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

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

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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
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To explain the paradox of a smart species that embraces fake news, conspiracy theories and paranormal woo, we need to rethink rationality, says psychologist Steven Pinker

Humans

8 December 2021

By Graham Lawton
Jennie Edwards
HUMANITY faces some huge challenges, from the coronavirus pandemic and climate change to fundamentalism, inequality, racism and war. Now, more than ever, we need to think clearly to come up with solutions. But instead, conspiracy theories abound, fake news is in vogue and belief in the paranormal is as strong as ever. It seems that we are suffering from a collective failure of rationality.
Steven Pinker doesn’t buy into this disheartening conclusion. In his new book, Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters, the Harvard University psychologist challenges the orthodoxy that sees Homo sapiens … More