Humans

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Absynthe by Brendan Bellecourt is a delirious tale of altered realities set in a world where the first world war ushered in a technological utopia of automata and monorails, plus a serum that can give people telepathic abilities.
Mark Waugh
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Cancer Revolution at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK, explores the new science that is allowing more of us than ever before to live longer and better with the disease. The exhibition is free and runs until March 2022.Advertisement

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Racism, Not Race is a rigorous discussion of the scientific answers to questions of race. Joseph Graves Jr and Alan Goodman explain why race isn’t a biological fact and ponder why society continues to act as if it is.

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To explain the paradox of a smart species that embraces fake news, conspiracy theories and paranormal woo, we need to rethink rationality, says psychologist Steven Pinker

Humans

8 December 2021

By Graham Lawton
Jennie Edwards
HUMANITY faces some huge challenges, from the coronavirus pandemic and climate change to fundamentalism, inequality, racism and war. Now, more than ever, we need to think clearly to come up with solutions. But instead, conspiracy theories abound, fake news is in vogue and belief in the paranormal is as strong as ever. It seems that we are suffering from a collective failure of rationality.
Steven Pinker doesn’t buy into this disheartening conclusion. In his new book, Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters, the Harvard University psychologist challenges the orthodoxy that sees Homo sapiens … More

By Sally Adee

Are we really just puppets being controlled by the words of those in charge?Shutterstock/SvetaZi
Outcast
Louise Carey
Gollancz 20 JanuaryAdvertisement

“YOU’VE exceeded everyone’s expectations.” These are words that Tanta, the hero of Louise Carey’s InScape series, hears often from her boss. The resulting dopamine rush is strong enough to make her knees tremble and to reinforce her total devotion to her employer, InTech.
InTech isn’t just any tech company. It is also the local government, a role it assumed in the wake of a global disaster that obliterated nation states. Civil rights have been replaced by end-user licence agreements, and violations of community guidelines get you executed.
Tanta, like most of her coworker-citizens, has internalised her company’s values so completely that the worst thing you can say about someone is that they are “not being very corporate”.
In Outcast, the second book in the series, Tanta has been assigned the task of finding the deeply uncorporate mole who is selling company secrets. But there is a twist: first, she needs to rid her mind of the phrases used by the corporate autocracy to command loyalty in its citizen-employees.
This is the point at which the series pivots to deft satire, skewering the cult-like employee culture that exists not only in Carey’s dystopian future but in our present, too. From Mark Zuckerberg’s exhortation to “move fast and break things” to Disney’s insistence that all its employees, down to the janitorial staff, identify as “cast members”, corporations already use certain phrases to get inside employees’ heads. Carey has a degree in psychology, which clearly informs her send-up of the way companies do this.
“In Outcast, your employer determines whether you live or die and you think that is good and fair”
In Battle of the Linguist Mages, Scotto Moore takes the idea of weaponised linguistics to the next level. In this world, human language began as an embedded sentient alien mind virus that colonised humanity back in the mists of time, shaping the way we communicated ideas. Then one human finds a way to weaponise these mind viruses into “power morphemes”, sounds that can bypass logic and motor control to evoke a particular feeling, action or belief.
This book won’t be for everyone. It veers wildly from one style to the next: one minute it reads as a snackable version of Ready Player One, the next it channels the loopy extravagance of Douglas Adams, then it abruptly skids into the style of a dense Wikipedia entry. In between the main plot, driven by a glitter-caked, disco-themed multiplayer game where bad guys are killed with a kaleidoscopic beam, Moore plunges into discursive ravines where he explores concepts like memetics and the weaponised persuasion tactics of the advertising industry.
These are very different books by very different authors, but the thread running through both is the unstoppable evolution of persuasion techniques. Using words as weapons is as old as advertising and politics, of course. The question is where the iterations will end. In Outcast, the endpoint is that your employer determines whether you live or die, and you think that is good and fair. In Battle of the Linguist Mages, others can use words to control your ability to think.
What’s scary is that if language as a form of mind control is even theoretically possible, you can be sure some executive has assigned a working group to it. This is the world we live in now. But at least we get to laugh at it through the medium of science fiction.

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StockFood/Jones, Huw
CREATING a gingerbread house is a fun festive activity, but shoddy construction can spoil the party and put any gingerbread inhabitants in serious danger. This recipe and some tips will help you avoid catastrophe.
First, create a design. It is helpful to draw the pieces for your house on paper, then cut these shapes out to use as templates. The quantities of ingredients listed will give you enough gingerbread to make a structure 30 centimetres tall with walls 20 cms wide.
Building requires a strong and stable biscuit. A dense dough with a low moisture content is ideal, so … More

Magnificent adventures are captured in this selection of photographic firsts, some of the earliest images from each location, taken by world-renowned photographers including Gertrude Bell, Carleton Watkins, Isabella Bird, Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley.

