Humans

From deep-sea mines to aquaculture, bioprospecting and energy generation, humanity’s accelerating expansion into the high seas has potentially huge consequences for its health

Humans

20 April 2022

By Graham Lawton
Wind power could require 45,000 km2 of European waters by 2050Miguel Navarro/Getty Images
BLUE BUSINESS: Power and comms
The world’s first offshore wind farm opened off the coast of Lolland, Denmark, in 1991. Since then, the global installed capacity has grown to nearly 35 gigawatts – enough to power the entire UK – almost all of it in European (25 GW) and Chinese (9 GW) waters. Other sources of ocean renewable energy are also being eyed up, including waves, tides, currents, salinity gradients, thermal gradients and marine biomass. The EU has a target of installing 1 GW of these alternative sources by 2030, says Benjamin Lehner at the Dutch Marine Energy Centre in The Hague.
All these figures are a drop in the ocean compared with the world’s 1840 GW of gas-fired power capacity. Yet with wind power generation getting cheaper all the time – costs declined 70 per cent between 2012 and 2021 – rapid growth looks like a foregone conclusion. The trade association Wind Europe estimates that, by 2050, Europe will have 450 GW of offshore wind.
That brings its own challenges. It will require about 45,000 square kilometres of ocean, most of it between 11 and 22 kilometres from shore, the goldilocks zone for offshore wind. Europe has 550,000 square kilometres of this real estate in total, but more than 60 per cent is earmarked for marine protected areas, says António Sarmento at consultancy firm WavEC Offshore Renewables in Lisbon, Portugal. Building, operating and maintaining offshore wind farms can damage the seabed, while the power cables that carry electricity to shore … More

As buyers await the launch of a bicycle saddle that promises to be earthquake resistant, Feedback also ponders the sculptures set to be housed in a transparent cube on the moon, and key information on the errant mass of the W boson

Humans

20 April 2022

Josie Ford
Quaking on our bikes
Feedback doesn’t live in great fear of earthquakes. The last significant tremor in our neck of the woods – a 4.3-magnitude shocker that hit Folkestone, UK, in 2007 – was, according to one eyewitness, like someone was at the end of my bed hopping up and down. This is how it felt the last time the earth moved for us, too, although admittedly that was even further back.
Still, you can’t be too careful, and the past couple of years have taught us nothing if not the value of the precautionary principle, although possibly not even … More

There is a historical obligation for higher-income countries to transfer some of their vast and ill-gotten wealth to lower-income ones to compensate them for the damage they have done to the environment, writes Graham Lawton

Humans

| Columnist

20 April 2022

By Graham Lawton
B5HKJ9 The United Glass Limited Glass Works in Alloa, Clackmannanshire, Scotland, UK. Reflected in the River ForthDavid Robertson/Alamy

