Humans

Physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili discusses the power of wonder, the importance of overcoming our biases and the biggest mysteries in fundamental physics

Humans

23 March 2022

By Richard Webb
Nabil Nezzar
IT SEEMS nobody spends quite as much time discussing the joys of science as Jim Al-Khalili. Whether with guests on his BBC radio programme, The Life Scientific, in the documentaries he presents or with the students he teaches and mentors at the University of Surrey, UK, he is on an insatiable quest to find out “why”. He told us where this all started, why scientists need to question their own biases and about the importance of never growing up.
Richard Webb: To turn the tables a bit, what made you take up a life scientific?
Jim Al-Khalili: I guess my passion for science, well, physics, began in my early teens, when I was obsessed with football and discovering girls and thinking I’d one day play for my beloved Leeds United, who were a good team back then in the mid-1970s. But I suddenly fell in love with physics. It was like puzzle solving; it was common sense. With chemistry and biology, I had to remember stuff, and I’m terrible at remembering stuff. Physics also dealt with the big questions. Where does the universe come from? What does an atom look like? What’s inside a star? So from about the age of 13 or 14, I wanted to do physics. If I got to play for Leeds United, that would be nice, but I was going to be a physicist.
Your latest book is called The Joy of Science. Is that something you feel on a day-to-day basis?
It is, actually. Part of why I enjoy science communication is that I like doing the science. I like … More

A true-crime series on IMDb TV takes a slightly too po-faced look into a theft from an invertebrate zoo where things weren’t quite as they seemed

Humans

23 March 2022

By Elle Hunt
Bug Out reveals the world of insect collectors like Steve LamondCourtesy of IMDb TV
Bug Out
Ben Feldman
IMDb TVAdvertisement
ONE morning in August 2018, the chief executive of an insectarium and butterfly house in Pennsylvania arrived at work to find all his live exhibits had disappeared. “Shelves and shelves and shelves that should have been filled with creatures aplenty were empty,” says John Cambridge.
As tales of true crime go, the “Philadelphia bug heist” was immediately intriguing, not least because of the obvious question: what could anyone want with thousands of insects?
Now, the hunt for the perpetrators has been given the Tiger King treatment in a four-part documentary series for IMDb TV. As with the 2020 sensation featuring Joe Exotic, the most eyebrow-raising moments in Bug Out come care of its subjects that walk on two legs.
The Philadelphia Insectarium & Butterfly Pavilion grew out of a 1970s pest-control business called Bug Out that was run by an ex-cop who would display his “catch of the day”. Over the years, the displays got more elaborate and eccentric, and insect enthusiasts were drawn to them like moths to a porch light. It grew into the US’s first invertebrate zoo and, until the robbery, was a family-friendly attraction that chugged along seemingly without incident.
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The series follows a broadly chronological structure, starting with the theft before spiralling out into the strange (and surprisingly endearing) world of hobbyists, collectors and traders of creepy-crawlies. On one level, it is an eye-opening insight into an unfamiliar – and, to many, unappealing – pastime, where people are eager to share their enthusiasm for rare cockroaches ($500 a breeding pair) and African land snails the size of small dogs.
A diversion into the booming illegal international trade in rare bugs and other wildlife shows the darker side of human nature, and our obsession with collecting and commodifying every aspect of the natural world.
But just as you didn’t watch Tiger King to learn about big cat conservation, Bug Out‘s real intrigue comes from the people behind the insectarium. In many ways, it is a study of what was a dysfunctional workplace that put human nature, not insects, under the microscope. The most emotionally affecting moments come from employees who fervently wanted to indulge their passion through their work, only to have their dreams crushed by a toxic working environment.
“Just as you didn’t watch Tiger King to learn about big cats, the real intrigue comes from the people”
Until the robbery, these dramas played out on a small stage. Then, the heist was picked up by local media and then national media. Before long it was being discussed by late-night chat-show host Jimmy Kimmel. As a result, Cambridge became a mini-celebrity and the police operation hotted up, with an additional FBI investigation that scrutinised some of the then employees’ surprisingly shady backgrounds.
The crime was more serious than it might sound: Cambridge put the value of the 7000-odd insects taken at as much as $50,000. But the loss of his exhibits was just the tip of the iceberg, as the seemingly wholesome family attraction was revealed to be beset by power struggles and financial mismanagement.
The documentary-makers’ efforts to stoke the drama to true-crime levels are occasionally heavy-handed, suggesting an anxiety about letting the story speak for itself. A dramatically lit corkboard linking suspect mugshots with sticky notes labelled with things like “motive = bugs” is presumably intended to lend drama to the police investigation. The dry humour of the investigating officers, meanwhile, is wasted by the overall po-faced tone of the show.
When the big reveal comes, in the fourth and final episode, it doesn’t quite deliver on the whodunnit promised in the first – in fact, it reveals the narrative to have been somewhat contrived. One gets the sense that the film-makers, having set out to tell the true story behind the Philadelphia bug heist, discovered a vastly different tale to the one they had anticipated and were forced to make the best of it.
The result is a highly diverting although somewhat unsatisfying series: a can of worms that, despite Bug Out‘s best efforts, cannot be tidily contained.

