Humans

By Swapna Krishna

In Star Trek: Lower Decks, we see what life is like for low-ranking members of Starfleet2021 CBS Interactive, Inc.
TV
Star Trek: Lower Decks
Amazon Prime Video

WHEN Star Trek: Lower Decks first premiered in the US last August, it presented a perspective we had rarely seen within the Star Trek universe. While we had traditionally focused on the “upstairs” bridge crew boldly going where no one had gone before, Lower Decks turned its sharp eye towards the “downstairs”: the workers responsible for the least glamorous tasks on the ship. That it was … More

John Kraus/Courtesy of Netflix
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Countdown: Inspiration4 mission to space follows the first all-civilian crew of a SpaceX Dragon. Their three days in orbit later this year will raise funds for a children’s research hospital. On Netflix from 6 September.

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Five Minds, a speculative thriller by Guy Morpuss, is set in a future where, to solve the planet’s population problem, human bodies play host to multiple minds. But what if you might be sharing a body with a murderer?

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What’s Eating the Universe? wonders physicist Paul Davies, as he … More

By Jacob Aron

Don’t break the Golden Rule otherwise statues will come after youDear Villagers
Game
The Forgotten City
Modern Storyteller Multiple consolesAdvertisement

IF YOU could live today again, would you do anything differently? This theme has been explored in everything from films like Edge of Tomorrow to pretty much every sci-fi TV show of the 1990s looking to produce an episode on the cheap, but time loops are rarer in video games.
At first, that might seem strange – unlike a film, a time loop running on a computer can be instantly reset, making them easy to produce – until you realise that the best examples of the genre (Groundhog Day, obviously) make heavy use of cuts and rely on the viewer to fill in the repetitive details. That is harder to do in a game, where players are responsible for all of the protagonist’s actions.
The Forgotten City has a neat solution to this problem, which I will get to in a moment. The game sees you thrown back 2000 years to an underground Roman settlement, where you must attempt to solve a mystery in order to free yourself from living the same day over and over. Only then can you return to your own time.
The titular city has one very simple law, the Golden Rule: if anyone commits a sin, everyone is punished. Exactly what counts as a sin is one of the themes explored in the game, as no one in the city is exactly sure. All they know is that if someone breaks this rule, the golden statues that are littered all over the place will come to life, attacking everyone they see and turning them into gold.
“By exploring the consequences of an all-seeing authority, the game critiques modern surveillance systems”
Thanks to the time loop, you are able to escape this fate – and more importantly, keep any items you have picked up, along with any knowledge of what has happened before.
This makes for some fun puzzles to solve. Some are simple – can’t get inside a locked door? Steal the key, reset the loop and let yourself in. Some are more complex, such as a woman who seems to have been poisoned, and is about to die, without anyone breaking the Golden Rule.
Thankfully, once you have solved a puzzle, you don’t have to do it again the next loop around. The first person you meet at the start of every loop, Galerius, will happily, if slightly bewilderedly, follow your instructions to complete tasks on your behalf.
This frees you up to delve further into the plot, which had me hooked. Although set in ancient Rome, the game serves as a criticism of the panopticon concept invented by 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who designed a prison in which everyone could be watched from one location, with the intention being they would be on their best behaviour. By exploring the consequences of an all-seeing authority, it also critiques modern surveillance systems.
One slight disappointment is that the time loop in the game is a bit of a cheat – certain events trigger not at particular times each day, but when you approach a specific location – but I can forgive that.
These days, most video games are created by vast armies of developers operating in teams around the globe, so I was impressed to learn that The Forgotten City was mainly the work of just three people. They have cleverly worked within those limitations – the city you explore is more of a large town, and only hosts a couple of dozen people, while the time loop allows for scenes to be reused without feeling cheap – to create something that really shines.
Jacob also recommends…
Games
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask
Nintendo
The definitive time-loop video game, in which hero Link has just three days to prevent the moon (which has an evil-looking face!) crashing into the planet.
The Sexy Brutale
Cavalier Game Studios
Another time-loop mystery, set in an Agatha Christie-like mansion whose inhabitants are all murdered over a 12-hour period.

