Humans

Pavements date back some 2000 years, but are seldom built with pedestrians in mind. Here’s why reinvented sidewalks could benefit your joints — and the planet

Technology

7 July 2021

By Anthony King

Paving materials come in many forms (clockwise from top: granite, cement, marble, cobbles), but being hard makes them less than ideal for pedestriansTop: Gordon Scammell/Alamy; Bottom (L/R): Franck Legros/Getty Images; David Keith Jones/Alamy; The Photo Works/Alamy
WHEN Viveca Wallqvist first phoned a local asphalt company, she didn’t mince her words. “I have something to tell you,” she said. “Your material is really hard – too hard. People are getting hurt.” Her comments didn’t go down well. “They were like,’Who is this crazy scientist?,’” she recalls. Asphalt is supposed to be hard, they said. But a few days later, the company rang back. It was the beginning of a journey that could reinvent the ground we walk on.
Wallqvist’s passion is rare. It is more than two millennia since the Romans laid their first pavimentum, from where we get the word “pavement”. Since then, very few people have questioned the fact that the pavements we walk on are, in effect, extensions of the road surface, made of stuff with properties that almost exclusively reflected the needs of horse-drawn and then motorised vehicles rather than pedestrians. Wallqvist, a materials chemist at the Research Institutes of Sweden in Stockholm, is determined to change that.
Meanwhile, in London, plans are afoot to build a giant research facility to test new, spongier walking surfaces. It is the brainchild of Nick Tyler at University College London, who is also convinced that pavement pounding is harming us. The average person takes around 200 million steps in a lifetime, he notes, and we aren’t evolved to deal with such hard surfaces.
So, after waiting more than 2300 years for a pavement … More

New insights into the different states of human consciousness and where it occurs in the brain are helping us crack the mystery of what gives rise to felt experience

Humans

7 July 2021

By Emma Young

Eva Redamonti
What is consciousness?
In essence, consciousness is any kind of subjective experience. Being in pain; smelling onions frying; feeling humiliated; recognising a friend in the crowd; reflecting that you are wiser than you were last year – all of these are examples of conscious experiences. In a field fraught with disagreements, this is something that most, but not all, researchers agree on. Go any deeper, though, and the rifts open up.
The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes famously divided the universe into “matter stuff”, such as rocks and physical bodies, and “mind stuff”. In the 20th century, philosopher David Chalmers at New York University built on Descartes’s separation, known as “dualism”, and the work of later thinkers, to distinguish between “easy problems of consciousness” and “the hard problem”.
The easy stuff consists of explaining the brain processes associated with consciousness, such as the integration of sensory information, learning, thinking and being awake or asleep. Though we are making steady progress, these problems have yet to be cracked: they are easy only in the sense that the known strategies of cognitive and neuroscientific research should eventually provide full explanations.
The hard problem, which Chalmers introduced at a scientific meeting in 1994, is to explain why and how we have subjective experiences at all. “Consciousness poses the most baffling problem in the science of the mind,” Chalmers said. When we think and perceive, there is a “whir of information-processing” in the brain, as he put it, but also very distinctive subjective states of mind. The puzzle is how a 1.3 kilogram organ with the consistency of tofu can generate the feeling of being. … More

We are finally testing the ideas that quantum collapse in the brain gives rise to consciousness and that consciousness creates the reality we see from the quantum world.

Humans

7 July 2021

By Anil Ananthaswamy

If physical processes in a brain create consciousness, what are they?Victor de Schwanberg/Science Photo Library
If physics explains all the phenomena in the universe, and if consciousness is part of the universe, then is seems that physics can explain consciousness.
Of course, this assumes that consciousness isn’t separate from the material reality that physics explains – which runs counter to René Descartes’s dualist view of mind and matter. Some have no problem with that. They include Daniel Dennett at Tufts University in Massachusetts and Michael Graziano at Princeton University, who argue that our intuitive sense that consciousness needs an explanation that goes beyond objective descriptions of the physical world is misplaced. Consciousness is a mirage produced by sophisticated neural mechanisms in the brain, they contend, so we need no new physics to explain it. Rather, we need a better understanding of how the brain creates models: of the world, of a self in the world and of a self subjectively experiencing the world.

