Enlarge / Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris are the authors of Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.
Basic Books
There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: A conversation with psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris on the key habits of thinking and reasoning that may serve us well most of the time, but can make us vulnerable to being fooled.
It’s one of the most famous experiments in psychology. Back in 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an experiment on inattentional blindness. They asked test subjects to watch a short video in which six people—half in white T-shirts, half in black ones—passed basketballs around. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. Halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the midst of the players and thumped their chest at the camera before strolling off-screen. What surprised the researchers was that fully half the test subjects were so busy counting the number of basketball passes that they never saw the gorilla.
The experiment became a viral sensation—helped by the amusing paper title, “Gorillas in Our Midst“—and snagged Simons and Chabris the 2004 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize. It also became the basis of their bestselling 2010 book, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Thirteen years later, the two psychologists are back with their latest book, published last July, called Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It. Simons and Chabris have penned an entertaining examination of key habits of thinking that usually serve us well but also make us vulnerable to cons and scams. They also offer some practical tools based on cognitive science to help us spot deceptions before being taken in.
“People love reading about cons, yet they keep happening,” Simons told Ars. “Why do they keep happening? What is it those cons are tapping into? Why do we not learn from reading about Theranos? We realized there was a set of cognitive principles that seemed to apply across all of the domains, from cheating in sports and chess to cheating in finance and biotech. That became our organizing theme.”
Ars spoke with Simons and Chabris to learn more.
Ars Technica: I was surprised to learn that people still fall for basic scams like the Nigerian Prince scam. It reminds me of Fox Mulder’s poster on The X-Files: “I want to believe.“
Daniel Simons: The Nigerian Prince scam is an interesting one because it’s been around forever. Its original form was in letters. Most people don’t get fooled by that one. The vast majority of people look at it and say, this thing is written in terrible grammar. It’s a mess. And why would anybody believe that they’re the one to recover this vast fortune? So there are some people who fall for it, but it’s a tiny percentage of people. I think it’s still illustrative because that one is obviously too good to be true for most people, but there’s some small subset of people for whom it’s just good enough. It’s just appealing enough to say, “Oh yeah, maybe I could become rich.”
There was a profile in the New Yorker of a clinical psychologist who fell for it. There are people who, for whatever reason, are either desperate or have the idea that they deserve to inherit a lot of money. But there are a lot of scams that are much less obvious than that one, selecting for the people who are most naive about it. I think the key insight there is that we tend to assume that only gullible people fall for this stuff. That is fundamentally wrong. We all fall for this stuff if it’s framed in the right way.
Christopher Chabris: I don’t think they’re necessarily people who always want to believe. I think it really depends on the situation. Some people might want to believe that they can strike it rich in crypto, but they would never fall for a Nigerian email or, for that matter, they might not fall for a traditional Ponzi scheme because they don’t believe in fiat money or the stock market. Going back to the Invisible Gorilla, one thing we noticed was a lot of people would ask us, “What’s the difference between the people who noticed the gorilla and the people who didn’t notice the gorilla?” The answer is, well, some of them happened to notice it and some of them didn’t. It’s not an IQ or personality test. So in the case of the Nigerian email, there might’ve been something going on in that guy’s life at that moment when he got that email that maybe led him to initially accept the premise as true, even though he knew it seemed kind of weird. Then, he got committed to the idea once he started interacting with these people.
Christopher Chabris
So one of our principles is commitment: the idea that if you accept something as true and you don’t question it anymore, then all kinds of bad decisions and bad outcomes can flow from that. So, if you somehow actually get convinced that these guys in Nigeria are real, that can explain the bad decisions you make after that. I think there’s a lot of unpredictableness about it. We all need to understand how these things work. We might think it sounds crazy and we would never fall for it, but we might if it was a different scam at a different time.
Enlarge/ Sol, imaged by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
NASA
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
Good morning. It’s January 4, and today’s image is a photo of our star, Sol. The image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, on Wednesday.
So why a picture of the Sun? Because we’ve just passed perihelion, the point at which planet Earth reaches its closest point to the Sun. This year perihelion came at 00: 38 UTC on Wednesday, January 3. We got to within about 91.4 million miles (147 million km) of the star. Due to its slightly elliptical orbit around the Sun, Earth will reach aphelion this year on July 5, at a distance of 94.5 million miles (152 million km).
There is a bit of irony for those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, of course. We approach nearest to the Sun at almost the coldest time of year, just a couple of weeks after the winter solstice. Our planet’s seasons are determined by Earth’s axial tilt, however, not its proximity to the Sun.
In any case, happy new year, a time when the world can seem full of possibility—shiny and bright like a star.
What draws us to choose romantic partners? A sweeping new meta-analysis suggests we gravitate toward certain shared traits.
There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: a broad meta-analysis spanning over a century of studies finds that opposites don’t really attract when it comes to choosing a mate.
We’ve all heard the common folk wisdom that when it comes to forming romantic partnerships, opposites attract. Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, contend that this proverbial wisdom is largely false, based on the findings of their sweeping September study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior. The saying, “birds of a feather flock together,” is a more apt summation of how we choose our partners.
“These findings suggest that even in situations where we feel like we have a choice about our relationships, there may be mechanisms happening behind the scenes of which we aren’t fully aware,” said co-author Tanya Horwitz, a psychology and neuroscience graduate student at UCB. “We’re hoping people can use this data to do their own analyses and learn more about how and why people end up in the relationships they do.”
Horwitz et al. conducted a systematic review of peer-reviewed studies in the English language involving comparisons of the same or similar complex traits in partners, all published before August 17, 2022, with the oldest dated 1903. They excluded same-sex/gender partners, maintaining that these partnerships warranted a separate analysis since the patterns could differ significantly. The meta-analysis focused on 22 distinct traits. The team also conducted a raw data analysis of an additional 133 traits, drawing from the UK’s Biobank dataset, one of the largest and most detailed in the world for health-related information on more than 500,000 people. All told, the study encompassed millions of couples spanning over a century: co-parents, engaged pairs, married pairs, and cohabitating pairs.
