Humans

By Michael Marshall

Human brains have been shaped by DNA that evolves quicklycomotion_design/Getty Images
Many of the fastest-evolving sections of the human genome are involved in brain development. These rapidly changing segments of DNA may have played key roles in the evolution of the human brain and in our cognitive abilities.
Chris Walsh at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts and his colleagues studied sections of the human genome dubbed “human accelerated regions” (HARs). These stretches of DNA are virtually identical in many other mammals that have been studied, suggesting they have important functions – but they differ in humans, implying our evolution has changed them.
Previous studies have identified 3171 possible HARs, but Walsh says it is unlikely that they are all important. “Probably hundreds of them are, but probably not thousands,” he says. His team set out to identify HARs that have played important roles in the evolution of our brains.Advertisement
The researchers placed copies of each HAR, as well as their chimpanzee equivalents, into developing brain cells from mice and humans. In each cell line, they tracked how much each gene in the genome was expressed. This allowed them to determine whether each HAR enhanced the activity of genes, compared with the equivalent sequence from a chimp.

Using this and other methods, the team identified 210 HARs that significantly enhanced gene activity in the neural cells. These HARs probably affect human brain development.
The researchers then zeroed in on a gene called PPP1R17, which is expressed in some of the cells of the developing brain and regulated by several HARs, so it therefore behaves differently in humans than in other mammals. They compared the expression of PPP1R17 in the developing brains of mice, ferrets, rhesus macaques and humans. In the macaques and humans, the gene was expressed in the cerebral cortex, but it wasn’t in the mice and ferrets.
“This gives an example of how dynamic these enhancers are over the course of evolution,” says Walsh.
It isn’t clear why PPP1R17 came to be activated differently in humans, but it may be related to our unusually large brains. Big brains need lots of cells, each of which is likely to contain harmful mutations that need to be fixed. These repairs take time, and PPP1R17 is known to make cells take longer to grow and divide.
Journal reference: Neuron, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2021.08.005
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By Abigail Beall

NASA
Film
The Wonderful: Stories from the space station
Clare Lewins UniversalAdvertisement
OVER 20 years ago, five space agencies representing 15 countries came together to build one of the most ambitious engineering projects the world had ever seen. It took more than 30 missions, with parts manufactured thousands of kilometres apart and assembled by spacewalkers orbiting at 28,000 kilometres per hour, before the International Space Station (ISS) was completed in November 2000.
But The Wonderful – a documentary celebrating the ISS – isn’t an engineering story. It is the story of the people who have made the space station their home in the decades since it was first occupied, and the story of their loved ones back on Earth. Since it was first occupied, there has never been a day when there wasn’t someone living on the ISS.
From the crew who assembled the space station to its most recent inhabitants, this documentary explores the lives of those who have been involved in the ISS since the beginning. Punctuated with music and recordings of Earth from space, the night sky or training facilities, The Wonderful tells the story of the ISS through those who have been most involved with it.
Many of those interviewed dreamed of going into space since childhood, when looking at the night sky sparked their imagination, but it wasn’t always plain sailing. When Ginger Kerrick’s dreams of becoming an astronaut were dashed after NASA discovered she had kidney stones, she instead trained astronauts to prepare for their missions and supported the first crew to fly on the space station – she was there with them until take-off. Astronaut Peggy Whitson spent 10 years applying to become an astronaut until she was finally selected. She went on to spend 665 days in space in her career – more than any other NASA astronaut.
Some didn’t share this childhood dream. Sergey Volkov describes how growing up with his father, the cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov, made him think going into space was “heroic and difficult”. Many years later, Aleksandr was surprised to learn of his son joining the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, through reading the case files of those selected for the physical assessment.
“In all the years since it launched, there has never been a day when there wasn’t someone living on the ISS”
Pictures and videos can help us understand what it is like to be in space, but nothing quite encapsulates the full experience like hearing it first-hand. In The Wonderful, it is the added details that bring life on the ISS to life. Scott Kelly remarks on the vibrant colours he could see when his vision wasn’t altered by the air, Tim Peake describes the sensation of silence slowly creeping up on him when he made his way into the vacuum of space for his spacewalk, and Samantha Cristoforetti describes seeing the space station up close for the first time.
Behind every astronaut living 400 kilometres above Earth’s surface, there are people on the ground missing them. The Wonderful gives us a glimpse of what it is like when your loved ones are floating above your head. NASA astronaut Cady Coleman’s husband, Josh Simpson, describes hearing from his wife every night, before going outside with their son Jamey to look up and see the ISS whizzing by overhead.
While everyone’s experience of space is different, something that seems to bring those who have been there together is a realisation of how fragile the planet is. A few people in the film mention their surprise at the size of the atmosphere compared with the planet, which Kelly describes as like a contact lens on someone’s eye.
While climate change isn’t explicitly mentioned, it is difficult not to make a comparison between the feat of science and engineering being celebrated in The Wonderful and the challenge facing Earth today. But the story of success that is the space station leaves the viewer with hope that, when working together, humans can do great things.

