Humans

By George Bass

HOW did humans progress from measuring time with stone solstice markers to a smart watch on which it is also possible to read this review?
In A Brief History of Timekeeping, Chad Orzel, physicist and author of bestselling book How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, turns his enthusiasm for time travel to something more tangible: how humans through the ages have measured the passage of time.
It may seem like being ruled by the clock is a relatively recent phenomenon, but Orzel argues that it has been “a major concern in essentially every era and location we find evidence of human activity”.
Thanks to a 1960s excavation of a site in east Ireland, for example, we know that the 5200-year-old tomb Newgrange was built by people with enough astronomical knowledge to create an opening that focuses a shaft of light onto the back of the chamber at sunrise on the winter solstice.
Knowledge of the movement of stars remains important today in our understanding of time, says Orzel. It explains, for instance, why religious holidays change dates from year to year. Yet the calendar is also a social construct, representing a delicate balancing act between stellar movement, bureaucracy, ritual and religion. The overnight jump from Wednesday 2 September to Thursday 14 September when Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752 is a case in point.
Orzel’s enthusiasm for the past is balanced by his disdain for modern misconceptions around time. He admonishes the flat-Earth conspiracy theory that has been promoted by celebrities like basketball player Kyrie Irving, and the way it disrupts geography and astronomy lessons in schools.
He also laments how the passing aeons often only become of interest to the public when they have something dramatic to say, such as the widely shared Mayan prophecy that the world would end on 21 December 2012. This was based on a fundamental misreading of the Mayan calendar system, says Orzel, who concedes that at least it made people more aware of the Mayans’ pioneering base-20 numerical system.
Throughout the book, Orzel scoots backwards and forwards in time, treating us to illustrations of spectacular forgotten timepieces. He explains how Athenian water clocks were used to limit speaking time in law courts, how a 12th-century Chinese water tower designed by Su Song became the basis for the modern mechanical clock, using a system of scoops, bronze spheres, counterweights and – crucially – a numbered face. Rod-based verge-and-foliot clocks followed in its wake, and Orzel details how these gave way to the pendulum, which reduced the number of missed ticks per day from several hours’ worth to just minutes.
The author’s enthusiasm doesn’t wane as he moves into the digital era, explaining how quartz-based wristwatches “democratised” time and serve as temporal “tuning forks” for the masses, before exploring how many of our modern devices sync up with caesium atomic clocks for the latest word in punctuality.
He also ponders how tomorrow’s quantum computers may prompt physicists to argue for the decimalisation of time. This has been attempted before, most recently by 19th-century French polymath Jules Henri Poincaré, who argued for splitting the day into 100 minutes made up of 100 seconds. This would be confusing for a generation or so, but as Orzel’s book makes clear, time, and its measurement, stands still for no one.

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Reiner Bajo/Lionsgate
Watch
Moonfall sees director Roland Emmerich try to top his other disaster films, such as The Day After Tomorrow and Independence Day, by knocking the moon out of orbit and crashing it into Earth. In cinemas from 4 February.

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The Man Who Tasted Words and other unusually gifted or affected people are the subject of neurologist Guy Leschziner’s journey through our senses, setting out how we use them to understand the complexities of the world around us.Advertisement
Rolex/Ambroise Tézenas
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Thao Nguyen Phan has combined videos, silk paintings and mixed media to explore the history, industry and contested future of Vietnam’s Mekong river. The exhibition runs at Tate St Ives, UK, from 5 February.

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A partial skull from China represents the earliest human with a “modern” brain size. It could represent an unknown group of ancient humans, or perhaps one of the enigmatic Denisovans

Humans

26 January 2022

By Michael Marshall
Fragments of a large ancient human skull known as Xujiayao 6Xiu-Jie Wu,Christopher J.Bae, Martin Friess, Song Xing, Sheela Athreya, Wu Liu
An ancient human that lived in China at least 160,000 years ago had an unusually large brain for the time – comparable to the brain size of people alive today. The find is more evidence that hominin evolution went in many different directions, rather than taking a straight line from small brains to large ones.
It is also possible that the skull belonged to a mysterious kind of hominin called a Denisovan. Very few Denisovan bones are known, so … More

By Elle Hunt

Kirsten and her close friend August stick together to surviveHBO Max/Warner Media
TV
Station Eleven
Created by Patrick SomervilleAdvertisement