The personality traits included were based on the so-called Big Five basic personality traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. (The Big Five is currently the professional standard for social psychologists who study personality. Here’s a good summary of what those traits mean to psychologists.) The other traits studied included such things as educational attainment, IQ score, political values, religiosity, problematic alcohol use, drinking, quitting smoking, starting smoking, quantity of smoking, smoker status, substance use disorder, BMI, height, waist-to-hip ratio, depression, diabetes, generalized anxiety, whether they were breastfed as a child, and age of first intercourse, among others.
The meta-analysis and Biobank analysis revealed that the strongest correlations for couples were for birth year and traits like political and religious attitudes, educational attainment, and certain IQ measures. Couples tend to be similar when it comes to their substance use, too: heavy drinkers tend to be with other heavy drinkers, and teetotalers tend to pair with fellow teetotalers. There were a handful of traits among the Biobank couples where opposites did seem to attract, most notably whether one is a morning person or a night owl, tendency to worry, and hearing difficulty.
The weakest correlations were for traits like height, weight, medical conditions, and personality traits, although these were still mostly positive, apart from extroversion, which somewhat surprisingly showed almost no correlation. “People have all these theories that extroverts like introverts or extroverts like other extroverts, but the fact of the matter is that it’s about like flipping a coin,” said Horwitz. “Extroverts are similarly likely to end up with extroverts as with introverts.”
Horwitz et al. cautioned that even the strongest correlations they found were still fairly modest. As for why couples show such striking similarities, the authors write that there could be many reasons. Some people might just be attracted to similar sorts, or couples might become more similar over time. (The study also found that the strength of the correlations changed over time.) Perhaps two people who grow up in the same geographical area or a similar home environment might naturally find themselves drawn to each other.
The authors were careful to note several limitations to their meta-analysis. Most notably, most of those partners sampled came from Europe and the United States, with only a handful coming from East and South Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Furthermore, all participants in the UK Biobank dataset were between the ages of 40 and 69 when they were originally recruited, all of whom were less likely to smoke, be socioeconomically deprived, or drink daily. The studies included in the meta-analysis also varied widely regarding sample sizes used to draw correlations across traits. For these reasons, the authors caution that their findings “are unlikely to be generalizable to all human populations and time periods.”
Enlarge/ Dr. Greg House has a better rate of accurately diagnosing patients than ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is still no House, MD.
While the chatty AI bot has previously underwhelmed with its attempts to diagnose challenging medical cases—with an accuracy rate of 39 percent in an analysis last year—a study out this week in JAMA Pediatrics suggests the fourth version of the large language model is especially bad with kids. It had an accuracy rate of just 17 percent when diagnosing pediatric medical cases.
The low success rate suggests human pediatricians won’t be out of jobs any time soon, in case that was a concern. As the authors put it: “[T]his study underscores the invaluable role that clinical experience holds.” But it also identifies the critical weaknesses that led to ChatGPT’s high error rate and ways to transform it into a useful tool in clinical care. With so much interest and experimentation with AI chatbots, many pediatricians and other doctors see their integration into clinical care as inevitable.
The medical field has generally been an early adopter of AI-powered technologies, resulting in some notable failures, such as creating algorithmic racial bias, as well as successes, such as automating administrative tasks and helping to interpret chest scans and retinal images. There’s also lot in between. But AI’s potential for problem-solving has raised considerable interest in developing it into a helpful tool for complex diagnostics—no eccentric, prickly, pill-popping medical genius required.
In the new study conducted by researchers at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York, ChatGPT-4 showed it isn’t ready for pediatric diagnoses yet. Compared to general cases, pediatric ones require more consideration of the patient’s age, the researchers note. And as any parent knows, diagnosing conditions in infants and small children is especially hard when they can’t pinpoint or articulate all the symptoms they’re experiencing.
For the study, the researchers put the chatbot up against 100 pediatric case challenges published in JAMA Pediatrics and NEJM between 2013 and 2023. These are medical cases published as challenges or quizzes. Physicians reading along are invited to try to come up with the correct diagnosis of a complex or unusual case based on the information that attending doctors had at the time. Sometimes, the publications also explain how attending doctors got to the correct diagnosis.
Missed connections
For ChatGPT’s test, the researchers pasted the relevant text of the medical cases into the prompt, and then two qualified physician-researchers scored the AI-generated answers as correct, incorrect, or “did not fully capture the diagnosis.” In the latter case, ChatGPT came up with a clinically related condition that was too broad or unspecific to be considered the correct diagnosis. For instance, ChatGPT diagnosed one child’s case as caused by a branchial cleft cyst—a lump in the neck or below the collarbone—when the correct diagnosis was Branchio-oto-renal syndrome, a genetic condition that causes the abnormal development of tissue in the neck, and malformations in the ears and kidneys. One of the signs of the condition is the formation of branchial cleft cysts.
Overall, ChatGPT got the right answer in just 17 of the 100 cases. It was plainly wrong in 72 cases, and did not fully capture the diagnosis of the remaining 11 cases. Among the 83 wrong diagnoses, 47 (57 percent) were in the same organ system.
Among the failures, researchers noted that ChatGPT appeared to struggle with spotting known relationships between conditions that an experienced physician would hopefully pick up on. For example, it didn’t make the connection between autism and scurvy (Vitamin C deficiency) in one medical case. Neuropsychiatric conditions, such as autism, can lead to restricted diets, and that in turn can lead to vitamin deficiencies. As such, neuropsychiatric conditions are notable risk factors for the development of vitamin deficiencies in kids living in high-income countries, and clinicians should be on the lookout for them. ChatGPT, meanwhile, came up with the diagnosis of a rare autoimmune condition.
