Humans

By Gege Li

An artist’s impression of how Earth’s first multicellular animals looked on the sea floorMark Garlick/Science Photo Library
Book
Otherlands: A world in the making
Thomas HallidayAdvertisement

OUR planet has existed for some 4.5 billion years In that time, it has undergone extraordinary changes, with landscapes and life forms that would seem almost alien to us today. Yet clues to their existence and fate can be found buried deep within Earth’s layers.
Otherlands by palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday provides a unique portrait of these strange and remarkable environments and the species that inhabited them. Through rich, detailed descriptions of ancient organisms and geological processes that draw on the fossil record and his own imagination, Halliday transports us back through deep time, from the relatively recent – tens of thousands of years ago – to when complex life first emerged in the Ediacaran period hundreds of millions of years ago.
Each chapter spans a geological time period, focusing on a specific part of the world that stands out either for the quality of the fossil evidence or a notable event.
Halliday is careful to not only give attention to charismatic animals like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths, but also to plants, land masses and oceans, using the latest research to back up his conclusions.
In one chapter, we discover that giant penguins flourished in the then-rainforests of Antarctica during the Eocene. In another, how Jurassic seas in what is now Germany contained vast tropical reefs built by glass sponges that looked like “frozen lace”, as marine pterosaurs soared in the skies overhead. We also see how, during the Devonian period, Scotland was home to metres-high fungi that would have resembled “half-melted grey snowmen”.
As well as painting an intricate picture of the worlds that once existed, Halliday also highlights the fleeting existence of humanity. Our ancestors make the briefest splash onto the scene in the Pliocene around 4 million years ago, when early hominins appeared in the fossil record in what is now Kanapoi in Kenya.
If Earth’s history were squeezed into a single day, written human history would make up the last 2 thousandths of a second, Halliday points out. And yet “our species has an influence unlike almost any other biological force”. It is also far more destructive than the prominent natural disasters of the past.
Here, the book carries a clear message: that we must do something about the urgent climate situation we find ourselves in and the coming human-induced mass extinction. This, he argues, warrants a meticulous look back through Earth’s palaeontological record to understand how things might turn out in the future, and how we might take control of them.
This message is, by now, one we are used to hearing. For me, the most distinctive feature of the book is the way that Halliday chooses to describe the past. He encourages us to treat his writings like “a naturalist’s travel book, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space”. This provides a sense of adventure and exploration where we see “short willows write wordless calligraphy in the wind” 20,000 years ago, or walk across “centuries-old mattresses of conifer needles” 41 million years ago.
It is refreshing to come across a book on palaeontology and geology that doesn’t just state what we know and why. Instead, Halliday uses scientific information to provide insights into worlds long gone. He is appropriately lavish in his depiction of the variety and resilience of life, without compromising on scientific accuracy.
To read Otherlands is to marvel not only at these unfamiliar lands and creatures, but also that we have the science to bring them to life in such vivid detail.

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The Weaponisation of Everything explores how old-style warfare has been replaced by disinformation, espionage, crime and subversion. According to security expert Mark Galeotti, this may turn out to be a good thing.

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The Orbital Children is a dizzying sci-fi anime series set in a future where AI has given people the freedom to travel through space. When a group of children get stranded on a space station they must fight to survive. On Netflix from 28 January.
Bassam Al-Sabah, I AM ERROR, 2021. Video HD, 28 min. Film still. Commissioned by Gasworks
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I Am Error at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, UK, sees artist Bassam Al-Sabah weave together video, painting and sculpture to explore how masculinity is represented in computer games. From 30 January.

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We now know that economic growth doesn’t necessarily translate into greater well-being. A closer look at Nordic countries such as Finland reveals surprising truths about what really makes a happy society and how other governments can emulate their success

Humans

19 January 2022

By David Robson
Matt Dartford
IF YOU want to maximise your chances of living a happy and fulfilled life, you might consider moving to one of the coldest, darkest countries in the world. Since 2012, The World Happiness Report has ranked the average life satisfaction of more than 150 nations. In the past four years, the top slot has been taken by one country: Finland.
No one was more surprised than the Finns. “The Finnish self-image is that we are this introverted, melancholic people,” says Frank Martela, a philosopher and psychologist at Aalto University in Finland. More surprising, at first glance, is the fact that as the country has ascended to the top of the well-being charts, its economic development has remained remarkably flat.
This seeming paradox confirms what many people have long suspected – that our traditional focus on economic growth doesn’t translate into greater well-being. While gross domestic product (GDP) continues to be the default proxy for people’s welfare, many economists and governments are waking up to the fact that our fixation on money is distracting us from policies that could actually improve the quality of people’s lives. Indeed, various nations, from the UK to New Zealand and Costa Rica, have now publicly stated their intention to track measures designed to better capture human happiness.
Clearly, this is no trivial task. So what can we learn from the evidence emerging from psychology, and the social sciences more broadly, about the various factors that contribute to our emotional well-being? And what, if anything, can that tell us about how other countries can emulate Finland’s success?
One of the biggest problems is that happiness is … More