EARLY in the covid-19 pandemic, as people struggled to make sense of the unfolding global crisis, many turned to stories almost as often as the latest news and science.
In January 2020, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion entered the top 10 of the UK iTunes movie rental charts nearly a decade after its release. And much to the bemusement of its author, Emily St John Mandel, the 2014 dystopian novel Station Eleven – in which the “Georgia flu” kills most of the world’s population – suddenly gained a new audience. “I don’t know who in their right mind would want to read Station Eleven during a pandemic,” Mandel said at the time.
The book has since been adapted into a 10-part miniseries by screenwriter Patrick Somerville, who also wrote for The Leftovers, another critically acclaimed drama about the collapse of civilisation. His adaptation of Station Eleven was released to rave reviews in the US and Australia.
Station Eleven follows Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis), first as a child actor (Matilda Lawler) orphaned by the Georgia flu in present-day Chicago and then 20 years in the future, where she makes a living as a roving performer in a theatre troupe called the Travelling Symphony. She and her friends tour the settlements of the Great Lakes performing music and Shakespeare plays to survivors, lifting their spirits and sharing their motto (originally from Star Trek: Voyager): “Survival is insufficient”.
These two timelines, year zero and year 20, blur and merge with Kirsten’s fears for the future and recollections of her traumatic past, both of which intrude on her present. In particular, her thoughts return to Jeevan (Himesh Patel) and his brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), who took her in during the first weeks of the pandemic. Kirsten also repeatedly returns to a graphic novel, called Station Eleven, which she clung to as a child, and which takes on totemic importance in the post-pandemic world.
“The episodes in year zero show a world unsettlingly like 2020, with cities emptied and aircraft grounded”
Most of the characters we meet have some connection to the graphic novel and, in the series, its spaceman protagonist Doctor Eleven takes on a comforting presence, watching over Kirsten and her friends like a sort of benevolent god. The connections between characters are gradually revealed as the series slides back and forth in time. Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler) is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel, while her ex-husband Arthur (Gael García Bernal) is a movie star who was acting alongside young Kirsten in King Lear in the “before”. He dies on stage from Georgia flu.
Though the pandemic of the TV show is a near-extinction event, the episodes set in year zero show a world unsettlingly like 2020, with supermarket shelves stripped bare, cities emptied and aircraft grounded. It also captures the lockdown surge in creativity as Kirsten, Jeevan and Frank find purpose and unity in making music and plays as the end of the world unfolds around them.
By year 20, the parallels with our covid-19 pandemic are minimal. There is even a generation of “post-pans”: 20-somethings who never saw the world as we know it and who press Kirsten for stories of smartphones and Uber as if they were fairy tales. They weren’t that great, she reassures them.
Not everyone is at peace in the post-pandemic world, as Kirsten and her friends discover with often devastating results. However, without shying away from confronting the turmoil and trauma of massive societal change, Station Eleven paints a surprisingly uplifting picture of the future, showing how civilisation might be rebuilt with art and community at its centre. It is a comforting vision as we ease into year three of living with covid-19.
Mandel recently said she felt “profoundly uncomfortable” that her novel dealing with a fictional pandemic was being boosted by a real-world life-or-death one. But as these uncertain times continue, Station Eleven‘s vision of the future – where humanity endures, and beauty is cherished – is a reassuring one to share in.