Though the chatbot struggled in this test, the researchers suggest it could improve by being specifically and selectively trained on accurate and trustworthy medical literature—not stuff on the Internet, which can include inaccurate information and misinformation. They also suggest chatbots could improve with more real-time access to medical data, allowing the models to refine their accuracy, described as “tuning.”
“This presents an opportunity for researchers to investigate if specific medical data training and tuning can improve the diagnostic accuracy of LLM-based chatbots,” the authors conclude.
Enlarge/ One of the most historic rockets in SpaceX’s fleet toppled over Christmas Day on the return trip to Cape Canaveral, Florida, following its previous mission.
The Falcon 9 rocket that launched NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on SpaceX’s first crew mission in 2020 launched and landed for the 19th and final time just before Christmas, then tipped over on its recovery ship during the trip back to Cape Canaveral, Florida.
This particular booster, known by the tail number B1058, was special among SpaceX’s fleet of reusable rockets. It was the fleet leader, having tallied 19 missions over the course of more than three-and-a-half years. More importantly, it was the rocket that thundered into space on May 30, 2020, on a flight that made history on several counts.
It was the first time a commercial rocket and spacecraft launched people into orbit, and ended a nine-year gap in America’s ability to send astronauts into orbit from US soil, following the retirement of the space shuttle. This mission, known as Demo-2 and launched by SpaceX under contract with NASA, ended US reliance on Russian rockets to send crews to the International Space Station.
SpaceX recovered the booster on one of its offshore landing platforms after the historic launch in May 2020, while the Falcon 9’s upper stage fired into orbit with the Crew Dragon spacecraft containing Hurley and Behnken. Then, the rocket went into SpaceX’s fleet rotation to launch 18 more times, primarily on missions to deploy Starlink Internet satellites.
Hurley, who commanded the Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Demo-2 mission, kept up with the booster’s exploits well after his return to Earth. He regularly exchanged text messages with Behnken and Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, as the rocket just kept flying.
“For Bob and I, that particular booster was always pretty special for a lot of reasons,” said Hurley, a veteran Marine Corps fighter pilot who retired from NASA’s astronaut corps in 2021. He now works at Northrop Grumman.
An inauspicious ending
Hurley told Ars he would like to see the booster’s remains displayed in a museum alongside the Crew Dragon spacecraft (named Endeavour) he and Behnken flew in 2020. “In a perfect world, I’d love to see Endeavour and at least now part of that booster in the Smithsonian or in a museum somewhere,” he said.
“It’s kind of a bummer,” Hurley told Ars. But he understands SpaceX got a lot of use out of this rocket. SpaceX also has a lot of love for Hurley and Behnken. The company named two of its recovery ships for payload fairings “Bob” and “Doug” after the astronaut duo.
“SpaceX has got a business to run,” he said. “I think, at this point, certainly Endeavour is going to fly more, but this booster isn’t, so hopefully they can find a spot to display it somewhere. Even part of it would look kind of cool somewhere. They could figure something out … People, I think, can get a lot of inspiration from seeing stuff that’s actually flown in space, and being able to get right up close to it, I think, is a big deal to a lot of people.”
Enlarge/ Doug Hurley, right, commanded the Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Demo-2 mission in 2020.
NASA
The 19th launch of this booster on December 23 was just as successful as the previous 18, with a smooth climb into space before shutting down its nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines. The booster coasted to the highest point in its trajectory—72 miles (116 kilometers)—before Earth’s gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere.
Two engine burns slowed the rocket as it descended toward SpaceX’s drone ship positioned near the Bahamas, and then four carbon-fiber legs deployed moments before an on-target touchdown. Then, as usual, the recovery vessel started its slow journey back to Florida with the 15-story-tall booster standing vertically.
There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Archaeologists found two stone engravings in Jordan and Saudi Arabia that may represent the oldest architectural plans for desert kites.
During the 1920s, aerial photographs revealed the presence of large kite-shaped stone wall mega-structures in deserts in Asia and the Middle East that most archaeologists believe were used to herd and trap wild animals. More than 6,000 of these “desert kites” have been identified as of 2018, although very few have been excavated. Archaeologists found two stone engravings—one in Jordan, the other in Saudi Arabia—that they believe represent the oldest architectural plans for these desert kites, according to a May paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.
“The discovery of these very ancient representations highlights the question of the methods used by kite builders,” the authors wrote. “Kites are large material structures that could not be designed without what we call today planning. The ability to transpose large spaces into a small two-dimensional surface represents a milestone in intelligent behavior. Such structures are visible as a whole only from the air, yet this calls for the representation of space in a way not seen at this time.”
The eight kites at Jibal al-Khashabiyeh in Jordan were discovered in 2013, and archaeologists began excavations in 2015 and 2016. Looters had targeted one such site, so archaeologists conducted a rescue excavation, noting numerous carved cigar-shaped limestones scattered around the surface. One such stone had a very well-preserved engraving. The engraving’s shape is characteristic of the two desert kites at Jibal al-Khashabiyeh that are nearest to where the engraved rock was found, and the authors estimate the age of the engraving to be about 7,000 years old.
The engraving was likely carved with a lithic tool, employing a combination of fine incisions to mark out the contours of the kite and pecking. The kite-shaped engraving comprises two primary converging curved lines, which the researchers interpreted as representing driving lines. These lead to a carved star-shaped enclosure with eight circular cup marks at the circumference representing pit traps. The characteristics are typical of desert kite structures in southeastern Jordanian kites. The archaeologists remain puzzled by a zigzagging chevron pattern running perpendicular to the corridor, but hypothesize that it might represent a slope break feature.
