Humans

By Gregory Wakeman
Malik (Riz Ahmed, centre) is determined to prepare his sons to fight the aliensAmazon Content Services LLC
Encounter
Michael Pearce
UK cinemas, Amazon PrimeAdvertisement
ENCOUNTER brings together three of the most exciting stars in the British film industry: director Michael Pearce, whose debut feature Beast was critically acclaimed on its release in 2017, screenwriter Joe Barton, who created the equally lauded Giri/Haji, and Riz Ahmed, whose performances in Four Lions, The Night Of and Sound Of Metal secured his status as one of the UK’s best actors.
For the first half of Encounter, their talents complement each other perfectly. Ahmed stars as Malik Khan, an ex-soldier on a mission to rescue his two young children Jay (Lucian-River Chauhan) and Bobby (Aditya Geddada) when the world comes under attack from an extraterrestrial invasion that is made more terrifying by the fact that the aliens come in the form of parasitic microorganisms that first infect insects, then move on to tackle humans.
Encounter begins by immediately establishing the seriousness of the extraterrestrial threat. Before the title sequence even hits the screen, we see the aliens arrive on Earth, attack insects and then quickly explode in numbers. Pearce shoots this sequence with a detail that is simple to follow yet sinister and creepy. So much so that the subsequent shots of insects will make your skin crawl.
The action ratchets up further when Malik’s ex-wife Piya (Janina Gavankar), who doesn’t see the rescue in quite the same light, informs the authorities that her children have been kidnapped. Special agents Shepard (Rory Cochrane) and Hattie (Octavia Spencer) are put on the case and set off in pursuit across the mountains and deserts of California and Nevada.
At this early stage of the film, it is a blast, successfully towing the line between a riveting sci-fi drama and a road-trip movie.
Ahmed commands the screen instantly, giving Malik a toughness and intensity that emerge gradually as the story progresses. The young actors who play his sons are just as impressive, but for very different reasons. It won’t take long for audiences to be charmed by Geddada, who brings a much needed levity and heart to the film. Chauhan becomes more confident as time goes on, displaying an impressive maturity and strength of character. Pearce gives Malik, Jay and Bobby the space to build a genuinely touching connection.
“Ahmed commands the screen, giving Malik a toughness and intensity as the story progresses”
With all this going on amid the beauty and desolation of the Californian mountains, it is impossible not to be drawn into the story. Barton’s economical and believable script propels the film forwards, while providing just enough backstory on the alien attack to keep audiences intrigued. The soundtrack, too, subtly makes the alien creatures feel present and menacing, without ever allowing the sound of their advancement to get in the way of the scene-building and storytelling.
Then, just when Encounter is really getting under way, Pearce hits us with a seismic shift in direction. While potentially a deliberate ploy to surprise the audience and keep us engaged, it doesn’t quite work. Instead, it disrupts what was building into a beautiful and unnervingly atmospheric experience and throws us for a loop. For a good 10 minutes after this turn, it feels as if the story is thrashing around. It is unnerving to say the least.
Despite this unexpected shift in perspective, the narrative isn’t entirely derailed. It soon finds its footing again, and Ahmed’s continually powerful performance ensures that Encounter remains intriguing all the way to its finale. Chauhan, alongside him, does a great job at keeping the intensity high.
On the other hand, anyone who was enjoying the sci-fi-cum-road-trip experience may find themselves less invested in the more intimate and psychological character study that Encounter becomes. Ultimately, by the time the credits roll, it feels like two separate movies that have been jammed together to form an uneven psychological sci-fi thriller that, while good, could have been so much more.

