Category Archives: Technology

Feelings: what’s the point of rational thought if emotions always take over?

I have long sought to make radical changes to my life, such as leaving a toxic workplace and losing weight. Yet I never get around to it. I am scared to leave work and sad about being overweight – and I eat when I feel that way. To what extent are humans driven by fear and emotion? What’s the point of rational thought if it keeps getting overridden by emotions? Ed, 42, London.

One of the most famous brain injuries recorded in history was that suffered by Phineas Gage. Having had a large iron rod driven through his head, Gage lost a major part of his prefrontal cortex, which among other things facilitates interaction between reasoning and emotions. Gage survived his injury and maintained most of his cognitive functions. He could do maths, but he failed to make almost any decisions – especially those involving social interactions.

That’s because decision making is a complex matter involving both reasoning and emotions. Even the most emotional person uses rational thought when deciding, and even the most rational person is affected by emotions when making decisions. Yet we often, as you do here, tend to highlight the negative role of emotions in decision making.

This article is part of Life’s Big Questions
The Conversation’s new series, co-published with BBC Future, seeks to answer our readers’ nagging questions about life, love, death and the universe. We work with professional researchers who have dedicated their lives to uncovering new perspectives on the questions that shape our lives.

It may seem like life would be easier if we could be entirely rational. But evolution has supported the development of feeling and thinking exactly because we need them both. Feelings take care of our desires and needs now, while rationality is defending our interests and wellbeing in the future. I call these two entities that live in us Tod (today) and Tom (tomorrow).

If Tom didn’t exist, we would definitely be in a bad shape. Just imagine a world without reasoning – we would lose interest in anything that doesn’t provide us with instant pleasure. We would avoid learning, producing and protecting ourselves. We would simply sink into a life of addiction that would kill us even before we managed to breed.

But without Tod we wouldn’t survive either. Tod is providing us with immediate decisions when danger is imminent. If we spot a car coming towards us while crossing the street, Tod will stop us. Tom might be able to calculate velocities and distances to tell whether or not we are in danger, but by the time he’d come up with the answer, it would be too late.

Tod is also facilitating our social interactions, not only with his positive habits, such as love and empathy, but also with nasty ones. Studies show that people who can evoke a certain degree of anger and insult during bargaining and debate do better than measured people.

A world without feelings

But beyond all this, there is one crucial reason why we should never be sorry for Tod being part of us. My friend Tali Tishbi, an eminent artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, believes that, in a few decades, AI will manage to do away with death and grant us all eternal life – albeit digitally. Here is how it is going to work: during our regular life – phase 1 – a database will store all the decisions, views, comments and ideas we have ever made, together with the circumstances in which they were made.

Machine learning (a type of AI) techniques will then analyse this data and generate software that can produce decisions in hypothetical circumstances based on those we took in our life. When our phase 1 life eventually terminates, we will enter phase 2 of eternal life, through this software. Our bodies will be dead at this stage, and this data from our minds will instead be located in a computer.

We would feel or experience nothing, but for all other purposes, we’d be there. This version of ourselves can resume our job as a chief executive because the machine would make exactly the same decisions that we would have done had we been in phase 1 of our life. It would also still be able to offer advice to our children when they are in their 90s, and be able to comment on our grand-grand-grandchild’s new girlfriend in 2144.

But let’s now go back to Tod and Tom. Life without Tod would look pretty much like what my friend calls phase 2 of life – and what I call death with an advanced photo album. Had our decisions been ruled solely by Tom, we wouldn’t be humans – we would be algorithms.

For you, it sounds like Tod is ruling the day in your life, leaving little space for Tom. After all, you can always start a diet or quit your job tomorrow – right now, though, you’d rather relax. People may differ in how much they rely on rational thought, but everybody ultimately uses both – even you. You have, after all, identified a goal that you want to achieve.

So how can we have a better balance between the Tod and Tom? Several psychology studies show that our patience with Tom is depleted rather quickly. This is not surprising, since he is the one who tells us to do those unpleasant things, such as staying away from croissants. When we were kids it was the role of our parents to help us to invite Tom in. But even when we are independent, we need help in a similar way from time to time.

One way of doing this is to ask our partner or friends to support us in achieving our goals. Another is inviting Tom to comment on someone else who is in a similar situation to us. We don’t like Tom to tell us what to do, but we are curious to hear what he has to say. So with a little bit of self-deception we might be able to take the perspective of an “impartial spectator”, which will make it harder to ignore him.

Tod and Tom are better friends than we tend to believe. They feed and reinforce one another. The best rational decisions take feelings into account. If you want to go on a diet, the best option is not always picking the one with the smallest calorie intake, but the one that you like the most and can stick with. For some people, it will be eating only boiled potatoes, while for others it will be a low-carb diet.

So don’t be scared to let Tod have a say. And get some help with inviting Tom in. It is ultimately together that they work best.

To get all of life’s big answers, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value evidence-based news by subscribing to our newsletter. You can send us your big questions by email at bigquestions@theconversation.com and we’ll try to get a researcher or expert on the case.

More Life’s Big Questions:

• What would happen if we all just stopped following rules?

• Death: can our final moment be euphoric?

• Love: is it just a fleeting high fuelled by brain chemicals?

Eyal Winter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation: Technology https://theconversation.com/feelings-whats-the-point-of-rational-thought-if-emotions-always-take-over-128592

Green ammonia could slash emissions from farming – and power ships of the future

For the past 100 years, a simple molecule has had an immensely positive impact on our world. Ammonia, which comprises three hydrogen atoms bonded to a single nitrogen atom, is widely used to make the fertilisers enable us to produce enough food for everyone on the planet. That makes it pretty much the most important molecule after water.

However, ammonia manufacturing is the world’s third biggest industrial process emitter of carbon dioxide, creating half a billion tonnes of CO₂ each year – 1.8% of global CO₂ emissions.

My colleagues and I have just produced a report for the Royal Society that shows producing zero-carbon green ammonia could cut global carbon emissions by almost 2%. What’s more, it could also store nation-scale amounts of renewable energy and power ships, trains and heavy-duty vehicles.