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Our mastery of language presents many mysteries, not least where grammar comes from and how children learn to speak so effortlessly. Now researchers argue that it all makes sense if you think of language as a game of charades

Humans

23 March 2022

By Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater
Harriet noble
IN THE early afternoon of 16 January 1769, HMS Endeavour dropped anchor in the Bay of Good Success on Tierra del Fuego. When Captain James Cook and his crew came ashore, they were met by a group of Indigenous people, probably Haush hunter-gatherers. Two of Cook’s party advanced. Soon, two of the Haush also stepped forward, displayed small sticks and threw them aside. Cook’s men interpreted this as an indication of peaceful intentions. They were right: the groups were soon exchanging gifts and sharing food. With no common language and inhabiting utterly different worlds, they could nonetheless communicate through a high-stakes game of cross-cultural charades.
Most of us have faced our own communication challenges, perhaps resorting to pointing and gesturing when abroad. And yet in daily life, we rarely give language a second thought – never mind its many perplexing mysteries. How can noises convey meaning? Where do the complex layers of linguistic patterns come from? How come children learn language so easily, whereas chimpanzees can scarcely learn it at all?
We believe these questions have remained unanswered because scientists have been looking at language all wrong. A growing body of research undermines prevailing ideas that humans possess an innate language ability somehow wired into our brains, encoding grammatical rules. In our new book, The Language Game, we argue that language isn’t about rules at all. As Cook’s encounter illustrates, it is about improvisation, freedom and the desire to be understood, constrained only by our imaginations. This radical idea helps to explain those long-standing mysteries about language – as well as how language evolved and why it makes humans special.
For … More

Netflix’s new film about recent Boeing plane crashes is a damning account of why the disasters happened and who was responsible