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Josie Ford
Guess the planet
Feedback has always been mildly sceptical of, not to say narked by, requests to click on pictures of bicycles and fire hydrants to prove we aren’t a robot. True, no one has ever seen an algorithm riding a bicycle, but when the shape-shifting terminator bots finally arrive, they will probably take on innocent forms such as fire hydrants. It might take one to know one.
At least they won’t be able to get social security benefits in Spain. Genís Cardona from Solsona, Catalonia, reports accessing an official Spanish government portal for tax and welfare services and being requested to answer a quiz question: “Which of the following is a planet? A. Banana; B. Pluto; C. Scissors; D. Bee”.
A decade and a half on, Pluto’s controversial demotion from planethood clearly still rankles in some quarters. Like Genís, we appreciate the spirit of this open defiance of the International Astronomical Union’s edicts. Come to think of it, though, does anyone know which side the robots are on?Advertisement
Flipping bird
Our mention of “New Zealand’s most annoying tūī” (1 January) prompts Matthew Arozian to write from Baltimore, Maryland, with the heartfelt insight that the Carolina wren – Thryothorus ludovicianus, we savour on our tongue – weighs approximately 18 to 22 grams yet produces calls that can reach 110 decibels.
He asks us to imagine the cacophonous circus of a brood being taught to fly just outside his home-office window. We close our eyes, rapidly open them again and sympathise. Mind you, the transcendent benefits for our well-being of being within and bonded to nature are well known, Matthew. Call it home delivery.
Polly the pickled parrot
Staying with our feathered frenemies, our Australasia correspondent Alice Klein provides an addendum to our item last week about alcoholic overindulgence in the animal kingdom with the story of Broome Veterinary Hospital in Kimberley, Australia, which ABC News reported in December was treating a spate of red-winged parrots apparently boozed up on fermenting mangoes.
As Michael Considine, a biologist at the University of Western Australia, pointed out, volatile compounds released by the fermentation of fallen mangoes attract the birds, encouraging them to propagate the plant’s seeds – even if, by whumping into windows, falling over and generally sitting around dazed and vulnerable to predators, the parrots’ own chances of survival aren’t exactly enhanced.
Evolution in the raw, and a reminder to the rest of us not to drink and fly.
Can’t find the words
The Guardian reports rage and distress at copycat app versions of the online word game Wordle that assault the original’s innocent ethos of freedom from both charge and data hoovering. For those who haven’t yet fallen down this rabbit hole, Wordle confronts its players with a blank series of five letters to fill in, giving them six attempts to arrive at the actual five-letter word that the computer was thinking of, once told whether their letters appear in that word.
As Fields medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers has highlighted, this gamifies entropy in an information theory sense, as the information required to specify a given object. This makes it Solid Science, but Feedback has now fallen down the rabbit hole at the bottom of the rabbit hole with Sweardle, a game that does the same thing with a more limited set of four-letter words, and Letterle, which gives a maximum of 26 goes to guess a single letter. We know all of this is contributing to the heat death of the universe, but we can’t stop now.
Tin lid on it
Of which, many thanks to those of you who wrote in varying degrees of delight and distress over our fiendishly difficult holiday word search featuring the names of all the known fundamental particles, the chemical elements and the amino acids that make up life’s proteins (18/25 December 2021, p 43). We are treating it as a slow-burning abvent calendar – a term we just invented, and we expect letters about – finding one a day as Christmas recedes.
For those of you whose year is off to an even slower start, we forward Bob Ladd’s query, which we take as expressing both delight and distress, asking how you might design the same word search with no accidental instances of TIN – apart from those required in TIN and ASTATINE, say. That sounds like a case for the entropy theory of information to us. And in response to Mike Clark’s query, we don’t know whether it is SULPHUR or SULFUR yet, either.
Whale units
Still in holiday mode, Harry Lagoussis writes from Athens concerning our statement that a lump of ambergris, or ancient whale poo, the size of a human head “could fetch you £50,000 or more” (18/25 December 2021, p 56).
“Does that make the ‘shithead’ the standard unit of ambergris volume? And, perhaps more importantly, if 1 shithead = £50,000, does that justify the use of the selfsame unit when discussing the global financial system, celebrity net worth etc.?” he asks. At a punt, it’s no and no, but we will ask our ever-vigilant subeditors. And with that, we tiptoe out of the room.
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Our life satisfaction is shaped by many things including our genes and relative wealth, but there is now good evidence that you can boost your basic happiness with these key psychological strategies

