Humans

Josie Ford
Hybrid learning
A man in a hide jerkin and disposable face mask sits knapping flints against the backdrop of an unaccountably large, bright red tractor. Rounding a corner, a 3-metre-high luminous yellow grinning gummy bear suddenly looms over us, from which we flee through a door into a side room where Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is talking soulfully about 100 per cent renewable trams.
Not Feedback’s latest cheese dream – although close – but sure signs we were on the shop floor at New Scientist Live Manchester, as part of our drive to bring the office stationery cupboard to you.
Like many people, Feedback currently finds being in real places with real people a discombobulating experience that requires several deep-breathing exercises and us remembering to wear something on our bottom half. Many attendees in Manchester weren’t actually in Manchester, but watching it all from the safety of their own underpants at home, which brings its own challenges, it turns out. When digital attendees complain that the main stage is freezing, getting someone to turn up the thermostat in the hall doesn’t cut it. Lesson learned as the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds slowly melt, as indeed the people in the hall did.Advertisement
The truth is out there
“Don’t think of a black hole as a Hoover, think of it as a couch cushion”. Astrophysicist Becky Smethurst – Dr Becky to her legion of YouTube fans – won the prize for the most unexpected metaphor of the event, her point being that you are less likely to get sucked into a black hole than to lose your car keys down the side of one. Or something like that.
Meanwhile, we were delighted to learn from Dallas Campbell and Suzie Imber’s talk on how to leave Earth about the 1638 book The Man in the Moone, written by Church of English bishop Francis Godwin, in which the protagonist flies to the moon in a chariot towed by moon geese. We would take this option, which strikes us as classier than the unspeakably vulgar rockets favoured by today’s billionaire class.
We also now know the current location of the first sandwich in space, what an industrial vacuum does to a marshmallow and how to make a rocket with half an Alka-Seltzer and a 35-millimetre film canister. That’s definitely one not to try at home. For anyone tempted, all the talks are available in the metaverse.
Going nuclear
The 3-metre-high mutant gummy bear was, it turns out, advertising the benefits of nuclear power. Feedback regards this as brave, as we also do the UK Atomic Energy Authority titling a talk “Nuclear Fusion: Forever 30 years away”.
Still, we learn that a gummy bear is about the same size as a uranium fuel pellet, that one fuel pellet produces enough power to drive an electric car 20,000 miles and so a 3-metre-high gummy bear would make enough electricity to power 2 million electric cars for a year in the UK. This makes us happy.
Blowing in the wind
Meanwhile, out in the real world, the real world was still going on. The gummy bear is possibly a more appropriate unit of power for a family magazine than that contained in a tweet from the Victorian Trades Hall Council that Paul Campbell forwards us following our session on “how big is a gigawatt?” in last week’s Feedback.
It celebrates the announcement of 2 gigawatts of wind power capacity to be installed off the Australian state’s coast in the coming 10 years, or as the tweet has it in an accompanying picture: “SH**LOADS OF POWER. SH**LOADS OF JOBS”.
Clue: it wasn’t “shed”. We idly wonder if this is now a unit of power and how many horses it would take to produce it. Around 2.7 million, we make it. They would be a truly magnificent sight riding in the waves, although we do wonder whether any of this counts as clean energy.
Butt out
While our back was turned, we also discover that a portion of Twitter declared 1 to 8 March InverteButt Week in celebration of the backsides of creatures without backbones.
We doubt the world truly needed this, but then again, with past headlines in this august publication such as “Comb jelly videos are rewriting the history of your anus”, perhaps people in glass houses shouldn’t throw… slugs.
This leads us to delve rather more deeply than we might otherwise have done into the lifestyle and morphology of the bristle worm Ramisyllis multicaudata, a detailed study of which, published last year, seems to have been a prime mover of InverteButt Week. The worm lives, with delightful specificity, within sponges in Darwin Harbour, northern Australia. Its single head is buried deep within the sponge, but its body randomly branches out into up to 1000 rear ends that poke hopefully out of it. The gut is continuous throughout all these branches, yet doesn’t seem to process any food, leading to speculation that the worm has “adopted a fungal lifestyle”.
This sounds pleasingly louche, like flying with the moon geese. Even more fun is that, when it comes to reproduction, new heads – complete with brains and eyes – start forming and bud off from the worm’s butts. Cute.
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Living for likes and subscribers can be a poisoned chalice or a dream come true, according to Get Rich or Lie Trying by journalist Symeon Brown