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By Simon Ings

MRI scans and other tools allow researchers to see our neurological responses to artJOHNNY GREIG/Getty Images
Wonderworks: Literary invention and the science of storiesAngus FletcherSwift Press
NEUROLOGICAL takes on art are fertile ground for a book. In 1999, neurobiologist Semir Zeki published Inner Vision, which explained how different schools of art affect us neurologically – put crudely, Rembrandt tickles one corner of the brain, Mondrian another. Eight years later, Oliver Sacks contributed to an already crowded music psychology shelf with Musicophilia, a collection of true tales in which neurological injuries and diseases are successfully treated with music.Advertisement
Angus Fletcher believes the time has come for literature to get the neurological treatment too. Over the past decade, researchers have used pulse monitors, eye-trackers, brain scanners and other gadgets to look inside our heads as we consume novels, poems, films and comic books. Now these efforts are starting to bear fruit, as he sets out in Wonderworks.
Fletcher’s own experimental work includes a 2016 study into the psychological effects of “free indirect discourse”, a form of narrative that draws attention away from the narrator, instead slipping in and out of characters’ experiences and consciousness. Five literary texts that deal with revenge, including Homer’s Odyssey and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, were presented in an adapted form to volunteer readers, sometimes as “straight“ stories and at other times written in free indirect discourse. The study found that readers of the latter tales not only offered more empathic responses to a follow-up questionnaire, they also showed a greater understanding of behaviours and moral choices they didn’t identify with.
The claim that reading novels improves theory of mind – the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes – has been circulating since the mid-2000s, and has been especially popularised by a team of psychologists at the University of Toronto headed by Keith Oatley. When we are very young, we assume that everyone thinks and feels as we do, but somewhere around our fourth birthday, most of us begin to realise that other people’s heads have their own distinct contents.
Our theory of mind develops as we imaginatively simulate other people’s thoughts. Since stories can present characters’ interiority, might this aid us as we practise and improve our real-life theory-of-mind skills? Research by Oatley and his colleagues has pointed in this direction. Other studies suggest that fiction readers are more social, that romance fiction can make us more empathetic and that fiction can increase the empathy of low-empathy individuals.
Defining technology as “any human-made thing that helps to solve a problem”, Fletcher now jumps several stages further, hypothesising that a story is a suite of narrative-emotional technologies that have helped our ancestors cope with the psychological challenges posed by human biology.
Wonderworks, then, is Fletcher’s scientific history of literature – each of its 25 chapters identifies a narrative “tool” that triggers a traceable, evidenced neurological outcome. Every tool comes with a goofy label: here you will encounter Butterfly Immersers (which push our sense of socially acceptable behaviour, calming the activity of the brain’s medial frontal gyrus) and Stress Transformers (which play on the shared neurological origins of horror and humour).
The book is an intelligent, engaged and erudite attempt to neurologically tackle not just some abstract and simplified “story”, but some of the world’s greatest narratives, from the Iliad to Dream of the Red Chamber, from Disney’s Up to the novels of Elena Ferrante. It speaks to the inner reader in us all, as well as to the inner neurologist.

