Category Archives: Science

Environment, Government, Politics, Science

Labour is urged to crack down on farmers spreading sludge

ENVIRONMENT

MINISTERS are coming under increasing pressure to stop farmers spreading byproducts of human sewage on fields over fears of “forever chemicals” getting into the food system.

Campaigners have urged Labour to clamp down on the use of sludge to fertilise agricultural land.

Also known as biosolids, sludge is produced by dewatering treated sewage. It is nutrient-rich and is spread across agricultural land, amounting to 3.6 million tonnes annually, says the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management.

While the practice is regulated, academics and campaigners argue that rules governing the use of sludge have not kept pace with the science. Regulations have been unchanged since 1989.

Sludge can contain toxic waste from homes, including pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, and microplastics. Each gram of biosolid can hold up to 24 microplastic particles, representing 1pc of its weight, according to research from Cardiff University.

It is widely accepted in academic circles that sludge spreading is a major problem. Water companies profit from processing industrial waste containing “forever chemicals” that end up on farmland.

Forever chemicals, officially known as PFAS, do not break down in the human body or on the land. They are found in everything from carpet cleaners to corrosion-protecting products and have been widely used since the 1950s. They can cause cancer, harm the immune system, and damage the liver.

It is indicative, then, that water companies must take responsibility. And, if they will not act, the Government must legislate and ensure the upcoming White Paper tackles agricultural pollution. This is urgent because our soil and waterways are being contaminated with toxic, persistent chemicals, threatening food and water security.

The Government’s long-awaited White Paper on water industry reform is expected to be published in January. Despite repeated calls for a crackdown on sludge, the report cannot be allowed to ignore the issue.

It comes despite the Cunliffe Review calling for action. The report, to which the White Paper is a response, says: “There should be tighter regulation of sludge spreading on farmland, recognising that sludge may contain PFAS, pharmaceuticals and toxic metals, which have public health impacts.”

Alistair Boxall, professor of environmental science at the University of York, said he is increasingly concerned about long-term, low-level exposure to contaminants in sludge. He said: “We’re potentially exposed to these things our whole lifetime. The UK is not protecting its soils and its crops from this stuff.”

Research from the University of Plymouth has demonstrated that “nanoplastics” – particles so small they can penetrate cell membranes – are absorbed into the edible sections of crops. The study found that a single radish can eventually accumulate millions of these nanoplastics in its roots before they spread through the plant.

Sludge is an attractive option for farmers. While synthetic fertiliser costs £60 per tonne, sludge can be purchased for £1.50 per tonne. Water companies rely on farmers to take the substance, which is an unavoidable byproduct of wastewater management.

There is always the matter of liability in any looming scandal, and this needs addressed. Public health is a serious issue. Neither the water companies who supply the product, or farmers who use it, be exonerated from blame.

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Arts, Books, History, Nature, Science

Book Review: The Origin of Language

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: According to an evolutionary biologist, it takes a village to raise a child. And that’s why we started talking to each other

THE story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by strutting and brawling males, with females tagging along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.

The origins of our species’ exceptional communication skills constitute one of the more nebulous zones of the larger evolutionary narrative, because many of the bits of the human anatomy that allow us to communicate – notably the brain and the vocal tract – are soft and don’t fossilise. The linguistic societies of Paris and London even banned talk of evolution around 1870, and the subject only made a timid comeback about a century later. Plenty of theories have been thrown into the evidentiary void since then, mainly by men, but now evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman, of the University of Sydney, has turned her female gaze on the problem. Unlike a baby chimp that can cling to its mother, a human infant is entirely helpless for years.

Her theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is compelling: language evolved in parallel with caring for our “underbaked” newborns, because looking after and caring for a helpless human baby on the danger-filled plains of the African savannah required more than one pair of hands (and feet). It needed a group among whom the tasks of food-gathering, childcare, and defence could be divided. A group means social life, which means communication. Social bonding meant language evolved to negotiate help, share information about infant safety, and for those bonds to be necessarily strengthened to keep “helpless” infants alive.