The kites at Jebel az-Zilliyat in Saudi Arabia were discovered in 2014 and excavated the following year. The engraved sandstone boulder in this case—found during rock art surveys—was studied in situ and dated to around 8,000 years ago. The carving was likely made by pecking the contours using a lithic tool or a handpick. While the eastern engraving on the boulder was very readable, the western one had been badly damaged by erosion. Both feature the same two short, widely spaced driving lines that gradually converge into a star-shaped enclosed surface surrounded by six cup marks (pit traps). Once again, the authors noted clear similarities between the engraved representations of kites on the boulder and actual desert kite shapes nearby.
There have been other maps, plans, or representations in human history, per the authors, such as Upper Paleolithic engravings in Europe that seem to be maps of hunting strategies, or a mural in Turkey from about 6600 BCE that seems to depict a village. There is even a reed-bundle boat found in Kuwait, dated 5000 BCE, that is considered to be the oldest three-dimensional model of a large-scale object. However, the two engravings found in Jordan and Saudi Arabia are unique because they were done to scale: approximately 1: 425 and 1: 175, respectively.
As for why the engravings were made, the authors considered three hypotheses: it was a detailed kite construction plan; it was a plan for preparing hunting activities; or it could be more symbolic—a means of passing on knowledge of the pace and/or its function. Of those, the authors consider the second to be the most credible, given the careful graphical representation of the functional elements of the trap, but cannot rule out the other two possibilities.
“A map would most probably be used here as a means of communication (almost like an ancestral way of writing) and would enable the collective interaction required for the smooth running of hunting operations,” the authors concluded. “These two major innovations, i.e., building what would become the largest structures in human history at that time and making cartographic representations to scale, are closely linked by a common point: mastering the three-dimensional perception of a space, and translating it into an inscribed form of communication.”
On Saturday NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting Jupiter for the better part of a decade, made its closest flyby of the innermost moon in the Jovian system.
The spacecraft came to within 930 miles (1,500 km) of the surface of Io, a dense moon that is the fourth largest in the Solar System. Unlike a lot of moons around Jupiter and Saturn, which have surface ice or subsurface water, Io is a very dry world. It is also extremely geologically active. Io has more than 400 active volcanoes and is therefore an object of great interest to astronomers and planetary scientists.
Images from the December 30 flyby were posted by NASA over the New Year holiday weekend, and they provide some of the clearest views yet of this hell-hole world. The new data will help planetary scientists determine how often these volcanoes erupt and how this activity is connected to Jupiter’s magnetosphere—Io is bathed in intense radiation from the gas-giant planet.
To date Juno has mostly observed Io from afar as the spacecraft has made 56 flybys of Jupiter, studying the complex gas giant in far greater detail than ever before. Since arriving in the planetary system in July 2016, Juno has previously gotten to within several thousand miles of the moon. Juno will make another close flyby of Io on February 3, 2024, and this will allow scientists to compare changes on the moon’s surface over a short period of time.
Since its launch on an Atlas V rocket, Juno has performed very well while operating in the Jovian system, surviving extended operations in the harsh radiation of the planet. This is a significant challenge for any spacecraft bound for Jupiter, which must carry radiation-hardened instruments, including its cameras.
“The cumulative effect of all that radiation has begun to show on JunoCam over the last few orbits,” said Ed Hirst, project manager of Juno at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Pictures from the last flyby show a reduction in the imager’s dynamic range and the appearance of ‘striping’ noise. Our engineering team has been working on solutions to alleviate the radiation damage and to keep the imager going.”
Eventually, the radiation will win, so NASA has a disposal planned for Juno before it ceases being operational. Originally, the space agency planned to end the vehicle’s life in 2018, but because Juno has been such a survivor as it has probed the largest planet in the Solar System, the spacecraft now is planned to operate until September 2025.
At that point, however, it will descend into Jupiter’s atmosphere to burn up, in order to not contaminate any of the planet’s moons with any stray Earth microbes on board, unlikely though that may be.
There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Using markerless motion capture technology to determine what makes the best free throw shooters in basketball.
Markerless motion-capture technology shows the biomechanics of free-throw shooters. Credit: Jayhawk Athletic Peformance Laboratory.
Basketball season is in full swing, and in a close game, the team that makes the highest percentage of free throws can often eke out the win. A better understanding of the precise biomechanics of the best free-throw shooters could translate into critical player-performance improvement. Researchers at the University of Kansas in Lawrence used markerless motion-capture technology to do just that, reporting their findings in an August paper published in the journal Frontiers in Sports and Active Living.
“We’re very interested in analyzing basketball shooting mechanics and what performance parameters differentiate proficient from nonproficient shooters,” said co-author Dimitrije Cabarkapa, director of the Jayhawk Athletic Performance Laboratory at the University of Kansas. “High-speed video analysis is one way that we can do that, but innovative technological tools such as markerless motion capture systems can allow us to dig even deeper into that. In my opinion, the future of sports science is founded on using noninvasive and time-efficient testing methodologies.”
Scientists are sports fans like everyone else, so it’s not surprising that a fair amount of prior research has gone into various aspects of basketball. For instance, there has been considerable debate on whether the “hot hand” phenomenon in basketball is a fallacy or not—that is, when players make more shots in a row than statistics suggest they should. A 1985 study proclaimed it a fallacy, but more recent mathematical analysis (including a 2015 study examining the finer points of the law of small numbers) from other researchers has provided some vindication that such streaks might indeed be a real thing, although it might only apply to certain players.
Some 20 years ago, Larry Silverberg and Chia Tran of North Carolina State University developed a method to computationally simulate the trajectories of millions of basketballs on the computer and used it to examine the mathematics of the free throw. Per their work, in a perfect free throw, the basketball has a 3 hertz backspin as it leaves the player’s fingertips, the launch is about 52 degrees, and the launch speed is fairly slow, ensuring the greatest probability of making the basket. Of those variables launch speed is the most difficult for players to control. The aim point also matters: Players should aim at the back of the rim, which is more forgiving than the front.