Humans

16 March 2022

By Chris Stokel-Walker

THE influencer economy, fuelled by the ability of social media to instantly reach millions of people, has changed the way we work, rest and play. For some, the rise of this new way to make a living has been a boon – demolishing gatekeepers, minting a new era of celebrities and making millionaires of people who might otherwise be trapped in a dead-end job.
But this has been far from a uniformly good thing for society. As Channel 4 News journalist Symeon Brown uncovers in Get Rich or Lie Trying, the seedy side of social media can be as harmful as it is helpful.
Brown’s reporting sees him go back to the streets of London where he grew up to hear from school friends who have fallen prey to pyramid schemes dressed up as online cryptocurrency investments. He also heads to Los Angeles, where he meets nipped and tucked influencers seeking the perfect body, often ruining their health in the process.
Get Rich or Lie Trying is a chastening read, clearly showing that the lowlights of online fame are as depressing as its highlights are inspiring. Brown races through the influencer economy and the different industries it touches, from the sweatshops churning out poor-quality clothing to ensure that scrolling teenagers can keep up with the latest red carpet looks on a budget, to the surgeons that perform Brazilian butt lifts, a risky procedure where fat is taken from other parts of the body and injected into the buttocks.
At times, Brown hurtles through first-person stories so fast that there is hardly a chance to blink. Those he highlights as exploiting social media – or being exploited by it – sometimes pass by too quickly for us to remember who they are or why we should care. It feels a bit like the relentless hamster wheel of the algorithms that drive social media platforms, and the whole experience can become a bit discombobulating.
At times, you struggle to see who to feel sorrier for: the young woman cajoled into performing a sex act on camera, or the man who is paid to receive insults online. Sometimes, they blur into a catalogue of horrors that becomes difficult to unpick and reflect on.
The book’s stronger sections are those that bring the action closer to home and address some deeper, more systemic issues. A chapter on how social media’s unique voice is often driven by authentic Black voices that are then co-opted and copied by richer, white entrepreneurs without qualms is particularly powerful, and begins to tackle wider problems entrenched in social media.
Elsewhere in the book, the bigger picture is lacking, however. We know, for example, that the drive to achieve physical “perfection” is an issue, and research has made clear both the role that social media platforms play in perpetuating this and the effects of such ideals on mental and physical health. Yet Brown spends surprisingly little time questioning what can be done about the broken bodies and livelihoods left behind in the race to get famous on social media, or even who is to blame.
The book does a much better job of highlighting just how perilous living a life designed to go viral can be – and how quickly the thing that made you famous can become passé. It raises important questions about the value we place on superficial appearances, and how social media all too often encourages us to sacrifice thinking deeply in favour of a neat sound bite.
Overall, Get Rich or Lie Trying is well worth reading – but, like social media, at times it would do well to go deeper and dwell a little longer.

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Read
Don’t Trust Your Gut says data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. You probably know less than you think about how to be healthy and happy. So, it may be time to ignore your instincts and try self-help by data. Out on 9 June.
Ingela Ihrman
Visit
Rooted Beings can teach us a lot about how to connect with each other, according to this exhibition on plants and fungi. Work from the botanical archives will be shown alongside new art at London’s Wellcome Collection from 24 March.Advertisement

Read
The Flight of the Aphrodite is a thrilling new sci-fiction novel from S. J. Morden about an eventful mission to Jupiter’s moons. Ship and crew are already at breaking point and then it seems they have uninvited company.

