Humans

By Luke Taylor

The roar of the home crowd really does have an impactClive Rose/Getty Images
It is a long-held belief that football teams playing in their home stadium get a boost from their fans. However, quantifying this effect on match results was difficult until the pandemic created an unprecedented natural experiment when most of the 2020/21 season was played behind closed doors.
Statistics shared with New Scientist by London-based sports intelligence firm Twenty First Group show that home teams in Europe’s five major men’s football leagues lost a significant home advantage when their games … More

By Jacob Aron

Home feels a long way away when you don’t know who to trustFabio Formaggio/EyeEm/Getty Images
Book
The Apollo Murders
Chris Hadfield QuercusAdvertisement

I FOLLOW space flight pretty closely, and yet I couldn’t tell you the names of the people currently aboard the International Space Station (ISS) without looking it up.
We weren’t always this blasé about human space flight. In the early days of crewed missions, NASA’s Mercury Seven astronauts were magazine cover stars and celebrities. In the 21st century, though, most astronauts are completely anonymous.
Chris Hadfield, the Canadian former commander of the ISS, is a rare exception. He first flew to space in 1995, riding on NASA’s space shuttle to visit the Russian space station Mir. He came to public prominence much later, in 2013, during his third and final mission to orbit, when he used social media including Twitter and YouTube to swap messages with the likes of William Shatner and talk about life onboard the station.
All of this culminated with Hadfield releasing a cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded in microgravity. The video has since been viewed more than 50 million times, and is still as awe-inspiring as ever. While on the ISS, Hadfield made space seem exciting and relevant to the average person in a way that it hadn’t been for many years. “Space flight isn’t just about doing experiments, it’s about an extension of human culture,” he told me when we spoke following his return to Earth.
Since retiring from the Canadian Space Agency, Hadfield has written a number of non-fiction books, including his autobiography, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. Now, he has turned his hand to thrillers with The Apollo Murders, an alt-history set during the cold war that seemingly draws on his own space flight experiences and takes them to dramatic extremes.
The story unfolds in an alternative version of 1973, when a new kind of space race quickly gets ugly as both the USSR and the US are hoping to exploit an unusual find on the surface of the moon. Hadfield’s version of 1973 has two key differences from our own. First, the Apollo 18 moon mission was redesignated to be a military operation run by the US Air Force, rather than being cancelled along with Apollo 19 and 20 following the failure of Apollo 13, as happened in reality.
Second, the Soviet Union’s first attempt at launching an Almaz military space station was successful. The real version burned up in Earth’s atmosphere after failing to reach a stable orbit, though a second attempt succeeded in 1974.
These two historical tweaks set the stage for the first military encounter in space – an event that thankfully has never happened in the real world. Old rivalries between the nations play out alongside personal grudges and a rising uncertainty about who to trust. The fact that back-up is almost 400,000 kilometres away only adds to the tension. It also allows Hadfield to unleash his inner Tom Clancy to great effect.
As someone who has actually been to space, Hadfield makes his techno-thiller jargon read true, whether it is the details of managing air pressure changes during a rocket launch or the blow-by-blow mechanics of hand-to-hand combat in microgravity.
“The story is improbable but not implausible. Hadfield only includes events that could have actually happened”
Overall, the story comes across as improbable but not implausible. Hadfield is careful to only include events that could have actually happened. In this respect, there are echoes of the excellent Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, which also deals with an alt-history space conflict. While reading, I did wonder if Hadfield had been watching the series and taking notes – the book was written during lockdown in the covid-19 pandemic, so perhaps he had time on his hands.
Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised to see The Apollo Murders get its own turn on the screen, because it seems ripe for adaptation as a film or TV series.
If I have one quibble, it is with the way that Hadfield has written some of the dialogue between Soviet characters. Scenes with Russian speakers that take place in the USSR are written in plain English, but when they encounter people from the US, the writing switches to transliterated Cyrillic, which is then repeated in English, to grating effect.
Still, it is a minor point for what is otherwise an accomplished story from a first-time novelist. Hadfield leaves the door open for potential sequels in this universe, and I am keen to see what he does next.

