Humans

By Bethan Ackerley
Manoj Shah/Getty Images
1 In August, we learned that bumblebees are better at foraging for nectar when given which substance?
A Methamphetamine
B Caffeine
C Cocaine
D Nicotine

2 In October, we visited Finland to see how it plans a bioeconomy that runs on wood. But which of the following wood technologies did we not report on this year?
A Transparent wood for energy-saving windows
B Extra-sharp wooden knives
C Posture-correcting stairs
D Electricity-generating floors

3 Which event millions of years ago may be responsible for determining the character of today’s Amazon rainforest, according to a study we covered in April?
A … More

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

Humans

15 December 2021

Josie Ford
2021, eh? While undertaking the end-of-year reordering of our extensive piling system, we are tempted to file the past 12 months under “see 2020”. But leafing through our leaves with moistened forefinger, we find much to delight ourselves from this year as we dole out the Feedbys, the coveted annual Feedback awards.
New and shiny
As billionaires competed to get to space in 2021, those of us left on the ground got a feel for the high life thanks to “zero-gravity” chairs and beds that featured in our pages this year – the former with super-atmospherically super-useful UV-resistant mesh seating, the latter with anti-snore preset positions ensuring that, even if in space someone could hear you snore, they wouldn’t.
We also discovered hydrogenated water, now the secret of Feedback’s eternally fresh’n’young-looking skin. But our award for Innovation of the Year goes to a forward-thinking, digital addition to the personal grooming space: Nimble, “the world’s first device that uses artificial intelligence to self-paint and dry nails in under 10 minutes”. Feedback has four on order with a special telescopic applicator stick, for those rushed mornings when we need to look just fabulous.Advertisement
Computer says wot?
Staying in the digital space, February brought us the story of Liam Thorp, a 32-year-old journalist based in Liverpool, UK, who received an urgent call-up for an early covid-19 vaccine. The assessment of Thorp’s BMI as 28,000 kg/m2 turned out to be based on interpreting his height of 6 foot, 2 inches as 6.2 centimetres.
But on the basis that human error might well have played a part here, Malgorithm of the Year goes to the Facebook photo-checking algorithm that found shots of a high-rise building, the England cricket team and a herd of cows overly sexual, and denounced a set of tramlines in Reims, France, for violating its ticket sales policy.
A herring’s throw
Ever-more inventive ways to explain 2 metres to people were a feature of 2020’s Feedbys. This year, we are pleased to honour authorities in the Netherlands who combined social distancing with a vaccine incentive, by offering free portions of Hollandse nieuwe pickled herrings with a jab. And that is quite enough covid – for this year.
Poles apart
And so to Brexit. In a year when blaming global supply chain issues on Brexit and Brexit-related supply chain issues on global problems became a UK national sport, we doff our hat to the maker of “bipolar magnetic dog collars”, which in April explained to reader Peter Holness that a monopolar version wasn’t available due to “Brexit-related supply issues”. End-of-year update: physicists hunting for magnetic norths sans souths at the Large Hadron Collider, a facility beneath an EU external border, are also still suffering persistent supply problems. Point proven, whatever it was.
Flame grilling
“nope. science itself isn’t ‘true’ it’s a constantly refining process used to uncover truths based in material reality and that process is still full of misteaks. neil just posts ridiculous sound bites like this for clout and he has no respect for epistemology”. This tweet from frozen steaks manufacturer The Steak-Umm Company to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson came in response to his tweet “The good thing about Science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it”. A dual award for Social Media Takedown and Epistemological “Truth” of the Year.
Getting the measure
This year was, by any standard, the time it took Earth to orbit once around the sun measured against the fixed stars. Or possibly just 365 days. Or the time after which a fingernail would extend 1/30th of the distance around Earth’s orbit, if nanometres were kilometres.
This was indeed the year of the bamboozling measurement unit. We had the baby boy whose length at birth was, said UK newspaper The Sun, almost 24 inches long, or “two footlong Subway sandwiches for perspective”. We had The Guardian‘s sterling efforts, including depicting Earth’s annual heat absorption as the heat output of “630bn common household hairdryers blowing all day and night, 360 days a year” and a mass of sea cucumber excrement in multiples of the Eiffel Tower.
Special mention goes to a Colorado sheriff’s office that tweeted about a road blocked by “a large boulder the size of a large boulder”. But for sheer dedication to the cause of inexplicable explication, The Wall Street Journal wins Measurement of the Year by urging us to imagine an “adult African male elephant suspended from a rope that’s the same diameter as a table tennis ball”. It was about the tensile stress of tempered glass, natch.
Keeps popping up
It is tempting to grant our last award, for Person of the Year, to Keith Weed, whom so many of you were intent on informing us is the president of the Royal Horticultural Society. We make that his third mention, so instead the award goes collectively to you, our dear readers, for all the smiles and giggles in another trying year. A happy new year to you all, and see you for possibly too much more of the same in 2022.
Got a story for Feedback?
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