Other non-dualists don’t outright deny that consciousness may have unusual properties that need explaining. If they are correct, then quantum mechanics may offer an explanation.
Quantum systems can exist in a superposition of all possible states simultaneously, and classical reality emerges when this superposition collapses into a single state. One idea is that this happens when the mass of a quantum system … More

By New Scientist

Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard
Richard Lewontin, the geneticist and evolutionary biologist whose research showed that humans from different ethnic backgrounds aren’t as genetically different as appearances might suggest, has died at the age of 92.
Lewontin’s work revealed that nearly 85 per cent of humanity’s genetic diversity is seen between individuals of a single population, such as those of a single nation. A further 8 per cent occurs between such populations that might have been put into the same racial category. Differences between ethnic groups accounted for just 7 per cent of genetic diversity. Simply put: two people are different because they are … More

By James Urquhart

An aerial view of coastal area of Llanos de Challe National Park in the Atacama Desertabriendomundo/Getty Images
When coastal hunter-gatherers settled inland to begin farming about 3000 years ago in the Atacama desert, their violence became more gruesome, often with intent to kill, according to a study of human remains from the time.
Vivian Standen at the University of Tarapacá in Chile and her colleagues studied signs of violence in the remains of 194 adults buried between 2800 and 1400 years ago in a coastal desert valley of northern Chile.
The team … More

The relationship between a robot and a monk is at the heart of a new bookZoonar GmbH/Alamy
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Becky Chambers
Tor.comAdvertisement

I READ a lot of sci-fi and, my, the future can be grim at times. Whether it is characters dealing with alien invasions, technology gone wrong or the ravages of climate change, most modern books in the genre are dour affairs, in stark contrast to the “golden age” sci-fi of the 1940s and 50s, when unrealistic techno-utopianism ruled.
But it isn’t all bad. Increasingly, authors are writing “hopepunk” stories (a slightly cringeworthy term inspired by cyberpunk) that weaponise optimism, according to one Vox journalist.
At the forefront of this subgenre is Becky Chambers, award-winning author of the Wayfarers series. But unlike the golden age stories, Chambers’s characters live complex lives and know that not all problems can be tackled with the wave of a plot-solving gizmo. Instead, they rely on relationships to succeed, picking each other up and dusting themselves down in the face of adversity.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the first book in the series, details the adventures of the crew of the ship Wayfarer. As the title suggests, it is much more about the journey than the destination. In a way, not a lot happens, but all the characters are changed by their interactions with one another.
My favourite character in the book is the charming and tragic Dr Chef (yes, he is the ship’s doctor and chef), one of the last of an alien species called Grum, which resemble a kind of six-limbed otter and gradually change biological sex over their lifetime.
This is just one example of the incredibly diverse cast of aliens that populate the Wayfarers books, which share a universe but mostly stand alone. There are Aeluons, who communicate by flashing colours on their faces, and the reptilian Aandrisk, whose society is influenced by the fact they lay eggs – children are normally the result of casual sex, and aren’t reared by their biological parents.
There are also artificial intelligences that run ships and other hardware, but it is illegal to upload an AI to a humanoid robot. This is key in the second book, A Closed and Common Orbit, which is a fantastic examination of identity and autonomy.
Chambers’s latest, the novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built, takes place in a new continuity outside the Wayfarers universe, but shares much of its DNA. It is set on a moon called Panga where humans realised that their sprawling, oil-burning factories were unsustainable and set up a vast rewilding project. “It was a crazy split, if you thought about it: half the land for a single species, half for the hundreds of thousands of others,” writes Chambers. “Finding a limit they’d stick to was victory enough.” Around the same time, robots became sentient and withdrew to the new wilderness, with humans promising to leave them alone.
The book is set some time after this Transition, and follows a tea monk, Sibling Dex, who goes from settlement to settlement as a travelling salesperson-slash-roaming therapist. Despite bringing joy and comfort to those visited, Dex is unsatisfied and heads out into the wilds, looking for a new purpose – eventually making contact with a robot, Mosscap, the first time humans and robots had met in centuries.
The heart of the book is the relationship between the two and the way they support each other. It is a joyful experience and, as with all of Chambers’s books, I was left with a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.

