Humans

By Tiffany O’Callaghan

A herd of wild Asian elephants strolls through a village in ChinaVCG via Getty Images
Book
Fuzz: When nature breaks the law Mary Roach
WW NortonAdvertisement

MARY ROACH has a knack for choosing subjects for her books that won’t have necessarily crossed your mind and convincing you that you must now know everything about them. She has covered the logistics of strapping cadavers into cars to use as human crash test dummies (Stiff), how studying what orgasms look like in the brain requires people to get busy in an MRI scanner (Bonk), pondered the literal ins and outs of what competitive eating does to your digestive tract (Gulp) and contemplated how astronauts poop in space (Packing for Mars, a rare deviation from her single word titles).
In her new book, Fuzz: When nature breaks the law, her subject is the unfortunately now familiar issue of human-wildlife conflict. But she hasn’t decided to switch gears and approach her subjects from a place of earnest lamentation, in this case about the perils of our encroachment on wild habitats. Instead, with her characteristic dry wit, she brings an intense fascination to the seldom discussed details and the at times absurd miscellany in the unexplored corners of unappreciated research.
The opening chapter finds her at a wildlife forensics conference, where she learns about what happens after a human is mauled by a wild animal. The focus of the Wildlife-Human Attack Response Training conference is mainly bears in the Pacific Northwest. We learn that very often the culprit is identified and killed, but occasionally the backwoods whodunnit turns up a surprise: a “gnawed on corpse” is no smoking gun. An opportunistic omnivore does occasionally stumble on a human already dead from other causes.
Each chapter explores a new type of conflict, from elephants that stomp their way across crops (and people) to albatrosses that get sucked into jet engines, leopards that attack people to deer that collide with aircraft (yes, you read that right).
Along the way you pick up plenty of helpful tips. The best makes of car if you plan to survive crashing into a moose? Saab or Volvo. The most cost-efficient way to keep birds from eating your harvest on a small farm? Humans regularly chasing them off.
As to whether you should stay still or fight back in a hostile bear encounter, it largely depends on what kind of bear it is, “black fight back, brown lie down” as the ditty goes. The trouble is, as Roach points out, some brown bears’ fur can be black, and some black bears look pretty brown.
“It’s impossible not to smirk, chortle and sometimes outright belly laugh as you read the many wry asides”
“A more reliable way to distinguish the two is by the length and curvature of their claws,” she says, before conceding that, “by the time you’re in a position to make that call, the knowledge will be of limited practical use.”
It is impossible not to smirk, chortle and sometimes outright belly laugh as you read her many wry asides and funny but fascinating footnotes.
A particular favourite for me has to do with the surprisingly persistent myth that birds will explode if they eat the rice tossed at weddings: “Some churches ban the practice anyway, not because it’s perilous for birds but because it’s perilous for guests, who could slip on the hard, round grains and fall and then fly off to a personal injury lawyer.”
She provides an ample supply of factoids to regale your friends with. Did you know that it is our “looming sensitivity” that helps us and other animals anticipate how fast something is coming at us, so we can get out of the way? (Or not, see the earlier mention of deer and aircraft.)
But the real trick Roach pulls off is to keep you laughing while at the same time making sure the earnest points come across. Among the many that stuck with me is that before the 1980s, wildlife and wilderness were conserved in the US to provide good hunting and fishing. It is only recently that “conservation” has been about protecting these areas and creatures for their own sake.

