Humans

We once shared the planet with at least seven other types of human. Ironically, our success may have been due to our deepest vulnerability: being dependent on others

Humans

24 November 2021

By Kate Ravilious
Simon Pemberton
HUMANS today are uniquely alone. For the majority of the existence of Homo sapiens, we shared the planet with many other types of human. At the time when our lineage first evolved in Africa some 300,000 years ago, there were at least five others. And if you were going to place a bet on which of those would outlast all the rest, you might not have put your money on us.
The odds would have seemed more favourable for the Neanderthals, who had already adapted to live in colder conditions and expanded to inhabit much of Eurasia. Or Homo erectus, who had made a success of living in south-east Asia. By contrast, our direct Homo sapiens ancestors were the new kids on the block, and wouldn’t successfully settle outside of Africa until more than 200,000 years later. Yet, by 40,000 years ago, or possibly a bit more recently, we were the only humans left standing. Why?
Many explanations have been put forward: brainpower, language or just luck. Now, a new idea is building momentum to explain our dominance. Ironically, it may be some of our seemingly deepest vulnerabilities – being dependent on others, feeling compassion and experiencing empathy – that could have given us the edge.
Today, surrounded by computers, phones and all the other clever things we have invented, it is easy to pin our success on our cognitive abilities. But the more we learn about other types of human, the more they seem similar to us in this regard. In the case of Neanderthals, and possibly the mysterious Denisovans, this includes the ability to make sophisticated … More

Exclusive: A fast-track visa route for Nobel prize laureates and other award-winners in science, engineering, the humanities and medicine has failed to attract any applicants

Humans

22 November 2021

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Kevin Foy/Alamy
Not a single scientist has applied to a UK government visa scheme for Nobel prize laureates and other award winners since its launch six months ago, New Scientist can reveal. The scheme has come under criticism from scientists and has been described as “a joke”.
In May, the government launched a fast-track visa route for award-winners in the fields of science, engineering, the humanities and medicine who want to work in the UK. This prestigious prize route makes it easier for some academics to apply for a Global Talent visa – it requires only one application, with no need to meet conditions such as a grant from the UK Research and Innovation funding body or a job offer at a UK organisation.
The number of prizes that qualify academics for this route currently stands at over 70, and includes the Turing Award, the L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science International Awards, and various gongs awarded by professional or membership bodies both in the UK and elsewhere.Advertisement
“Winners of these awards have reached the pinnacle of their career and they have so much to offer the UK,” said home secretary Priti Patel when the prestigious prize scheme launched in May. “This is exactly what our new point-based immigration system was designed for – attracting the best and brightest based on the skills and talent they have, not where they’ve come from.”
But a freedom of information request by New Scientist has revealed that in the six months since the scheme was launched, no one working in science, engineering, the humanities or medicine has actually applied for a visa through this route.
“Chances that a single Nobel or Turing laureate would move to the UK to work are zero for the next decade or so,” says Andre Geim at the University of Manchester, UK. Geim won a Nobel prize in 2010 for his work on graphene. “The scheme itself is a joke – it cannot be discussed seriously,” he says. “The government thinks if you pump up UK science with a verbal diarrhea of optimism – it can somehow become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Frankly, having precisely zero people apply for this elitist scheme doesn’t surprise me at all,” says Jessica Wade, a material scientist at Imperial College London and a diversity in science campaigner. “UK scientists’ access to European funding is uncertain, we’re not very attractive to European students as they have to pay international fees, our pensions are being cut and scientific positions in the UK are both rare and precarious.”
“It’s clear this is just another gimmick from a government that over-spins and under delivers,” says shadow science minister Chi Onwurah. “It is not surprising that the government has failed so comprehensively to attract scientists from abroad, given their lack of consistent support for scientists here.”
A Home Office spokesperson told New Scientist that the prestigious prizes route makes it easier for those at the “pinnacle of their career” to come to the UK. “It is just one option under our Global Talent route, through which we have received thousands of applications since its launch in February 2020 and this continues to rise,” they said.
Neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop at the University of Oxford says other visa routes are already quick-moving for top scientists and says it is odd that this scheme was launched in the first place.
Andrew Clark at the Royal Academy of Engineering says his organisation is happy with the number of applications they have seen recently across all immigration routes for foreign scientists. “In many cases applicants would be eligible for multiple routes,” he says. “We wouldn’t want to focus on the use of any particular route over a six-month period, but rather the overall success.”
The idea of prioritising entry to the UK for science award winners is flawed, according to geoscientist Christopher Jackson at the University of Manchester, who in 2020 became the first black scientist to host the Royal Institution’s Christmas lectures. Jackson says these awards are inherently biased and an immigration system based on them will only replicate science’s lack of diversity.
“How we measure excellence is very nebulous,” says Jackson. “These awards favour certain people – those who are white, male, heterosexual, cis-gendered – and reward them based on their privilege.”
Of the over 600 Nobel science laureates from 1901, just 23 are women. No award has ever been given to a black laureate in a science subject. “Studies show that most scientific award winners are white men of European descent and often working at American universities,” Jackson says.
Similar patterns are seen in those who win some of the other awards eligible for the prestigious prize visa route. Of the five who have won the Institute of Physics’ Isaac Newton Medal and Prize since 2015, none have been women. Only one woman has won the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Prince Philip Medal since 2014.