Ammonia is commonly produced by reacting methane with steam to produce hydrogen, and then reacting this with nitrogen from the air using what is known as the Haber-Bosch process. But the steam methane reforming also gives off carbon dioxide. In contrast, green ammonia is produced with hydrogen that has been separated from water using renewable electricity.

It’s also possible to break ammonia back down into hydrogen and nitrogen, giving off energy in the process. And it can be burned like fossil fuels such as diesel. This means ammonia can also be used as an energy store.

Read more: Five ways chemicals can save the world from climate change

The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, UK, has a unique green ammonia demonstration system. It is powered by an on-site wind turbine and capable of producing up to 30kg of green ammonia a day. It can also feed green electricity back into the grid as required.

The challenge in making green ammonia production a viable alternative is bringing down the cost, of which 85% is electricity. In most parts of the world, renewable energy is still significantly more expensive than the methane used in conventional ammonia manufacturing.

However, the cost of electricity in areas with abundant renewable potential has decreased dramatically over the past decade, to around 1.7-3.4 GBP pence per kWh. This means you can produce green ammonia for around £220 per tonne.

This still isn’t as cheap as the conventional process. But to keep using this method while reducing our emissions to net zero we would have to combine carbon capture and storage so the resulting CO₂ wouldn’t enter the atmosphere. And that’s when green ammonia can become cost competitive.

Zero-carbon fuel

Green ammonia also has the potential to address one of the biggest unsolved challenges in the race for net zero emissions: how do we create flexible zero-carbon fuel reserves that last for years in the way current fossil fuels do?

Ammonia is easily stored in large quantities as a liquid at modest pressures (between 10 and 15 times that of our atmosphere) or refrigerated to -33°C. In this form, the energy density is around half that of petrol and over ten times that of batteries.

What ammonia has over other potential fuel alternatives is that we already have a global manufacturing and distribution system in place because of its widespread use as a feedstock for fertilisers. There is also a comprehensive network of ports that handle ammonia at large scale so it could become a fuel for long-distance shipping with relative ease.

In fact, the international shipping industry has already proven the feasibility of using ammonia as a fuel in their largest ocean-going container ships. MAN Energy Solutions, a designer and manufacturer of marine engines, has announced that the first ammonia engine could be in operation by early 2022. This would also open up opportunities for green fuels for trains, heavy-duty freight and perhaps even zero-carbon aviation.

Ammonia does present other challenges. The use of ammonia-based fertilisers contributes to global declines in biodiversity, widespread air quality problems and greenhouse gas emissions. New uses of ammonia must include effective measures to prevent any additional emissions.

Stringent controls that are already present at all current ammonia storage and relevant industrial sites, must be in place to ensure that the risks of ammonia release and the resulting formation of harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) are negligible.

What we need to do now is to research and demonstrate the potential of ammonia, from improving wind and solar power through optimising green ammonia production and storage. And we need to develop a comprehensive portfolio of ways of turning ammonia back into power when and where we need it.

Bill David receives funding from UKRI for academic research.

Source: The Conversation: Technology https://theconversation.com/green-ammonia-could-slash-emissions-from-farming-and-power-ships-of-the-future-132152

What would happen if we all just stopped following rules?

I’m in my late twenties and I’m feeling more and more constrained by rules. From the endless signs that tell me to “stand on the right” on escalators or “skateboarding forbidden” in public places to all those unwritten societal rules such as the expectation that I should settle down, buy a house and have a family. Do we really need all these rules, why should I follow them and what would happen if we all ignored them? Will, 28, London

We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten – it’s practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations are rife with regulations and red tape that seemingly are there to dictate our every move. We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they’re “there to be broken”.

But as a behavioural scientist I believe that it is not really rules, norms and customs in general that are the problem – but the unjustified ones. The tricky and important bit, perhaps, is establishing the difference between the two.

A good place to start is to imagine life in a world without rules. Apart from our bodies following some very strict and complex biological laws, without which we’d all be doomed, the very words I’m writing now follow the rules of English. In Byronic moments of artistic individualism, I might dreamily think of liberating myself from them. But would this new linguistic freedom really do me any good or set my thoughts free?

This article is part of Life’s Big Questions
The Conversation’s new series, co-published with BBC Future, seeks to answer our readers’ nagging questions about life, love, death and the universe. We work with professional researchers who have dedicated their lives to uncovering new perspectives on the questions that shape our lives.

Some – Lewis Carroll in his poem Jabberwocky, for example – have made a success of a degree of literary anarchy. But on the whole, breaking away from the rules of my language makes me not so much unchained as incoherent.

Byron was a notorious rule breaker in his personal life, but he was also a stickler for rhyme and meter. In his poem, When We Two Parted, for example, Byron writes about forbidden love, a love that broke the rules, but does do so by precisely following some well-established poetic laws. And many would argue it is all the more powerful for it:

In secret we met
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?–
With silence and tears.

Consider, too, how rules are the essence of sport, games and puzzles – even when their entire purpose is supposedly fun. The rules of chess, say, can trigger a tantrum if I want to “castle” to get out of check, but find that they say I can’t; or if I find your pawn getting to my side of the board and turning into a queen, rook, knight or bishop. Similarly, find me a football fan who hasn’t at least once raged against the offside rule.

But chess or football without rules wouldn’t be chess or football – they would be entirely formless and meaningless activities. Indeed, a game with no rules is no game at all.

Lots of the norms of everyday life perform precisely the same function as the rules of games – telling us what “moves” we can, and can’t, make. The conventions of “pleases” and “thank yous” that seem so irksome to young children are indeed arbitrary – but the fact that we have some such conventions, and perhaps critically that we agree what they are, is part of what makes our social interactions run smoothly.

And rules about driving on the left or the right, stopping at red lights, queuing, not littering, picking up our dog’s deposits and so on fall into the same category. They are the building blocks of a harmonious society.

The call of chaos

Of course, there has long been an appetite among some people for a less formalised society, a society without government, a world where individual freedom takes precedence: an anarchy.

The trouble with anarchy, though, is that it is inherently unstable – humans continually, and spontaneously, generate new rules governing behaviour, communication and economic exchange, and they do so as rapidly as old rules are dismantled.

