Humans

New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

2 February 2022

Read
Strange Bedfellows accompany many of us through our lives, yet most of us know next to nothing about common sexually transmitted infections. Ina Park aims to change all that in this upbeat look at the science of STIs.
National Museums Scotland
Visit
Audubon’s Birds of America is a chance to see this rare, hand-coloured natural history book and to learn more about its controversial creator, John James Audubon. It is on show at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh from 12 February.Advertisement
Shutterstock/Triff Source: Shutterstock
Watch
Death by Shakespeare sees chemist Kathryn Harkup reveal the science behind some of the grisly methods used by the Bard to kill characters in his plays. Online talk by the Royal Institution on 10 February at 7pm GMT.

More on these topics: More

Josie Ford
No-vax’s good vibrations
“If you wish to understand the Universe, think of energy, frequency and vibration.” This quote, attributed to the visionary electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla, possibly in his distinctly odd late phase, has long been beloved of those with a vibrantly different understanding of the universe.
Feedback hesitates to use the word “fruitloopery”, particularly as we now encounter the quote on the website of QuantBioRes, a company whose blameless existence investigating alternative treatments for covid-19 has recently been disturbed by the revelation that its majority shareholder is world men’s tennis no. 1 and vaccine refusenik Novak Djokovic.
“At QuantBioRes, we work in utilizing unique and novel Resonant Recognition Model (RRM),” we read on the company’s website. “The RRM is a biophysical model based on findings that certain periodicities/frequencies within the distribution of energies of free electrons along the protein are critical for protein biological function and interaction with protein receptors and other targets.”Advertisement
Following the paper trail a little further, we discover that, in the case of covid-19, the crucial frequency is 0.3145. We aren’t entirely sure what units that is in for those inclined to try it at home. Sadly, clicking what we hoped were links to a battery of exciting tests already performed produces no vibration on the internet’s surface, so we are left none the wiser as to progress.
These things can take time. In the meantime, we point to the existence of highly effective vaccines, whatever your resonant frequency may be.
Champagne’s moment
David Myers writes from the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland – nice work if you can get it – asking us to sit down as we imbibe the revelation contained in an article from CNN that “No amount of alcohol is good for the heart”. We are unsure whether it is the message itself that he expects to give us the vapours, or the fact that the chair of the World Heart Federation advocacy committee that released the report is Beatriz Champagne. No cause for celebration either way.
Pussy galore
Our news report “Ancient Egyptians used bandages for medicine too” (15 January, p 20) caused ripples in our inbox. For Ian Gammie, it was our assertion that “until now, Egyptologists hadn’t found bandages used to dress the wounds of living ancient Egyptians”. As he points out, living ancient Egyptians are hard to come by these days.
Others were more exercised by the mention of a dressing placed over a “puss-filled wound”. This seems to imply a degree of veneration of the feline form beyond even that familiar from ancient Egypt. Ken Hawkins wonders whether it was discovered using a CAT scan, a line that we will file under “timeless”.
Fine words, buttered
Talking of which, Feedback had considered correspondence closed on the age-old conundrum of why toast lands buttered-side down – except perhaps when its polarity is reversed by being attached to the back of a falling cat. Not so, judging by our post since its reappearance in our Twisteddoodles cartoon on 4 December last year.
“Howdy Dr Feedback,” booms one missive from Heikki Henttonen in Espoo, Finland – a city where we seem to have quite a following, judging by our postbag – exhibiting both forthright charm and a suitable (and entirely justified) faith in our academic qualification. “How to make sure that your toast lands butter-side up,” he writes succinctly. “You should butter your toast on both sides.”
Sensible advice. Although we shouldn’t be at all surprised if a double-buttered slice would never hit the floor, but instead remain suspended slightly above it, permanently rotating, unsure of which way up to land. You might call that a physics-violating perpetual motion machine; we just call it resonance.
The universe against us
The last word on the toast thing – until the next one – goes to our mathematics guru Ian Stewart at the University of Warwick, UK. “As regards toast landing butter side down, you might be interested in the article ‘Tumbling toast’, Murphy’s Law and the fundamental constants’ by Robert Matthews in European Journal of Physics 16 (1995) 172-176,” he writes.
We most certainly would, since it contains the results of a model that applies Newton’s laws of motion with realistic parameters for the height of intelligent bipeds, the height of the tables they use and the nature of their toast to conclude that, if a slice of toast starts sitting butter-side up on a table, it will rotate more than 180 degrees but less than 360 degrees for any reasonable value for the initial speed at which it is nudged off, thus almost always landing buttered-side down.
Further expressing the relations in terms of eight fundamental constants, including the gravitational and electromagnetic fine-structure constants and the Bohr radius, leads to a stark conclusion: in any universe that supports intelligent bipeds, toast will almost always fall buttered-side down. “This is the opposite of cosmological fine tuning: there is no way to fine-tune a universe to prevent this outcome,” Ian writes. “I call this the Anthropomurphic Principle.” Also timeless.
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
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