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In an era of social media cancelling, our nasty side has never been more prominent. But the latest research suggests that, when wielded right, petty ill will can be a force for good

Humans

1 September 2021

By Simon McCarthy-Jones

Ruby Fresson
A MAN buys a house next door to his ex-wife and installs a 4-metre bronze statue of a hand, middle finger raised, facing her window. A prominent investor buys a company so he can fire the management he dislikes, even though he stands to lose money. People take their time at the checkout to annoy the next customer, buy gnomes for their garden to antagonise a neighbour and slow down to annoy tailgaters, even though it puts everyone in danger.
Examples of spiteful behaviour, harming another at some cost to yourself, aren’t hard to find. As a psychological game where no one wins, spite is puzzling: we may wonder why it wasn’t weeded out by evolution long ago. Instead, in a competitive era of identity politics, all too often played out on social media, it seems more prevalent than ever.
Yet, compared with other social behaviours like selfishness, cooperation and altruism, there has been relatively little psychological research into why we do it. With potentially far-reaching consequences for both political stability and individual mental health, it has never been more important to understand this dark side of human behaviour.
For many years, most of the research into spite came from the field of behavioural economics: the study of how human decision-making differs from what you would expect from a purely rational point of view. Classical economists dreamed up the concept of Homo economicus, a person who only ever acts to maximise their own rewards. If offered a choice between something and nothing, Homo economicus would always take what is on offer.
In experiments, however, this isn’t how everyone behaves. In … More

By Michael Marshall

The Actual Star culminates in Actun Tunichil Muknal in Belizemauritius images GmbH/Alamy
The Actual Star: A novel
Monica Byrne
Harper VoyagerAdvertisement

WITH her second novel, author Monica Byrne has pulled out all the stops. The Actual Star was eight years in the making. It has three storylines, separated by millennia: one is set 1000 years ago in a declining Mayan kingdom, one in 2012 and one in a distant future shaped by catastrophic climate change. The seemingly disparate stories are rapidly revealed to be linked.
When a book is this ambitious, either it is a thumping success or it falls on its face. Happily, The Actual Star is a stone-cold masterpiece. It is one of the most moving novels I have read and surely a contender for major awards.
The first thing that struck me was how immediately immersive the three stories are. The ancient Mayan storyline follows three young members of a royal family: Ajul, Ixul (the “x” is pronounced “sh”) and Ket. Byrne keeps the story tightly focused on their perspectives. She has a tricky tightrope to walk because the characters use human sacrifice to solidify their political power, and Ajul and Ixul have incestuous sex. Yet Byrne shows their motivations and makes them sympathetic, without unduly softening them.
“The Actual Star is a stone-cold masterpiece. It’s one of the most moving novels I have read”
The middle timeline follows a young woman named Leah from Minnesota, who travels to Belize on a journey of self-discovery: her late father was from there, but she never met him and is in search of her identity and heritage. Byrne finds great depth and nuance in this story, never falling into the trap of exoticising the Belizean culture. It helps that some chapters are told from the perspectives of two Belizean tour guides, Xander and Javier, so we get to see Leah through their eyes.
The futuristic sections follow Niloux deCayo, who finds herself labelled a heretic when she dares to challenge her society’s beliefs. Byrne’s version of the future is richly imagined. In response to devastating sea level rise and extreme weather, humanity has adopted a nomadic existence. Nobody is allowed to stay in the same place for more than a few days.
Acquiring possessions beyond what is absolutely necessary is condemned as “hoarding”: these future people look back on our consumer era with horror. Byrne imagines a swathe of new social rules, an entire political system based on decentralised technologies like blockchain and, crucially, a new religion.
It is in the religion that the three timelines link. Byrne’s futuristic theology is based on Mayan beliefs, specifically the idea of Xibalba: an underworld ruled by gods of death.
But this version of Xibalba is a place where people can finally perceive the world as it truly is, without the filters and concepts imposed by our sense organs and brains – to comprehend “the thing-in-itself”, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it. Or as Ixul thinks at one point: “The star we see is not the actual star.” In all three timelines, characters converge on the cave of Actun Tunichil Muknal in Belize where this transcendent perception may be possible.
If this all sounds like a lot, it is, but the book is perfectly paced: it is leisurely enough to let you get to know the people and grasp the heady concepts, but there is constant forward momentum and a steady crescendo. The climax is as dramatic as anyone could wish for, but for me the real joys of The Actual Star are the vivid characters and societies. It is a book that will resonate with me for a long time.