A few decades ago, the generic pronoun in written language was widely assumed to be male: he/him/his. That rule has, quite rightly, largely been overturned. Yet it has also been replaced – not by an absence of rules, but by a different and broader set of rules governing our use of pronouns.

Or let’s return to the case of sport. A game may start by kicking a pig’s bladder from one end of a village to another, with ill-defined teams, and potentially riotous violence. But it ends up, after a few centuries, with a hugely complex rule book dictating every detail of the game. We even create international governing bodies to oversee them.

The political economist Elinor Ostrom (who shared the Noble Prize for economics in 2009) observed the same phenomenon of spontaneous rule construction when people had collectively to manage common resources such as common land, fisheries, or water for irrigation.

She found that people collectively construct rules about, say, how many cattle a person can graze, where, and when; who gets how much water, and what should be done when the resource is limited; who monitors whom, and which rules resolve disputes. These rules aren’t just invented by rulers and imposed from the top down – instead, they often arise, unbidden, from the needs of mutually agreeable social and economic interactions.

The urge to overturn stifling, unjust or simply downright pointless rules is entirely justified. But without some rules – and some tendency for us to stick to them – society would slide rapidly into pandemonium. Indeed, many social scientists would see our tendency to create, stick to, and enforce rules as the very foundation of social and economic life.

Our relationship with rules does seem to be unique to humans. Of course, many animals behave in highly ritualistic ways – for example, the bizarre and complex courtship dances of different species of bird of paradise – but these patterns are wired into their genes, not invented by past generations of birds. And, while humans establish and maintain rules by punishing rule violations, chimpanzees – our closest relatives – do not. Chimps may retaliate when their food is stolen but, crucially, they don’t punish food stealing in general – even if the victim is a close relative.

In humans, rules also take hold early. Experiments show that children, by the age of three, can be taught entirely arbitrary rules for playing a game. Not only that, when a “puppet” (controlled by an experimenter) arrives on the scene and begins to violate the rules, children will criticise the puppet, protesting with comments such as “You are doing that wrong!” They will even attempt to teach the puppet to do better.

Indeed, despite our protests to the contrary, rules seem hardwired into our DNA. In fact, our species’ ability to latch onto, and enforce, arbitrary rules is crucial to our success as a species. If each of us had to justify each rule from scratch (why we drive on the left in some countries, and on the right in others; why we say please and thank you), our minds would grind to a halt. Instead, we are able to learn the hugely complex systems of linguistic and social norms without asking too many questions – we simply absorb “the way we do things round here”.

Instruments of tyranny

But we must be careful – for this way tyranny also lies. Humans have a powerful sense of wanting to enforce, sometimes oppressive, patterns of behaviour – correct spelling, no stranded prepositions, no split infinitives, hats off in church, standing for the national anthem – irrespective of their justification. And while the shift from “This is what we all do” to “This is what we all ought to do” is a well-known ethical fallacy, it is deeply embedded in human psychology.

One danger is that rules can develop their own momentum: people can become so fervent about arbitrary rules of dress, dietary restrictions or the proper treatment of the sacred that they may exact the most extreme punishments to maintain them.

Political ideologues and religious fanatics often mete out such retribution – but so do repressive states, bullying bosses and coercive partners: the rules must be obeyed, just because they are the rules.

Not only that, but criticising rules or failing to enforce them (not to draw attention to a person wearing inappropriate dress, for example) becomes a transgression requiring punishment itself.

And then there’s “rule-creep”: rules just keep being added and extended, so that our individual liberty is increasingly curtailed. Planning restrictions, safety regulations and risk assessments can seem to accumulate endlessly and may extend their reach far beyond any initial intention.

Restrictions on renovating ancient buildings can be so stringent that no renovation is feasible and the buildings collapse; environmental assessments for new woodlands can be so severe that tree planting becomes almost impossible; regulations on drug discovery can be so arduous that a potentially valuable medicine is abandoned. The road to hell is not merely paved with good intentions, but edged with rules enforcing those good intentions, whatever the consequences.

Individuals, and societies, face a continual battle over rules – and we must be cautious about their purpose. So, yes, “standing on the right” on an escalator may speed up everyone’s commute to work – but be careful of conventions that have no obvious benefit to all, and especially those that discriminate, punish and condemn. The latter can become the instruments of tyranny

Rules, like good policing, should rely on our consent. So perhaps the best advice is mostly to follow rules, but always to ask why.

To get all of life’s big answers, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value evidence-based news by subscribing to our newsletter. You can send us your big questions by email at bigquestions@theconversation.com and we’ll try to get a researcher or expert on the case.

More Life’s Big Questions:

• Have humans evolved beyond nature and do we even need it?

• Death: can our final moment be euphoric?

• Love: is it just a fleeting high fuelled by brain chemicals?

Nick Chater receives funding from ESRC. He is a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change, and a director of DecisionTechnology, Ltd. He is the author of The Mind is Flat (2018) Penguin/Yale University Press.

Source: The Conversation: Technology https://theconversation.com/what-would-happen-if-we-all-just-stopped-following-rules-128664

Vigilantes and private security are policing the internet where governments have failed

The internet revolution of the past 20 years has opened up countless new ways for people to shop, bank, find love – and to commit crimes. Every time we switch on a computer, open an email, view a website or make an online payment, there are multiple new opportunities for crimes to occur. In fact, almost half of all crimes against individuals in England and Wales now involve or are enabled by the internet.

These technological changes have fuelled a substantial new private policing sector that includes commercial companies but also online vigilantes. This change is comparable to the “quiet revolution” seen in the 1970s when conventional private policing, particularly the use of uniformed security officers, emerged on an industrial scale.

Despite its scale, online private policing activity has been largely ignored by researchers and politicians. Yet it is already creating some significant issues that need addressing.

This new online private policing sector exists most obviously in the numerous companies providing services. These include designing, testing and maintaining security systems, responding to cyber-attacks and moderating websites for harmful or illegal content.

But many other organisations have also developed their own cybersecurity structures to better protect themselves from online crime. In most large organisations, these structures are led by what are generally called chief information security officers (CISO) but there are also many other new cybersecurity roles such as security architects and ethical hackers.