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By Gege Li

The foraging of Hadza honey in Tanzania is under threat due to increasing demand for landKatiekk2/Getty Images
Book
Eating to Extinction
Dan SaladinoAdvertisement

OUR diets are more homogenous than at any other point in human history, says food journalist Dan Saladino. Particularly in the West, a revolution in farming methods since the second world war has led us to a point where much of what we eat comes from just a few established varieties of crops and animals, controlled by a handful of companies.
This has undoubtedly had many benefits for humanity, making food supplies more predictable, cheaper and more accessible, and helping to curb malnutrition. Yet in his new book, Eating to Extinction: The world’s rarest foods and why we need to save them, Saladino argues that it has also pushed thousands of little-known foods, many with beneficial characteristics or rich historical and cultural significance, to the brink of extinction.
“The human diet has undergone more change in the last 150 years (roughly six generations) than in the previous one million years (around 40,000 generations),” he writes. This is worrisome, because restricting ourselves to such a narrow range of varieties diminishes the genetic variation that might protect crops and livestock from disease.
It also narrows the diversity of our gut microbiome, which is vital for our health and well-being, and risks the loss of entire culinary traditions forever. As Saladino puts it, “where nature creates diversity, the food system crushes it”.
Through a narrative that weaves science and history with stories spanning every corner of the globe, Saladino makes an urgent call to protect the world’s rare foods. The alternative, he warns, is a future where we lose our grip on nature and the vital services it provides, perhaps permanently.
The book is split into 10 parts, each focusing on a different category: wild foods (hunted or foraged); cereals; vegetables; meat; fish and seafood; fruit; cheese; alcohol; stimulants (tea and coffee) and sweet foods. In every chapter, Saladino highlights a few ingredients and traces their origins, meeting the people who are championing food biodiversity. Often, these individuals represent the last line of defence between a food and its extinction.
Saladino covers so much ground that it is hard to touch on even a fraction of the foods he explores. Just one example of a rare food with a remarkable story to tell is Hadza honey, foraged by some of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies – the Hadza people of Tanzania.
Through a relationship forged over millennia, the Hadza have learned to work together with honeyguide birds so both can reap the rewards of the nutritious honey found high in baobab trees.
But this special dynamic is under threat: the rising demand for land for crops and livestock is spilling into Hadza territory, putting their livelihoods at risk and depleting the supply of honey and other wild foods on which they depend. Saladino makes the impact of these potential losses clear, often rounding off a chapter with a moving story that underscores how tragic it would be if these foods ceased to exist.
Packed full of knowledge about a host of ingredients that you probably didn’t even know existed, Eating to Extinction captures the urgency (and cost) of heading towards a future that is less nutritionally diverse.
“We cannot afford to carry on growing crops and producing food in ways that are so violently in conflict with nature; we can’t continue to beat the planet into submission, to control, dominate and all too often destroy ecosystems,” Saladino concludes. “The endangered foods in this book helped make us who we are; they could be foods that show us who we become.”

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By Simon Ings

National Library of Scotland
Film
Living Proof: A climate story Emily Munro
Online nowAdvertisement

An era-defining investigation of how growth occurs in nature and society, from tiny organisms to empires and civilisations, exploring the pitfalls of the drive to go big.
MOST environmental documentaries concentrate on the environment. Most films about climate change focus on people tackling the crisis. Living Proof, assembled and edited by Emily Munro, a curator of the moving image at the National Library of Scotland, is different.
It is a film about working people and their employers, about people whose day-to-day actions have contributed to Scotland’s industrialisation, its export of materials and methods (particularly in the field of offshore oil and gas) and the associated environmental impact.
Collated from an array of public information films and promotional videos from the 1940s onwards, and set to a contemporary soundtrack, Living Proof is an archival history of what Scotland has told itself about itself. It also explores the local and global repercussions of those stories, ambitions and visions.
Munro is in thrall to the changing Scottish industrial landscape, from its herring fisheries to its dams, from its slums and derelict mine-heads to the high modernism of its motorways and strip malls.
Living Proof is also – and this is more important – a film that respects its subjects’ changing aspirations. It tells the story of a nation that is trying to do right by its people.
It will come as no surprise, as Glasgow prepares to host the COP26 global climate conference, to hear that the consequences of those efforts haven’t been uniformly good. Powered by offshore oil and gas, and a redundancy-haunted grave for a dozen heavy industries, from coal mining and shipbuilding to steel manufacture, Scotland has a somewhat chequered environmental history.
“Much harm has been done to the planet in the name of doing what is best for the people”
As Munro’s film shows, however, the environment has always been a central plank of arguments both for and against industrial development in Scotland. The idea that people in Scotland (and elsewhere) have only now considered the environment is nonsense.
Only towards the end of Munro’s film do we meet protesters of any kind, deploring the construction in 1980 of a nuclear power plant at Torness, about 50 kilometres east of Edinburgh. Munro is less interested in the protest itself than in one impassioned speech that completes the argument begun in the first reel (via a public information film from the mid-1940s): that much harm has been done to the planet in the name of what is best for the people who depend on it, both as a home and a source of income.
This, indeed, is where we began: with a vision of a nation that, if it cannot support its own people, will go to rack and ruin, with (to quote that 1943 information film) “only the old people and a few children left in the glen”.
Living Proof critiques an economic system that, whatever its promises, cannot help but denude the planet of its resources, often at the expense of its people. It is all the more powerful for being articulated through real things: schools and pharmaceuticals, earth movers and oil rigs, washing machines and gas boilers.
Reasonable aspirations have done unreasonable harm to the planet. That is the real crisis elucidated by Living Proof. It is a point too easily lost in all the shouting. And it has rarely been made so well.
Simon also recommends…
Film
Bodysong
Simon Pummell
This BAFTA award-winning documentary about the human condition is woven from a dizzying array of archive resources.
Book
Growth
Vaclav Smil