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By New Scientist

Science is very good at explaining the “how” – how the planets revolve around the sun on elliptical orbits, how evolution by natural selection produces the vast diversity of life forms that we see, and so on. It’s far less good at answering the “why?” – why are things as they are?
To celebrate New Scientist’s 65th anniversary, we’ll attempt to fill in that gap, plunging into the twilight zone where science meets metaphysics and philosophy as we peel back layers of understanding to find deeper truths about some of the most mysterious questions surrounding life, the universe and everything. Or, more likely, more onion.

The concept of the big bang revolutionised 20th-century cosmology. But the idea that the universe began from this point, a case of something from nothing, seems increasingly unlikely.Advertisement

We are tiny specks of life in a vast, indifferent cosmos – but to say that decreases the value of our existence is to measure ourselves against the wrong thing.

Dig down, and evolution by natural selection is just about spontaneous, sustained accumulation of complexity – if life elsewhere exists, it’s likely to develop in the same way.

The one-way flow of time is one of the great mysteries of physics. It might be that we see causes and effects just because our information about reality is incomplete.

The human capacity for both good and evil has long mystified philosophers. Evolutionary biology suggests they are both offshoots of one of our oddest character traits.

Physicists have long speculated why our universe seems “just right” for life. The most complex answer might be the simplest – that every other universe also exists.

It’s easy to think human conscious experience is unique, but a better understanding of consciousness’s mysteries comes by tracing it back in the evolutionary tree.

It’s easy to think human conscious experience is unique, but a better understanding of consciousness’s mysteries comes by tracing it back in the evolutionary tree.

Quantum theory is peerless at explaining reality, but assaults our intuitions of how reality should be. It seems likely the fault lies with our intuitions.

Nothing in the cosmos can travel faster than light speed. By distinguishing cause and effect and stopping everything happening in a jumbled mess, our existence depends on it.

Myths and stories trump rational reasoning when it comes to analysing distant threats like climate change. But we have tools to combat that – and it’s a myth irrationality is on the rise.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been going on for 60 years without success. Given the hurdles to interstellar communication, that’s just a blink of an eye.

We have made huge progress in understanding some bits of the cosmos, but we’ve hit a brick wall with things like quantum theory and our own minds. Is there a way round?

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In theory, genomes shared anonymously could be linked to people on social media because the DNA can be used to predict facial features, but the risk is vanishingly small

Humans

17 November 2021

By Michael Le Page
Matching faces in online photos to genomes is harder than some supposedfranckreporter/Getty Images
What your face looks like is determined almost entirely by the DNA you inherit. This has led to the claim that the millions of anonymised genomes shared for medical research could be linked to specific individuals via photos shared on social media – but the risk is very low, according to Rajagopal Venkatesaramani at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues.
The researchers studied the genomic data and online photos of 126 individuals, then tried to match faces to genomes. They worked backwards from the faces, using AI to analyse the photos and predict gene variants, then looking for genomes with those predicted variants.
Given a subset of just 10 individuals, the team was able to identify a quarter of them. However, as the number of people increased, accuracy plummeted. For groups larger than 100 people, it was negligible.Advertisement
Venkatesaramani and his colleagues say a key reason for this is that social media images are much lower quality than the studio photographs used in previous studies.