There was also a 2021 study by Malaysian scientists that analyzed the optimal angle of a basketball free throw, based on data gleaned from 30 NBA players. They concluded that a player’s height is inversely proportional to the initial velocity and optimal throwing angle, and that the latter is directly proportional to the time taken for a ball to reach its maximum height.
Enlarge/ Graphic showing the contrast in release angles between proficient and nonproficient shooters.
Jayhawk Athletic Performance Laboratory.
Cabarkapa’s lab has been studying basketball players’ performance for several years now, including how eating breakfast (or not) impacts shooting performance, and what happens to muscles when players overtrain. They published a series of studies in 2022 assessing the effectiveness of the most common coaching cues, like “bend your knees,” “tuck your elbow in,” or “release the ball as high as possible.” For one study, Cabarkapa et al. analyzed high-definition video of free-throw shooters for kinematic differences between players who excel at free throws and those who don’t. The results pointed to greater flexion in hip, knee, and angle joints resulting in lower elbow placement when shooting.
Yet they found no kinematic differences in shots that proficient players made and those they missed, so the team conducted a follow-up study employing a 3D motion-capture system. This confirmed that greater knee and elbow flexion and lower elbow placement were critical factors. There was only one significant difference between made and missed free-throw shots: positioning the forearm almost parallel with an imaginary lateral axis.
There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Archaeologists relied on chemical clues and techniques like FTIR spectroscopy and archaeomagnetic analysis to reconstruct the burning of Jerusalem by Babylonian forces around 586 BCE.
Archaeologists have uncovered new evidence in support of Biblical accounts of the siege and burning of the city of Jerusalem by the Babylonians around 586 BCE, according to a September paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
The Hebrew bible contains the only account of this momentous event, which included the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. “The Babylonian chronicles from these years were not preserved,” co-author Nitsan Shalom of Tel Aviv University in Israel told New Scientist. According to the biblical account, “There was a violent and complete destruction, the whole city was burned and it stayed completely empty, like the descriptions you see in [the Book of] Lamentations about the city deserted and in complete misery.”
Judah was a vassal kingdom of Babylon during the late 7th century BCE, under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II. This did not sit well with Judah’s king, Jehoiakim, who revolted against the Babylonian king in 601 BCE despite being warned not to do so by the prophet Jeremiah. He stopped paying the required tribute and sided with Egypt when Nebuchadnezzar tried (and failed) to in invade that country. Jehoiakim died and his son Jeconiah succeeded him when Nebuchadnezzar’s forces besieged Jerusalem in 597 BCE. The city was pillaged and Jeconiah surrendered and was deported to Babylon for his trouble, along with a substantial portion of Judah’s population. (The Book of Kings puts the number at 10,000.) His uncle Zedekiah became king of Judah.
Zedekiah also chafed under Babylonian rule and revolted in turn, refusing to pay the required tribute and seeking alliance with the Egyptian pharaoh Hophra. This resulted in a brutal 30-month siege by Nebuchadnezzar’s forces against Judah and its capital, Jerusalem. Eventually the Babylonians prevailed again, breaking through the city walls to conquer Jerusalem. Zedekiah was forced to watch his sons killed and was then blinded, bound, and taken to Babylon as a prisoner. This time Nebuchadnezzar was less merciful and ordered his troops to completely destroy Jerusalem and pull down the wall around 586 BCE.
There is archaeological evidence to support the account of the city being destroyed by fire, along with nearby villages and towns on the western border. Three residential structures were excavated between 1978 and 1982 and found to contain burned wooden beams dating to around 586 BCE. Archaeologists also found ash and burned wooden beams from the same time period when they excavated several structures at the Giv’ati Parking Lot archaeological site, close to the assumed location of Solomon’s Temple. Samples taken from a plaster floor showed exposure to high temperatures of at least 600 degrees Celsius
Enlarge/ Aerial view of the excavation site in Jerusalem, at the foot of the Temple Mount
Assaf Peretz/Israel Antiquities Authority
However, it wasn’t possible to determine from that evidence whether the fires were intentional or accidental, or where the fire started if it was indeed intentional. For this latest research, Shalom and her colleagues focused on the two-story Building 100 at the Giv’ati Parking Lot site. They used Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy—which measures the absorption of infrared light to determine to what degree a sample had been heated—and archaeomagnetic analysis, which determines whether samples containing magnetic minerals were sufficiently heated to reorient those compounds to a new magnetic north.
The analysis revealed varying degrees of exposure to high-temperature fire in three rooms (designated A, B, and C) on the bottom level of Building 100, with Room C showing the most obvious evidence. This might have been a sign that Room C was the ignition point, but there was no fire path; the burning of Room C appeared to be isolated. Combined with an earlier 2020 study on segments of the second level of the building, the authors concluded that several fires were lit in the building and the fires burned strongest in the upper floors, except for that “intense local fire” in Room C on the first level.
“When a structure burns, heat rises and is concentrated below the ceiling,” the authors wrote. “The walls and roof are therefore heated to higher temperatures than the floor.” The presence of charred beams on the floors suggest this was indeed the case: most of the heat rose to the ceiling, burning the beams until they collapsed to the floors, which otherwise were subjected to radiant heat. But the extent of the debris was likely not caused just by that collapse, suggesting that the Babylonians deliberately went back in and knocked down any remaining walls.
Furthermore, “They targeted the more important, the more famous buildings in the city,” Shalom told New Scientist, rather than destroying everything indiscriminately. “2600 years later, we’re still mourning the temple.”
While they found no evidence of additional fuels that might have served as accelerants, “we may assume the fire was intentionally ignited due to its widespread presence in all rooms and both stories of the building,” Shalom et al. concluded. “The finds within the rooms indicate there was enough flammable material (vegetal and wooden items and construction material) to make additional fuel unnecessary. The widespread presence of charred remains suggests a deliberate destruction by fire…. [T]he spread of the fire and the rapid collapse of the building indicate that the destroyers invested great efforts to completely demolish the building and take it out of use.”