Snowflakes can form in either a plate or column shape, but no one understood why – until physicist Kenneth Libbrecht investigated. His theory is the result of two decades making snow in the lab

Humans

15 December 2021

By Kenneth Libbrecht
Courtesy of Kenneth Libbrecht
SNOWFALL in Pasadena, California, is so rare, it’s almost unheard of. Except, that is, at the California Institute of Technology, where Kenneth Libbrecht can conjure it up using the world’s most sophisticated snowflake-making equipment.
As a physicist, Libbrecht has tackled some fairly epic questions, like the nature of gravitational waves and the internal workings of the sun. But he also has a delightful sideline in the science of snowflakes, which are far more complex and mysterious than you might think. One of the biggest unanswered questions about them is why they appear to come in two distinct types.
Libbrecht went on a 20-year odyssey to solve this mystery. Recently, he published the fruits of that journey in the form of a monograph that runs to more than 500 pages. It contains a kind of grand unified theory of snowflakes, explaining for the first time how and why they grow into the delicate shapes they do.
Joshua Howgego: What got you interested in snowflakes?
Kenneth Libbrecht: One day I was chewing the fat with one of my students and we got talking about how crystals grow and take on shapes. We started thinking about what we could study in this area and I thought: well, water would be cheap and easy. Then I thought: actually, that would be the physics of snowflakes, I wonder how that works? Apropos of nothing – I was just curious – I started reading up on research on snowflakes and I found it really fascinating.
“I can turn knobs to control the conditions exactly, so I can get these designer snowflakes”
What was the big question … More

Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild via Getty Images“A YEAR of tackling great challenges.” In the title of our review of the year, “tackling” is the operative word. Two great challenges have dominated the past 12 months: the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, and efforts to address climate change, as embodied by the COP26 summit held in Glasgow, UK, in November. Both have seen significant progress – but only the most irrational optimist could claim that what we have achieved so far amounts to solutions.
Our retrospective leader of 2020 was devoted to the promise that vaccines might bring a swift end to covid-19. At the time, more than 70 … More

Hop plants are largely what distinguish your dark ales from your refreshing pales, and each has its own “terroir”. With changing weather affecting how and where they grow, what does the future hold for brewing and beer?