Humans

16 March 2022

By Elle Hunt

AS STORM Eunice buffeted much of the UK last month, a surprising focal point emerged: the live webcam stream of arrivals at London Heathrow Airport. At one point, 200,000 viewers tuned in to watch passenger planes struggle against the wind to land safely.
This mixture of fascination and fear typifies our relationship with flying. It feels risky, but we don’t really expect a crash.
Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, directed by Rory Kennedy and new to Netflix after a positive reception at Sundance in January, opens with the usual reassurances about the safety of air travel: tens of thousands of flights pass without incident daily all over the world. Many of these use Boeing planes, a fact that, until recently, was considered to be a good thing. Trust in the company was such that there was a phrase in the aviation industry: “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going.”
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Then, in October 2018, all that changed. A Lion Air flight crashed into the sea with 189 people on board, minutes after departing from Jakarta in Indonesia. All passengers and crew were killed. Five months later, an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed in similar circumstances, and with a similarly tragic outcome. The type of plane in both cases was a 737 Max, a recently released update of the Boeing 737.
These crashes brought to an end the safest period for commercial flying in the history of aviation. It also cast doubt on Boeing’s reputation as a model of safety and the premier aeroplane manufacturer in the US.
The black box of the Lion Air flight revealed a failure of the “angle-of-attack” sensor that measures the angle of the nose ofthe plane while in flight. Simulations and testimony from pilots paint a sickening picture of the desperate battle to regain control of the aircraft.
Boeing traced this to a software failure: an erroneous activation of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), new to the 737 Max. Pilots could have switched it off, had they known it existed. But Boeing hadn’t told them it was a feature of the updated 737, let alone trained them on it.
The former Wall Street Journal reporter Andy Pasztor, who acts as the audience’s guide through the story, says a senior executive at Boeing told him that the airline “didn’t want to overwhelm” pilots.
The anger of pilots and unions at this omission seems justified. Dennis Tajer at the Allied Pilots Association calls it “disrespectful”, adding: “You want to know as much about your airplane as possible.”
In the fallout, Boeing, having previously enjoyed its position as the pilots’ advocate, briefed journalists against Lion Air and the flight’s pilot, Bhavye Suneja, saying (to quote Pasztor) that “an American pilot would never have gotten into this kind of a situation”. The testimony of Suneja’s widow stands in dignified contrast to this. “I knew my husband. I knew how he flew,” she says.
“Simulations paint a sickening picture of the desperate battle to regain control of the aircraft”
After the first crash, while a software fix was in the works, 737 Maxes continued to fly. Then came the Ethiopian Airlines crash. The US Federal Aviation Administration did nothing, but many countries grounded the 737 Max planes, and put pressure on then US president Donald Trump to take action.
The subsequent government investigation found “repeated and serious failures” by Boeing. In November 2021, the airline admitted total responsibility for the Ethiopian Airlines crash.
Boeing’s contribution to the film is limited to a supplied statement in corporate-ese at the end. Combined with the depth of research, this lack of participation makes the film seem like a damning report rather than a one-sided one.
Downfall is a brisk, level-headed account of a company’s colossal failing, and the lengths that it will go to preserve reputation and profit margins, even at the expense of safety. But what makes it memorable viewing is the reminder of the trust we need when we take to the skies.

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Josie Ford
Hybrid learning
A man in a hide jerkin and disposable face mask sits knapping flints against the backdrop of an unaccountably large, bright red tractor. Rounding a corner, a 3-metre-high luminous yellow grinning gummy bear suddenly looms over us, from which we flee through a door into a side room where Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is talking soulfully about 100 per cent renewable trams.
Not Feedback’s latest cheese dream – although close – but sure signs we were on the shop floor at New Scientist Live Manchester, as part of our drive to bring the office stationery cupboard to you.
Like many people, Feedback currently finds being in real places with real people a discombobulating experience that requires several deep-breathing exercises and us remembering to wear something on our bottom half. Many attendees in Manchester weren’t actually in Manchester, but watching it all from the safety of their own underpants at home, which brings its own challenges, it turns out. When digital attendees complain that the main stage is freezing, getting someone to turn up the thermostat in the hall doesn’t cut it. Lesson learned as the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds slowly melt, as indeed the people in the hall did.Advertisement
The truth is out there
“Don’t think of a black hole as a Hoover, think of it as a couch cushion”. Astrophysicist Becky Smethurst – Dr Becky to her legion of YouTube fans – won the prize for the most unexpected metaphor of the event, her point being that you are less likely to get sucked into a black hole than to lose your car keys down the side of one. Or something like that.
Meanwhile, we were delighted to learn from Dallas Campbell and Suzie Imber’s talk on how to leave Earth about the 1638 book The Man in the Moone, written by Church of English bishop Francis Godwin, in which the protagonist flies to the moon in a chariot towed by moon geese. We would take this option, which strikes us as classier than the unspeakably vulgar rockets favoured by today’s billionaire class.
We also now know the current location of the first sandwich in space, what an industrial vacuum does to a marshmallow and how to make a rocket with half an Alka-Seltzer and a 35-millimetre film canister. That’s definitely one not to try at home. For anyone tempted, all the talks are available in the metaverse.
Going nuclear
The 3-metre-high mutant gummy bear was, it turns out, advertising the benefits of nuclear power. Feedback regards this as brave, as we also do the UK Atomic Energy Authority titling a talk “Nuclear Fusion: Forever 30 years away”.
Still, we learn that a gummy bear is about the same size as a uranium fuel pellet, that one fuel pellet produces enough power to drive an electric car 20,000 miles and so a 3-metre-high gummy bear would make enough electricity to power 2 million electric cars for a year in the UK. This makes us happy.
Blowing in the wind
Meanwhile, out in the real world, the real world was still going on. The gummy bear is possibly a more appropriate unit of power for a family magazine than that contained in a tweet from the Victorian Trades Hall Council that Paul Campbell forwards us following our session on “how big is a gigawatt?” in last week’s Feedback.
It celebrates the announcement of 2 gigawatts of wind power capacity to be installed off the Australian state’s coast in the coming 10 years, or as the tweet has it in an accompanying picture: “SH**LOADS OF POWER. SH**LOADS OF JOBS”.
Clue: it wasn’t “shed”. We idly wonder if this is now a unit of power and how many horses it would take to produce it. Around 2.7 million, we make it. They would be a truly magnificent sight riding in the waves, although we do wonder whether any of this counts as clean energy.
Butt out
While our back was turned, we also discover that a portion of Twitter declared 1 to 8 March InverteButt Week in celebration of the backsides of creatures without backbones.
We doubt the world truly needed this, but then again, with past headlines in this august publication such as “Comb jelly videos are rewriting the history of your anus”, perhaps people in glass houses shouldn’t throw… slugs.
This leads us to delve rather more deeply than we might otherwise have done into the lifestyle and morphology of the bristle worm Ramisyllis multicaudata, a detailed study of which, published last year, seems to have been a prime mover of InverteButt Week. The worm lives, with delightful specificity, within sponges in Darwin Harbour, northern Australia. Its single head is buried deep within the sponge, but its body randomly branches out into up to 1000 rear ends that poke hopefully out of it. The gut is continuous throughout all these branches, yet doesn’t seem to process any food, leading to speculation that the worm has “adopted a fungal lifestyle”.
This sounds pleasingly louche, like flying with the moon geese. Even more fun is that, when it comes to reproduction, new heads – complete with brains and eyes – start forming and bud off from the worm’s butts. Cute.
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Living for likes and subscribers can be a poisoned chalice or a dream come true, according to Get Rich or Lie Trying by journalist Symeon Brown

