Humans

The characters used to write the Vai script, which was invented in Liberia in 1833, have become visually simpler over time, reflecting the evolutionary pressures acting on writing

Humans

11 January 2022

By Colin Barras
A character representing the syllable “bi” in Vai scriptKelly et al
The symbols we use to write words evolve to become visually simpler over time, and an analysis of a writing system from West Africa shows that they can do so over just a few generations.
The script used to write the Vai language was invented in Liberia in 1833 and is still in use today. Those who devised it may have had some awareness of the Latin and Arabic alphabets, but the Vai script isn’t modelled on either. Its characters denote … More

Cut marks on animal bones suggest ancient hominins butchered them for their meat, and that they were first on the scene instead of having to scavenge from carnivores like big cats

Humans

11 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Notches on a bone left by human butchering activityJennifer A. Parkinson, Thomas W. Plummer, James S. Oliver, Laura C. Bishop
Ancient humans were regularly butchering animals for meat 2 million years ago. This has long been suspected, but the idea has been bolstered by a systematic study of cut marks on animal bones.
The find cements the view that ancient humans had become active hunters by this time, contrasting with earlier hominins that ate mostly plants.
The new evidence comes from Kanjera South, an archaeological site near Lake Victoria in Kenya. Kanjera South has been excavated on and off since 1995. It … More

By Colin Barras
Ancient Egyptians had a wide range of medical knowledgeAndrAfter virtually unwrapping the mummified body of a young girl who died 2000 years ago, archaeologists have found something unique: an ancient Egyptian bandaged wound.
The ancient Egyptians were no strangers to linen bandages, which they first used to wrap their dead more than 6000 years ago, about a thousand years before the first pharaohs rose to power. But until now, Egyptologists haven’t found bandages that were used to dress the wounds of living ancient Egyptians.
As part of a study … More

By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Tim Gainey
IN THE depths of the UK winter, most of my vegetable beds are bare, except for my star performer: purple sprouting broccoli. It is in the middle of its fabulous January growth spurt.
This giant of a broccoli plant is arguably the queen of the brassica family of vegetables. Also known as winter sprouting broccoli, it is very tolerant of cold, and requires several weeks of cold weather before it puts forth its flower buds and becomes ready to harvest.
Unlike ordinary broccoli plants, which have a single large head and are usually harvested by autumn, purple sprouting broccoli … More

By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Tim Gainey
IN THE depths of the UK winter, most of my vegetable beds are bare, except for my star performer: purple sprouting broccoli. It is in the middle of its fabulous January growth spurt.
This giant of a broccoli plant is arguably the queen of the brassica family of vegetables. Also known as winter sprouting broccoli, it is very tolerant of cold, and requires several weeks of cold weather before it puts forth its flower buds and becomes ready to harvest.
Unlike ordinary broccoli plants, which have a single large head and are usually harvested by autumn, purple sprouting broccoli … More

By Francesca Steele

Jessica searches every corner of Colombia for the source of the noiseNeon
Film
Memoria
Apichatpong WeerasethakulAdvertisement

“IN THIS town, there are a lot of people who have hallucinations,” a doctor tells Jessica (Tilda Swinton) at the beginning of Memoria. Then, in a neat encapsulation of the mix of the mystical and the medicinal that runs throughout this strange and heady film, she prescribes the tranquilliser Xanax while advising her patient not to take it in case it inhibits her ability to savour the beauty of the world.
Jessica is a British botanist in Colombia who wakes one night to a heavy thumping noise that is loud enough to set off car alarms. When it becomes apparent that no one else heard it, it sends her on a downwards spiral into anxiety. She can find no obvious source and continues to hear the noise regularly, while no one else can. Jessica travels from city to jungle to try to work out what it all means, getting caught up in deep and sometimes disturbing questions about the nature of reality.
The film-maker himself, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, had exploding head syndrome – a rare sleep disorder in which people are woken by the sensation of an (imagined) loud noise. Yet while his experience of this strange and unexplained condition was part of the inspiration for the story, Memoria is defiantly unempirical, more interested in how something might feel than what might have caused it.
As she investigates the strange noise, Jessica meets and befriends Agnes, an anthropologist who is examining a newly unearthed thousand-year-old skeleton of a young girl with a hole in her skull: probably “a ritual” to release evil spirits, the scientist reasons.
She also meets a sound engineer called Hernàn, who tries to replicate the sound inside her head with a catalogue of absurd cinema sound effects like “stomach hit wearing hoodie”, while Jessica explains that it is more like “a ball of concrete hitting a metal wall surrounded by seawater” and “a rumble from the core of the Earth”.
Hernàn puts the sound that comes closest to music with his band, and Jessica listens to it with headphones on and a wry smile. The audience cannot hear the music and it is a typically oblique move from Weerasethakul, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010 for the equally enthralling Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
Memoria is Weerasethakul’s first film set outside his home nation of Thailand, and it is essentially a meditation on interconnectedness. What does the past mean to modern life? Do we carry the memory of it, and of each other, with us somehow? And when things get weird, what should we pathologise and fix and when should we just try to understand ourselves better?
“What should we pathologise and fix and when should we just try to understand ourselves better?”
In doing this, Memoria isn’t didactic. Weerasethakul is asking questions, not answering them, and he seems to be aware of how lofty and pretentious it may all appear. Jessica laughs when she hears that Hernàn’s band is called The Depth of Delusion Ensemble, welcome levity that creates an unusual tone, feeling at once preternatural and realistic.
Memoria pushes people away before pulling them close. Swinton appears frail, nervy but curious. She talks carefully, urgently to Hernàn (whom later she discovers no one else has heard of), to her sister, to Agnes, but the camera always stays far away and static, shots so long, calm and still that the film envelops you instead of talking at you like most do.
It is a considered exercise in empathy and patience, a commitment between the camera and its audience as much as between people and generations. In its second half, Jessica visits an anthropological dig at Bogotá and there she meets a different Hernàn, a man who claims to remember everything. “I try to limit what I see,” he says, “experiences are harmful.”
As Jessica and the new Hernàn commune over coffee and pastoral meditations on life and death, memory becomes a fluid thing, a shared thing, as if we are all part of some collective experience. It is surreal and moving.
An abrupt change of direction in the finale feels like quite a U-turn and won’t be to everybody’s tastes, but overall Memoria is measured and deeply felt. This is slow cinema to see on a big screen and get lost in.