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Centuries before the pharaohs emerged in Egypt, the local elites used a thick porridge-like beer in their ceremonies

Humans

3 December 2021

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Reconstruction of beer cups and jars from early EgyptDr. Renee
The elite members of early Egyptian society – before the emergence of the pharaohs – probably drank beer, which they transported around in six-litre jars.
Jiajing Wang at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire and her colleagues analysed fragments of pottery found at Hierakonpolis, an archaeological site in southern Egypt. The fragments date back to between 3800 and 3600 BC, about 600 years before Egypt was united into one state under Narmer, the first pharaoh.
The fragments were found in an area that served as … More

Until around 150 years ago, humans were relatively short – but our recent growth spurt may have more to do with social factors than dietary ones

Humans

2 December 2021

By Michael Marshall
A man measures a woman’s heightImage Point Fr/Shutterstock
For most of our history, humans have been short, a study has found. Until around 150 years ago, few people grew taller than 170 centimetres – not even the most privileged individuals, who had ready access to food. This discovery adds to growing evidence that stunting – being unusually short – isn’t a wholly reliable indicator of malnutrition. Instead of being a sign of a good diet, growing taller may instead reflect competition for dominance in some societies.
Christiane Scheffler at the University of Potsdam and paediatrician … More

Josie Ford
Load of old…
The stereotype of scientists as unfeeling automatons is lazy and, in Feedback’s experience, entirely inexplicable. On the contrary, the passions the pursuit of knowledge bring to the boil often froth over in raw, all-too-real emotion.
We feel this with a 2020 paper in the journal ACS Nano from Martin Pumera at the Center for Advanced Functional Nanorobots at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague that our science fiction columnist Sally Adee sends us, entitled “Will any crap we put into graphene increase its electrocatalytic effect?”Advertisement
Ah graphene, that two-dimensional carbon wonder-repository of hopes, dreams and the UK government’s entire industrial strategy. As far as Feedback can discern, the bone of contention this paper is tearing hunks of raw meat off is whether you can boost energy-producing chemical reactions within hydrogen fuel cells and the like by adding a pinch of other chemical elements to their graphene-surfaced electrodes.
“To make our point of the meaninglessness of efforts to co-dope graphene with various elements experimentally, we evaluate in this work if guano-doped graphene poses any advantages over nonguano-doped graphene,” the researchers write, with forthrightness of both word and intent. Having basted graphene in bird poo, they conclude that it does.
Feedback is impressed, although not entirely surprised: after all, back in the day nations went to war over guano for its nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur content, prized for making fertiliser and gunpowder. Now just add it to the list of clean energy’s potential dirty secrets (13 November, p 38). Unless of course the whole thing’s a pile of old crap. We say this entirely without feeling.
King bee
Joyously, Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University of London, takes to Twitter with a picture of a subscription communication from chez nous. “For years, the New Scientist addressed me as Queen L Chittka – probably an AI conflation of my name and address,” he writes. “Now some automatism has added ‘Her Royal Highness’.”
We ascribe this not to automatism, Lars, but the ghost in our machine’s appreciation of your cutting-edge research on the sensory and navigational capabilities of bees, a world in which there is only one description for the top, errm… dog. We think it’s rather sweet, but if you want us to try to unjam said machine, do let us know.
Horny problem
Many thanks to most of Canada, and also, pleasingly, John Burman of Port Macquarie, Australia, who write in pointing out the only news of real significance last week: Air Canada’s announcement that, in response to the devastating floods that cut key supply links to southern British Columbia, it would be temporarily adding goods capacity into Vancouver airport “equivalent in weight to approximately 860 adult moose”.
We add this to our towering pile of “Culturally relevant measurement units (Canada)”, while idly wondering what 43 score moose translate to volumetrically. This raises the interesting problem of optimal moose tessellation, which may require more mathematical firepower than our speculative doodles of interlocking antlers. The related question of how many adult male African elephants the moose convert to is of course only relevant if they are flying in a jumbo jet.
Uncertain times
Feedback understands that the nature of quantum reality and the location of the boundary between its fuzzy realm and our solid, classical world are active areas of research, if only for a certain, small value of “understands”. Seeking further enlightenment, we have for many years been an eager student of quantum overspill effects into the classical realm.
“Please enter thru both doors,” a board with arrows pointing right and left instructs Jonathan Stoppi in the Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney, British Columbia. “Please have your proof of vaccination and photo ID ready to present.”
This second part in particular rather puzzles us. Even supposing an individual’s quantum trajectory can be recombined behind the doors, what does a positive proof of vaccination there tell us about vaccination status before they pass through the doors? Possibly for the purposes of the Mary Winspear Centre this doesn’t much matter, but we think we should be told.
Viro-robo-cop
More signs of the times, as a paper in PLoS One details a robot than can enforce social distancing. Using lidar and a depth camera, Soditbot – as no one has called it, yet – can remotely detect groups of people breaching a safe 2-metre distance in crowded environments and glide in, displaying a stern message on a laser display screen.
This is admittedly not an entirely new idea – Feedback recalls the robodog that patrolled a Singapore park broadcasting social distancing messages via a loudhailer last year, and similar, less cute robot enforcers in the island city state. Nevertheless, we agree with a colleague who suggests that if this is really to work, the robot needs to be equipped with a water pistol or Nerf gun. We just hope Soditbot is regularly wiped, so as not to become a vector itself.
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