Unfamiliar voices seem to put the sleeping brain on alert in a way that familiar voices don’t

Humans

17 January 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Electroencephalography (EEG) is used to monitor brain activityShutterstock / NPS_87
The sleeping brain is more active if it hears unfamiliar voices rather than familiar ones. The finding suggests that we can process information about our environments even in the depths of sleep.
Manuel Schabus at the University of Salzburg in Austria and his colleagues monitored 17 people, with an average age of 23, in a sleep lab over two nights. Brain activity was monitored using an electroencephalography (EEG) machine.
“The first night was so that the subjects could get comfortable with their new environment,” says Schabus.Advertisement
During the second night, while the participants were asleep, they played an audio recording of human speech on loop. The voice was either unfamiliar to the sleeper or belonged to a familiar person, such as a parent or a romantic partner.
In either case, the voice repeatedly uttered three first names: two random but common names and the name of the sleeper. The audio recordings were played for four 90-minute periods during the night. There was a 30-minute gap between each audio recording so that it would be easier for people to stay asleep.
The audio was played at a volume so as not to wake the participants up. “We adjusted the sound levels individually,” says Schabus.

The researchers found that unfamiliar voices generated more brain activity in the sleepers than familiar voices. In particular, they found an increase in the number of K-complexes – a type of brainwave that is slow and isolated – when the subjects heard unfamiliar voices.
“K-complexes are interesting because they show the immediate response to a disturbance,” says Schabus. That response is divided into two parts, he says: first, the brain processes the information, then it inhibits the information so it doesn’t wake up the sleeping individual.
If the participant’s brain activity suggested that they were on the verge of waking up, the researchers lowered the volume of the recordings to help them stay asleep.
Schabus says it makes sense evolutionarily why unfamiliar voices generate stronger brain activity than familiar ones. “Unfamiliar voices should not be speaking to you at night – it sets off an alarm,” he says.
The finding may be part of the reason why we sometimes struggle to sleep in new environments, such as hotel rooms, says Schabus.
“This study shows that unfamiliar voices disturb sleeping people more than familiar ones,” says Julie Darbyshire at the University of Oxford. “We see these effects when hospital patients find it very hard to sleep.”
“Partly, this is because almost nothing in the environment is familiar. As well as unfamiliar voices, patients will also be surrounded by equipment with unfamiliar and unpredictable pings, bongs and beeps.”
Unfamiliar voices also triggered fewer K-complexes in the second half of the night compared with the first half. “It means we can learn something new in the near-unconscious state,” says Schabus.
But he notes that this doesn’t mean we can learn new words during sleep. “You need the night to sleep and rest and if you don’t sleep properly, it does more harm than good for learning,” he says.
Journal reference: Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.2524-20.2021

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By Elle Hunt

CHASTENED by the sight of her newborn baby’s face lit up by the blue light of her phone, Catherine Price set about limiting the time she spent in front of screens. The journalist and her husband stopped mindlessly scrolling on social media and started taking 24-hour “digital sabbaths”.
By cutting down on her screen time, Price found that she had gained hours in her day – but now, she struggled to know how to pass them. What was missing from her life, she realised, was fun. But what was fun, if not bingeing on Netflix and playing games on her phone?
Price has form in turning “personal issues into professional projects”. Her previous book, 2018’s How to Break Up With Your Phone, was the result of her attempts to quell her overuse. With that problem more or less in hand, she decided to investigate what fun was, so that she could fill her life with more of it. The result is The Power of Fun, a practical guide with lessons for all of us, especially as we live through a decidedly not-fun pandemic.
This new book is a kind of spiritual sequel to How to Break Up With Your Phone, providing answers to the question of how to replace an all-encompassing habit.
Price comes up with a definition of the most satisfying type of fun, what she calls “True Fun”: typically a serendipitous experience that brings together “playfulness, connection and flow”, adding a dose of much-needed meaningful engagement to our lives.
It is this confluence of factors, Price argues, that distinguishes the most exhilarating, restorative fun from something fleeting and somewhat superficial, like getting a pedicure or going out to a bar.
That said, less-sophisticated fun isn’t just a frivolous activity that we can simply do without. It, too, can serve as an antidote to stress, making it vital for our physical and psychological well-being.
Price gives examples of True Fun from her own life, such as singing in the car with friends and learning guitar and playing in a group. “There is a reason that our moments of True Fun stand out in our memories: True Fun makes us feel alive,” she writes.
As for how to get more of it, Price found it isn’t as simple as just spending less time on screens, or trying to squeeze more activities into schedules that are already stretched thin. In fact, it often involves doing less: prioritising rest or sleep, for instance. Or it might mean coming up with a plan to ensure that household tasks or childcare are shared evenly to make room for moments of pleasure and serendipity.
Price draws from the science of positive psychology in her quest to have more fun, but rigorous research takes a back seat to her own exploration and the findings of her Fun Squad: a global group of about 1500 people that Price recruited from her newsletter subscribers and invited to share their fun-seeking exploits.
Including less from this somewhat self-selecting group and adding more on new psychological research would have helped to bolster the book’s scientific standing. However, this might have come at the expense of its practical relevance. The strength of The Power of Fun is that it is approachable, anecdotal and inviting. After two years of living through a pandemic, many of us have spent more than enough time trying to force fun into our lives (Zoom quiz anyone?).
“True Fun’ is typically a serendipitous experience that brings together playfulness, connection and flow”
The success of Price’s self-experimentation provides motivation to at least try to seek out more activities that we actually take pleasure in. And her main point, that we should clear space in our lives for the things that truly mean something to us, is a sound one.
Price quotes the author Michael Lewis: “If you get in the habit of life not being fun, you start to not even notice.” Once you have noticed and, more importantly, taken action, there is plenty of fun out there for the taking. Why waste your time on anything else?