THE country I live in is one of the richest on the planet, but also one of the poorest. By GDP, the UK is a superpower with the fifth largest economy in the world. But in terms of intact biodiversity, it is in the bottom 10 per cent globally and the worst in the G7.
These two facts aren’t unrelated. The UK got rich – and has stayed rich – in no small part by overexploiting its natural resources. The agricultural and industrial revolutions turned great swathes of what was once green and pleasant into a polluted and overgrazed wasteland. Even today, more than two-thirds of the UK’s land area is farmed and 8 per cent is built on, leaving little room for wildlife. The nation’s Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) – a measure of how much wild nature remains – is 53 per cent. The global average is 75 per cent. The ideal is 90 per cent plus.Advertisement
That pathway to riches is one that many less-wealthy countries aspire to. But it is also a pathway to mutually assured destruction. A global BII comparable with the UK’s would be catastrophic.
Preventing nature-rich countries from trashing their biodiversity is, of course, one of the goals of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), over which the latest round of negotiations took place in Geneva last month. Such talks naturally feature conservation targets, habitat restoration and so on. But they actually revolve around something else: money.
Before the meeting began, I spoke to conservation biologists about what to look out for. One of them, Stephen Woodley at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, told me bluntly: “It’s all about the money.”
Biodiverse countries are often GDP-poor, and many don’t see why they should be forced to remain so in order to rescue wealthy nations from catastrophe. And even where there is the will to preserve, countries often lack the necessary resources and need financial help. “The big issue is about wealth transfer,” Woodley told me. “I suspect that the negotiations will hinge on that.”
He was right. There were many sticking points, but by far the stickiest was finance. Reports from the meeting say that the spirit of the talks was mean, with negotiators generally putting national interests first. For rich countries, that meant digging their heels in over the payments.
“The US and Europe are responsible for more than half of global ecological destruction over the past 50 years”
If anything, the negotiations went backwards. The draft text at the start of the meeting included concrete figures, such as that lower-income nations should be given an extra $10 billion every year for conservation. By the end of the talks, all of those numbers had disappeared, replaced by a dog’s breakfast of watered-down and disputed suggestions.
This isn’t just greedy and immoral in the here and now. There is also a historical obligation for richer countries to transfer some of their vast and ill-gotten wealth to poorer ones, to compensate them for the damage they have done to the environment. A recent analysis published in The Lancet Planetary Health found that the US and Europe are responsible for more than half of global ecological destruction over the past 50 years. Other wealthy countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan and Saudi Arabia, are collectively responsible for another quarter, while the low and middle-income countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia are responsible for just 8 per cent.
Alongside greed, immorality and injustice, we can add short-sightedness. “We will pay this amount of money, either today, or we will pay substantially more later on in lost ecosystem services, clean water, clean air, pollination, all these things that we take for granted,” says Brian O’Donnell at the Campaign for Nature, an alliance of more than 100 conservation organisations. “If we destroy the ecosystems we rely on, the cost will be astronomical.”
This is depressingly familiar from climate talks. In 2015, wealthy nations promised to donate billions to lower-income ones to help them mitigate climate change and adapt, but have yet to cough up. They cynically stamp out attempts to extract compensation for “loss and damage”, apparently frit that this would be seen as an admission of guilt and open the floodgates to reparation claims.
There is hope. The clean text that the talks opened with was an ideal one drawn up by the CBD; the mess that emerged is a work in progress by the people who wield actual power. There is a history of brinkmanship at such talks and the CBD itself said that progress had been made.
And while countries like the UK will never accept that much of their wealth is an ecological overdraft that is now overdue, they are starting to understand that they have no option but to pay. “I think governments are starting to recognise that this is an investment rather than just a cost,” says O’Donnell.

Graham’s week
What I’m reading
The Age of Extremes: The short twentieth century, 1914–1991 by Eric Hobsbawm. Suddenly very relevant again
What I’m watching
Dinosaurs: The final day with David Attenborough on the BBC. Attenborough does it again.
What I’m working on
Whether to get a new cat. The old one sadly joined his younger companion.

Up next week: Annalee Newitz

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In 12 psychological experiments with a total of 942 participants, 82 per cent overestimated the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups

Humans

14 April 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
A stock image of a group of people of a range of ethnicitiesShutterstock/Rawpixel.com
People may subconsciously overestimate the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups, even if they belong to those groups, which could create illusions of diversity within populations.
“Individuals from the minority group are by definition less frequent,” says Rasha Kardosh at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. “Therefore, we are more likely to notice them and so are more likely to remember their presence, and so we end up overestimating their presence.”
Previous studies suggest people in … More

The earliest evidence of calendar use by the Maya may have been found in the remains of an ancient temple in Guatemala