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By Alexandra Martiniuk and Joseph Freeman
Simone Rotella
CYBERBULLYING was already a problem before the covid-19 pandemic hit. In Australia, for example, one in five young people reported in 2017 that they had been socially excluded, threatened or abused online, and the same proportion said they had participated in cyberbullying themselves. Then lockdowns and work-from-home orders came into force, meaning even more time was spent online.
Yet when it comes to cyberbullying, the pandemic has had a different effect than you might expect. Although we have been online more, some studies show that cyberbullying has decreased. The reasons behind this could tell us how to better tackle this problem once we emerge from the pandemic.
Unlike in-person bullying, cyberbullying can occur 24/7 and has a stronger association with suicidal ideation. We know that teenagers already spend a lot of time online, and that is increasing. A survey of people aged 10 to 18 in 11 European countries during the 2020 spring lockdowns found that nearly half of them felt they were experiencing “online overuse”. They were online for 6.5 hours per weekday on average, and around half of that time was related to school. In 2018, the comparable number was 2.7 hours per day.Advertisement
Previously, more time online had been linked with an increased chance of participating in cyberbullying. Studies have also shown that stress and anxiety have increased during the pandemic, both of which can drive increases in anger and cyberbullying.
Yet this phenomenon has actually decreased during the pandemic. One study looked at school cyberbullying in the US using Google search data. Trends in the search term “cyberbullying” have previously matched up with actual survey data about it. This study found that searches for both “cyberbullying” and “bullying” dropped by 30 to 40 per cent relative to historical norms after US schools adopted remote learning.
Another study involving South Korean schoolchildren found that the proportion of school-aged children that were either cyberbullying or being cyberbullied decreased from 27 per cent in 2019 to 23 per cent in 2020.
What’s going on? One reason for the decline is that in-person interactions can fuel both online and in-person bullying. Bullying tends to start in unstructured time, which doesn’t exist in the same way in online schooling. This suggests if we focus prevention efforts on unstructured time, it is likely we will stop both traditional bullying and cyberbullying.
Bullying rates aren’t fixed. When children feel nurtured and socially and emotionally safe, they bully less. During the pandemic, young people have spent more time at home with their parent or carer. For some, this has probably provided feelings of safety – a positive effect well known to occur in times of disaster or crisis.
Positive relationships also help reduce bullying. While some families have had interpersonal conflicts during the crisis, most households worldwide have reported increased cohesion and positive bonding between family members. Studies have shown that children reflected positively about spending more time with family. Keeping these positive relationships strong may also help prevent bullying in the future.
Unstructured play is key to the development of self-esteem, self-determination and the ability to self-regulate – all vital parts of emotional development that help prevent children bullying and protect them from being bullied.
The answer isn’t to get rid of unstructured time. But by making it a more nurturing environment backed up by positive relationships, the reduction in cyberbullying seen during the pandemic may stick around for some time.
Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans: 116123 (samaritans.org). Visit bit.ly/SuicideHelplines for hotlines and websites for other countries

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Josie Ford
Ancient aromas
It can sometimes get a little – what’s the word – “close” in Feedback’s stationery cupboard cave. It is to this that we attribute a colleague advancing with pegged nose, thrusting our way on a pair of tongs an advert for the perfume line “Neandertal ® for modern human”.
“This pair of fragrances take us on an olfactory journey deep into humanity’s past giving voice to a lost civilisation whose DNA lives on today only through ourselves, while also celebrating the future they were never able to see,” we read among very many other words, not all of which necessarily make much sense to us. “The results are contemporary, highly original, and experimental fragrance structures, free from conventional and traditional perfumery standards.”
“With notes of BO and tooth decay?” a colleague asks, unkindly. Foliage, ginger, pink pepper, grapefruit and pine, apparently.Advertisement
A temporary blimp
Keith Macpherson from Somerset, UK, reports being informed by DHL of the imminent arrival of a parcel with a weight of 1 kilogram and a volume of 32,884 cubic metres and wondering who ordered a blimp. He later found this corrected to a weight of 1 kg, but a volume of 0 cubic metres, and wondered who had ordered a black hole singularity. “My daughter asked if we had been given a delivery window. My son replied no, an event horizon,” Keith reports – proof that, whatever it was that eventually arrived in Somerset, the dad joke seems safe for another generation.
Gorilla journalism
Many thanks to the many of you who allowed yourselves – and us – a chuckle at an erratum in a recent edition of The Economist: “Correction: Last week, in a chart accompanying a piece on nuclear power, we said Britain produced 235 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. That should have been 235 grams. We apologise for the rather large error.”
Indeed, fifteen orders of magnitude large. Our schadenfreude is tempered with a healthy dose of “there but for the grace…”. With weary experience, we call into being the journalistic version of the gorilla effect, where you don’t see the big thing because you are too busy concentrating on the small things.
Motions in the dark
Balance being another great journalistic trait, we are compelled to give space to Graeme Flint, who professes no financial interest in the matter, but writes in defence of motion-sensor toilet bowl lights (27 November). He points out that they enable you to do night-time business in low-light conditions while not activating noisy bathroom fans. “I think they are an energy and sleep saving triumph and more people should give them a try,” he says. Right of reply granted, Graeme – we aren’t entirely convinced, but we are at least going through the motions.
In their element
Ilpo Salonen writes in from Espoo, Finland, deploring the lack in our pages of late of a certain deterministic name phenomenon we shall not name. It being December and the season of goodwill, we hold back from sending the usual cease-and-desist letter. Especially as, by way of compensation for our oversight, Ilpo points us to the existence of a now sadly retired science correspondent at the Finnish Broadcasting Company, Yleisradio Oy, called Maija Typpi.
That’s Mary Nitrogen to her English fans. It is fair to say we are enjoying rolling these departures from Indo-European word roots around our tongue. We also find naming people after chemical elements, rather than the other way round, a fun excursion. Although by no means a unique one, come to think of it. The computer scientist Stephen Wolfram is a reminder of why there is a W in the periodic table, although no element officially beginning with W. We welcome other examples of elementary names from across the globe to enrich our cultural experience.
While we’re there…
The former captain of the Geneva firefighting force was Marc Feuardent (or Captain Strong Fire), there is a BBC wildlife documentary producer called Giles Badger and a 2004 paper in the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering was “Structure and mechanics of nonpiscine control surfaces” by Frank E. Fish.
We are mentioning these purely on the principle of not fouling our own nest. Or, as the French say, don’t piscine the…
All aflutter
Moving swiftly onwards, backwards and almost undoubtedly inwards to black holes, Jon Sparks raises suspicions that we are now trying to generate our own column inches with a choice experiential unit. He notes that our colleague Leah Crane, discussing the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy in her Launchpad newsletter, writes “Sagittarius A* is more than 4 million times as massive as the sun. An NBA basketball has a mass of 0.62 kilograms. So if Sagittarius A* had the mass of a basketball, the sun’s mass would be 0.16 milligrams – about the average mass of two eyelashes.”
Eye-watering. The thing is, Jon, you might have been wondering about the eyelash thing, but while everyone was distracted by the basketball, a gorilla waltzed across the back of the page.
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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