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

Humans

12 January 2022

Josie Ford
Boozing hamsters
Feedback has a soft spot for hamsters, whose hoarding and nesting behaviours are similar to our own. Our feeling of oneness only increases with an article in The Atlantic forwarded to us by Peter Hamer: “You have no idea how hard it is to get a hamster drunk”.
Hamsters have a high tolerance for strong alcohol, we read, scoring low on a special scale of falling over sideways no matter how much they imbibe. We wonder how the statistics are skewed if you’re just going round and round on a wheel at the time, but nevertheless we add hamsters to our pile, accumulated over aeons, of animals that science says can take their booze.
This list includes bonobos, chimpanzees and bats, which is just as well, because getting entangled with an inebriated bat is a thought that doesn’t bear much thinking about. It most definitely doesn’t include cows, horses, rampaging elephants and the cedar waxwing bird. Their frequent collisions with fences and glass windows in the Los Angeles area were shown in 2012 to be down to the fruit of the Brazilian pepper tree fermenting in their internal food storage pouches.Advertisement
Don’t try that at home. This being Dry January, we burrow deeper into our extensive piling system and root out a 1995 paper from the journal Physiology & Behavior that we were saving for bedding material. Entitled “Tomato juice, chocolate drink, and other fluids suppress volitional drinking of alcohol in the female Syrian golden hamster”, it provides a way to get your hamster off the wheel and onto the wagon: ply it with calorie-rich hot chocolate. We rarely say no to that, either.
What’s in a name?
“I know it’s a bit early to get up this year, but nominative determinism won’t go away just because you’re having a lie-in,” writes Mike Egan from County Meath in Ireland, ignoring the squeaking of our treadmill. We have only ever expressed that as a hope, Mike, not an expectation.
Elizabeth Economy is a senior adviser at the US Department of Commerce, he writes. Others point out that Mark Rocket is the chief executive of Kea Aerospace based in New Zealand, and duck lover Alan Gosling was named last week as the first person known to have contracted bird flu in the UK. Vegetation of the Peak District is a book passably reviewed by Nature on publication in 1913 that remarkably appears still to be in print, authored by C. E. Moss. Our sincere thanks to all as ever.
Big in Basingstoke
A tweet from Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council sent in by Gwynneth Page indicates that we may have followers in that jewel of northern Hampshire. “Our street cleansing team have been sweeping leaves from the borough’s streets as part of our annual leaf clearance schedule,” they announced on 5 January. “Since October, the team have collected 560 tonnes of leaves – the equivalent to 112 adult elephants!”
Gwynneth confesses difficulty in visualising a pile of leaves equal to an elephant in weight. Us too, but we reckon that, spread out thinly, the whole lot would cover an area about the size of Basingstoke.
Pitch perfect
How much is that in football pitches? Courtesy, in a convoluted way, of an exchange of letters about measurement standards in the Financial Times drawn to our attention by Michael Zehse, we find ourselves consulting the The FA Guide to Pitch and Goalpost Dimensions for a steer.
If that sounds like fun, it is, revealing a line-up of recommended football pitch sizes ranging from 40 by 30 yards for the little ‘uns to 110 by 70 yards for the fully sized. Pre-revolutionary units still reign supreme in this corner of Merrie Olde England. We make that a full factor 6.4 range in football pitch sizes, which is a satisfyingly variable measurement standard. Just don’t complain about shifting the goalposts, they can be anything from 12 to 24 feet apart.
Ashes to ashes…
Congratulations to “Huntingdon in Bloom” – the Cambridgeshire town has received an Outstanding commendation in the Green Solutions category of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Community Awards 2021. Our thanks to Ralph Platten for pointing out that “of particular note is the recycling of heat generated by the UK’s first electric crematorium to warm a glasshouse that will be used to propagate and grow plants for the town’s flowerbeds, containers and community projects”. Charming.
Elementary, again
“And finally” is a phrase that strikes fear into the hearts of UK TV news viewers, indicating the imminent arrival of Whimsy. So, and finally, Dave Hawke from Devizes, UK, wins some form of kudos, not just for rocking one of the few English place names not stressed on its first syllable (Penzance; Carlisle; the -hamptons; feel free to go on your own mental journey), but for a late-breaking reply to our call for elementary names (11 December 2021).
He introduces us to the Um siblings, Ray D, Barry, (H)erbi, Ceri, Reni, Ruby and Moly B. D., “lastly not to forget Uncle Nick Hall”. Thank you, Dave, although if you’re looking for Pseudo Names, it is Private Eye you’re after. But frankly it’s Dry January, and we’ll do anything for laughs.
Got a story for Feedback?
Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TTConsideration of items sent in the post will be delayed More