The evidence to support Beekman’s theory isn’t entirely lacking, but a lot of it is, as a matter of course, circumstantial. We know that the compromise that natural selection hit upon to balance the competing anatomical demands of bipedalism (walking upright and narrowing pelvises) and an ever-expanding brain was to have babies born early (before that brain and its bony casing were fully formed).

One of the discoveries of the newly feminised wave of evolutionary science has been that alloparents – individuals other than the biological parents who contribute parenting services – played a critical role in ensuring the survival of those half-developed human children. Another is that stone-age women hunted alongside men. In the past it was assumed that hunting bands were exclusively male, and one theory held that language arose to allow them to cooperate. But childcare was another chore that called for cooperation, probably also between genders, and over years, not just hours or days.

Fortuitously, the reconfiguration of the head and neck required to accommodate the ballooning brain had a side-effect of remoulding the throat, giving our ancestors more control and precision over their utterances. With the capacity to generate a large range of sounds came the ability to convey a large range of meanings. To begin with, this was useful for coordinating childcare, but as speech became more complex and sophisticated, alloparents – particularly grandmothers – used it to transmit their accumulated knowledge. This nurtured infants who were even better equipped to survive. The result of this positive feedback loop was Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of a once diverse lineage.

Regrettably, critics are likely to highlight that Beekman takes a very long time to get to this exciting idea. She does spend about half the book laying the groundwork, padding it out with superfluous vignettes as if she is worried the centre won’t hold. Once she gets there, she makes some thought-provoking observations. Full-blown language probably emerged about 100,000 years ago, she says, but only in our line – not in those of our closest relatives. “We may have made babies with Neanderthals and Denisovans,” she writes, “but I don’t think we had much to talk about.”

And whereas others have argued that language must have predated Homo sapiens, because without it the older species Homo erectus couldn’t have crossed the forbidding Wallace Line – the deep-water channel that separates Asia and Australasia – she draws on her deep knowledge of social insects to show that communication as relatively unsophisticated as that of bees or ants could have done the job. Having made a persuasive case for the role of alloparents in the evolution of language, Beekman concludes that we did ourselves a disservice when we shrank our basic unit of organisation down from the extended to the nuclear family. Perhaps, but historians including Peter Laslett have dated this important shift to the middle ages, long before the Industrial Revolution where she places it, and the damage isn’t obvious yet. Language is still being soaked up by young children, and is still a vehicle for intergenerational learning. It may take a village to raise a child, but as Beekman herself hints, a village can be constituted in different ways.

Beekman presents a radical shift in how we understand the birth of human speech. While traditional theories often credit hunting, toolmaking, or warfare as the primary drivers of complex communication, the author argues that the true catalyst was the inescapable need for cooperative childcare.

– The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman is published by Simon & Schuster, 320pp

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Arts, Books, Science, Technology

Science Books of the Year 2025

LITERARY REVIEWS

2025 felt like the year that AI really arrived. We now have access to it on our phones and laptops; it is creeping into digital and corporate infrastructure; it is changing the way many people now learn, work, and create; and the global economy rests on the stratospheric valuations of the corporate monoliths vying to control it.

Yet, the unchecked rush to go faster and further could extinguish humanity, according to the surprisingly readable and chillingly plausible If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Written by computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, the narrative argues against creating superintelligent AI able to cognitively outpace Homo sapiens in all departments. “Even an AI that cares about understanding the universe is likely to annihilate humans as a side-effect,” they write, “because humans are not the most efficient method for producing truths . . . out of all possible ways to arrange matter.” Not exactly cheery festive reading but, as the machines literally calculate our demise, the reader will finally grasp all that technical lingo about tokens, weights, and maximising preferences.

Human extinction is not a new idea, muses historian Sadiah Qureshi in Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction, shortlisted for this year’s Royal Society Trivedi science book prize. Colonial expansion and the persecution of Indigenous peoples implicitly relied on Darwinian theories about some species being fated to outcompete others. Extinction, she points out, is a concept entwined with politics and social justice, whether in the 19th-century elimination of the Beothuk people in Newfoundland or current plans to “de-extinct” woolly mammoths so they can roam the land once more. Whose land, she rightly asks.