Humans

13 April 2022

By Carissa Wong
An ancient fragment of a Maya calendarHeather Hurst/Skidmore College/Saratoga Springs
Two pieces of an ancient wall may preserve the earliest evidence of the Maya calendar. The fragments are decorated with a dot and line above a deer head – representing one of the dates from the 260-day calendar – and they are from a temple built between 2300 and 2200 years ago in what is now Guatemala in central America.
Several ancient communities living across the Americas – including the Aztecs, Maya, Mixtecs and Zapotecs – tracked the time using cycles of 13 days denoted by numbers, alongside cycles of 20 days named after gods. In this calendar, a specific day is assigned both a number and a name, producing 260 unique days before the cycle repeats. It is thought that people used the calendar to decide when to hold ceremonies, to mark important dates or to attempt to predict future events.
Until now, most previous early evidence for calendar use by these ancient people had been found on stone monuments dating to around 100 BC. David Stuart at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues have now found evidence that the Maya people may have used this calendar over a century earlier.Advertisement
The team previously discovered the San Bartolo archaeological site, which includes a pyramid called Las Pinturas – meaning “the paintings” – back in 2001. Excavations then revealed that the Maya completed several phases of construction, with earlier structures eventually knocked down to form the foundations of the pyramid.
When the researchers were sorting through pieces of plaster collected from the pyramid’s foundations, they realised that two pieces fit perfectly together to form a date symbol.
“That was a stunner – we believe that this is the earliest example of the use of the Maya calendar, showing the day seven Deer,” says Stuart.

The fragments came from the remains of a long platform that was probably built to track astronomical events as well as the time. “This platform may have acted as an observatory for looking at the rising sun or other astronomical bodies in the sky, or for just keeping track of time. Like a kind of architectural clock,” says Stuart.
By radiocarbon dating charcoal found alongside the fragments, the team dated the symbols to between 300 and 200 BC. Stuart believes the symbols may have been used to denote the date of a new year, but they may also have been used to reference a person or deity.
However, some archaeologists question whether this is really the earliest evidence of the 260-day calendar. Mary Pohl at Florida State University believes that a previously discovered roller stamp from Tabasco in Mexico shows this date notation was used in 500 BC. But Stuart thinks the symbols on the stamp from 500 BC aren’t necessarily a form of date notation comparable to the Maya system.
“Early evidence of the… calendar has been debated, but in this study they present clear evidence of the 260-day calendar use. This is very important work,” says Takeshi Inomata at the University of Arizona.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abl9290
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An analysis of bones from about 500 individuals who died between 1830 and 1867 in Middenbeemster suggests women in the dairy farming community did not breastfeed

Health

13 April 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Engraving from From The Five Senses by Fredrick Bloemaert, after Abraham Bloemaert, 1632-1670F. Bloemaert/A. Bloemaert/N. Visscherimage/Rijks Museum/Public Domain
Women from a 19th-century farming community in the Netherlands probably didn’t breastfeed their babies because they were too busy working. It is the first time that widespread artificial feeding has been discovered in a farming community from this period.
Andrea Waters-Rist at Western University in Canada and her colleagues analysed the bones of about 500 individuals who died between 1830 and 1867 in Middenbeemster, a rural village in the north of the Netherlands.
The remains were dug up because a church was expanding into the cemetery, and Waters-Rist and her team were offered the chance to analyse them. They also had death certificates for about half the people. “It’s really rare to have such a large sample size and to have all this amazing archival information,” she says.Advertisement
The researchers wanted to find out more about the diets of the women and children in this village, which mainly consisted of dairy farmers at this time. “One of the main reasons behind this type of research is to rectify the historical record about the lives of women and children,” says Waters-Rist. “Traditional archaeology has focused on what adult males were doing and women were just seen as passive actors.”
The team was able to determine whether the children were breastfed by analysing the chemical isotopes in their bones. Children who are breastfed have different carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios to their mothers.

Out of 20 children who had died before the age of 1, 15 showed no evidence of breastfeeding. “Even the five who did show some sign – it did not seem like they were breastfed for long,” says Waters-Rist.
And out of 35 children aged between 1 and 6, 29 showed no signs of breastfeeding in their bones. The team believes this was probably due to the fact that women predominantly worked the farms in this community, milking and raising the cows.
“We think it’s a sign of how hard the women were working and that they were just really busy,” she says. “Also, there was always fresh cow’s milk.”
Waters-Rist says this has never been seen among farmers from this period before. “We’ve only seen this behaviour in really large cities where women were working in factories and couldn’t take their babies with them,” she says.
“The findings of this study are intriguing for an agricultural community where mothers and infants would not have spent long periods apart,” says Ellen Kendall at Durham University in the UK. But she says the results may be skewed by only looking at children who died before the age of six – it could be that children who weren’t breastfed were more likely to die early.
Journal reference: PLOS One, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265821