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Jay Shaw Baker/NurPhoto via Getty Images
THE best bits of being a particle cosmologist are the moments where I feel the mathematical pieces of an idea click into place. When I understand an equation or successfully solve one, I have the same experience I had over 30 years ago when I was learning my times tables. It is a unique kind of elation.
I realise that a lot of people have never had this experience. I write this column especially for those of you who were discouraged because I know that whether or not you love most people are interested in the universe beyond their everyday … More

By Josh Bell
When Dr Sewon Koh uploads memories from dead people, he doesn’t always like what he seesCourtesy of Apple
Dr. Brain
Apple TV+
WITH a name like Dr Brain, the title character of the first South Korean-language series from Apple TV+ sounds like he should be a second-string Marvel superhero. Yet while Dr Sewon Koh (Parasite‘s Lee Sun-kyun) does have superhuman powers of a kind, he isn’t a superhero, and no one actually calls him Dr Brain.Advertisement
The series is an adaptation of a South Korean webtoon in which a neuroscientist develops a way to mine the brains of dead people for their memories, which he can weave into his own. Despite the somewhat absurd premise, this adaptation plays it mostly straight, keeping its story grounded in character drama and sci-fi.
Sewon is a talented and eccentric neuroscientist who has devoted his life to understanding how brains work. He develops a technology called brain syncing, which connects two brains through a silly-looking contraption made of wires, dials and blinking lights that are supposed to have something to do with quantum entanglement. The details are hazy, but series director and co-writer Kim Jee-woon presents it all with due reverence.
Sewon decides that he must be the first human test subject for his invention. So he tasks his assistant with procuring a fresh body from the morgue and hooks himself up to the dead man’s brain.
As we soon discover, Sewon’s motivation for uploading other people’s memories isn’t solely scientific curiosity. He also comes overburdened with a tragic backstory, which began when his mother was killed in a road accident when he was a child. Then, years later, he saw his young son die in a house fire and his wife fall into a coma after a suicide attempt – a condition in which she remains.
The incidents with his wife and son occurred under mysterious circumstances, and soon after Sewon’s first brain sync, he is visited by a private investigator who is also looking for answers about those tragedies. The police soon show up, too, and Dr. Brain morphs into a murder mystery, as Sewon uses his skills to uncover a shadowy conspiracy that is targeting him and his family.
However, the more brains that Sewon syncs with, the more his mind fractures, as bits of the personalities and skills of the subjects take hold in his own brain. At one point, he hooks himself up to his family’s dead cat, which may have witnessed a murder. From then on, he possesses cat-like abilities, allowing him to quickly climb a tree, see better in the dark and land on his feet when jumping from a building. It is an appealingly goofy touch in a series that sometimes takes itself too seriously, given its somewhat outlandish premise.
Kim, who is best known outside South Korea for mind-bending thrillers A Tale of Two Sisters and I Saw the Devil (as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie The Last Stand), directs Dr. Brain as a mix of mundane police procedural and bizarre head trip.
The middle portion of the six-episode series drags a little, as it focuses more on crime solving and less on brain syncing. But Kim reliably returns to the surreal imagery of Sewon’s visions, regardless of whether he is hooked up to another brain or just receiving some crucial piece of insight. The director also stages some exciting action sequences, including a chase through a mall and a close-quarters fight in an empty cargo transport.
Dr. Brain isn’t quite as out there as fans of Kim’s best-known films might hope for (or as its faintly ridiculous set-up might suggest), but it is still an entertainingly off-kilter take on a murder mystery, with a protagonist who is admirably committed to his own strange ideas.