Humans

15 December 2021

By Chris Simms
Wicked weed: freshly harvested hop flowersJean/Stockimo/Alamy
WATER, malted barley and hops. It is the classic recipe for the world’s favourite intoxicant. According to a law declared in 1516 in the German state of Bavaria, a place that likes to see itself as beer’s spiritual home, those are the only three ingredients it may contain – the yeast that converts the sugars in the barley to alcohol being out of sight and out of mind back then.
Today’s craft beer revolution takes such strictures less seriously, with new and exotic brews catering for all manner of tastes. But one ingredient remains a constant – indeed the fulcrum – of good beer. Hops give beer the bitterness that counterbalances the sickly sweetness of the fermenting grain and imparts subtle flavour tones that distinguish one brew from another, all while acting as a natural preservative.
That is reason enough to declare the hop one of the world’s most important, if often overlooked, plants. Yet trouble is brewing, with a perfect storm of changing tastes and changing weather contriving to shake up its cultivation. The question frothing on many a lip now is whether an ale and hearty future for the hop can be assured.
Hops weren’t always so universally beloved. In England, they were once dubbed the “wicked weed”, and traditional ales were brewed without them. It is a myth that Henry VI once tried to ban them, although the city of Norwich did in 1471, as it tried to defend the purity of yeoman English ale in the face of perfidious hopped continental imports. Before … More

The covid-19 pandemic has forced millions to participate in one of the biggest social experiments of our time. Nearly two years in, it’s time to take stock: what happens when workers abandon offices?

Humans

15 December 2021

By Alice Klein
Working from home has led to rises in productivity for someExperience Interiors/iStock
THE covid-19 pandemic has forced millions of us to participate in one of the biggest social experiments of our time: what would happen if office workers largely abandoned their workplaces and began working from home? More than 18 months in, it is time to take stock.
One thing seems clear: more people working remotely has brought some benefits for the environment. With less commuter traffic, wildlife has been able to reclaim urban spaces while people have been tapping away at their home keyboards.
But what about the benefits to people? The major perks of home working include people having more flexibility to mould jobs around their family, exercise and leisure time, being able to wear whatever they like, controlling their own heating and lighting and not having to commute. The lack of commuting may be the biggest bonus, since surveys show that workers typically rate their commute as the worst part of their day, unless they walk or cycle.Advertisement
Many people have also been able to get more done while working remotely, possibly due to fewer distractions. A survey by Boston Consulting Group of 1500 managers at large European companies found that more than half had seen productivity levels rise as their employees shifted to remote work during the pandemic.
“There used to be a lot of resistance to working from home because managers thought employees would just goof off and watch Netflix, but there’s a lot more trust now,” says Sue Williamson at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia.
However, the experiment hasn’t been all positive. Many people forced to work from home have reported feeling isolated and finding it harder to switch off due to the blurred boundary between work and home life.
“Surveys show that workers typically rate their commute as the worst part of their day”
Many managers have also reported declines in innovation, which is probably because “it’s hard to get those serendipitous conversations between people that spark ideas” when everyone is physically separated, says Anne Bardoel at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.
Then there is “Zoom fatigue”, the drained feeling that often accompanies virtual meetings, even though they tend to be shorter than in-person ones. This may be because people have a stronger sense of being on show while on screen and feel more pressure to present well, says Allison Gabriel at the University of Arizona.
As vaccines help to control covid-19, many organisations are hoping to reap the best of both worlds by letting employees work from home on some days and travel to the office on others. The coming months and years will undoubtedly involve trial and error as companies and employees settle on the optimum mix of office and work-from-home days. But one thing seems certain: now that office workers have been given a chance to really think about how they want their work lives to look, there is no turning back.
“It is this opportunity to reset and rethink how we actually work, and I think that’s a very positive thing,” says Bardoel.

2021 in review
This was a year of tackling great challenges, from the covid-19 pandemic to climate change. But 2021 was also rich in scientific discoveries and major advances.

More on these topics: More

Computer predictions for the outcome of European football matches over a 26-year period become more accurate in recent years

Humans

15 December 2021

By Chris Stokel-Walker
A match between KRC Genk and Club Brugge in the Belgian First Division AJoris Verwijst/BSR Agency/Getty Images
Football matches have become more predictable over time, according to an analysis of 87,816 matches across 11 European leagues.
The study covers the results of matches between 1993 and 2019, including 10,044 each from England’s Premier League and Spain’s La Liga, as well as leading divisions in Belgium, Greece, Scotland and Turkey, among others.
A computer model that was given data from the matches tried to predict whether the home or away team would win by looking at the performance of the teams in previous matches in the league. The model didn’t count any drawn matches, which excluded between a quarter and a third of the total matches from the analysis.Advertisement
“Our model isn’t the most accurate,” says Taha Yasseri at University College Dublin in Ireland. “I’m sure there are better models, but it’s very simple and you can go back 26 years and do the exercise as if you were doing the prediction 26 years ago.”
The average AUC score – which measures how well the computer model performed – was around 0.75, meaning that the model correctly predicted the match result 75 per cent of the time.