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This moving book sees neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo explore the effect on her cognitive functioning when she fell in love with a fellow scientist

Humans

13 April 2022

By Elle Hunt
Stephanie Ortigue and John T. Cacioppo tracked their burgeoning loveJoe Sterbenc/University of Chicago
Wired for Love: A neuroscientist’s journey through romance, loss and the essence of human connection
Stephanie CacioppoRobinson
SHE studied love, he researched loneliness – it was such a perfect match it could have been made in a lab. When Stephanie Ortigue met John T. Cacioppo at a neuroscience conference in Shanghai, both knew their whirlwind romance would be influenced by their research and inform it in turn.Advertisement
It was 2011. Stephanie was 36, and publishing papers on pair-bonding and romantic love, despite having never known it herself. “I assumed I would never experience romance outside the laboratory,” she writes. John was an expert on the dangers of loneliness to physical and mental well-being, and, at 60, was twice divorced, “not lonely, but by myself”, he said.
Both were self-avowed workaholics until they found love, and almost at first sight. “And once I did, my life and my research were changed forever,” writes Stephanie (who took her husband’s name). Now, in Wired for Love, Cacioppo moves away from case studies and turns her scientific attention onto her marriage. Her book is “both the story of my science, and the science behind my story”.
As a tale of romance, it is epic, culminating in a spur-of-the-moment wedding in the Luxembourg Garden in Paris and a profile in the popular Modern Love column in The New York Times. But what takes the Cacioppos’ story beyond a heart-warming reminder to never lose hope are their professional insights into our brains in love.
Through their courtship and marriage, Stephanie and John studied themselves, observing and noting “the intention, the subtext underlying every step we took as a fledgling couple” and its effect on cognitive functioning.
In Wired for Love, Cacioppo explores their findings with critical distance. What was behind their instant attraction? How could they feel so close when they were often oceans apart? Would they have fallen in love if they hadn’t found each other physically attractive? What part did their expectations play? And for two people who thought themselves in love with their work, how did the real thing compare?
Cacioppo, a psychiatrist and behavioural neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, enlarges her experience with studies (her own, and others) for the sake of non-scientific readers who may be seeking to understand and perhaps cultivate romantic connection themselves. The appetite for these scientific insights into our personal lives is evident in popular non-fiction such the recent Heartbreak: A personal and scientific journey by journalist Florence Williams. And it is even shown by the bashful requests by Cacioppo’s students to use her “love machine”, a patented computer test that aims to reveal their unconscious preferences of partner from their brain activity.
Yet Cacioppo – who became the first female president of the Society for Social Neuroscience – describes struggling to be taken seriously early in her research of romantic love, with most neuroscientists devoting themselves to the darker side of the emotional spectrum.
In the early 2000s, a male faculty adviser told her that to study love would be “career suicide”, that the subject was too lightweight to be the basis for academic research. She was first able to overcome that bias by substituting the word “love”, in a grant proposal, for “pair-bonding”.
And by studying the brain in love, we can see it as a complex and hardwired neurobiological phenomenon, suggesting to Cacioppo that “love is not merely a feeling but also a way of thinking”.
Her early career experience speaks to the snobbery and sexism at play in what is deemed worthy of study, as well as how much we don’t know about what might be considered a universal experience and an essential need.
As covid-19 laid bare, writes Cacioppo, “the need for love might be less immediate than the need to avoid danger, but it is by no means a luxury”. Indeed, John’s death from cancer in 2018 shows love’s potential to both devastate and endure. Cacioppo confronts her loss boldly, concluding that “love is a much more expansive concept than we give it credit for”, not all of which can, or should, be explained by chemistry.