Globally, this new sector is estimated to support around 6 million jobs and is predicted to be worth US$248 billion (£190 billion) by 2023. This is much more than the traditional private security industry, which is only predicted to be worth around US$167 billion (£128 billion) by 2025.

One of the most interesting roles to emerge in this new sector is that of the moderators who police the content published on the internet. They play an important role in preventing the publication of undesirable material, from hardcore pornography and footage from war zones through to abusive and inappropriate language.

There has been virtually no academic research of these important operatives. But media reports have raised concerns over the welfare of these staff, who often have to view large amounts of distressing content, including images. So their conditions of employment and capabilities should be more of a priority for researchers and regulators.

Online vigilantes

The internet hasn’t just stimulated new forms of commercial private policing but has also enabled a new type of vigilantism to flourish. For example, the limited law enforcement response to the masses of scam emails and bogus websites we’re at risk from everyday has led to the growth of “scambaitors”. These are private individuals who try to engage with scammers and waste their time or simply raise awareness of their scams.

One of the problems with scambaiting is the humiliation and racism often involved. For example some scammers have been encouraged to do repetitive tasks such as draw street maps and rewrite books, paint themselves or pose naked in humiliating positions, all of which have then been publicised. Sometimes this is done with explicit or implicit racist commentaries, relating to the fact that many of the scammers are black West Africans.

Perhaps the most controversial area of online vigilantism that has emerged is paedophile hunting. Organised groups of internet users pose as children in online chatrooms to lure and expose paedophiles.

The actions of these groups have clearly helped the police and led to the exposure of real paedophiles who have subsequently been charged and convicted. In 2018, at least 150 people in England and Wales were charged using evidence provided by paedophile hunters.

But some groups have made their exposures and confrontations public, in some cases even live-streaming them online. This has led to innocent people being falsely and publicly condemned, while others have killed themselves after the exposure. It has also been revealed that some of the people enacting this “justice” are themselves convicted criminals – whereas police forces themselves often bar people with criminal records from joining.

The rapid growth of both commercial and amateur attempts at policing the internet shows there is a demand that is not being met by the traditional provider of law enforcement, the state. But the problems that are emerging from this private security activity demonstrate why it isn’t enough to leave such significant operations to the market or volunteers.

The first “quiet revolution” eventually resulted in many jurisdictions introducing regulations to better control the activities of private security. This new shift at least warrants further research and investigation to determine if the controls are adequate. The suspicion is that they are not.

Mark Button receives funding from from the Home Office and IPSO/Mori on cyber related research. These projects did not directly relate to this article, but did touch upon some of the issues raised in the paper.

Source: The Conversation: Technology https://theconversation.com/vigilantes-and-private-security-are-policing-the-internet-where-governments-have-failed-132040

Quantum internet: the next global network is already being laid

Google reported a remarkable breakthrough towards the end of 2019. The company claimed to have achieved something called quantum supremacy, using a new type of “quantum” computer to perform a benchmark test in 200 seconds. This was in stark contrast to the 10,000 years that would supposedly have been needed by a state-of-the-art conventional supercomputer to complete the same test.

Despite IBM’s claim that its supercomputer, with a little optimisation, could solve the task in a matter of days, Google’s announcement made it clear that we are entering a new era of incredible computational power.

Yet with much less fanfare, there has also been rapid progress in the development of quantum communication networks, and a master network to unite them all called the quantum internet. Just as the internet as we know it followed the development of computers, we can expect the quantum computer to be accompanied by the safer, better synchronised quantum internet.

Like quantum computing, quantum communication records information in what are known as qubits, similar to the way digital systems use bits and bytes. Whereas a bit can only take the value of zero or one, a qubit can also use the principles of quantum physics to take the value of zero and one at the same time. This is what allows quantum computers to perform certain computations very quickly. Instead of solving several variants of a problem one by one, the quantum computer can handle them all at the same time.

These qubits are central to the quantum internet because of a property called entanglement. If two entangled qubits are geographically separated (for instance, one qubit in Dublin and the other in New York), measurements of both would yield the same result. This would enable the ultimate in secret communications, a shared knowledge between two parties that cannot be discovered by a third. The resulting ability to code and decode messages would be one of the most powerful features of the quantum internet.

Commercial applications

There will be no shortage of commercial applications for these advanced cryptographic mechanisms. The world of finance, in particular, looks set to benefit as the quantum internet will lead to enhanced privacy for online transactions and stronger proof of the funds used in the transaction.

Recently, at the CONNECT Centre in Trinity College Dublin, we successfully implemented an algorithm that could achieve this level of security. That this took place during a hackathon – a sort of competition for computer programmers – shows that even enthusiasts without detailed knowledge of quantum physics can create some of the building blocks that will be needed for the quantum internet. This technology won’t be confined to specialist university departments, just as the original internet soon outgrew its origins as a way to connect academics around the world.

But how could this quantum internet be built anytime soon when we currently can only build very limited quantum computers? Well, the devices in the quantum internet don’t have to be completely quantum in nature, and the network won’t require massive quantum machines to handle the communication protocols.

One qubit here and there is all a quantum communication network needs to function. Instead of replacing the current infrastructure of optical fibres, data centres and base stations, the quantum internet will build on top of and make maximum use of the existing, classical internet.

With such rapid progress being made, quantum internet technology is set to shape the business plans of telecom companies in the near future. Financial institutions are already using quantum communication networks to make inter-bank transactions safer. And quantum communication satellites are up and running as the first step to extending these networks to a global scale.

The pipes of the quantum internet are effectively being laid as you read this. When a big quantum computer is finally built, it can be plugged into this network and accessed on the cloud, with all the privacy guarantees of quantum cryptography.

What will the ordinary user notice when the enhanced cryptography of the quantum internet becomes available? Very little, in all likelihood. Cryptography is like waste management: if everything works well, the customer doesn’t even notice.

In the constant race of the codemakers and codebreakers, the quantum internet won’t just prevent the codebreakers taking the lead. It will move the race track into another world altogether, with a significant head start for the codemakers. With data becoming the currency of our times, the quantum internet will provide stronger security for a new valuable commodity.

Harun Šiljak works for CONNECT, Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications.