More on these topics: More

By Michael Marshall

Fragments of a human skull found on the island of Sulawesi in IndonesiaUniversity of Hasanuddin
For the first time, DNA has been obtained from the bones of a Stone Age person who lived on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The genetic information sheds light on the prehistory of the South-East Asian islands – including what happened when our species, Homo sapiens, first reached the area.
Sulawesi is one of the largest islands in South-East Asia, the region between the Asian mainland and Australia. On the island’s South Peninsula, researchers have excavated a cave called … More

By Michael Marshall

Based on the average height of humans, we should have longer stridesJohnnyGreig/Getty Images
Humans have lost their swing. Chimpanzees and other great apes swing their hips when they walk, but modern humans do not. This means our strides are shorter than those of chimpanzees, even though our legs are proportionally longer.
“We’ve always had this idea that evolution has been acting on fossil humans to make strides longer and longer,” says Nathan Thompson at the New York Institute of Technology in the US. But in fact, he says, “humans right … More

By Simon Ings

sasilsolutions/Getty Images
Book

Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and mapping desirable futures
Katy BörnerAdvertisement
MIT Press

MY LEAFY, fairly affluent corner of south London has a congestion problem, and to solve it, there is a plan to close certain roads. You can imagine the furore: the trunk of every kerbside tree sports a protest sign. How can shutting off roads improve traffic flows?
German mathematician Braess answered this question back in 1968, showing that adding a road to a network can actually increase travel times due to a boost in drivers using the same routes and therefore increasing traffic. Now a new book, Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and mapping desirable futures by Katy Börner, uses it as a fine example of how a mathematical model predicts and can be used to resolve a real-world problem.
This and more than 1300 other models, maps and forecasts are referenced in Börner’s latest atlas, the third to be derived from Indiana University’s travelling exhibit Places & Spaces: Mapping science.
Her first, Atlas of Science: Visualizing what we know revealed the power of maps in science, while the second, Atlas of Knowledge: Anyone can map, focused on visualisation. In her latest foray, Börner wants to show how models, maps and forecasts inform decision-making in education, science, technology and policy-making.
It is a well-structured, heavyweight argument, supported by descriptions of more than 300 applications. Some entries, like Bernard H. Porter’s Map of Physics of 1939, earn their place purely because of their beauty and the insights they offer. Mostly, though, Börner chooses models that were applied in practice and made a positive difference.
Her range is impressive. We begin at equations, revealing that Newton’s law of universal gravitation has been applied to human migration patterns, and move through the centuries. We tip a wink to Jacob Bernoulli’s 1713 book The Art of Conjecturing –which introduced probability theory – and James Clerk Maxwell’s 1868 paper “On governors”, which was an early nod towards cybernetics. Finally, we arrive at our current era of massive computation and ever-more complex model building.
It is here that interesting questions start to surface. To forecast the behaviour of complex systems, especially those that contain a human component, many current researchers reach for modelling (ABM) in which discrete autonomous agents interact with each other and with their common (digitally modelled) environment.
But, warns Börner, “ABMs in general have very few analytical tools by which they can be studied, and often no backward sensitivity analysis can be performed because of the large number of parameters and dynamical rules involved”. In other words, an ABM model offers us an exquisitely detailed forecast, but no clear way of knowing why the model has drawn the conclusions it has – a risky state of affairs, given that its data came from foible-ridden humans.
Her sumptuous, detailed book tackles issues of error and bias head-on, but she left me tugging at a different problem, represented by those irate protest signs smothering my neighbourhood.
In over 50 years since Braess’s research was published, reasonably wealthy, mostly well-educated people in comfortable surroundings have remained ignorant of how traffic flows work. So what are the chances that the rest of us, busy and preoccupied as we are, will ever really understand, or trust, the other models that increasingly dictate our civic life?
Börner argues that modelling data can counteract tribalism, misinformation, magical thinking, authoritarianism and demonisation. I can’t for the life of me see how. What happens when a model reaches such complexity that only an expert can understand it, or when even the expert can’t be sure why the forecast is saying what it is saying?
We have enough difficulty understanding climate forecasts, let alone explaining them. To apply these technologies to the civic realm begs a host of problems that are nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with whether anyone will listen.

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Nino Marcutti/Alamy
THE tale of human origins continues to throw up surprises. For many years, the generally accepted narrative was that our species emerged on the continent of Africa, before spreading to other continents around 60,000 years ago. It is certainly true that our origins lie primarily in Africa. But in this issue, we explore the crucial role that nearby Arabia played in human evolution.
Evidence unearthed in Stone Age Arabia points to a much richer story, in which human populations ebbed and flowed in this region over hundreds of thousands  of years as the climate shifted.
The remarkable discoveries from … More