Humans

By Sam Wong
Zhanna Tretiakova/Alamy
IF YOU eat at fancy places, you may have encountered orbs of sauce or puree, held inside a membrane, that burst in your mouth. Making them involves a little chemistry, but it can be done at home.
Now a staple of modernist cuisine, the spherification technique was patented in 1942 by food scientist William Peschardt and later popularised by chef Ferran Adrià at El Bulli restaurant in north-east Spain in the 2000s.
To try it, you need two special ingredients that can be ordered online. One is a salt called sodium alginate, which comes from brown algae. Alginate is formed … More

The threats of cyberwarfare and online disinformation loom over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but even in this online age, war is still life or death for those in the firing line

Humans

| Leader

16 March 2022

Sean Gallup/Getty Images
THE ever-growing threats of cyberwarfare and online disinformation are now in the spotlight amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With the NATO military alliance reluctant to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, or engage in any other actions that could ignite a much wider conflict, the internet has inevitably become a key battleground.
But that isn’t to say there haven’t been surprises. On page 8, one expert expresses shock at the volume of online fake news about the war. Clearly, the invasion isn’t the first war associated with this issue – researchers and think tanks have also monitored online propaganda in other recent conflicts, including in Syria and Libya – but it is … More

A new family tree of apes that lived in the Miocene between 23 and 5.3 million years ago reveals which are our close relatives and which are only distant cousins

Humans

16 March 2022

By Michael Marshall
Dryopithecus, an extinct ape from the MioceneJOHN SIBBICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
A huge study of fossil apes clarifies which extinct species are most closely related to humans. But it can’t resolve one of the most controversial questions in human evolution: whether the last common ancestor we shared with living African apes like chimpanzees lived in Africa or Eurasia.
Primatologist Kelsey Pugh at the American Museum of Natural History in New York looked at apes that lived during the Miocene epoch, between 23 and 5.3 million years ago. She focused on those from the middle … More

The current reference human genome is based on a handful of people but the new Pangenome project will incorporate DNA from hundreds of people all around the world

Humans

16 March 2022

By Michael Marshall
DNA sequence dataShutterstock / Gio.tto
The human genome is being sequenced again – but better. A new project to read DNA from a large number of people has launched, with the aim of sequencing the “pangenome”, a version of the genome that reflects the full genetic diversity of our species.
The human genome, the set of DNA that every person carries in their cells, was first read or “sequenced” between 1990 and 2001. However, this first genome was incomplete because many chunks couldn’t be reconstructed. Geneticists have improved it since, with the last major … More

A psychological study shows people can be over-confident in their ability to perform tasks for which they have no formal training

Humans

16 March 2022

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
Pilot working through a simulation a simulation exerciseChris Urso/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Wire/Alamy
People can be so confident they can teach themselves skills they actually lack – including the ability to land a commercial jet – that they could actually put themselves and other people in serious danger.
“People think, ‘Well, if it really mattered, like in an emergency, I could land the plane’,” says Maryanne Garry at the University of Waikato, in New Zealand. “But … that requires skills that most people just don’t have.”
Garry and her colleagues enlisted 780 volunteers for their psychological study. Half of the study participants were asked to watch an approximately 4-minute-long silent YouTube video showing two commercial pilots landing a plane in a mountainous area.Advertisement
The scientists then gave each participant a hypothetical scenario:
Imagine you are on a small commuter plane. Due to an emergency, the pilot is incapacitated and you are the only person left to land the plane.
They then asked the participants how confident they would feel – on a percentage scale – about responding to the situation.
They found that people who had watched the video were up to 30 per cent more confident in their ability to land a plane without dying, compared to the confidence ratings of people who had not watched the video. But even people who had not watched the video gave themselves an average confidence score of 29 per cent for their ability to land the plane without dying, says Garry.
Some participants who watched the video were asked prior to doing so how confident they were they could land the plane as well as any trained pilot. After watching the video, their self-confidence rose: they were up to 38 per cent more confident that they could perform as well as any trained pilot. In general, men were significantly more confident in their abilities than women were, she adds.

The results were particularly surprising, the researchers say, given that the respondents in general were convinced that landing a plane requires a great deal of expertise. They ranked the required skill level for landing a plane at an average of 4.4 out of 5, says Garry. Trained pilots learn to land planes after hundreds of hours of training and education in physics, engineering, and meteorology, she adds.
Garry says the findings suggest that people “tend to inflate their confidence about certain things” as a result of what she calls a “rapid illusion”, meaning they see images that make them believe they are capable of feats for which they actually have no skill. She adds that the findings suggest this applies to a “disturbing proportion of ordinary people”.
While overconfidence has its benefits – for example, giving people a boost that helps them take on life’s challenges – it can also be detrimental when it puts people’s lives in danger, says Kayla Jordan, also at the University of Waikato.
“It’s pretty surprising that people become more confident they could carry out this highly-specialised feat – while at the same time telling us they know that landing a plane requires a great deal of expertise,” says Jordan.
Journal reference: Royal Society Open Science, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.211977

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True Crime meets research at this New Scientist event featuring writer Val McDermid, psychologist Mark Freestone and forensic investigator Niamh Nic Daeid. At London’s Conway Hall from 6.30pm on 16 March.

