A bit early this month but I need to make space for more updates next week. The most unusual thing about this installment is that none of the three articles this month are from The Economist! Two of the three articles are about biology while the last one is very speculative, very theoretical physics.
The first of these articles discusses a controversial book about a topic that I’m sure everyone has thought of at one point or another: were our ancestors really faster, stronger and tougher than the humans living today now are? According to the author of Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male, Peter McAllister, the answer is yes. An anthropologist, he bases his conclusions on a wide range of evidence. For example, he examined fossilized footprints of Australian aboriginals who lived 20,000 years ago to estimate their running speed.
His calculations show that they reached speeds of 37 kph on a soft, muddy lake edge and were still accelerating towards the end of the tracks. Compare this to Usain Bolt’s record breaking performance at the Beijing Olympics, who achieved 42 kph but with spiked shoes and a rubberized, flat track. He argues that this proves that a typical Aboriginal male from that time period should outperform even today’s fastest runner under similar conditions. Other examples he cites include records of Roman legionnaires marching long distances while carrying more than half their body weight in equipment and the oarsmen used on the ships of ancient Athens.
The author puts this down to the easier life that modern humans enjoy and argues that even the scientifically devised training regimens of today’s best athletes can’t replicate the brutal conditions that forged such tough people. Of course, this also means that ancient humans aren’t innately tougher. If it were possible to truly replicate those conditions today, the human organism should still rise to the challenge, especially given the better diets and medical knowledge that we now have access to.
The second article talks about what is known as the uncanny valley effect. This is the phenomenon whereby artificially created representations of humans designed to be as realistic as possible induce uncomfortable feelings of eeriness in observers. This happens most often in computer generated animation but can also occur with androids with realistic human faces. The reason for this effect is that no one can quite capture all of the subtle movements and tics of real human faces, so as the representations become ever more realistic, the parts that are wrong or incongruous stick out more conspicuously and end up being repulsive. As this article from Science Daily explains, this is also why Pixar, arguably the best animation studio in the world, chooses to use stylized characters with a somewhat cartoonish look rather than try to achieve photorealism.
Experiments performed by Asif Ghazanfar and his team at Princeton University have now demonstrated that the same effect also seems to occur in macaque monkeys. These monkeys normally coo and smack their lips at each other but when presented with computer generated images of monkeys they quickly averted their eyes and seemed frightened. However when presented with real monkey images or even images that were artificial but were not realistic, they tended to view them more often and for longer periods. The article concludes with some speculative ideas of the reasons why such a biological reaction exists but nothing has been proven yet.
The final article isn’t based on a scientific study at all. It is rather some rather speculative musing on the part of Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto on why the Large Hadron Collider, billed as the world’s most expensive science experiment and the powerful particle collider in existence, has been shut down for more than a year now. The collider was designed to search for the Higgs boson, thought to be the fundamental particle that imbues all other particles with mass, but was shut down due to an accident not long after it was completed.
The physicists theorize that the creation of the Higgs boson could be so abhorrent to nature that the project, and any other similar ones, is jinxed. As the article explains, it’s as if someone from the future, knowing what a catastrophe the creation of the boson would be, traveled back in time to sabotage the project. The only thing that lends this hare-brained idea any credence is that the pair actually published their theory before the collider was shut down but after a similar US-based project was canceled after being plagued with numerous problems and cost overruns. Note that I don’t buy this wacky story for a second, but I always enjoy reading established scientists publish crazy stuff in an academic journal.