Jacob also recommends…
TV
Legends of Tomorrow
This show about time-travelling superheroes embraces the joy of being silly, and it is now one of my favourites. A recent episode has them meet David Bowie in 1970s London and find Spartacus on a spaceship.
Book
Revenger
Alistair Reynolds
The first novel in a trilogy sees sisters Adrana and Fura Ness join the crew of the Revenger, led by the space pirate Captain Rackamore, for swashbuckling sci-fi.

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Chuang Zhao
LAST week saw the announcement of not one but two groups of ancient humans, both new to science, and there is no reason to think the discoveries will stop any time soon.
In Israel, a team of researchers discovered bones from a member of a population that apparently lived in the area between 420,000 and 120,000 years ago. These hominins, which the team calls Nesher Ramla Homo, looked a bit like the Neanderthals, and the team claims that members of the new-found group were the Neanderthals’ ancestors. Not everyone agrees, however, and other interpretations have already been … More

By Michael Marshall

FOR many of the people reading this, tropical forests are remote places. A few may have visited the Amazon on holiday, or ventured into the Bornean rainforests to see orangutans, but for most, tropical forests seem far removed from everyday life.
In Jungle, his first book for a general audience, archaeologist Patrick Roberts sets out to tear down the barriers and show us how our lives are intertwined with tropical forests, “to convince you that the history of tropical forests is your history too”.
To do so, Roberts has written a history of the world according to the tropics and their jungles. He begins with the first land plants and the origins of trees, sketching how they affected the dinosaurs, early mammals and first primates.
The middle third of the book is devoted to the role of tropical forests in human evolution. A key message is that tropical forests aren’t inhospitable: people have lived in them for hundreds of thousands of years. Roberts attacks the long-standing idea that our ancestors left the trees to live on grasslands. Early hominins clearly spent less time up trees than apes such as chimpanzees, but the evidence suggests that our ancestors lived in many places, from the most open savannah to dense forests. More recently, people living in tropical forests have built city-like settlements, as in the Amazon.
Roberts moves on to document how the European empires of the past few centuries wrought havoc on the people and ecosystems of the tropics: for instance, by setting up the global trades in sugar and rubber, and exploitative labour systems such as slavery on which they relied. He brings the story up to date by outlining the multiplying threats the forests face from climate change, agriculture and wildfires, ending with pleas for their preservation. If we don’t save the tropical forests, warns Roberts, “climate change, declining food sources, economic catastrophe, political instability, mass migration and an explosion of pandemic diseases will very soon be knocking at your own door”.
In short, Jungle is enormously ambitious for a first popular book: it spans hundreds of millions of years and ranges across many disciplines. Does Roberts pull it off? Sort of.
On an intellectual and factual level, he unquestionably succeeds. Jungle is deeply researched, and moves with great skill from ecology and evolution to history and politics. Roberts handles them deftly, rarely putting a foot wrong.
Where the book does fall down is its writing style. This is so dry and complicated it might as well be an academic text. Sentences routinely run over five lines and paragraphs sprawl over whole pages. Vast arrays of facts and figures are hurled at the reader, largely unleavened by humour, anecdote or anything else.
This is compounded by a generally grim tone. Even the early chapters on evolution and dinosaurs, in which you might expect joy, thrills or awe before the serious stuff kicks in, are tough going. And the final five chapters, where Roberts outlines how modern capitalism abused tropical forests and its peoples, are an almost unbearable trudge through what feels like an endless series of atrocities.
“Jungle is enormously ambitious for a first popular book: it spans millions of years and many disciplines”
I am not suggesting Roberts should have dialled back his message: why should he, when he is so plainly correct? Moreover, some readers may not mind the style, while students looking for a panoramic and detailed survey of tropical forests will get a lot out of Jungle. But its difficult style and dourness will limit the appeal, which is a shame because its message should be heard.
For me, Jungle‘s biggest problem is that while it does a superb job of conveying the factual and rational reasons why we should all care about tropical forests, it doesn’t make you feel it in your bones.

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