Source: The Conversation: Technology https://theconversation.com/quantum-internet-the-next-global-network-is-already-being-laid-131355

Why the most distant object ever visited looks like a snowman – flyby delivers results

Just over a year ago, courtesy of NASA’s New Horizons mission, we were treated to images of 2014MU69, a small object 6.6 billion kilometers from the sun – making it the most distant object to have ever been visited by a spacecraft. It was described, variously, as a snowman, a bowling pin or a peanut. What we were seeing was a picture of one of the oldest and most primitive bodies in the solar system.

New Horizons took only a handful of minutes to fly past the object at its closest approach of about 3,500km – but those minutes were well spent, recording a huge amount of information. It has taken many months to download the data from the spacecraft because of its distance from Earth and slow rate of data transfer.

Now, though, a series of papers from the mission team, published in Science (see here and here), illustrate what can be learnt with a few minutes of carefully planned and coordinated recording time. The papers give a detailed description of the object. It hasn’t changed in shape – but now we know why it has the shape it does. And the explanation will help us understand more about the most unaltered objects in the solar system.

The object resides in the Kuiper Belt. “Kuiper Belt Objects” form a belt of small bodies that extends way out beyond the orbit of Neptune. They are the cold and rocky remnants of solar system formation. The body in question is dark and a bit reddish in colour. Its double-lobed appearance resembles comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the target of ESA’s incredibly successful Rosetta mission.

But before we get into what the 36km-long body can tell us, we should know how to refer to it correctly. What is it called? Its official name is still 2014MU69, but, as is common with important astronomical objects, it has been given a more memorable label. For many months following the fly-by, 2014MU69 was referred to as “Ultima Thule”, meaning a far distant land – and 2014MU69 certainly was (and is) a far distant land.

But this nickname was rather controversial, as it has links to Nazism, with “Thule” referred to as the original origin of the “Aryan race” according to far-right mythology. The New Horizons team also wanted something more specific. In November 2019, the International Astronomical Union (the organisation that oversees the naming of astronomical objects) agreed to name 2014MU69 “Arrokoth”.

Why Arrokoth? The beauty of the night sky has inspired generations of poets and songwriters; it is the backdrop for myths and legends and is a “free-to-view” panorama of celestial entertainment. The sky is, of course, a boundless horizon – which is why, when the New Horizons mission team was searching for a name for their latest target, they turned to the sky for inspiration.

Arrokoth is a Native American term meaning “sky” – and as Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission explained:: “The name ‘Arrokoth’ reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own.”

Gentle merger

Back then, to what Arrokoth has shown us. It is described as a contact binary – which means that it has two lobes that are stuck together. We have known that since the flyby, but now that higher-resolution images have been received, we can see that the surface of Arrokoth is quite smooth and has very few craters.

One of the most important aspects, though, is the way the two lobes are joined. The neck between the two lobes is well defined, but now also seen to be smooth – there is no indication of any fracturing. This is important, as fracturing would be the case if the two lobes had smashed together in an energetic impact or were collisional fragments from a larger body.

The implication is that the individual lobes were already bound to each other by gravity, rotating slowly before coming together in a gentle collision at a velocity of only a few metres per second. At the time of the collision, there would still have been sufficient gas present to slow down the rotation and help to move the bodies together – hence the gentle impact.

Even though the lobes are thought to be single bodies, and not accretion of smaller units, they can still be mapped into different terrains marked by changes in colour, slope and smoothness. We do not have sufficient information to determine whether these units have differing mineralogies, but data show that even though the changes in colour are quite subtle, they can be distinguished.

Deposits of methanol ice and complex organic compounds cover Arrokoth’s surface. The organics are likely to be material derived directly from the primordial cloud from which the sun was born, mixed with more complex compounds produced by radiation-driven reactions on the surface. Although water and ammonia ices have not been identified, they might be present below the surface layer of dust and organics. However, given the freezing temperatures in the Kuiper Belt, Arrokoth is very unlikely to host any life.

Arrokoth’s two lobes would each have formed by aggregation of dust in the primordial cloud. This makes Arrokoth a first-generation occupant of the solar system, having been little disturbed for 4567 million years.

The sky is not the limit for the New Horizons mission – even though the data from Arrokoth have not yet all been downloaded, planning is in progress for the spacecraft’s next target. I wonder what shape that might turn out to be – snowman, bowling pin or peanut?

Monica Grady receives funding from the UK Space Agency and the STFC. She is a member of the Liberal Democrats, Research Fellow of the Natural History Museum and Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University

Source: The Conversation: Technology https://theconversation.com/why-the-most-distant-object-ever-visited-looks-like-a-snowman-flyby-delivers-results-131797

The origin and evolution of love

Why do we love? At best, it’s a mixed blessing, at worst, a curse. Love makes otherwise intelligent people act like fools; it causes heartache and grief. Lovers break our hearts, family sometimes drive us mad, friends can let us down.

But we’re hard-wired to bond with each other. That suggests the capacity for love evolved, that natural selection favoured caring for one another. Fossils tell us that love evolved hundreds of millions of years ago, helping our mammalian ancestors survive in the time of the dinosaurs.

Humans have peculiarly complex emotional lives. Romantic love, the long-term bonding between males and females, is unusual among mammals. We’re also unusual in forming long-term relationships with unrelated individuals (friendships).

But humans and all other mammals share one kind of love, the bond between a mother and her offspring. The universality of this attachment suggests that it’s the original, ancestral form of bonding – the first kind of love, from which all others evolved.

Evidence of parent-offspring bonding appears around 200 million years ago, in the latest Triassic and earliest Jurassic periods. Fossils of Kayentatherium, a Jurassic proto-mammal from Arizona, preserve a mother who died protecting her 38 tiny babies. For this behaviour to exist, the instincts of both mother and offspring first had to evolve.

In primitive animals, such as lizards, parents aren’t exactly parental. A mother Komodo dragon abandons her eggs, leaving hatchlings to fend for themselves. If she ever meets her young, she is likely to try to eat them: komodo dragons are cannibals. The young will instinctively run for their lives upon meeting her – and should.