Humans

19 January 2022

By David Robson
Tara Moore/Getty Images; Matt Dartford
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY?
You probably know the type: those Pollyannas who seem to have a relentlessly sunny disposition. Are they simply born happy? Is it the product of their environment? Or does it come from their life decisions?
If you are familiar with genetics research, you will have guessed that it is a combination of all three. A 2018 study of 1516 Norwegian twins suggests that around 30 per cent of the variance in people’s life satisfaction is inherited. Much of this seems to be related to personality traits, such as neuroticism, which can leave people more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, and extraversion, which encourages more gregarious behaviour. Both traits are known to be influenced by a range of genes.
To put this in context, the heritability of IQ is thought to hover around 80 per cent, so environmental factors clearly play a role in our happiness. These include our physical health, the size and strength of our social network, job opportunities and income. The effect of income, in particular, is nuanced: it seems that the absolute value of our salary matters less than whether we feel richer than those around us, which may explain why the level of inequality predicts happiness better than GDP.
Interestingly, many important life choices have only a fleeting influence on our happiness. Consider marriage. A 2019 study found that, on average, life satisfaction does rise after the wedding, but the feeling of married bliss tends to fade over middle age. Needless to say, this depends on the quality of the relationship: marriage’s impact on well-being is about twice as large … More

By Gege Li

An artist’s impression of how Earth’s first multicellular animals looked on the sea floorMark Garlick/Science Photo Library
Book
Otherlands: A world in the making
Thomas HallidayAdvertisement

OUR planet has existed for some 4.5 billion years In that time, it has undergone extraordinary changes, with landscapes and life forms that would seem almost alien to us today. Yet clues to their existence and fate can be found buried deep within Earth’s layers.
Otherlands by palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday provides a unique portrait of these strange and remarkable environments and the species that inhabited them. Through rich, detailed descriptions of ancient organisms and geological processes that draw on the fossil record and his own imagination, Halliday transports us back through deep time, from the relatively recent – tens of thousands of years ago – to when complex life first emerged in the Ediacaran period hundreds of millions of years ago.
Each chapter spans a geological time period, focusing on a specific part of the world that stands out either for the quality of the fossil evidence or a notable event.
Halliday is careful to not only give attention to charismatic animals like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths, but also to plants, land masses and oceans, using the latest research to back up his conclusions.
In one chapter, we discover that giant penguins flourished in the then-rainforests of Antarctica during the Eocene. In another, how Jurassic seas in what is now Germany contained vast tropical reefs built by glass sponges that looked like “frozen lace”, as marine pterosaurs soared in the skies overhead. We also see how, during the Devonian period, Scotland was home to metres-high fungi that would have resembled “half-melted grey snowmen”.
As well as painting an intricate picture of the worlds that once existed, Halliday also highlights the fleeting existence of humanity. Our ancestors make the briefest splash onto the scene in the Pliocene around 4 million years ago, when early hominins appeared in the fossil record in what is now Kanapoi in Kenya.
If Earth’s history were squeezed into a single day, written human history would make up the last 2 thousandths of a second, Halliday points out. And yet “our species has an influence unlike almost any other biological force”. It is also far more destructive than the prominent natural disasters of the past.
Here, the book carries a clear message: that we must do something about the urgent climate situation we find ourselves in and the coming human-induced mass extinction. This, he argues, warrants a meticulous look back through Earth’s palaeontological record to understand how things might turn out in the future, and how we might take control of them.
This message is, by now, one we are used to hearing. For me, the most distinctive feature of the book is the way that Halliday chooses to describe the past. He encourages us to treat his writings like “a naturalist’s travel book, albeit one of lands distant in time rather than space”. This provides a sense of adventure and exploration where we see “short willows write wordless calligraphy in the wind” 20,000 years ago, or walk across “centuries-old mattresses of conifer needles” 41 million years ago.
It is refreshing to come across a book on palaeontology and geology that doesn’t just state what we know and why. Instead, Halliday uses scientific information to provide insights into worlds long gone. He is appropriately lavish in his depiction of the variety and resilience of life, without compromising on scientific accuracy.
To read Otherlands is to marvel not only at these unfamiliar lands and creatures, but also that we have the science to bring them to life in such vivid detail.

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The Weaponisation of Everything explores how old-style warfare has been replaced by disinformation, espionage, crime and subversion. According to security expert Mark Galeotti, this may turn out to be a good thing.

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The Orbital Children is a dizzying sci-fi anime series set in a future where AI has given people the freedom to travel through space. When a group of children get stranded on a space station they must fight to survive. On Netflix from 28 January.
Bassam Al-Sabah, I AM ERROR, 2021. Video HD, 28 min. Film still. Commissioned by Gasworks
Visit
I Am Error at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, UK, sees artist Bassam Al-Sabah weave together video, painting and sculpture to explore how masculinity is represented in computer games. From 30 January.

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