By Layal Liverpool

A rising global population has led to a resurgence of eugenics-based ideasBen Edwards/Getty Images
Control: The dark history and troubling present of eugenics
Adam Rutherford
Weidenfeld & NicolsonAdvertisement

WHAT does the word “eugenics” bring to mind? For many, it is Nazi Germany and the atrocities that were committed in its name, not least the murder and involuntary sterilisation of people that they deemed unworthy of reproducing. But eugenics didn’t begin or end with the Nazis. In fact, writes geneticist Adam Rutherford in his new book Control, “the idea persisted – and persists”.
Eugenics didn’t begin with Francis Galton either, even though he coined the term in the 1800s and was responsible for spreading the idea around the world. More than 30 countries, including Germany and the US, had formal eugenics policies in the 20th century, with awful consequences.
In fact, as Rutherford points out, notions of eugenics and population control date back much further in human society to the 4th century BC, when the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato outlined in books V and VI of Republic a detailed plan to control the reproduction of the people in a utopian city-state. “Children born with defects would be hidden away, which may well have been a euphemism for killed,” writes Rutherford. Plato’s plan was never enacted, he adds, but infanticide has been a constant feature in human societies throughout history and around the world.
Eugenics became a dirty word after the horrors of the 20th century, yet some of its ideas survived in science and medicine, says Rutherford. Eugenics formed the basis for the modern field of human genetics, with many eugenicists rebranding themselves as geneticists after the second world war, he argues.
Some of the language and phrases of the 20th-century eugenics movement remain in general use today, although their meanings have evolved. “Today’s casual insults such as ‘imbecile’, ‘moron’ or ‘idiot’ carried specific psychiatric significance a century ago, and… could warrant enforced institutionalisation and, in hundreds of thousands of cases, involuntary sterilisation,” writes Rutherford.
Unfortunately, the drive to restrict reproduction to those deemed by some to be the most “suitable” still exists. In 2020, there were reports that up to 20 women were involuntarily sterilised in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centres in the US. And in Canada, a class action lawsuit in response to the coerced sterilisation of hundreds of Indigenous women as recently as 2018 is ongoing. Meanwhile, sex-selective abortion practices continue to skew sex-ratios in India and China, the most populous countries in the world.
Embedded in all of these practices are dangerous notions of inferiority and superiority that are unscientific and laced with prejudice, says Rutherford. And, as the world reckons with climate change, discussions around the idea of population control are increasingly resurfacing.
“There is still a question mark over whether eugenics would even work, even if it weren’t morally offensive”
Control ‘s strength is that it provides not only much-needed guidance for these conversations by reminding us of the horrors of the past, but also uses scientific evidence to dismantle the viability of these ideas.
Rutherford makes it clear that there is still a question mark over whether eugenics would even work, which neatly demonstrates how limited our understanding of human genetics actually is and how ill-equipped we are to direct our species’ evolution, even if it weren’t morally offensive.
The 2018 births in China of Lulu and Nana, the first gene-edited humans, provide one example. He Jiankui used CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology on two fertilised human embryos in an attempt to introduce a naturally occurring genetic mutation associated with resistance to HIV infection. But, as Rutherford describes, the intended gene editing failed. In the embryo that became Lulu, 15 letters of DNA were deleted, while in the one that became Nana some DNA was added and other parts deleted.
Control ultimately exposes eugenics as “a pseudoscience that cannot deliver on its promise” and encourages us to instead focus on interventions that we know can improve people’s lives and the state of our planet, such as improved education, healthcare, equality of opportunities and protection of the environment.