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A new family tree of apes that lived in the Miocene between 23 and 5.3 million years ago reveals which are our close relatives and which are only distant cousins

Humans

16 March 2022

By Michael Marshall
Dryopithecus, an extinct ape from the MioceneJOHN SIBBICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
A huge study of fossil apes clarifies which extinct species are most closely related to humans. But it can’t resolve one of the most controversial questions in human evolution: whether the last common ancestor we shared with living African apes like chimpanzees lived in Africa or Eurasia.
Primatologist Kelsey Pugh at the American Museum of Natural History in New York looked at apes that lived during the Miocene epoch, between 23 and 5.3 million years ago. She focused on those from the middle … More

The current reference human genome is based on a handful of people but the new Pangenome project will incorporate DNA from hundreds of people all around the world

Humans

16 March 2022

By Michael Marshall
DNA sequence dataShutterstock / Gio.tto
The human genome is being sequenced again – but better. A new project to read DNA from a large number of people has launched, with the aim of sequencing the “pangenome”, a version of the genome that reflects the full genetic diversity of our species.
The human genome, the set of DNA that every person carries in their cells, was first read or “sequenced” between 1990 and 2001. However, this first genome was incomplete because many chunks couldn’t be reconstructed. Geneticists have improved it since, with the last major … More

A psychological study shows people can be over-confident in their ability to perform tasks for which they have no formal training

Humans

16 March 2022

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
Pilot working through a simulation a simulation exerciseChris Urso/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Wire/Alamy
People can be so confident they can teach themselves skills they actually lack – including the ability to land a commercial jet – that they could actually put themselves and other people in serious danger.
“People think, ‘Well, if it really mattered, like in an emergency, I could land the plane’,” says Maryanne Garry at the University of Waikato, in New Zealand. “But … that requires skills that most people just don’t have.”
Garry and her colleagues enlisted 780 volunteers for their psychological study. Half of the study participants were asked to watch an approximately 4-minute-long silent YouTube video showing two commercial pilots landing a plane in a mountainous area.Advertisement
The scientists then gave each participant a hypothetical scenario:
Imagine you are on a small commuter plane. Due to an emergency, the pilot is incapacitated and you are the only person left to land the plane.
They then asked the participants how confident they would feel – on a percentage scale – about responding to the situation.
They found that people who had watched the video were up to 30 per cent more confident in their ability to land a plane without dying, compared to the confidence ratings of people who had not watched the video. But even people who had not watched the video gave themselves an average confidence score of 29 per cent for their ability to land the plane without dying, says Garry.
Some participants who watched the video were asked prior to doing so how confident they were they could land the plane as well as any trained pilot. After watching the video, their self-confidence rose: they were up to 38 per cent more confident that they could perform as well as any trained pilot. In general, men were significantly more confident in their abilities than women were, she adds.

The results were particularly surprising, the researchers say, given that the respondents in general were convinced that landing a plane requires a great deal of expertise. They ranked the required skill level for landing a plane at an average of 4.4 out of 5, says Garry. Trained pilots learn to land planes after hundreds of hours of training and education in physics, engineering, and meteorology, she adds.
Garry says the findings suggest that people “tend to inflate their confidence about certain things” as a result of what she calls a “rapid illusion”, meaning they see images that make them believe they are capable of feats for which they actually have no skill. She adds that the findings suggest this applies to a “disturbing proportion of ordinary people”.
While overconfidence has its benefits – for example, giving people a boost that helps them take on life’s challenges – it can also be detrimental when it puts people’s lives in danger, says Kayla Jordan, also at the University of Waikato.
“It’s pretty surprising that people become more confident they could carry out this highly-specialised feat – while at the same time telling us they know that landing a plane requires a great deal of expertise,” says Jordan.
Journal reference: Royal Society Open Science, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.211977