Guarding hatchlings requires that the mother evolve instincts to see her small, helpless offspring as things to protect, not easy prey. Meanwhile, the offspring must evolve to see mum as a source of security and warmth, not fear.

Kayentatherium‘s fossilised mother-child association implies that this instinctive evolution had already happened. But Kayentatherium probably wasn’t a doting mother. With 38 kids, she probably couldn’t feed them, or spend much time on them.

In Welsh rocks laid down in the Late Triassic, we find evidence of more advanced parental care. Here, the proto-mammal Morganucodon shows mammal-style tooth replacement. Instead of endlessly replacing teeth from birth to death –as in lizards and sharks – Morganucodon was toothless as a baby, developed baby teeth, then shed those for adult teeth.

This replacement pattern is associated with lactation. Babies that suckle milk don’t need teeth. So Morganucodon mothers made milk. Providing more care to her young, Morganucodon probably invested heavily in a few offspring, like modern mammals, and would have evolved a correspondingly stronger bond with them. The young, completely dependent on the mother for food, would have developed a stronger emotional attachment as well.

It’s at this point in mammal history that our mammal ancestors stopped seeing each other as lizards did, exclusively in terms of danger, food and sex, feeling only the primitive emotions of fear, hunger and lust. Instead, they started to care for one another. Over millions of years, they increasingly began to bond, to protect and seek protection, exchange bodily warmth, groom one another, to play with, teach and learn from each other.

Mammals evolved the ability to form relationships. Once they did, this adaptation could be used in other contexts. Mammals could form relationships as family and friends in sophisticated social groups: elephant herds, monkey troops, killer whale pods, dog packs, human tribes. And in some species, males and females formed pair bonds.

Romantic love between men and women is a recent evolutionary development, associated with males helping females care for children. In most mammals, males are absentee fathers, contributing genes and nothing else to their offspring. In our closest relatives, chimpanzees, paternal care is minimal.

In a few species, including beavers, wolves, some bats, some voles and Homo sapiens, pairs form long-term bonds to cooperatively raise children. Pair bonding evolved sometime after our ancestors split from chimps, 6 million to 7 million years ago – probably before the split between humans and Neanderthals.

Love in our DNA

We can guess that Neanderthals formed long-term relationships, because their DNA is in us. That implies that Neanderthals and humans didn’t simply mate. We had children, who themselves became parents, and grandparents, and so on. For the results of those unions to not just survive, but thrive and integrate into their tribe, mixed children were likely to have been born to parents who cared for them – and each other.

Not all encounters between our species were peaceful or pretty, but neither were they entirely violent. Neanderthals were different from Homo sapiens, but enough like us that we could love them, and they, us – even coming from different tribes. A love story worthy of Jane Austen, literally written into our species’ DNA.

There’s an adaptive benefit to love. Today, the ecosystem is dominated by animals with parental care. Mammals and birds, and social insects including ants, wasps, bees and termites, all of which care for their young, dominate terrestrial ecosystems. Humans are the dominant terrestrial animal on Earth.

Parental care is adaptive by itself, but by teaching animals to form relationships, it also paved the way for the evolution of sociality and cooperation on a larger scale. Parental care in wood roaches, for example, led one lineage, termites, to evolve vast family groups (colonies) that literally reshape the landscape.

Ants, forming up to 25% of the biomass of some habitats, likely evolved coloniality in the same way. Evolution can be violently competitive, but the ability to care and form relationships allowed for cooperative groups, which became effective competitors against other groups and species.

Caring helps us cooperate and cooperation helps us compete. Humans can be selfish and destructive. But we’ve dominated the planet only because an unparalleled ability to care for one another – for partners, children, families, friends, fellow humans – allowed cooperation on a scale never before seen in the history of life.

Nick Longrich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Source: The Conversation: Technology https://theconversation.com/the-origin-and-evolution-of-love-131109

Love: is it just a fleeting high fuelled by brain chemicals?

I am head over heels in love but my cynical friends keep telling me that love is nothing but a cocktail of pheromones, dopamine and oxytocin, and that these wear off after a couple of years. The thought scares me, it makes the whole thing seem meaningless. Is love really just brain chemistry? Jo, London.

Licence my roving hands, and let them go,

Before, behind, between, above, below.

It is no accident that arguably the most erotic line of English poetry is all prepositions. The essence of love, at least of passionately romantic love, is revealed in its very grammar. We fall in love, not wander into it. And, as you say, we fall head over heels, not dragging our feet – often at first sight rather than on careful inspection. We fall in love madly, blind to the other’s vices, not in rational appraisal of their virtues.

At its root, romantic love is spontaneous, overwhelming, irresistible, ballistic, even if, over time, its branches take on more complex hues. It is in control of us more than we are ever in control of it. In one sense a mystery, it is in another pure simplicity – its course, once engaged, predictable and inevitable and its cultural expression more or less uniform across time and space. The impulse to think of it in terms of simple causes precedes science. Consider the arrow of Cupid, the potion of a sorcerer – love seems elemental.

Yet love is not easily conquered by science. Let us look at why. Sex pheromones, chemicals designed to broadcast reproductive availability to others, are often quoted as key instruments of attraction. It is an appealing idea. But while pheromones play an important role in insect communication, there is very little evidence that they even exist in humans.

This article is part of Life’s Big Questions
The Conversation’s new series, co-published with BBC Future, seeks to answer our readers’ nagging questions about life, love, death and the universe. We work with professional researchers who have dedicated their lives to uncovering new perspectives on the questions that shape our lives.

If a chemical can signal attraction outside the body, why not inside it? The neuropeptide oxytocin, often inaccurately described as a “bonding hormone” and known for its role in lactation and uterine contraction, is the leading candidate here. This has been extensively studied, mainly in the prairie vole, whose monogamy and public displays of affection make it an ideal model animal.

Blocking oxytocin disrupts the pair bonding that is here a surrogate for love, and makes the voles more restrained in their emotional expressions. Conversely, inducing an excess of oxytocin in other, non-monogamous vole species blunts their taste for sexual adventure. In humans, though, the effects are much less dramatic – a subtle change in the romantic preference for the familiar over the new. So oxytocin is far from proven to be essential to love.

Love’s letterbox?