Daniel Crouch at the University of Oxford, who has studied the genetics of facial features, agrees that the risk is low. But he says the team’s analysis shows that this is actually due to the difficulty of linking gene variants with specific facial features, rather than image quality.
“It is not really the quality of photos that matters that much,” says Crouch. “We are still only really just starting to understand the genetics of facial variation.”
“Once our understanding of facial genetics improves, our ability to link faces and DNA will improve too,” he says. “However, I suspect we will never quite get to a point where we can predict whether a DNA sample belongs to a specific person, drawn from anyone on the planet, at least in our lifetimes.”
The claim that there was a serious risk that people whose genomes were being used for medical research could be identified from photographs was made in a 2017 paper. This study was heavily criticised for containing major flaws, says Crouch.Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg3296

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The human capacity for both good and evil has long mystified philosophers. Evolutionary biology suggests they are both offshoots of one of our oddest character traits

Humans

17 November 2021

By Graham Lawton
breakermaximus/Alamy
“THE evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So it will be with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.” So said Judge George O’Toole before sentencing Tsarnaev to death for his part in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. During the trial, it emerged that the killer was well liked by his teachers and friends, had been compassionate to people with disabilities and had apologised to victims and their families. But, said O’Toole, his goodness would always be overshadowed by his hateful act.
The human capacity for both good and evil, often within the same person, has long been recognised and puzzled over; O’Toole was quoting the Roman general Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. What is it about us that endows us with such diametrically opposite propensities?
Evolutionary biology has an answer, and it doesn’t reflect well on human nature. Acts of both good and evil are driven by altruism – and that is ultimately selfishness in disguise.

Take our expert-led evolution course and explore the source of life’s diversity

For a long time, altruism was a biological mystery. The prime directive of evolution is to pass on our genes to the next generation. Engaging in costly behaviours with no obvious survival pay-off seems to go against that grain. The polymath J. B. S. Haldane eventually twigged it: individuals mostly make sacrifices for close relatives, and hence help to usher copies of their own genes into the next generation. As Haldane put it: “I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.” Acts of true selflessness exist, but these are … More

The debilitating pain we sometimes feel at the loss of those we love is an evolutionary mystery. It could all come down to what happens in our childhoods

Humans

17 November 2021

By Catherine de Lange
Andrew Fox/Getty Images
“TIS better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” wrote Alfred Tennyson. Try telling that to someone in the throes of grief. “It’s so awful and so debilitating. People don’t eat and they don’t sleep, and they don’t function,” says Randolph Nesse at Arizona State University. Aside from the overwhelming emotional pain and sadness, grief is bad for our physical health too: those who have been recently bereaved are more likely to have health problems and even die in the weeks and months following a loss.
Evolution is famously all about survival (see “Why does evolution happen?”). So if grief is so debilitating that it leaves us unable to cope with life, why did we evolve this trait? “It doesn’t make that much sense for people to be so dramatically impaired for so long,” says Nesse.
One popular explanation starts with childhood. When we are young and vulnerable, forming strong attachments and staying close to others is a smart survival move. The reactions of children separated from their mothers – an intense “protest” phase, followed by a withdrawn period known as “despair” – are also seen in grieving adults. More recently, neuroimaging studies have backed up this idea. When grieving people think about the deceased, a reward centre in the brain associated with social bonding lights up.
The protest phase of loss is also characterised in behaviours like grieving people needing to find or see the body, thinking they have seen the deceased alive and even believing in ghosts.
This “searching” behaviour for someone you know is dead might sound pointless, but it may have been different in our … More

By Gregory Wakeman

Tom Hanks plays Finch, whose post-apocalyptic journey depends on a flawed, yet loyal, teamKaren Kuehn/Apple TV+
Film
Finch
Miguel SapochnikAdvertisement