Humans

16 March 2022

By Chris Stokel-Walker

THE influencer economy, fuelled by the ability of social media to instantly reach millions of people, has changed the way we work, rest and play. For some, the rise of this new way to make a living has been a boon – demolishing gatekeepers, minting a new era of celebrities and making millionaires of people who might otherwise be trapped in a dead-end job.
But this has been far from a uniformly good thing for society. As Channel 4 News journalist Symeon Brown uncovers in Get Rich or Lie Trying, the seedy side of social media can be as harmful as it is helpful.
Brown’s reporting sees him go back to the streets of London where he grew up to hear from school friends who have fallen prey to pyramid schemes dressed up as online cryptocurrency investments. He also heads to Los Angeles, where he meets nipped and tucked influencers seeking the perfect body, often ruining their health in the process.
Get Rich or Lie Trying is a chastening read, clearly showing that the lowlights of online fame are as depressing as its highlights are inspiring. Brown races through the influencer economy and the different industries it touches, from the sweatshops churning out poor-quality clothing to ensure that scrolling teenagers can keep up with the latest red carpet looks on a budget, to the surgeons that perform Brazilian butt lifts, a risky procedure where fat is taken from other parts of the body and injected into the buttocks.
At times, Brown hurtles through first-person stories so fast that there is hardly a chance to blink. Those he highlights as exploiting social media – or being exploited by it – sometimes pass by too quickly for us to remember who they are or why we should care. It feels a bit like the relentless hamster wheel of the algorithms that drive social media platforms, and the whole experience can become a bit discombobulating.
At times, you struggle to see who to feel sorrier for: the young woman cajoled into performing a sex act on camera, or the man who is paid to receive insults online. Sometimes, they blur into a catalogue of horrors that becomes difficult to unpick and reflect on.
The book’s stronger sections are those that bring the action closer to home and address some deeper, more systemic issues. A chapter on how social media’s unique voice is often driven by authentic Black voices that are then co-opted and copied by richer, white entrepreneurs without qualms is particularly powerful, and begins to tackle wider problems entrenched in social media.
Elsewhere in the book, the bigger picture is lacking, however. We know, for example, that the drive to achieve physical “perfection” is an issue, and research has made clear both the role that social media platforms play in perpetuating this and the effects of such ideals on mental and physical health. Yet Brown spends surprisingly little time questioning what can be done about the broken bodies and livelihoods left behind in the race to get famous on social media, or even who is to blame.
The book does a much better job of highlighting just how perilous living a life designed to go viral can be – and how quickly the thing that made you famous can become passé. It raises important questions about the value we place on superficial appearances, and how social media all too often encourages us to sacrifice thinking deeply in favour of a neat sound bite.
Overall, Get Rich or Lie Trying is well worth reading – but, like social media, at times it would do well to go deeper and dwell a little longer.