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Read
Absynthe by Brendan Bellecourt is a delirious tale of altered realities set in a world where the first world war ushered in a technological utopia of automata and monorails, plus a serum that can give people telepathic abilities.
Mark Waugh
Visit
Cancer Revolution at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK, explores the new science that is allowing more of us than ever before to live longer and better with the disease. The exhibition is free and runs until March 2022.Advertisement

Read
Racism, Not Race is a rigorous discussion of the scientific answers to questions of race. Joseph Graves Jr and Alan Goodman explain why race isn’t a biological fact and ponder why society continues to act as if it is.

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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

By Sally Adee

Are we really just puppets being controlled by the words of those in charge?Shutterstock/SvetaZi
Outcast
Louise Carey
Gollancz 20 JanuaryAdvertisement

“YOU’VE exceeded everyone’s expectations.” These are words that Tanta, the hero of Louise Carey’s InScape series, hears often from her boss. The resulting dopamine rush is strong enough to make her knees tremble and to reinforce her total devotion to her employer, InTech.
InTech isn’t just any tech company. It is also the local government, a role it assumed in the wake of a global disaster that obliterated nation states. Civil rights have been replaced by end-user licence agreements, and violations of community guidelines get you executed.
Tanta, like most of her coworker-citizens, has internalised her company’s values so completely that the worst thing you can say about someone is that they are “not being very corporate”.
In Outcast, the second book in the series, Tanta has been assigned the task of finding the deeply uncorporate mole who is selling company secrets. But there is a twist: first, she needs to rid her mind of the phrases used by the corporate autocracy to command loyalty in its citizen-employees.
This is the point at which the series pivots to deft satire, skewering the cult-like employee culture that exists not only in Carey’s dystopian future but in our present, too. From Mark Zuckerberg’s exhortation to “move fast and break things” to Disney’s insistence that all its employees, down to the janitorial staff, identify as “cast members”, corporations already use certain phrases to get inside employees’ heads. Carey has a degree in psychology, which clearly informs her send-up of the way companies do this.
“In Outcast, your employer determines whether you live or die and you think that is good and fair”
In Battle of the Linguist Mages, Scotto Moore takes the idea of weaponised linguistics to the next level. In this world, human language began as an embedded sentient alien mind virus that colonised humanity back in the mists of time, shaping the way we communicated ideas. Then one human finds a way to weaponise these mind viruses into “power morphemes”, sounds that can bypass logic and motor control to evoke a particular feeling, action or belief.
This book won’t be for everyone. It veers wildly from one style to the next: one minute it reads as a snackable version of Ready Player One, the next it channels the loopy extravagance of Douglas Adams, then it abruptly skids into the style of a dense Wikipedia entry. In between the main plot, driven by a glitter-caked, disco-themed multiplayer game where bad guys are killed with a kaleidoscopic beam, Moore plunges into discursive ravines where he explores concepts like memetics and the weaponised persuasion tactics of the advertising industry.
These are very different books by very different authors, but the thread running through both is the unstoppable evolution of persuasion techniques. Using words as weapons is as old as advertising and politics, of course. The question is where the iterations will end. In Outcast, the endpoint is that your employer determines whether you live or die, and you think that is good and fair. In Battle of the Linguist Mages, others can use words to control your ability to think.
What’s scary is that if language as a form of mind control is even theoretically possible, you can be sure some executive has assigned a working group to it. This is the world we live in now. But at least we get to laugh at it through the medium of science fiction.

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