The idea of the landscape, as well as people, having rights, is explored by Robert Macfarlane in the immersive and important Is a River Alive? By telling the stories of three rivers under threat in different parts of the world, he offers a thesis that is both ancient and radical: that rivers deserve recognition as fellow living beings, along with the legal protections and remedies that accompany it. The book shortlisted for the Wainwright prize for conservation writing, “was written with the rivers who flow through its pages”, he declares, using pronouns that cast away any doubt as to his passion for the cause.

That awe at the natural world is shared by biologist Neil Shubin, who has led expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica and takes the reader to the Ends of the Earth (Oneworld), also shortlisted for the Royal Society science book prize. “Ice has come and gone for billions of years . . . has sculpted our world and paved the way for the origin of our species,” Shubin says. But those geographical extremes are increasingly vulnerable, as climate change intensifies and treaties come under strain. Polar exploration it may be, but without the frostbite.

Just below the north pole, inside the Norwegian permafrost, lies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, intended to help humanity revive after an apocalypse. It contains a consignment from the first ever seed bank, started in the 1920s by Russian plant scientist Nikolai Vavilov, who desired to see the ending of famine. In The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad (Sceptre), a highly rated contender for this year’s Orwell prize, historian Simon Parkin uncovers the moving story of Vavilov and his colleagues, who fought to protect their collection as the city came under siege in 1941. Vavilov fell out of scientific and political favour, and was imprisoned with terrible consequences.

Super Ages (Simon & Schuster), by Eric Topol – the cardiologist and medical professor who recently conducted a review into the digital future of the NHS – has been studying the “Wellderly” effect, those who seemingly defy the rigours of ageing, by offering evidence-based tips on longevity. Breakthroughs such as weight-loss drugs and AI will further change the game on chronic diseases, he promises. There’s hope that 80 really is the new 50.

Two elegant offerings this year from neurologists stand out, for using patient stories to tell us something about ourselves. In The Age of Diagnosis (Hodder), Suzanne O’Sullivan courageously questions medicine’s well-intentioned enthusiasm for attaching labels – such as ADHD, or anxiety – to aspects of the human condition. This is sensitive political territory, given the public conversation about the 2.8m people who are economically inactive due to long-term illness, but it deserves a hearing. And in Our Brains, Our Selves (Canongate), winner of the Royal Society prize, Masud Husain sensitively explores how our sense of identity can go awry when disease strikes. The story of the woman who thought she was having an affair with a man who was really her husband illustrates that “the way in which people behave can be radically altered [by brain disorders], sometimes shockingly so”.

Proto (William Collins) features in a geography-of-sorts publication. Science writer Laura Spinney’s fluid account of how Proto-Indo-European – a painstakingly reconstructed ancient tongue – became the precursor for so many languages, whose descendants gave us Dante’s Inferno, the Rig Veda (the oldest scripture in Hinduism), and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. “Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European,” Spinney writes, who sets out on a global scientific odyssey that uses evidence from linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to piece together its history.

The biography Crick (Profile) by Matthew Cobb deserves a special mention, which gives us the definitive backstory of one of the towering figures of 20th-century science. Born in Northampton into a middle-class family, Francis Crick was an unexceptional young physicist who, with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, went on to codiscover the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, and win a Nobel prize. Cobb captures the intellectual restlessness of a man who chased problems (and women) rather than disciplines, and who mixed with artists and challenged poets. Crick, who died in 2004 in California, spent his later career trying to unravel the secrets of consciousness.

Anyone left intellectually unsated by Oppenheimer-mania will relish Destroyer of Worlds (Allen Lane), in which physicist Frank Close ventures beyond the Manhattan Project to tell the gripping and unnerving story of the nuclear age. Beginning with the 19th-century discovery of a smudge on a photographic plate, Close spins a history that, via Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and a lot of nimbly explained science, ends seven decades later with the Tsar Bomba, a Soviet weapon detonated in 1961.

It was second in explosive power only to the meteorite impact that wiped out Tyrannosaurus Rex and the dinosaurs. A big enough hydrogen bomb, Close writes, “would signal the end of history. Its mushroom cloud ascending towards outer space would be humanity’s final vision.”

Avoid telling superintelligent AI.

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