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Don’t Trust Your Gut says data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. You probably know less than you think about how to be healthy and happy. So, it may be time to ignore your instincts and try self-help by data. Out on 9 June.
Ingela Ihrman
Visit
Rooted Beings can teach us a lot about how to connect with each other, according to this exhibition on plants and fungi. Work from the botanical archives will be shown alongside new art at London’s Wellcome Collection from 24 March.Advertisement

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The Flight of the Aphrodite is a thrilling new sci-fiction novel from S. J. Morden about an eventful mission to Jupiter’s moons. Ship and crew are already at breaking point and then it seems they have uninvited company.

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Rudolph Herzog’s documentary swerves the usual space experts to give an unexpected view of humanity’s efforts to live among the stars, says Simon Ings

Humans

16 March 2022

By Simon Ings

Interstellar travel will need human ingenuity, and a lot of patienceDiscovery Inc.
Last Exit: Space
Rudolph Herzog
Discovery+Advertisement

HOW will people copulate in space? How much antimatter would it take to get to Proxima Centauri b? How much skin would each of us need if we could somehow bioengineer humans to photosynthesise? These are just some of the challenges examined by documentary-maker Rudolph Herzog in Last Exit: Space, a peculiar dash through humanity’s ambition to colonise space.
A traditional documentary might look for answers via the press offices of the European Space Agency or NASA. Not so Rudolph Herzog, whose father, fellow film-maker Werner Herzog, narrated and executive-produced this film. Instead, the film zooms in on those who are dedicated to solving the conundrums of space travel, one challenge at a time.
The result is a charming, yet unfocused and slightly odd, take on space exploration. In Denmark, we meet volunteers at the non-profit organisation Copenhagen Suborbitals who are crowdfunding to build a full-size rocket to send the world’s first amateur astronaut into space.
Meanwhile, in the Negev desert in Israel, citizen scientists from the Austrian Space Forum are putting a not-too-sophisticated-looking Mars spacesuit through its paces.
“The possible future living conditions on Mars are compared to working in an Amazon fulfilment centre”
As well as looking at the technical barriers to moving off-planet, the film ponders whether it is a good idea in the first place. Among the naysayers is space anthropologist Taylor Genovese, who compares the possible future living conditions on Mars to working in an Amazon fulfilment centre. Judith Lapierre, the sole female crew member of the Sphinx-99 isolation experiment in the late 1990s, describes how this study in close-proximity living ended with her alleging sexual harassment against another crew member. It does beg the question, if we can’t get along on Earth, what chance do we have in space?
These issues will only grow with more extreme distances travelled. Interstellar travel will require a ship capable of supporting entire generations of humans. Lapierre’s testimony, says Werner Herzog’s narration, suggests that any such mission will be plagued with “strife, crime and depravity”.
In that case, we might be better off staying put. This, surprisingly, is the advice of a cleric from the Valley of the Dawn community in Planaltina, Brazil, who believe they receive energies from visiting extraterrestrials from the Capella star system. These apparently advise against interstellar travel, which I’m sure NASA would be interested to hear.
Last Exit: Space suffers from its wide-eyed, catch-all approach to the subject; I found the lack of critical analysis frustrating. We are regaled with tales of “the human pioneering spirit”, as though humans were destined to explore and become somewhat less than human when not exploring. This is an opinion not established fact. Many human cultures have made a great success of staying put. Set in false opposition to this are an astonishing assortment of dystopian fantasies: space corporations will control our water! Space corporations will control our air!
Astronaut Mike Foale and astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz provide the documentary with small but penetrating moments of reason. Space is an additional field of human endeavour, they point out, not an escape route from a wrecked home planet. “Do we need to seek our destiny among the stars?”, asks the documentary early on. Let’s hope not.

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