Michael also recommends…
Film
Nomadland
A more contemporary take on nomadic life, Chloé Zhao’s beautiful film follows Frances McDormand’s Fern around the US in search of work following the 2008 economic crisis.
TV
Loki
Disney+
The latest Marvel series is a riot of invention that fuses time travel, multiple universes and a cosmic bureaucracy – even if the finale is a bit of a let-down.

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By Michael Marshall

The Nefud desert in northern Saudi Arabia, which humans have inhabited during periods of increased rainfallCeri Shipton
Ancient humans repeatedly entered the Arabian peninsula from Africa during the past 400,000 years. A single archaeological site in Saudi Arabia holds evidence of five separate occupations, according to a new study.
A second study suggests that each out-of-Africa migration was made possible by a shift to a wetter climate, creating green corridors. It simulated changes in the region’s climate over the past 300,000 years, and found that there were several periods when conditions … More

By Gege Li

Getty Images/Cavan Images

Podcast
Inventive Podcast
Overtone ProductionsAdvertisement

PICTURE an engineer and you may well imagine a white, university-educated man in a hard hat with a roll of blueprints under his arm.
The Inventive Podcast aims to flip these conceptions by highlighting inspirational and influential engineers who don’t fit this constricted, outdated mould.
Host Trevor Cox, an acoustic engineer at the University of Salford, UK, chats with a different guest in each episode before asking a writer to come up with an original story inspired by those conversations. That makes the podcast itself an innovation of sorts, in that it marries fact and fiction to demonstrate there is far more to engineering than people might think.
It is a welcome addition considering the lack of diversity and uptake that still plagues engineering. In the UK, only 12 per cent of engineers are women, and 186,000 new engineers are needed each year until 2024 to make up for the country’s skills shortfall in the profession.
Reassuringly, the podcast’s first three episodes feature women, the first of whom is electronics engineer and activist Shrouk El-Attar. Part of her day job involves designing and developing technologies for women’s health, including silent breast pumps and a pelvic floor trainer. El-Attar also performs as a belly-dancing drag king by night to challenge societal conventions and raise money for the LGBTQ+ community.
As a woman and asylum seeker from Egypt, El-Attar knows first-hand how being denied opportunities, such as going to university, can cause engineering to suffer – not only by being less diverse, but also at the expense of innovation. “How many amazing, creative technologies are we missing out on today as a society because we’re telling these people with the amazing ideas that they don’t belong here?” she asks.
In response to El-Attar’s work and her account of being inspired into engineering by the “magic” people living inside her TV as a child, writer Tania Hershman incorporates poetry to create a thought-provoking story that reflects El-Attar’s life. It uses the idea of a human being as a circuit board and emphasises the importance of language.
In the second episode, Cox meets Roma Agrawal, a structural engineer who was part of the team that designed The Shard, one of London’s most iconic landmarks. Agrawal also wrote the book Built: The hidden stories behind our structures. She did so to encourage people to become engineers by showing that it is “so utterly an intrinsic part of humans and the way we’ve lived right from the beginning”, she tells Cox.
“ShroukEl-Attar also performs as a belly-dancing drag king by night to challenge societal conventions”
The accompanying story by C. M. Taylor draws on Agrawal’s self-confessed love for concrete (“I have been known to stroke concrete – I love feeling it!”), as a mysterious figure known as the Night Builder begins to secretly create colossal concrete structures in cities.
Cox’s third guest is aerospace engineer Sophie Robinson, who works on a type of drone-inspired aircraft called eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing), with the idea of developing widely accessible air taxis that cut road congestion and carbon emissions.
Robinson is also an avid swimmer, having once swam across the English Channel, a fact that is at the centre of novelist Tony White’s story about an engineer who grapples with the ethical dilemmas of her job while on a cold water swimming trip.
As you would expect from the experience of the personnel, the podcast is built on strong foundations. Cox asks perceptive questions that get to the heart of what it means to be an engineer, as well as helping to flesh out the details of the work itself, while each writer’s take on the interviews adds an interesting and different element to the show.
The guests’ enthusiasm is also infectious. “Being an engineer is my superpower,” replies El-Attar, when Cox asks her which superpower she would like. “I hope people see that and that it can be your superpower too.”