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Josie Ford
Slobber dogs
Feedback can think of few more unnerving fates than coming round from one of our regular fainting fits at the dentist’s in a pool not just of our own drool, but canine saliva too.
Yet, “Dental patients at a practice in Green Bay, Wisconsin, can cuddle with a cockapoo named Charlie. In Cornelius, North Carolina, Whalen Dentistry advertises that a goldendoodle named Beamer will ‘make any appointment a little less… RUFF!’”, we read on Kaiser Health News.
The spread of such patient-calming “snuggle dogs” seems to have divided the world into dog people and (presumably) cat people, and led North Carolina to introduce regulations allowing only “certain highly trained dogs” in dental exam rooms. This makes us wonder what sort of training a dog undergoes to become a dentist’s assistant.Advertisement
Still, we see that a pilot study from researchers at the Autonomous University of Nuevo Leόn in Mexico in 2019 recorded lower blood pressure spikes among a small sample of anxious dental patients when a dog (English shepherd, schnauzer, border collie or Labrador retriever) was placed on a clean towel over their legs, so there is some solid science behind it.
That is more than can be said for fish. Proving there really is research for every occasion, we encounter a 2021 paper from researchers at the University of Zurich in Switzerland detailing a clinical trial looking at the effect of fish in a dental waiting room on patient stress levels. None, as it turns out. Still, slapping with a wet fish could be a good way to revive those who do pass out. And has no one really thought to try out dental cats?
Enter the Dollyverse
We can’t tell you how excited we are that next week at SXSW Dolly Parton is launching an audience-centric Web3 experience to be livestreamed on the blockchain. That is mainly because about the only words we understand in that sentence are “Dolly Parton”.
Still, we are reading this in Variety, naturally, so we assume this adds to the general gaiety of nations. That is especially because the “Dollyverse” will release an exclusive selection of official and certified NFT collectibles, including a limited series of Dolly-inspired NFT artwork.
Ah yes, NFT art! This is a subject we have shown our age about before (1 May 2021). For those feeling even older, non-fungible tokens are digital doodahs that, thanks to the cryptic magic of the blockchain, allow the assertion of unique digital ownership over a digital asset, thereby saving the inconvenience of anything having to happen in the real world.
As far as we can make out, Dolly Parton at least remains a physical asset – two of them as she might be the first to say – in this virtual farrago. Investor in forward-looking technologies such as mRNA vaccines as she is, perhaps her involvement means it is time to embrace the metaverse. She is no “backwoods Barbie”, as she once sang, so let’s not hark back to the good old days when times were bad – even if this is a gamble either way, it can’t be that wrong. Etc, etc.
Spook on spook
In an interview with The Telegraph’s Planet Normal podcast, Richard Dearlove, the former head of the UK’s not-so-secret intelligence service, MI6, adds his voice to those original thinkers advocating that the only rational way to wean ourselves off Russian gas in the light of the Ukraine crisis is to forget net-zero targets and install a fracking well in every living room. Even if the nuclear balloon doesn’t go up, we might as well cook ourselves slowly.
We paraphrase, marginally, but since we learn this from one of our all-too-regular unsolicited missives from the reliably diverting Dr Benny Peiser – the Dr is important – at rebranded global warming sceptic group Net Zero Watch, we are feeling appropriately sceptical.
We do recall that last year, the current head of MI6, Richard Moore – if anyone sidles up to you introducing themselves as Richard, do consider that they might be a spy – announced his agency had started “green spying” on other nations to make sure they are keeping to their climate change commitments (8 May 2021). At this rate, the UK could soon be spying on itself. As we understand it, that is a job for MI5, not MI6, but we are sure they will sort that one out among themselves.
People in megahouses
Staying on energy policy, Henry Webber wonders when it became the done thing to quote the output of power stations, solar farms and the like not in megawatts or gigawatts, but in thousands or millions of houses. Do we have a conversion factor, he asks?
Several, it turns out. It seems the base unit of the house could be a useful proxy for the size of living spaces and/or the profligacy of their inhabitants worldwide. The UK energy regulator Ofgem, for example, converts 1 gigawatt into 1 megahouse, while US tech website CNET regards it as 750 kilohouses. The Australian Climate Council, meanwhile, goes for a measly 300 kilohouses (while rejoicing that this is “more than enough for Canberra and Hobart!“).
Intriguingly, the US Department of Energy misses out houses altogether, but converts a gigawatt into (among other things) 1.3 megahorses. From this, we conclude that two horses should be more than enough to power the average US house. As with most things at the moment, we are unsure where this leaves us.
Got a story for Feedback?
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