More on these topics: More

By George Bass

HOW did humans progress from measuring time with stone solstice markers to a smart watch on which it is also possible to read this review?
In A Brief History of Timekeeping, Chad Orzel, physicist and author of bestselling book How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, turns his enthusiasm for time travel to something more tangible: how humans through the ages have measured the passage of time.
It may seem like being ruled by the clock is a relatively recent phenomenon, but Orzel argues that it has been “a major concern in essentially every era and location we find evidence of human activity”.
Thanks to a 1960s excavation of a site in east Ireland, for example, we know that the 5200-year-old tomb Newgrange was built by people with enough astronomical knowledge to create an opening that focuses a shaft of light onto the back of the chamber at sunrise on the winter solstice.
Knowledge of the movement of stars remains important today in our understanding of time, says Orzel. It explains, for instance, why religious holidays change dates from year to year. Yet the calendar is also a social construct, representing a delicate balancing act between stellar movement, bureaucracy, ritual and religion. The overnight jump from Wednesday 2 September to Thursday 14 September when Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752 is a case in point.
Orzel’s enthusiasm for the past is balanced by his disdain for modern misconceptions around time. He admonishes the flat-Earth conspiracy theory that has been promoted by celebrities like basketball player Kyrie Irving, and the way it disrupts geography and astronomy lessons in schools.
He also laments how the passing aeons often only become of interest to the public when they have something dramatic to say, such as the widely shared Mayan prophecy that the world would end on 21 December 2012. This was based on a fundamental misreading of the Mayan calendar system, says Orzel, who concedes that at least it made people more aware of the Mayans’ pioneering base-20 numerical system.
Throughout the book, Orzel scoots backwards and forwards in time, treating us to illustrations of spectacular forgotten timepieces. He explains how Athenian water clocks were used to limit speaking time in law courts, how a 12th-century Chinese water tower designed by Su Song became the basis for the modern mechanical clock, using a system of scoops, bronze spheres, counterweights and – crucially – a numbered face. Rod-based verge-and-foliot clocks followed in its wake, and Orzel details how these gave way to the pendulum, which reduced the number of missed ticks per day from several hours’ worth to just minutes.
The author’s enthusiasm doesn’t wane as he moves into the digital era, explaining how quartz-based wristwatches “democratised” time and serve as temporal “tuning forks” for the masses, before exploring how many of our modern devices sync up with caesium atomic clocks for the latest word in punctuality.
He also ponders how tomorrow’s quantum computers may prompt physicists to argue for the decimalisation of time. This has been attempted before, most recently by 19th-century French polymath Jules Henri Poincaré, who argued for splitting the day into 100 minutes made up of 100 seconds. This would be confusing for a generation or so, but as Orzel’s book makes clear, time, and its measurement, stands still for no one.

More on these topics: More

Reiner Bajo/Lionsgate
Watch
Moonfall sees director Roland Emmerich try to top his other disaster films, such as The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day, by knocking the moon out of orbit and crashing it into Earth. In cinemas from 4 February.

Read
The Man Who Tasted Words and other unusually gifted or affected people are the subject of neurologist Guy Leschziner’s journey through our senses, setting out how we use them to understand the complexities of the world around us.Advertisement
Rolex/Ambroise Tézenas
Visit
Thao Nguyen Phan has combined videos, silk paintings and mixed media to explore the history, industry and contested future of Vietnam’s Mekong river. The exhibition runs at Tate St Ives, UK, from 5 February.