FINCH has all the elements to be a dark, but ultimately uplifting, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi comedy drama. Not only does it boast Robert Zemeckis as a producer, it also comes from Steven Spielberg’s studio Amblin Entertainment and marks the second feature film of Miguel Sapochnik, who directed key parts of the iconic HBO series Game of Thrones.
The primary reason it should captivate audiences throughout, though, is that Tom Hanks plays the title character. Hanks is in pretty much every scene as Finch, an ailing inventor who is the last person on Earth. Since he still has his trusty and beloved dog Goodyear by his side, Finch decides to build an android named Jeff to look after his companion once he is gone.
But after learning of an impending storm that is going to destroy his home, Finch decides to leave St Louis, Missouri, and drive Jeff and Goodyear across the US to San Francisco in his run-down motorhome.
Along the way, Finch tries to teach his constantly malfunctioning robot what it means to be human so that he can truly protect Goodyear, all while trying to find food and safety in the dangerous and ravaged post-apocalyptic world.
Unfortunately for Hanks fans, Finch never actually comes close to delivering on its potential. While Sapochnik is able to create impressively menacing visuals of enormous storm clouds wreaking havoc, this feeling of peril quickly dissipates. Once gone, it never returns, as there aren’t enough set pieces to make you sit up, let alone put you on the edge of your seat.
At the same time, while the reasons for the destruction of civilisation are heavily teased, Sapochnik’s direction and Craig Luck and Ivor Powell’s script lack the detail or weight to really make the film’s message about the dangers of climate change connect.
The main reason why Finch falls so short, though, is that the camaraderie and relationship between Finch, Jeff and Goodyear doesn’t come close to resonating. Since Finch is struggling with illness, Hanks’s portrayal is rightfully timid and frail. But this means he never manages to bring out the humanity of the character, who spends most of the film either coughing up blood or getting annoyed at Jeff.
Somehow, Hanks was able to develop a more emotional connection with a volleyball covered in blood in Zemeckis’s 2000 survival drama Cast Away than he is with Jeff and Goodyear. Finch was clearly inspired by that film, as well as Spielberg’s repeated use of science fiction to explore fatherhood. But it doesn’t add anything to the genre or explore the theme in an insightful manner.
It also doesn’t help that Caleb Landry Jones’s vocal performance as Jeff is too flat. As a result, the repeated attempts at comedy fail. Instead, we are forced to endure scenes of Jeff falling over or misreading situations because he takes things too literally. All of which quickly becomes tiresome.
Despite all this, Finch isn’t a complete miss. The score from Gustavo Santaolalla is particularly rousing, while Sapochnik and his editor Tim Porter make sure that there is a steady pace that averts a full descent into tedium. Jo Willems’s cinematography glistens, too. It perfectly complements Sapochnik’s framing, which means that a lot of the shots are utterly gorgeous.
It is just a shame that Finch doesn’t actually do anything more heartfelt and thought-provoking with these images. Instead, it is the cinematic definition of style over substance and is ultimately so disappointingly tame that not even the star power of Hanks can salvage it.

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In The Riftbreaker, you scout an alien world and prepare it for colonisationEXOR Studios
Game
The Riftbreaker Exor Studios
PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/SAdvertisement
WHEN writing this column, I try to remember that many of New Scientist‘s readers don’t play video games. With that in mind, I try to pick titles that have something to say about science or technology but don’t require knowledge of gamer terminology. This month, I have failed, but stick with me while I tell you about one of the most entertaining games I have played this year.
The Riftbreaker casts you as Ashley Nowak, an explorer sent on a one-way trip to the distant planet of Galatea 37. Really, you play as her hulking mech suit, dubbed Mr Riggs. The story is paper-thin – there is a brief mention of Earth being uninhabitable after the “Yellowstone event”, presumably a reference to the potentially apocalyptic supervolcano in Wyoming. Your job is to survey the planet, construct a “rift gate” to enable teleportation back to Earth and to prepare Galatea 37 for colonisation.
It all starts fairly simply, as you set up wind turbines and solar panels to power automated mines and gather resources. But then you come under attack from the local animals – overwhelming hordes of reptilian beasties. Mr Riggs is bristling with weapons to defend yourself. You can also set up walls and turrets to build a defensible base. Then there are the natural disasters, such as earthquakes and meteor strikes, and bad weather that interferes with your power generation.
“Before you know it, you are chasing supply bottlenecks while occasionally pausing to mow down aliens”
This loop – gather resources, improve your weapons and your base and defend yourself – propels the entire game, deftly blending two genres known as real-time strategy (RTS) and twin-stick shooters. The former usually involves building up an army and smashing it into another until one of you is wiped off the map. The latter is about controlling a character and ducking out of the way of enemies as you try to take them down.
Combining these genres is a pretty weird idea, but The Riftbreaker really makes it work, as your base and Mr Riggs work in tandem to hold back the aliens. What I particularly like about The Riftbreaker is that, unlike mission-based RTS games such as genre classics StarCraft or Command & Conquer, your base persists throughout the entire game, meaning it grows into a sprawling behemoth. I occasionally found myself stumbling across sections that I had built hours earlier and had completely forgotten about.
As you grow your base, the game introduces another concept that regular readers will know I am a big fan of: supply chains. While your initial buildings are made of easily available carbon and iron (or “carbonium” and “ironium” as the game strangely calls them), building the rift gate requires rarer materials such as uranium and cobalt that can only be found by visiting other areas of Galatea 37 and setting up outposts, which in turn need supplying. Before you know it, you are chasing the bottlenecks in your system while occasionally pausing to mow down aliens. It is as if Ellen Ripley got a side gig as a logistics manager.
While playing, I did wonder if I should feel bad about strip-mining an entire planet. This point is touched on with a few lines of dialogue, and while you can choose to use only solar, wind, biomass or geothermal power throughout the game and receive a “going green” achievement for doing so, burning your way through the biosphere is too much fun to miss. More