By Gege Li

HAVE you ever become angry about something that, in hindsight, had more to do with the fact that you were having a bad day? Most of us have had moments like this, where we let our emotions get the better of us or allow them to influence our decisions. It isn’t necessarily ideal, and we often assume that the involvement of emotions – intended or otherwise – is always detrimental to our ability to make good choices.
Not so, says physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow in his book Emotional: The new thinking about feelings. He argues that while it might seem like getting emotional is a bad idea, our feelings actually play an essential role in shaping our thoughts and decisions, helping us to react flexibly to situations and motivating us to pursue our goals.
Drawing on the latest research, Mlodinow guides us through the ways in which neuroscientists are changing their understanding of human feelings – what he calls “the emotion revolution”.
One of the breakthroughs in the science of emotion is the finding that rational thought alone isn’t enough to process the masses of information that we are exposed to in our environment. To think effectively, we also need to feel. “Emotion is not at war with rational thought but rather a tool of it,” writes Mlodinow.
This challenges two well-worn assumptions laid out long ago by some of history’s greatest thinkers, such as Plato: that the human mind can be split into rational and non-rational parts, reason and emotion, and that harnessing the former while taming the latter holds the key to success and making good decisions.
But now that we have the technology to probe the human brain more deeply than ever before, modern science is uncovering the complex neural dynamics that are involved in generating our emotions, and in turn reshaping our knowledge of their importance.
Mlodinow explores how and why feelings evolved in the first place, arising initially from purely reflexive behaviours to environmental stimuli before the “upgrade” of emotion occurred, which provided a more flexible and effective way for organisms to react to the challenges they encountered.
The research also illustrates the universality of emotion and its benefits – scientists have seen emotion-guided behaviours at play in not only humans, but also rodents, fruit flies and bees.
Towards the end of the book, readers are given the chance to determine and reflect on their own emotional profile, using various questionnaires that were developed for research into specific feelings like happiness and anxiety. This is one of the more provocative elements of the book: the idea that we can gain power over our emotions by learning to understand and navigate them better. It is a tantalising concept that Mlodinow backs up with numerous studies and anecdotes. He also gives advice on how we can better manage our own emotions and gain more control over our lives.
Though the message of controlling your feelings to ultimately improve your well-being is an important one, it did get repetitive at times. What’s more, regular readers of New Scientist or of popular neuroscience in general may find the research and the solutions Mlodinow offers, such as meditation and exercise, to be a little predictable.
Emotional may occasionally seem like a self-help book, but it is nevertheless an illuminating read that deals well with the complexity of emotion, the emerging science behind it and the fascinating workings of the brain itself. It might just help you remain calm and collected, even on a bad day.

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Spark is medical physicist Timothy Jorgensen’s story of electricity as an essential force in biological life. It features tales of game-changing historical discoveries and the latest uses of electricity in medicine.
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The Case for Conservation Optimism is made by conservationist Martin Harper in this online talk from the Linnean Society of London at 6pm GMT on 20 January. We can prevent extinctions, he argues, if we take the right action now.Advertisement

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The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier sold a million copies and won the Prix Goncourt in its original French-language edition. Now translated, it is an ingenious sci-fi thriller about an Air France flight that enters a storm and is changed forever.

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