There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Pirates! Specifically, an interview with historian Rebecca Simon on the real-life buccaneer bylaws that shaped every aspect of a pirate’s life.
One of the many amusing scenes in the 2003 film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl depicts Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) invoking the concept of “parley” in the pirate code to negotiate a cease of hostilities with pirate captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush). “The code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules,” he informs her. Rebecca Simon, a historian at Santa Monica College, delves into the real, historical set of rules and bylaws that shaped every aspect of a pirate’s life with her latest book. The Pirates’ Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ship.
Simon is the author of such books as Why We Love Pirates: The Hunt for Captain Kidd and How He Changed Piracy Forever and Pirate Queens: The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Her PhD thesis research focused on pirate trails and punishment. She had been reading a book about Captain Kidd and the war against the pirates, and was curious as to why he had been executed in an East London neighborhood called Wapping, at Execution Dock on the Thames. People were usually hung at Tyburn in modern day West London at Marble Arch. “Why was Captain Kidd taken to a different place? What was special about that?” Simon told Ars. “Nothing had been written much about it at all, especially in connection to piracy. So I began researching how pirate trials and executions were done in London. I consider myself to be a legal historian of crime and punishment through the lens of piracy.”
Enlarge/ (left) Fanciful painting of Kidd and his ship, Adventure Galley, in New York Harbor. (right) Captain Kidd, gibbeted near Tilbury in Essex following his execution in 1701.
Public domain
Ars Technica: How did the idea of a pirates’ code come about?
Rebecca Simon: Two of the pirates that I mention in the book—Ned Low and Bartholomew Roberts—their code was actually published in newspapers in London. I don’t where they got it. Maybe it was made up for the sake of readership because that is getting towards the tail end of the Golden Age of Piracy, the 1720s. But we find examples of other codes in A General History of the Pyrates written by a man named Captain Charles Johnson in 1724. It included many pirate biographies and a lot of it was very largely fictionalized. So we take it with a grain of salt. But we do know that pirates did have a notion of law and order and regulations and ritual based on survivor accounts.
You had to be very organized. You had to have very specific rules because as a pirate, you’re facing death every second of the day, more so than if you are a merchant or a fisherman or a member of the Royal Navy. Pirates go out and attack to get the goods that they want. In order to survive all that, they have to be very meticulously prepared. Everyone has to know their exact role and everyone has to have a game plan going in. Pirates didn’t attack willy-nilly out of control. No way. They all had a role.
Ars Technica: Is it challenging to find primary sources about this? You rely a lot trial transcripts, as well as eyewitness accounts and maritime logs.
Rebecca Simon: It’s probably one of the best ways to learn about how pirates lived on the ship, especially through their own words, because pirates didn’t leave records. These trial transcripts were literal transcriptions of the back and forth between the lawyer and the pirate, answering very specific questions in very specific detail. They were transcribed verbatim and they sold for profit. People found them very interesting. It’s really the only place where we really get to hear the pirate’s voice. So to me that was always one of the best ways to find information about pirates, because anything else you’re looking at is the background or the periphery around the pirates: arrest records, or observations of how the pirate seemed to be acting and what the pirate said. We have to take that with a grain of salt because we’re only hearing it from a third party.
Ars Technica: Some of the pirate codes seemed surprisingly democratic. They divided the spoils equally according to rank, so there was a social hierarchy. But there was also a sense of fairness.
Rebecca Simon: You needed to have a sense of order on a pirate ship. One of the big draws that pirates used to recruit hostages to officially join them into piracy was to tell them they’d get an equal share. This was quite rare on many other ships. where payment was based per person, or maybe just a flat rate across the board. A lot of times your wages might get withheld or you wouldn’t necessarily get the wages you were promised. On a pirate ship, everyone had the amount of money they were going to get based on the hierarchy and based on their skill level. The quartermaster was in charge of doling out all of the spoils or the stolen goods. If someone was caught taking more of their share, that was a huge deal.
You could get very severely punished perhaps by marooning or being jailed below the hold. The punishment had to be decided by the whole crew, so it didn’t seem like the captain was being unfair or overly brutal. Pirates could also vote out their captain if they felt the captain was doing a bad job, such as not going after enough ships, taking too much of his share, being too harsh in punishment, or not listening to the crew. Again, this is all to keep order. You had to keep morale very high, you had to make sure there was very little discontent or infighting.
Enlarge/ “The code is more like guidelines than actual rules”: Geoffrey Rush as Captain Hector Barbossa in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003).
Walt Disney Pictures
Ars Technica: Pirates have long been quite prominent in popular culture. What explains their enduring appeal?
Rebecca Simon: During the 1700s, when pirates were very active, they fascinated people in London and England because they were very far removed from piracy, more so than those who traded a lot for a living in North America and the Caribbean. But it used to be that you were born into your social class and there was no social mobility. You’re born poor because your father was poor, your grandfather was poor, your children will be poor, your grandchildren will be poor. Most pirates started out as poor sailors but as pirates they could become wealthy. If a pirate was lucky, they could make enough in one or two years and then retire and live comfortably. People also have a morbid fascination for these brutal people committing crimes. Think about all the true crime podcasts and true crime documentaries on virtually every streaming service today. We’re just attracted to that. It was the same with piracy.
Going into the 19th century, we have the publication of the book Treasure Island, an adventure story harking back to this idea of piracy in a way that generations hadn’t seen before. This is during a time period where there was sort of a longing for adventure in general and Treasure Island fed into this. That is what spawned the pop culture pirate going into the 20th century. Everything people know about pirates, for the most part, they’re getting from Treasure Island. The whole treasure map, X marks the spot, the eye patch, the peg leg, the speech. Pirate popularity has ebbed and flowed in the 20th and 21st centuries. Of course, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise was a smash hit. And I think during the pandemic, people were feeling very confined and upset with leadership. Pirates were appealing because they cast all that off and we got shows like Black Sails and Our Flag Means Death.