Of course, even if we could identify such a substance, any message – chemical or otherwise – needs a recipient. So where is the letterbox of love in the brain? And how is the identity of the “chosen one” conveyed, given that no single molecule could possibly encode it?

When romantic love is examined with imaging of the brain, the areas that “light up” overlap with those supporting reward-seeking and goal-oriented behaviour. But that parts of our brains are set ablaze by one thing does not tell us much if they are just as excited by a very different, other thing. And the observed patterns of romantic love are not that different from those of maternal bonding, or even from the love of one’s favourite football team. So we can only conclude that neuroscience is yet to explain this “head over heels” emotion in neural terms.

Do we simply need more experiments? Yes, is usually the scientist’s answer, but here that assumes love is simple enough to be captured by a mechanistic description. And that is extremely unlikely, as nature would resist it. Evolutionarily speaking, love is ultimately about reproduction. Consider what would happen to an organism whose sexual attraction operated through a very simple mechanism involving a string of critical molecules, or a dozen or so vital neural nodes.

Its reproductive success would then be gated by the integrity of very few genetic elements, with the potential to be knocked out entirely by a mutation or two. A predator could evolve a poison that rendered its victim not just compliant, but positively amorous, only too happy to slide from a petite mort to the real thing. Were some inanimate thing to contain the key molecule in abundance, the entire species could become objectum sexuals, choosing to play with it over sex with each other. This is almost the joke truffles play on wild pigs, and it is telling that the animals are only temporarily diverted by it.

But the evolutionary vulnerability goes deeper. Remember that sex is not primarily about the reproduction of the species, but about its optimisation, and not just in response to the world as it is now, but as it might be across the widest range of hypothetical futures. This requires that organisms are diverse across their traits, as much as selected for their fitness. Were it not so, a sudden change in the environment could make a species go extinct overnight.

So each reproductive decision can be neither simple nor uniform, for we cannot be allowed to be guided by any single characteristic, let alone the same one. Universally attractive though tallness might be, if biology allowed us to select on height alone we would all have gigantism by now. And if the decisions have to be complex, so must the neural apparatus that makes them possible.

While this explains why romantic attraction must be complex, it doesn’t explain why it can feel so instinctual and spontaneous – unlike the deliberative mode we reserve for our most important decisions. Wouldn’t a cool, detached rationality be better? To see why it would not, consider what explicit reasoning is there for in the first place. Evolving later than our instincts, we need rationality only to detach ourselves from the grounds for a decision so that others can record, understand and apply it independently of us.

But there is no need for anyone else to understand the grounds for our love, indeed the last thing we want to do is provide others with a recipe to steal our object of desire. Equally, in ceding control to recorded cultural practice, evolution would place too much “trust” in a capacity – collective rationality – that is, in evolutionary terms, far too young.

It is also a mistake to think of instinct as simple, and inferior to careful deliberation. That it is tacit makes it potentially more sophisticated than rational analysis, for it brings into play a wider array of factors than we could ever hold simultaneously in our conscious minds. The truth of this stares us in the face: think how much better we are at recognising a face compared with describing it. Why should the recognition of love be any different?

Ultimately, if the neural mechanisms of love were simple, you should be able to induce it with an injection, to extinguish it with a scalpel while leaving everything else intact. The cold, hard logic of evolutionary biology makes this impossible. Were love not complicated, we would never have evolved in the first place.

That said, love – like all our thoughts, emotions and behaviours – rests on physical processes in the brain, a very complex interplay of them. But to say that love is “just” brain chemistry is like saying Shakespeare is “just” words, Wagner “just” notes and Michelangelo “just” calcium carbonate – it just misses the point. Like art, love is more than the sum of its parts.

So those of us lucky to experience its chaos should let ourselves be carried by the waves. And if we end up wrecked on the surf-hidden rocks, we can draw comfort from knowing reason would have got us no further.

To get all of life’s big answers, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value evidence-based news by subscribing to our newsletter. You can send us your big questions by email at bigquestions@theconversation.com and we’ll try to get a researcher or expert on the case.

More Life’s Big Questions:

• Death: can our final moment be euphoric?

• Nature: have humans now evolved beyond the natural world, and do we still need it?

Parashkev Nachev receives funding from the Wellcome Trust and the UCLH NIHR Biomedical Research Centre.

Source: The Conversation: Technology https://theconversation.com/love-is-it-just-a-fleeting-high-fuelled-by-brain-chemicals-129201

Early humans in Africa may have interbred with a mysterious, extinct species – new research

One of the more startling discoveries arising from genomic sequencing of ancient hominin DNA is the realisation that all humans outside Africa have traces of DNA in their genomes that do not belong to our own species.

The approximately six billion people on Earth whose recent ancestry is not from Africa will have inherited between 1% and 2% of their genome from our closest but now extinct relatives: the Neanderthals. East Asians and Oceanians have also inherited a small amount of ancestry from the Denisovans, another close relative of Homo Sapiens.

Now a new study, published in Science Advances, suggests that early humans living inside Africa may also have interbred with archaic hominims. These are extinct species that are related to Homo sapiens.

The interbreeding outside Africa happened after our Homo sapiens ancestors expanded out of Africa into new environments. It was there they had sex with Neaderthals and the related Denisovans.

This led to new discoveries. Early genetic studies of people from across the globe had previously suggested that our current distribution was the result of a single expansion out of Africa around 100,000 years ago. But the identification of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry in modern Eurasians complicated things.

We still think that most – anywhere between about 92% and 98.5% – of the ancestry in people not living in Africa today does indeed derive from the out-of-Africa expansion. But we now know the remainder came from archaic species whose ancestors left Africa hundreds of thousands of years before that.

What was happening inside Africa?

Insights into interbreeding have been driven by the much greater availability of modern and ancient genomes from outside of Africa. That’s because the cold and dry environments of Eurasia are much better at preserving DNA that the wet heat of tropical Africa.

But our understanding of the relationship between ancient human ancestors within Africa, and their connection with archaic humans, is beginning to deepen. A 2017 study of ancient DNA from southern Africa investigated 16 ancient genomes from people alive over the last 10,000 years. This showed that the history of African populations was complex. There wasn’t just a single group of humans around in Africa when they expanded out 100,000 years ago.