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How to Speak Whale is a question that has intrigued humans for centuries. Now that AI is helping us decode animal languages, conversations with whales may be possible, says naturalist Tom Mustill. But what will they have to say?
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Into the Abyss go ocean explorers Don Walsh, Victor Vescovo and Patrick Lahey, who will share their submarine adventures and vision of the future of oceanic exploration at London’s Royal Institution on 14 March at 7pm.

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In The Cartographers, Peng Shepherd’s latest work of magical realist speculative fiction, the characters have a habit of asking “what makes a map?”. The answer, it becomes clear, is its purpose, finds Sally Adee

Humans

9 March 2022

By Sally Adee

Shutterstock/vikas31
The Cartographers
Peng Shepherd
Orion Books (17 March)Advertisement

MAPS can seem such dry, factual objects: blueprints of reality that are useful to get from A to B, but instantly forgettable when you get there. Three new science-fiction books, released this month, challenge this view, showing that maps are more than the objective depictions we take them to be.
In The Cartographers, Peng Shepherd’s latest work of magical realist speculative fiction, the characters have a habit of asking “what makes a map?”. The answer, it becomes clear, is its purpose. From political maps to resource maps and road maps, the main purpose of cartography is to create a shared version of reality: one that suits the map-maker’s ideals.
Shepherd’s protagonist, a young cartographer named Nell, finds this out to her cost when she inherits a mysterious map after the death of her estranged father. The power of maps to make visible what the map-makers want you to see, and to hide what they would rather you didn’t, is revealed when Nell discovers a shady cartel that has killed a lot of people to keep this particular map secret.
First and foremost, The Cartographers is a love letter to maps and the secrets they hide. It is also a Luddite’s cri du coeur against Google and other tech giants, whose maps are stripped of cultural and historical perspective.
As speculative fiction, it works well, but the book also drifts into vignettes about dramas between student cartographers in an academic hothouse that recall scenes from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The book ultimately sags under the weight of so many competing ambitions, but overall, the plot is strong enough to carry you through to the end.
“If maps shape our expectations of reality, what happens when reality contradicts those expectations?”
If maps shape our expectations of reality, what happens when reality contradicts those expectations? Lucy Kissick explores this in Plutoshine, which follows the quest to terraform Pluto into a habitable water world for humans. This requires some suspension of disbelief given that the ambient temperature is -240°C, methanol and nitrogen freeze solid and it isn’t easy to pick out the sun in the murky “daytime” sky.
It is undeniably science fiction, but there is a heavy emphasis on science. From astrophysics to cosmochemistry, there is a lot to learn, including about the various isotopes of hydrogen.
Science lessons aside, Plutoshine is worth the admission fee for the fantastical depictions of Pluto alone, with its jewelled ice slopes in a rainbow of different colours of frozen elements. And also for the point at which it transpires that mapping technology missed what is hiding under all that ice.
What drives us to map such wild, uncharted terrain at all is the central question of Sweep of Stars, Maurice Broaddus’s beautiful new Afrofuturist vision. In Broaddus’s world, space exploration is driven not by the whims of billionaires, but by people who have been pushed to create empires where others fear to tread. The Muungano Empire is the diaspora of Black people on Earth who fled to escape their oppressors. The elders must chart their expansion while keeping their peoples’ histories alive. Not easy, when they are pursued by their enemies, who spout the eerily-familiar motto: “Earth first”. Broaddus’s characters are as captivating as those in Game of Thrones, and the story is as big as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
All three books provide a timely reminder not only to look more closely at maps, but to question who created them and why.

Sally also recommends…
Until the Last of Me
Sylvain Neuvel
Michael Joseph
Book two of the Take Them to the Stars series, about an ancient matrilineal society whose goal is to get humanity into space. Catch up by reading the previous book, A History of What Comes Next, which takes place in an alternative version of the 1960s space race.

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Shutterstock/Romolo Tavani
SOMETIMES it pays to take the long view. Look at the past half-century of cosmology, as UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees does in our interview, and it is plain how far we have come.
The story of the universe’s origin in a big bang – an idea not especially favoured when Rees started as a researcher in the 1960s – is now as close to an established fact as science permits. We have also elucidated the properties and phenomena of an unimaginably vast cosmos with ever more acuity. It is a privilege to live in an age when, for the first time, we have a convincing story of most of the grand sweep of cosmic evolution.
“If so many planets are out there, how come intelligent life hasn’t come our way?”Advertisement
These are truly thrilling developments, albeit ones that have, in the nature of science, thrown up more holes in our understanding – holes that instruments such as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope are designed to plug.
Yet this progress also gives reason for introspection. Many researchers like Rees find themselves drawn to questions of humanity’s future. The discovery of thousands of exoplanets circling other stars, and the realisation that even icy moons in the outer solar system might harbour warm and wet environments, boosts the belief that if life exists on one tiny blue dot, it might exist elsewhere, too.
So why hasn’t intelligent life elsewhere made itself known to us? Perhaps because hubristic missteps give technological civilisations a limited lifespan – and perhaps also because, as we have learned, space is an unforgiving environment. It is a half-century now since the last person walked on the moon and, as Rees warns, while billionaires such as Elon Musk battle it out to return there, it is folly to think “space tourism” will ever be the norm for our species. Any vestiges of humanity that leave our solar system will probably be very different to us, and most likely the progeny of the pioneers who establish a future beyond Earth, on Mars for example.
For the rest of us, our planet is all there is. The problems we face, not least the tragedy currently unfolding in Ukraine, are a reminder that progress can just as easily be undone. All the more reason to apply our common humanity to solving the problems of the here and now. More