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Josie Ford
Branson pickle
The world was agog in July as two grown men squared off about who would be the first to reach space on their own rocket. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos looked set to win when he announced his Blue Origin take-off for 20 July – only to see Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson pip him to the post with an 11 July flight.
That wasn’t the end of the cockpit fighting, though. As the Virgin Galactic trip wouldn’t be quite high enough to meet the international definition of space flight, Blue Origin cast aspersions on the size of Branson’s, ahem, trajectory.
Feedback had to watch coverage of the missions through our fingers, because space flight isn’t the kind of endeavour that should be rushed. It wasn’t just safety on our mind, but also what Branson might do in front of cameras. He has been known to demonstrate his manliness by picking up the nearest woman and brandishing her aloft like a human trophy, as documented on a blog called “Richard Branson picking up women”. We were glad to see he didn’t attempt this stunt with his two female fellow crew members.Advertisement
Hardly rocket science
Thankfully, both missions were successful, but it has emerged that Branson’s flight didn’t go entirely smoothly. During the ascent, first a yellow warning light came on, to signal that the rocket-plane was going off-course, then a red one, indicating a need to take corrective action or to abort the mission, it has been reported.
While a company spokesperson said the flight was never in danger, anonymous company sources told The New Yorker that the safest response would have been to abort. And a Virgin Galactic pilot has previously said such a red light should “scare the crap out of you”.
In the meantime, the US Federal Aviation Administration has grounded the company’s space flights until the incident has been investigated. The reduction in emissions from keeping the rocket-planes in their hangars is something the planet can be grateful for, if not Branson.
Just a minute
Talking of living dangerously, a colleague sent us a press release from a new flavoured water brand using “retronasal technology” – translation: it smells nice – which claims that every soft drink we consume cuts our lifespan by 12.5 minutes. Can this be true?
Feedback is sceptical. Putting aside the fact that different studies regularly assert that the worst dietary sin is, by turns, sugar, fat, starch, meat or, indeed, any major food group depending on what day of the week it is, the press release has an implausible level of precision over our allotted time on Earth. It seems unlikely that a 20-year-old innocently quaffing a can of cola today is condemning themselves to die, not 60 years hence, but instead in 59 years, 11 months, 29 days, 23 hours and 47.5 minutes. Still, we have come to expect such unscientific pronouncements from press releases.
An apple pie a day…
Except… what’s this? A paper in respectable, peer-reviewed journal Nature Food, which calculates the same implausibly precise lifespan metric for food items ranging from chicken wings to macaroni cheese. A hot dog, for instance, takes 36 minutes off your life, while apple pie lengthens it by 1.3 minutes.
Sadly, when one of the authors announced their findings on Twitter, the reception was… impertinent. One respondent said that they had eaten so many hot dogs that they should have died 56 years ago, while others used unkind terms such as “pseudoscience”, “garbage” and other words that shouldn’t be repeated in a family publication.
Taking the results at face value, though, a quick calculation suggests that if you must have a hot dog, just follow it with 27.7 apple pies and there will be no net change. Incidentally, the most life-lengthening food, according to this study, is peanut butter and jam sandwiches, each one making you live half an hour longer. Eat nothing but these and you would presumably live forever – or perhaps it would only feel like that.
Horsing around
One item not in that paper’s catalogue of life-extending substances is ivermectin, the horse dewormer that is a covid-19 wonder drug, according to conspiracy theorists. Judging by their communications on social media, it seems to be the same people who don’t trust coronavirus vaccines – tested in tens of thousands in carefully monitored randomised trials – who are placing their faith in a drug that is untested and unlicensed for covid-19.
While ivermectin is used in people to treat parasitic worms and head lice, most doctors won’t prescribe it for covid-19, so conspiracy theorists are resorting to buying the veterinary version of the drug. This comes in a more concentrated form, though, so is sadly leading to overdoses, causing vomiting, diarrhoea and seizures.
Veterinary stores are now quizzing prospective ivermectin buyers on their horse breed and insisting on production of a horse selfie. The US Food and Drug Administration has a diplomatically written advice sheet on why it is inadvisable for people to take animal medicines, but whoever runs their Twitter account was more succinct, saying simply: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” Words to live by – literally.
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By Bethan Ackerley

A complex network called the Gleaming watches over the town of Ora via a huge inverted treeShutterstock/Tithi Luadthong
Book
In the Watchful CityAdvertisement
S. Qiouyi Lu Tordotcom

MODERN life is built around the accumulation of objects: some valuable, some not, and most entirely unnecessary. But which, if any, of your possessions could represent the core of who you are? In S. Qiouyi Lu’s debut novella, each item in a mismatched collection of curios is a window into a defining moment of another person’s life.
In the Watchful City is set in Ora, an isolated metropolis at the heart of a cloud forest. Ora’s society is vibrant, comprising people of many cultures, genders and even mythical species, but its citizens are monitored via the Gleaming, a complex network that integrates qì – the vital force of all living things – with vast amounts of data. The Gleaming is channelled through the Hub, an enormous, inverted tree that acts as a database for the all-encompassing surveillance state.
Yet neither Ora’s governance nor the lives of its citizens is the focus of In the Watchful City. It instead follows the inner turmoil of Anima, a “node” who is rooted to the Hub’s inner sanctum, who can manipulate the Gleaming by slipping into a Minority Report-style amniotic bath. It is Anima’s job to watch over the city, be that by scouring for evidence of financial crimes or by borrowing the bodies of animals to chase down fugitives.
Anima – who uses the non-binary neopronouns ae/aer – has always lived in Ora and has been both unable and unwilling to physically leave the Hub since ae became a node as a child. All that changes when a mysterious stranger called Vessel arrives at the Hub with a qíjìtáng, a cabinet of curiosities from far-flung places; the items range from rarities like a bone marionette and a mermaid’s scale to a simple bundle of letters.
In the Watchful City is a mosaic novella: for every object in the qíjìtáng that Anima observes, we get a glimpse of another story from the lands outside Ora. Some of these tales feel relatively disconnected from the main narrative, like A Death Made Manifold, in which a man goes to extraordinary lengths to resurrect his late brother. Others may help explain why Ora’s society is so isolated. This Form I Hold Now, for instance, reveals more about the cultural imperialism of the Skylanders, a federation in the clouds that has colonised many nations on the planet’s surface.
Though the novella takes a little time to show its full potential – the opening pages bombard you with details about Anima and Ora, while the first of the qíjìtáng’s tales is the weakest – Lu has crafted an impressive mythos that draws from the traditions and legends of a variety of cultures, especially Chinese folklore. Take The Sky and Everything Under, a bittersweet tale that describes an imperial duarchy based on Chinese myths of one-winged birds, dependent on each other for flight. But these lofty allusions are leavened by rich, joyful descriptions of everyday life; a lengthy depiction of an outdoor food market viewed through the eyes of a hungry dog is a particular highlight.
It comes as little surprise, then, that Anima grows more and more intrigued by life outside the confines of Ora. Readers expecting a thorough analysis of the city’s surveillance culture will be disappointed; Lu is more concerned with the psychological effects of Anima’s isolation than the system that necessitates aer physical confinement.
Such details could have been fleshed out in a longer narrative, and more than once I found myself wishing that certain events, like Anima witnessing the death of a stranger, had been given more room to breathe. But I suspect that, much like the effect the tales of the qíjìtáng have on Anima, In the Watchful City will linger all the more for being an incomplete picture.

