants, the enzyme is known to help berries grow in response to ethylene, which suggests it does the same in grapes.
Understanding which genes encode favourable traits in grapes can allow us grow better grape crops, says Di Gaspero.
Journal reference: Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27487-y

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The size of a child’s hippocampus can be limited by stress, and US state welfare schemes that give families $500 a month or more are linked to a reduction in this association

Humans

20 December 2021

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Illustration of the hippocampus in a child’s brainScience Photo Library / Alamy
Higher payments from US welfare schemes can reduce the impact that living in a low-income household has on the size of a crucial region of a child’s brain.
David Weissman at Harvard University in Massachusetts, and his colleagues analysed images of the brains of more than 11,000 children aged 9 and 10 in the US, looking specifically at the size of each child’s hippocampus.
“The hippocampus is a brain region involved in learning and memory,” says Weissman. Its development is believed to be impaired by excess stress, which can be caused by growing up in poverty, he says.Advertisement
“Prior studies show that kids with small hippocampal volumes are more likely to develop internalising problems [such as anxiety and social withdrawal] and develop depression,” he says.
The children came from 17 states, and while they aren’t wholly representative of the US population they are “pretty close”, according to Weissman. The data set is slightly skewed towards more urban areas because the imaging can only be done in places that have available neuroimaging equipment and related expertise.
Weissman and his team looked at whether a state had expanded Medicaid, a federally subsidised healthcare scheme, in 2017. That year, states had to choose whether to begin covering a portion of the services that were previously fully covered by the federal government. Just over 7500 of the children involved lived in states that expanded Medicaid.
Then the researchers analysed the average amount of welfare benefits people in each state received under various anti-poverty schemes. The higher this total, the more generous they considered the state’s benefits system. “It’s a rough estimate, but it works,” says Weissman.

Combining this with the brain imagery revealed that children in families that received fewer welfare benefits from their state had a smaller hippocampus than average. This link was stronger in states with a high cost of living.
The team found there was a 37 per cent reduction in the association between lower family incomes and a smaller hippocampus in states that gave each family receiving welfare payments on average $500 a month or more, compared with those that gave less than $500 a month.
The link between receiving better welfare payments and a smaller hippocampus was also reduced by 19 per cent in states that had expanded Medicaid compared with those that hadn’t.
Weissman says the results aren’t surprising, but it is still “shocking” to see how major government policy decisions have an actual effect on the brain.
“If your goal is to have a fairer society where this doesn’t happen, then you should be pushing for policies that give more cash benefits to poorer families,” he says.
“I think that this finding is tremendously important,” says Jane Barlow at the University of Oxford. “The research [in this field] now clearly shows social adversity can become biologically embedded during the prenatal period and early years of a child’s life as a result of the way in which they impact the neurological development of the child.”
Reference: PsyArXiv, DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/8nhej

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