Ars Technica: Much of what you do is separate fact from fiction, such as the legend of Captain Kidd’s buried treasure. What are some of the common misconceptions that you find yourself correcting, besides buried treasure?
Rebecca Simon: A lot of people ask me about the pirate accent: “Aaarr matey!” That accent we think of comes from the actor Robert Newton who played Long John Silver in the 1950 film Treasure Island. In reality, it just depended on where they were born. At the end of the day, pirates were sailors. People ask about what they wore, what they ate, thinking it’s somehow different. But the reality is it was the same as other sailors. They might have had better clothes and better food because of how often they robbed other ships.
Another misconception is that pirates were after gold and jewels and treasure. In the 17th and 18th centuries, “treasure” just meant “valuable.” They wanted goods they could sell. So about 50 percent was stuff they kept to replenish their own ship and their stores. The other 50 percent were goods they could sell: textiles, wine, rum, sugar, and (unfortunately) the occasional enslaved person counted as cargo. There’s also a big misconception that pirates were all about championing the downtrodden:they hated slavery and they freed enslaved people. They hated corrupt authority. That’s not the reality. They were still people of their time. Blackbeard, aka Edward Teach, did capture a slave ship and he did include those slaves in his crew. But he later sold them at a slave port.
Enlarge/ Female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read were a deadly duo who plundered their way to infamy.
Public domain
Thanks to Our Flag Means Death and Black Sails, people sometimes assume that all pirates were gay or bisexual. That’s also not true. The concept of homosexuality as we think of it just didn’t exist back then. It was more situational homosexuality arising from confined close quarters and being very isolated for a long period of time. And it definitely was not all pirates. There was about the same percentage of gay or bisexual pirates as your own workplace, but it was not discussed and it was considered to be a crime. There’s this idea that pirate ships had gay marriage; that wasn’t necessarily a thing. They practiced something called matelotage, a formal agreement where you would be legally paired with someone because if they died, it was a way to ensure their goods went to somebody. It was like a civil union. Were some of these done romantically? It’s possible. We just don’t know because that sort of stuff was never, ever recorded.
Ars Technica: Your prior book, Pirate Queens, focused on female pirates like Anne Bonny and Mary Read. It must have been challenging for a woman to pass herself off as a man on a pirate ship.
Rebecca Simon: You’d have to take everything in consideration, the way you dressed, the way you walked, the way you talked. A lot of women who would be on a pirate ship were probably very wiry, having been maids who hauled buckets of coal and water and goods and did a lot of physical activity all day. They could probably pass themselves off as boys or adolescents who were not growing facial hair. So it probably wasn’t too difficult. Going to the bathroom was a a big thing. Men would pee over the edge of the ship. How’s a woman going to do this? You put a funnel under the pirate dress and pee through the funnel, which can create a stream going over the side of the ship. When it’s really crowded, men aren’t exactly going to be looking at that very carefully.
The idea of Anne Bonny and Mary Read being lesbians is a 20th century concept, originating with an essay by a feminist writer in the 1970s. There’s no evidence for it. There’s no historical documentation about them before they entered into piracy. According to Captain Charles Johnson’s highly fictionalized account, Mary disguised herself as a male sailor. Anne fell in love with this male sailor on the ship and tried to seduce him, only to discover he was a woman. Anne was “disappointed.” There’s no mention of Anne and Mary actually getting together. Anne was the lover of Calico Jack Rackham, Mary was married to a crew member. This was stated in the trial. And when both women were put on trial and found guilty of piracy, they both revealed they were pregnant.
Enlarge/ Rebecca Simon is the author of The Pirates’ Code: Laws and Life Aboard Ships/
University of Chicago Press/Rebecca Simon
Ars Technica: Pirates had notoriously short careers: about two years on average. Why would they undertake all that risk for such a short time?
Rebecca Simon: There’s the idea that you can get wealthy quickly. There were a lot of people who became pirates because they had no other choice. Maybe they were criminals or work was not available to them. Pirate ships were extremely diverse. You did have black people as crew members, maybe freed enslaved or escaped enslaved people. They usually had the most menial jobs, but they did exist on ships. Some actively chose it because working conditions on merchant ships and naval ships were very tough and they didn’t always have access to good food or medical care. And many people were forced into it, captured as hostages to replace pirates who had been killed in battle.
Ars Technica: What were the factors that led to the end of what we call the Golden Age of Piracy?
Rebecca Simon: There were several reasons why piracy really began to die down in the 1720s. One was an increase in the Royal Navy presence so the seas were a lot more heavily patrolled and it was becoming more difficult to make a living as a pirate. Colonial governors and colonists were no longer supporting pirates the way they once had, so a lot of pirates were now losing their alliances and protections. A lot of major pirate leaders who had been veterans of the War of the Spanish Succession as privateers had been killed in battle by the 1720s: people like Charles Vane, Edward Teach, Benjamin Hornigold, Henry Jennings, and Sam Bellamy.
It was just becoming too risky. And by 1730 a lot more wars were breaking out, which required people who could sail and fight. Pirates were offered pardons if they agreed to become a privateer, basically a government-sanctioned mercenary at sea where they were contracted to attack specific enemies. As payment they got to keep about 80 percent of what they stole. A lot of pirates decided that was more lucrative and more stable.
Ars Technica: What was the most surprising thing that you learned while you were researching and writing this book?