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Josie Ford
Solar system agronomy
Could we grow endangered plants on other planets? We pause and consider this question. No.
Still, since this query is the subject line of a PR email from an online flower-delivery service, handed to us by a colleague with a pair of tongs and a disparaging look, we find it worthy of further consideration. Even more so since we are promised conclusions reached “using research and working with a designer”.
“Today, nearly 40% of the world’s plants are endangered, according to a report from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,” we read. Sad, sad science fact. But never fear, once we have destroyed Earth’s ecosystems, a bright, green future exists elsewhere in the solar system, at least in the world of whirly-eyed PR.Advertisement
“As the soil on Mars has double the amount of iron than soil on planet earth, leafy green vegetables and microgreens would easily thrive there,” we learn. Dandelions, too, apparently – a species far from endangered on Feedback’s small patch of terra firma. “Hops vine [sic], trees, shrubs and poison ivy might be able to survive the challenging temperatures on this moon”, it opines of Jupiter’s satellite Europa, where days struggle to rise above -135°C and surface radiation levels are around 2000 times those on Earth. “One of the only things that can kill poison ivy is boiling water – so the cold and wet conditions on Europa seem to be the ideal environment for this plant.”
The outlook is even rosier on Titan, the Saturnian moon where water ice at around -180°C fulfils the function of bedrock, and great surface lakes are filled with liquid natural gas. “Titan’s surface is sculpted by methane and ethane, which only one other planet in the solar system has: Earth. Therefore, tobacco plants should grow on this moon too”, our correspondent concludes, non-sequentially.
“Please let me know if you have any questions”, the email ends. So, so many, including where we get some of the wacky Europa baccy too. Optimism is a fine, fine thing, but as far as the future of life on Earth is concerned, we fear the rationalist’s counterstatement applies: il faut cultiver notre jardin.
Bog standards
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”, as one of the usual suspects once wrote. Or we are all in the gutter, sending in responses to our recent item on peculiar toilet signage (31 July).
“Toilets and viewing area” was an unfortunate juxtaposition that confronted Richard Ellam at an Aberdeen Science Festival some years back, while Chris Evans relays that “A lay-by eatery near where I live (on the A59 between Skipton and Clitheroe) for some years displayed a sign reading ‘Sit-in or take-away toilet’” – neither of which seems particularly practicable or desirable.
Hazardous fore play
Our item on the newly introduced crocodile hazard at the Royal Port Moresby Golf Club in Papua New Guinea (14 August) reminds Stuart Reeves in Wake Forest, North Carolina, of playing at the Skukuza Golf Club in Kruger National Park in South Africa – a sentence that exhausts us even typing it.
Its “local rules” include such gems as “Burrowing animals – Rough/Fairway drop without penalty from holes made by burrowing animals and termites, NOT HOOF MARKS. Burrowing animals include warthogs, moles and termites”.
Other rules (“formal and informal”) that Stuart has encountered on his travels include “Give way to a herdsman and his cows crossing the fairway; free drop from a hippopotamus footprint; free drop about 3 club lengths if the ball lands in the coils of a snake (no need to be precise); if a monkey steals your ball it is a lost ball”. Strong stuff – and further congratulations on your self-confessed status as a “recovering golfer”.
Transcendental number
Mentions in Almost the last word (14 August) of “interesting numbers, numbers with their own Wiki page and the fine-structure constant (approximately 1/137) prompted me to recheck the Wiki page for 137″, writes Mike Sargent, displaying the talent for the tangent that we so admire among Feedback readers. “It has for several years now informed us that ‘Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics, died in a hospital room numbered 137, a coincidence that disturbed him’.”
“It is difficult to know which is more surprising, that Pauli’s consciousness transcended death, or that he then contrived to communicate his feelings on his demise to a Wiki page editor,” he continues. We don’t wish to sound too woo, but it is a fundamental tenet of quantum mechanics that information cannot be destroyed, and “Physics might create a backdoor to an afterlife – but don’t bank on it” is the headline of an article we see in our webspace starting from that basis. We would say that’s living proof, but that’s possibly not quite right.
Last laugh
Casting our all-seeing eye over our shoulder, we see that our neighbours and friends in Almost the last word (backwards readers: you’ll find it towards the front) are discussing how a photon “knows” to travel at the speed of light.
With the privilege of having the actual last word, we must give the obvious missing answer: because it is very bright.
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