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Read
The Dinosaurs: New Visions of a Lost World are conjured by palaeontologist Michael Benton and palaeoartist Bob Nicholls, showing how advances in technology have changed the way we see these beasts forever.
Nick Treharne/Alamy Stock Photo
Visit
How The Light Gets In festival brings deep thought to the grounds of Kenwood House in London on 18 and 19 September. Explore the temptations of rewilding, the seductiveness of memes and other hot topics. Also streamed online.Advertisement

Watch
Autism and Cinema, at London’s Barbican Centre from 16 September, hosts a series of films, including Temple Grandin (pictured), a biopic about the animal behaviour researcher and activist of the same name.

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By Simon Ings

In A New World Order, military robots have turned on humanityReel 2 Reel Films
Film
A New World Order
Daniel RaboldtAdvertisement

“FOR to him that is joined to all the living there is hope,” runs the verse from Ecclesiastes, “for a living dog is better than a dead lion.” Stefan Ebel plays Thomasz, the “living dog” in A New World Order. He is a deserter who, out of necessity, has learned to look out solely for himself.
In the near future, military robots have turned against their makers. The war seems almost over. Perhaps Thomasz has wriggled and dodged his way to the least settled part of the planet (Daniel Raboldt’s debut feature is handsomely shot in Arctic Finland by co-writer Thorsten Franzen). Equally likely is that this is what the whole planet looks like now: trees sweeping in to fill the spaces left by an exterminated humanity.
You might expect the script to make this point clear, but there is no script, or rather, there is no dialogue. The machines (wasp-like drones, elephantine tripods and one magnificent airborne battleship that wouldn’t look out of place in a Marvel movie) target people by listening out for their voices. Consequently, not a word can be exchanged between Thomasz and his captor Lilja, played by Siri Nase.
Lilja takes Thomasz prisoner because she needs his brute strength. A day’s walk away from the questionable safety of her log cabin, there is a burned-out military convoy. Amid the wreckage and bodies, there is a heavy case – and in the case is a tactical nuke. Lilja needs Thomasz’s help in dragging it to where she can detonate it, perhaps bringing down the machines. While Thomasz acts out of fear, Lilja is acting out of despair. Both are reduced to using each other. Both will have to learn to trust again.
“The film’s sound design is striking, even a car’s gear change comes across as an imminent alien threat”
In 2018, John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place arrived in cinemas – in which aliens chase down every sound and slaughter its maker. This can’t have been a happy day for the devoted and mostly unpaid German enthusiasts working on A New World Order. But such “silent” movies are no novelty, and theirs has clearly ploughed its own furrow. The film’s sound design, by Sebastian Tarcan, is especially striking, balancing levels so that even a car’s gear change comes across as an imminent alien threat.
Writing a good silent film is something of a lost art. It is much easier for writers to explain their story through dialogue than to propel it through action. Maybe this is why silent film, done well, is such a powerful experience. There is a scene in this movie where Thomasz realises not only that he has to do the courageous thing, but that he is at last capable of doing it. Ebel, on his own on a scree-strewn Finnish hillside, plays the moment to perfection.
Somewhere on this independent film’s long road to distribution – it began life on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in 2016 – someone decided “A Living Dog” was too obscure a film title for these godless times. It is a pity, I think, and not just because A New World Order, the title picked for UK distribution, manages to be at once pompous and meaningless.
Ebel’s pitch-perfect performance drips guilt and bad conscience. In order to stay alive, he has learned to crawl about the earth. But Lilja’s example, and his own conscience, will turn dog to lion at last, and in a genre that never tires of presenting us with hyper-capable heroes, it is refreshing, on this occasion, to follow the forging of one courageous act.
Simon also recommends…
Film
The Last Battle (1983)
Another debut with no dialogue, this time by Luc Besson. This mysterious, post-apocalyptic adventure, filmed in derelict corners of Paris, conjures up a future in which humanity has lost its powers of speech.
Book
Hope Island
Tim Major
Titan Books
This horror-sci-fi hybrid unpicks the sonic mysteries of a small island in the Gulf of Maine. It is a spine-tingling tale of screams and susurration and all manner of sinister audio wizardry.

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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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