More on these topics: More

By Michael Marshall

WHO were the first people to reach the Americas? When did they get there, and how? These are among the most mysterious questions in prehistory, and have long been studied using traditional archaeology: bones, artefacts and so on. In recent years, however, the field has been revolutionised by genetic data. DNA from living people and preserved remains has both enhanced and transformed our understanding of the continents’ First Peoples (those who were on the continent before Europeans arrived) and how they got there.
Jennifer Raff is a genetic anthropologist at the University of Kansas who has been involved in many studies of ancient American DNA, so she is an ideal guide to the subject. Her book Origin bills itself as “a genetic history of the Americas”, and it largely delivers on that promise. The final third of the book, in particular, draws on genetic and archaeological evidence to tell the story as we see it now. This section is a model of clear and nuanced explanation: Raff highlights the uncertainties and caveats, but doesn’t allow them to overwhelm the story.
The earlier part of the book is less clear in places. Raff re-examines not only some of the Americas’ most important digs, but the problems inherent in interpreting the evidence from artefacts alone, before the advent of genetic technology.
She recounts, for example, how archaeologists were convinced that the first people in the Americas were the Clovis, who made a distinctive kind of stone tool. This idea became dogma, and any archaeological sites that seemed older than the Clovis were dismissed – often on flimsy grounds. Only in the past decade or so has pre-Clovis settlement become accepted.
Then there is the question of how the First Peoples got there. All the evidence suggests that they came from Asia, but there is an open question over the route they took. The evidence is complex and contradictory, and Raff is admirably fair-minded in the way she handles it.
These sections are crucial to the story because they elucidate just how much light genetics has been able to shed on the big mysteries. Unfortunately, they jump back and forth in time, both in prehistory and in the historical sequence in which the discoveries were made, which can get a little confusing. The problem is exemplified by the first page, where an arresting anecdote is interrupted by four footnotes.
Despite this, Origin has many strengths. Raff is a critical historian of her own field, who casts a beady eye over the crimes and misdemeanours committed by earlier generations of archaeologists in the Americas. She argues that the story of anthropology in the Americas cannot be separated from the genocide perpetrated by Europeans on First Peoples. Archaeologists frequently dug up buried bodies without consulting local Native American groups, who regard the bodies as their own ancestors – a belief that has often been validated by genetic evidence.
These attitudes also fed into scientists’ conclusions. When huge artificial structures were found in North America, Europeans attributed them to a lost group of “Mound Builders” and argued that they couldn’t be the work of First Peoples.
“Raff casts a beady eye over the crimes and misdemeanours of earlier generations of archaeologists”
It will make uncomfortable reading for people still wrestling with the legacy of the European colonial empires. Some scientists may prefer that these darker episodes not be mentioned, but I tend to agree with Raff that it is crucial to face them head on. She argues that scientists studying the history and culture of Indigenous peoples anywhere in the world must be in constant dialogue with them: asking permission before conducting new studies and asking what the Indigenous peoples themselves want to know.
Minor niggles aside, then, Origin is a very human book. The settlement of the Americas isn’t simply a scientific mystery to be solved. For Raff, studying the First Peoples is also about learning collaboratively and healing the wounds of history.

More on these topics: More

A partial skull from China represents the earliest human with a “modern” brain size. It could represent an unknown group of ancient humans, or perhaps one of the enigmatic Denisovans

Humans

26 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Fragments of a large ancient human skull known as Xujiayao 6Xiu-Jie Wu,Christopher J.Bae, Martin Friess, Song Xing, Sheela Athreya, Wu Liu
An ancient human that lived in China at least 160,000 years ago had an unusually large brain for the time – comparable to the brain size of people alive today. The find is more evidence that hominin evolution went in many different directions, rather than taking a straight line from small brains to large ones.
It is also possible that the skull belonged to a mysterious kind of hominin called a Denisovan. Very few Denisovan bones are known, so … More

Our life satisfaction is shaped by many things including our genes and relative wealth, but there is now good evidence that you can boost your basic happiness with these key psychological strategies

Humans

19 January 2022

By David Robson
Tara Moore/Getty Images; Matt Dartford
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY?
You probably know the type: those Pollyannas who seem to have a relentlessly sunny disposition. Are they simply born happy? Is it the product of their environment? Or does it come from their life decisions?
If you are familiar with genetics research, you will have guessed that it is a combination of all three. A 2018 study of 1516 Norwegian twins suggests that around 30 per cent of the variance in people’s life satisfaction is inherited. Much of this seems to be related to personality traits, such as neuroticism, which can leave people more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, and extraversion, which encourages more gregarious behaviour. Both traits are known to be influenced by a range of genes.
To put this in context, the heritability of IQ is thought to hover around 80 per cent, so environmental factors clearly play a role in our happiness. These include our physical health, the size and strength of our social network, job opportunities and income. The effect of income, in particular, is nuanced: it seems that the absolute value of our salary matters less than whether we feel richer than those around us, which may explain why the level of inequality predicts happiness better than GDP.
Interestingly, many important life choices have only a fleeting influence on our happiness. Consider marriage. A 2019 study found that, on average, life satisfaction does rise after the wedding, but the feeling of married bliss tends to fade over middle age. Needless to say, this depends on the quality of the relationship: marriage’s impact on well-being is about twice as large … More