More on these topics: More

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

Humans

5 January 2022

Josie Ford
Nailed it
Gazing into the alternative reality featured on the other pages of this magazine, we have mixed feelings. That’s a generally valid statement, but it applies especially to the metaverse that The Company Formerly Known As Facebook and others are building.
Or it does until we realise it gives our influencer franchise a (glittery) golden opportunity to mention Metaverse Nails™ (patent pending), “the only product in the WORLD that allows you to adorn your digital and physical self with customisable holograms”. “Glam wearable tech” is very much our bag – see our tote? It’s totes virtual – although our community service order still stands after going too far with Gucci’s virtual clothing line in lockdown (3 October 2020). Collectible fashion accessories that interact with a 3D social app to trigger a dazzling range of interactive hologram nail stickers that can be snapped and shared in real time to social networks seem a safer bet.
As was reported last year, TCFKAF might have agreed: shortly after its metamorphosis in October, it briefly suspended the Instagram account, @metaverse, of the driving force behind Metaverse Nails™ (patent pending), Thea-Mai Baumann, for “pretending to be someone else”. Far be it for us to question motivations, but if being someone else isn’t the point of the metaverse, we aren’t sure what is.Advertisement
Flipping the bird
Feedback is relieved to be informed by our man in a hide with a pair of binoculars, Jeff Hecht, that birds are real. For those who hadn’t realised there was any doubt, we urge you to marinate – but not for too long – in the social media conspiracy theory that birds used to be real, but were replaced by US government spy drones. The walls of the metaverse being decidedly porous, this has seen billboards pop up in major US cities and a demonstration outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco demanding that the company change its logo.
For a while, we had a similar, special theory of avian unreality concerning the implausible, yet undoubtedly ornamental, pelicans of St James’s Park in the heart of London’s government district. We gave it up on the basis we couldn’t work out who ordered the poop. Now, as The New York Times revealed last month, the general theory of unreality has been revealed as a prank dreamed up to demonstrate the absurdity of conspiracy theories.
This is all pretty, well, meta. We are left pondering the truth value of the statement “this conspiracy theory is false”. While we do so, we offer up the fact that, although birds might exist, fish, reptiles, worms, wasps, jellyfish and a host of other things don’t. That isn’t a conspiracy, it is phylogenetics.
Look on the buttered side
Andy Bebington intervenes from Croydon, London, with a philosophical solution to the long-standing scientific puzzle in our Twisteddoodles cartoon on 4 December 2021: why toast always lands butter-side down. It is because we buttered the wrong side. We await explanation of how attaching buttered toast to the back of a falling cat retrocausually flips right side to wrong side. It is probably something to do with quantum theory; it usually is.
How low can you go?
Did monkeys really sail the oceans on floating rafts of vegetation? we asked in our super soaraway holiday edition (18/25 December 2021, p 50), answering the question with a firm “yeah but no but yeah”. Brian Horton of the floating raft of vegetation that is Tasmania takes exception, not to that, but to our description of a riverine floating island that “covered an area about the size of two Olympic swimming pools”.
“Surely everyone knows that area is measured in football pitches and swimming pools are only for volume,” he fumes. “Please ensure that the appropriate units are used in New Scientist articles to maintain standards.”
We hear you, Brian, while countering with Malcolm Drury of Ottawa’s clipping from a CBC News website article on oil sands tailing ponds in Alberta with a storage capacity “the equivalent volume of more than 560,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, which would stretch from Edmonton to Melbourne, Australia, and back if placed end-to-end”. Measurement standards are clearly slipping – to lower and lower dimensions.
In their element again
Many thanks to those of you who responded to our appeal for elemental names from across the world (11 December 2021). Sergio Frosini from Genoa, Italy, wins the prize of a gram of unobtanium in a virtual tote bag with his list of actors Franca Rame (copper) and Turi Ferro (iron), journalist Tito Stagno (tin) and horror film director Dario Argento (silver).
Sergio further enriches us by informing us that Stagno’s principal claim to fame is as the first person in the world to announce the Apollo 11 mission’s touchdown on the moon – a full 56 seconds before it happened. Miring ourselves briefly in the nether regions of the Italian-speaking web convinces us that those most liable to bring up this striking instance of retrocausality have well-defined views of the moon landing. Having seen the grainy footage ourselves, we are prepared to accept it was cock-up, not conspiracy. Which is a pretty good guiding principle for life, come to think of it.
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

Read
Why We Love is one of the fundamental questions of human nature. Anna Machin trawls the social and life sciences for answers to why we fall in and out of love with partners, celebrities, family members and pets.
The Natural History Museum/Alamy
Watch
Ancient Human Occupations of Britain will be revealed by Chris Stringer in this online talk at 6pm GMT on 10 January. Find out which species of early humans colonised Britain, when they arrived and the tools they made (pictured).Advertisement

Read
Harrow by Pulitzer finalist Joy Williams explores a post-apocalyptic world where nature has been destroyed, and no one cares but a few older survivors who are plotting their revenge on those responsible.

More on these topics: More