It’s a result that was supported earlier this year by a paper examining ancient DNA from four individuals from what is now Cameroon. Taken together, this research suggests there were geographically diverse groups in Africa well before the main expansion out of the continent. And many of these groups will have contributed to the ancestry of people alive in Africa today.

In addition, it now appears that there was potentially gene-flow into ancient African Homo sapiens populations from an archaic ancestor. One way in which this could happen is for people to expand out of Africa, have sex with Neanderthals, and then migrate back into Africa. Indeed, this has been demonstrated in one recent study.

The new paper provides evidence that there may also have been gene-flow into the ancestors of West Africans directly from a mysterious archaic hominin. The researchers compared Neanderthal and Densiovan DNA with that from four contemporary populations from West Africa. Using some elegant mathematics, they then built a statistical model to explain the relationships between the archaic hominins and modern Africans.

Interestingly, they suggest that 6%-7% of the genomes of West Africans is archaic in origin. But this archaic ancestry wasn’t Neanderthal or Denisovan. Their model suggested the additional ancestry came from an archaic population for which we don’t currently have a genome.

This ghost population likely split from the ancestors of humans and Neanderthals between 360,000 and 1.02 million years ago. That was well before the gene-flow event that brought Neanderthal DNA back into West Africa around 43,000 years ago – although the value of this could be anywhere between 0 and 124,000 years ago.

These dates position this ghost species as something akin to a Neanderthal, but that presumably was present within Africa, during the last 100,000 years. An alternative explanation is that the archaic hominin was present outside of Africa and interbred with populations there before they migrated back in.

Despite a raft of analyses that show that this result is not an artefact of either their methodology or some other genetic process, the authors are cautious about this result. They call for further analysis of both contemporary and ancient DNA from diverse populations in Africa.

Nevertheless, this research contributes to the ever-growing cannon of research demonstrating the promiscuous, species-crossing and complicated behaviours of the ancestors of all of us.

George Busby receives funding from Wellcome, the Medical Research Council, Oxford University and The Royal Geographical Society.

Source: The Conversation: Technology https://theconversation.com/early-humans-in-africa-may-have-interbred-with-a-mysterious-extinct-species-new-research-131699

Think you’ll make a great boss? Research shows that power can corrupt

People often complain that their boss lacks understanding and compassion, thinking they would have approached the job entirely differently. But are leaders really deficient when it comes to empathy? And if so, why?

The question is important. Since the ethical failures of leadership that led to the 2008 recession, there has been a concern for the relatively unchecked power of chief executives. These people after all have the ear of politicians and are influential in shaping society.

This has resulted in a desire for a more distributed and ethical approach to leadership. There is a trend for organisations to want to develop leadership at all layers – rather than it being the domain of a powerful few. We are also seeing an increase in publications that call on leaders to be empathetic, ethical, authentic, humble, fair, emotionally intelligent and responsible.

Despite this, recent research has shown that power is linked with selfishness. For example, people who have power over a greater number of followers are less likely to use moral reasoning and care for the collective wellbeing than those who have power over fewer followers.

What’s more, earlier research on “motor resonance” – which is linked to empathy because it measures our level of perception of other’s actions and experiences – found that people in power displayed lower resonance than people with less power did.

Chicken and egg

During Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, Michelle Obama made the observation: “Being President doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are”. So does power change a leader or does it reveal the leader for who they are?

Research on power and moral identity concluded that a person’s moral compass does influence whether their power results in self-interested behaviour.

Power for an organisational leader typically derives from assigned authority(positional power) and the ability to exert influence over others (personal power). When a leader balances authority and influence with attributes such as empathy, integrity or humility, this is more likely to result in ethical use of power. When authority and influence are not tempered by such positive attributes and are wielded for self-interest or morally ambiguous purposes, unethical abuse of power ensues.

But research also suggests that power can change us. So what happens when people gain power? The vast majority of us, after all, have empathy to some degree. This is central to emotional and social competency and to emotional intelligence, which are useful in running an organisation.

Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge, has explored the correlation between empathy and cruelty seeking to uncover how some people behave in depraved, immoral ways while others don’t. Baron-Cohen uses the term “empathy erosion” to explain how we can all turn our empathy off due to our beliefs, experiences, goals and emotions. When empathy is turned off, we are focused on our own interests to the detriment of others.

The road to leadership, with its focus on achievement of goals, delivery of results and financial performance – together with increased levels of stress – might therefore lead to empathy erosion even in the most well-intentioned leader. In fact, research suggests that power makes people more likely to act in a way that is consistent with their goals – increasing persistence and the seizing of opportunities. But this goal focus also makes them more likely to ignore peripheral information, which in social situations, can be perceived as lacking in empathy.

The company Enron, whose leaders were found guilty of fraud and conspiracy, provides an extreme example of empathy erosion with increases in power. While Enron adopted a formal statement of human rights principles advocating respect, integrity, communication and excellence, retrospective reviews of leadership describe them as immoral, arrogant and mercenary – exploiting loopholes, manipulating markets and inflating profits in a bid to be successful.

More recently, concern over leaders abusing power has shifted to the technology industry with the chief executives of Facebook, Twitter and Amazon coming under increasing scrutiny.

But is it really just the fault of the boss? Power and empathy in leadership is a complex dynamic. Baron-Cohen’s book illustrates it is not only leaders who might turn empathy off, followers may do too. If the results of power are beneficial to us, could it be that we even overlook a lack of empathy in our leaders?

In an increasingly polarised political landscape, we see differing political views challenged, not through debate and discussion, but through tribal behaviour. We often consider the groups that we belong to as worthy of empathy, respect and tolerance – but not others. What’s more, recent research has identified that we reward our leaders for being naysayers – negating, refuting or criticising others – rather than empowering them.

So yes, power can certainly corrupt. That said, if we want to create truly empathetic leaders we must all challenge our own behaviour.

Suzanne Ross is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Business School and Founder of 2thrive Consultancy.

Source: The Conversation: Technology https://theconversation.com/think-youll-make-a-great-boss-research-shows-that-power-can-corrupt-131584