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By Krista Charles

Alto Paraná Atlantic forests, BrazilLuiz Alves/EyeEm/Getty Images
The Tupi people, who originated in what is now Brazil, probably spread out from this ancestral location following climatic change.
The language they speak, also called Tupi, is one of the most widespread language families among the Indigenous peoples of South America, and emerged about 5000 years ago in the south-west Amazon.
Jonas Gregorio de Souza at the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and his colleagues explored just how it came to be so widespread by simulating different scenarios for human expansion in South … More

By Michael Marshall

The lake inside the collapsed caldera of Corvo Island in the AzoresSantiago Giralt
One of history’s greatest journeys has been uncovered. People arrived on the islands of the Azores, in the central Atlantic, about 700 years earlier than thought.
“We can clearly identify evidence of early human impact on the islands before the official colonisation by the Portuguese,” says Pedro Raposeiro at the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources in Ponta Delgada on São Miguel Island in the Azores.
It isn’t certain who the first colonists were, but there is evidence that it was … More

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

A letter from Marie Antoinette to Axel von Fersen, dated 4 January 1792, that has been partially redactedCRC
During the throes of the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette expressed her love for Swedish count Axel von Fersen through words that are finally readable 230 years later.
Modern scanning technology has successfully distinguished the ill-fated French queen’s ink from that of von Fersen, who scribbled over her text in what was probably an effort to protect his close friend and probable lover, says Anne Michelin at Sorbonne University in Paris.
She and her colleagues recently investigated 15 letters exchanged between Antoinette and von Fersen from 1791 to 1792 at the request of the French National Archives. While the majority of each letter was readable, certain words or sections had been hidden under heavily penned loops and random letters – Js, Ls, and Ts mostly – intended to censor the document. Forensic units of the French National Police made an unsuccessful attempt to uncover the hidden words in the 1990s, but the technology of the time was lacking, says Michelin.Advertisement
This year, Michelin’s team used X-ray fluorescence scanning to hone in on the compositions of metallic elements like copper, iron and zinc in the letters’ ink. Because the various inks used in the letters contained different ratios of these elements, the researchers were able to customise their scanning techniques to decipher original words buried under the layers of looping ink – sometimes needing to adjust their methods even for a single word, which could take several hours to scan.

Their analyses also resolved the mystery of who had censored the letters. By comparing the compositions of the ink used for scribbling out words and that used for von Forsen’s own writing, the researchers confirmed that von Fersen himself had done the redacting.
“There were probably political reasons for keeping the letters,” says Michelin, adding that they might have been intended to present a more favourable public image of the queen, who was ultimately beheaded by guillotine in 1793. “But von Fersen could have just been very attached to these letters, as well.”
Marie Antoinette wrote to von Fersen at lengths about political concerns of the time, including how the royal family was coping with the revolution, says Michelin. Her censored writing, however, featured more romantic vocabulary – terms like “beloved” and “adore” and intimate phrases like “No, not without you” and “you, whom I love and will continue to love until my…”.
Extramarital relationships were commonplace throughout the history of French royalty, so a romance between Marie Antoinette and von Fersen wouldn’t be surprising, says Michelin. Even so, the newly discovered words don’t confirm that they were lovers.
“Correspondence is always just one part of the whole story,” she says. “We write, but we don’t necessarily write what we think. And what we write can be exacerbated by dramatic situations, like a revolution. The queen was no longer free to move around, so of course that would exacerbate her emotions. You can really feel that in her writing.”
Unfortunately, the researchers’ scanning techniques still weren’t advanced enough to discriminate the buried words in seven of the letters, which remain a mystery, says Michelin.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg4266

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Three decades spent working as a psychotherapist with the most violent offenders has convinced Gwen Adshead that they aren’t the monsters we portray them as

Humans

29 September 2021

By Rowan Hooper

Jennie Edwards
HOW do people come to commit violent and life-threatening acts? Some think such people are innately bad, calling them “monsters” or “evil”. It is a view that William Shakespeare encapsulated in The Tempest when Prospero says of Caliban that he is “a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick”. But Gwen Adshead doesn’t accept that view. She has spent her career working as a psychotherapist with offenders in prisons and secure psychiatric hospitals, including Broadmoor Hospital, where some of the UK’s most notorious criminals are detained. Rather than seeing violent offenders as being innately evil, she thinks of her patients as survivors … More