Seven of the 11 leagues that were studied saw an increase in predictability over time. Richer leagues, such as the Premier League and La Liga, had higher AUC scores than worse-funded ones, like Belgium’s First Division A.
The study found a correlation between predictability and inequality, in terms of the distribution of points between teams at the end of the season – that is, match results are predicted correctly more often in leagues where the points are spread more unequally.
The researchers suggest that football is becoming more predictable because inequality between the richest and poorest teams has grown, as prize money and other revenues have increased and successful clubs can spend more on players.
The study also found that home team advantage is becoming less of a factor in matches. In France, for instance, home teams took around two-thirds of points in 1993, but around 58 per cent of them in 2019.
Joey O’Brien at the University of Limerick, Ireland, says the researchers make rigorous statistical arguments that football has become more predictable. “Perhaps, at a more philosophical level, one could also question whether this predictability is good for the game,” he says. “Do fans get just as much enjoyment observing skilled teams predictably performing strongly?”
Journal reference: Royal Society Open Science, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.210617

More on these topics: More

Maternal body odour signals to babies that they can safely build relationships with other adults, a trait that may have evolved so that mothers can share the load of child rearing

Humans

10 December 2021

By Alice Klein
A mother and daughterfizkes/Shutterstock
Babies are more socially receptive to unfamiliar women when they can smell their mother’s natural body odour, suggesting that maternal scent functions as a safety signal.
Previous research has found that mothers’ unique smell signatures allow their babies to recognise them and have a soothing effect when they are in pain.
Yaara Endevelt-Shapira at The Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, and her colleagues wondered if signals in maternal odour also change the way that infants respond to strangers.Advertisement
They asked 62 mothers to wear cotton T-shirts for two consecutive nights and avoid using deodorant or other scented products, so that their natural smell would rub off onto the clothing.
Their babies – aged 7 months on average – were then strapped into chairs and introduced to an unfamiliar woman who was about the same age as their mother, lived in the same area and was a mother herself.
When the babies had their mother’s T-shirt under their nose, they were more likely to smile, laugh and gaze at the stranger than if they were sniffing an identical unworn T-shirt.
Electroencephalography (EEG) devices fitted to both participants’ heads showed that the babies’ electrical brainwaves were also more likely to synchronise with the stranger’s when they could smell their mother’s T-shirt. The same kind of brainwave synchronisation is found between babies and their mothers when they gaze at each other and is thought to be a sign of feeling mutual connection.
The findings suggest that “maternal body odours can assist infants in transitioning to social groups, exploring new environments and communicating with unfamiliar partners”, says Endevelt-Shapira.

This could explain why bringing a “transitional object” like a blanket or cuddly toy from home can help young children settle into nursery school, because it might smell a bit like their mother, says Endevelt-Shapira. The researchers didn’t look at whether the scent of fathers or other familiar caregivers can have a similar effect.
Human babies benefit from bonding with adults other than their parents because they are more helpless than the young of other species and often require a wider circle of care, says Endevelt-Shapira. This may be why maternal odour facilitates these external relationships, she says.
The current study found that maternal scent helps babies to bond with women who are similar to their own mothers, but more research is needed to see if the effect extends to women from different cultures and men, says Endevelt-Shapira.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg6867
Sign up to our free Health Check newsletter for a round-up of all the health and fitness news you need to know, every Saturday

More on these topics: More