From our long lives to our social skills and even language, zoologist Antone Martinho-Truswell argues that we are more like birds than we think

Humans

9 March 2022

By Simon Ings

EVOLUTION has created a living world of jaw-dropping diversity. It has also generated what seem like astonishing coincidences. The pangolins of Africa and armadillos of South America, for instance, look like close cousins. In fact, each is more closely related to humans than to each other. Their similarity arises because they independently evolved near-identical strategies to cope with the same kind of environmental challenges.
This is just one example of what is known as convergent evolution, but there are many others, and not all of them are so easy to spot. Take humans and birds: few readers will be immediately won over by Sydney-based zoologist Antone Martinho-Truswell’s claims that we are “like a strangely featherless bird”, and that we have more in common with birds than with our mammalian cousins.
By the time I finished The Parrot in the Mirror, though, I found that idea both compelling and reasonable. Martinho-Truswell explores the traits shared by humans and birds, from our unusual longevity to our advanced social skills, from our parenting styles to our intelligence and even the use of language. These, he argues, are all examples of convergent evolution.
Briefly, his argument goes like this: once birds could fly, they could elude almost all predators. Since they were now less likely to be eaten in any given year, they could live longer and produce more offspring. With longevity came the opportunity and the need to develop increased intelligence. It is an advantage for long-living animals to be smart because it helps them to survive long enough to raise their young to adulthood. What’s more, because longer development requires a bigger egg and a bigger yolk sac, and because an egg can only get so big if its mother is to fly, most birds hatch out very immature, helpless young. Chicks require enormous amounts of care, often provided by pair-bonded parents, and sometimes supplemented by a larger community. This favours the evolution of complex social behaviour and communication.
Martinho-Truswell argues that the human evolutionary story is a warped mirror image of this. Our story begins, not with flight, but with communal behaviour among primates, which promoted the evolution of intelligence and social behaviour. This reduced the likelihood of predation, and longevity followed, boosting intelligence to the point where big-brained human young have to be born immature and helpless so as not to endanger their mothers’ lives during childbirth.
So, the argument goes, humans and birds evolved measurable intelligence in response to similar challenges. But how do we compare our abilities?
In this regard, Martinho-Truswell does well to strike a balance between precision and imagination. On the one hand, a duckling’s ability to identify its mother shortly after the moment of its birth puts it well ahead of chimpanzees, parrots, pigeons, crows and even human children. But this one hardwired ability doesn’t necessarily make the duckling more intelligent.
“Humans and birds evolved intelligence in response to similar challenges. But how do we compare abilities?”
On the other hand, it would be a dull observer indeed that didn’t see quite staggering evidence of advanced cognition in Irene Pepperberg’s 30-year study of language use in Alex, an African grey parrot. The bird not only answered questions, he asked them, too. And he got annoyed if people gave him silly answers.
Containing the complexities of convergent evolution in a straightforward narrative isn’t easy. Evolutionary causes and effects don’t follow each other in neat, storybook fashion, and there is always the temptation, reading this book, to take Martinho-Truswell’s acts of narrative shorthand at face value and suppose that humans, 50 million years behind parrots in the evolution of intelligence, somehow became more human by actually mimicking their distant avian cousins.
Clearly that isn’t the case. But perhaps it is better to be slightly misled by a gripping story than to be bludgeoned by a dull one. Martinho-Truswell has written a superb introduction to a surprisingly complex field of study. Having read it, you won’t look at yourself in the mirror in quite the same way.

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