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Josie Ford
Hunt the exopet
‘Twas the season to be jolly’, by which we mean April Fool’s Day has been and gone again, before you get too feisty with your falalalalas. Particularly jolly, Feedback found, was a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server by members of the Astrobites collaboration, “First detections of exop(lan)ets: Observations and follow-ups of the floofiest transits on Zoom”.
“For more than two years, humanity has been examining new methods of adjusting to work-from-home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists have tried everything: whipped coffee, sourdough bread, and even questioning whether everything is made out of cake,” the astronomers write. They have possibly also spent too long on video-conferencing platforms, as they continue, “Over two years of casual observation, we noted occasional drops in the brightness of a Zoom image of our far-flung collaborators.”
But systematic observation brings its own challenges, not least that these transits are less regular than those of exoplanets over the face of their parent star, and – the bane of physicists’ lives everywhere – caused not by conveniently spherical objects, but entities irregular in both shape and colour.Advertisement
At this point, we should say that these are follow-up observations to those made last year of similar objects found rolling around in the local environment by Laura Mayorga and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in their paper “Detection of rotational variability in floofy objects at optical wavelengths”.
This new analysis of “exopets” inhabiting other homes brings us further, not least in pinning down difficulties observing rarer types, such as Sub-Neptunian Animal Keplerian Extended bodies (SNAKEs) and Dynamically Unstable Coplanar Kepler objects (DUCKs). We salute the creative impetus of lockdown ennui, while fearing this might continue as long as astronomers are trapped on Zoom.
Absolutely roasting
As Isaac Asimov wrote – not apropos April, but Shakespeare – the secret of the successful fool is that he is no fool at all. This must be why the US National Weather Service chose 1 April to announce on Twitter: “Big changes to our forecast pages! To avoid any confusion between °F and °C, we’ve converted all of our temperatures to Kelvin. Enjoy!”
Feedback is a fan of absolutism, at least in the scientific sense, and certainly the daily high and low quoted by the NWS at Indianapolis International Airport, 281 K and 273 K, provide a fairer reflection of the relative benignity of Earth’s surface temperature fluctuations. But we fear this won’t catch on. We ourselves remain fans of what we call the Standard British Mixed Temperature system, in which low temperatures are quoted in Celsius and high temperatures in Fahrenheit, resulting in a handy scale ranging from 0 for cold to 100 for hot. What this loses in logic, it gains in user-friendliness, as long as you don’t worry too much about what happens in the middle. Take an umbrella anyway.
News from the future
Feedback joins the world – or everyone in the UK of a certain age or under – in saluting Newsround, the BBC news programme for children that recently celebrated its 50th anniversary and remains for many of us the prime source of trusted news that tells it like it is.
Richard Glover has the grumps, however, about a story on the Newsround web page claiming that “quantum technology” could be used to charge electric car batteries “in seconds”. “I would have thought that this would be more likely to involve extra wiring and some clever switching, than anything quantum mechanical,” he says.
Delving into the paper trail so you don’t have to, we discover some enthusiastic press releases and a paper from Juyeon Kim and his colleagues at the Institute for Basic Science in Daejeon, South Korea. The good news is that, whereas the charging time of dull old classical batteries shrinks with the number of battery cells, the charging time of whizzo batteries in an entangled quantum state could decrease with the square of the number of cells. The bad news is that no one yet knows how to put a battery in an entangled quantum state.
We fear this might not have changed by 2030, when the UK government plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. Still, hats off to Newsround for knowing its audience and highlighting a technology that, a bit like nuclear fusion, could well be ready by the time we all grow up.
Lost and found
One area where we can already rely on whizzo quantum speed-ups is in algorithms for searching for things. We are put in mind of this by the happy story of the return to Cambridge University Library of two priceless manuscripts written by Charles Darwin, one containing his famous “tree of life” sketch, in a pink gift bag accompanied by a typed note: Librarian, Happy Easter, X.
Discovered to be missing in 2001, and with various searches of the library’s 10-million-odd items turning up nothing, the books were finally reported as stolen in 2020. This exceeds even the time periods we have spent fruitlessly searching for our keys. Sadly, a practical quantum computer that can ask “Well, where did you last have it?” is probably a good few years away too. Still, won’t the future be marvellous when it comes? And with that: Reader, Happy Easter, X.
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