Rebecca Simon: Stuff about food, oddly enough. I was really surprised by how much people went after turtles as food. Apparently turtles are very high in vitamin C and had long been believed to cure all kinds of illnesses and impotence. Also, pirates weren’t really religious, but Bartholomew Roberts would dock at shore so his crew could celebrate Christmas—perhaps as an appeasement. When pirates were put on trial, they always said they were forced into it. The lawyers would ask if they took their share after the battle ended. If they said yes, the law deemed them a pirate. You therefore participated; it doesn’t matter if they forced you. Finally, my PhD thesis was on crime and the law and executions. People would ask me about ships but I didn’t study ships at all. So this book really branched out my maritime knowledge and helped me understand how ships worked and how the people on board operated.
Enlarge/ The bundengan (left) began as a combined shelter/instrument for duck hunters but it is now often played onstage.
There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: the surprisingly complex physics of two simply constructed instruments: the Indonesian bundengan and the Australian Aboriginal didgeridoo (or didjeridu).
The bundengan is a rare, endangered instrument from Indonesia that can imitate the sound of metallic gongs and cow-hide drums (kendangs) in a traditional gamelan ensemble. The didgeridoo is an iconic instrument associated with Australian Aboriginal culture that produces a single, low-pitched droning note that can be continuously sustained by skilled players. Both instruments are a topic of scientific interest because their relatively simple construction produces some surprisingly complicated physics. Two recent studies into their acoustical properties were featured at an early December meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held in Sydney, Australia, in conjunction with the Australian Acoustical Society.
The bundengan originated with Indonesian duck hunters as protection from rain and other adverse conditions while in the field, doubling as a musical instrument to pass the time. It’s a half-dome structure woven out of bamboo splits to form a lattice grid, crisscrossed at the top to form the dome. That dome is then coated with layers of bamboo sheaths held in place with sugar palm fibers. Musicians typically sit cross-legged inside the dome-shaped resonator and pluck the strings and bars to play. The strings produce metallic sounds while the plates inside generate percussive drum-like sounds.
Gea Oswah Fatah Parikesit of Universitas Gadja Mada in Indonesia has been studying the physics and acoustics of the bundengan for several years now. And yes, he can play the instrument. “I needed to learn to do the research,” he said during a conference press briefing. “It’s very difficult because you have two different blocking styles for the right and left hand sides. The right hand is for the melody, for the string, and the left is for the rhythm, to pluck the chords.”
Much of Parikesit’s prior research on the bundengan focused on the unusual metal/percussive sound of the strings, especially the critical role played by the placement of bamboo clips. He used computational simulations of the string vibrations to glean insight on how the specific gong-like sound was produced, and how those vibrations change with the addition of bamboo clips located at different sections of the string. He found that adding the clips produces two vibrations of different frequencies at different locations on the string, with the longer section having a high frequency vibration compared to the lower frequency vibration of the shorter part of the string. This is the key to making the gong-like sound.
This time around, Parikesit was intrigued by the fact many bundengan musicians have noted the instrument sounds better wet. In fact, several years ago, Parikesit attended a bundengan concert in Melbourne during the summer when it was very hot and dry—so much so that the musicians brought their own water spray bottles to ensure the instruments stayed (preferably) fully wet.
Enlarge/ A bundengan is a portable shelter woven from bamboo, worn by Indonesian duck herders who often outfit it to double as a musical instrument.
Gea Oswah Fatah Parikesit
“A key element between the dry and wet versions of the bundengan is the bamboo sheaths—the material used to layer the wall of the instrument,” Parokesit said. “When the bundengan is dry, the bamboo sheaths open and that results in looser connections between neighboring sheaths. When the bundengan is wet, the sheaths tend to form a curling shape, but because they are held by ropes, they form tight connections between the neighboring sheaths.”
The resulting tension allows the sheaths to vibrate together. That has a significant impact on the instrument’s sound, taking on a “twangier” quality when dry and a more of metallic gong sound when it is wet. Parikesit has tried making bundengans with other materials: paper, leaves, even plastics. But none of those produce the same sound quality as the bamboo sheaths. He next plans to investigate other musical instruments made from bamboo sheaths.“As an Indonesian, I have extra motivation because the bundengan is a piece of our cultural heritage,” Parikesit said. “I am trying my best to support the conservation and documentation of the bundengan and other Indonesian endangered instruments.”
Coupling with the human vocal tract
Meanwhile, John Smith of the University of New South Wales is equally intrigued by the physics and acoustics of the didgeridoo. The instrument is constructed from the trunk or large branches of the eucalyptus tree. The trick is to find a live tree with lots of termite activity, such that the trunk has been hollowed out leaving just the living sapwood shell. A suitably hollow trunk is then cut down, cleaned out, the bark removed, the ends trimmed, and the exterior shaped into a long cylinder or cone to produce the final instrument. The longer the instrument, the lower the pitch or key.
Players will vibrate their lips to play the didgeridoo in a manner similar to lip valve instruments like trumpets or trombones, except those use a small mouthpiece attached to the instrument as an interface. (Sometimes a beeswax rim is added to a didgeridoo mouthpiece end.) Players typically use circular breathing to maintain that continuous low-pitched drone for several minutes, basically inhaling through the nose and using air stored in the puffed cheeks to keep producing the sound. It’s the coupling of the instrument with the human vocal tract that makes the physics so complex, per Smith.
Smith was interested in investigating how changes in the configuration of the vocal tract produced timbral changes in the rhythmic pattern of the sounds produced. To do so, “We needed to develop a technique that could measure the acoustic properties of the player’s vocal tract while playing,” Smith said during the same press briefing. “This involved injecting a broadband signal into the corner of the player’s mouth and using a microphone to record the response.” That enabled Smith and his cohorts to record the vocal tract impedance in different configurations in the mouth.
Enlarge/ Producing complex sounds with the didjeridu requires creating and manipulating resonances inside the vocal tract.
Kate Callas
The results: “We showed that strong resonances in the vocal tract can suppress bands of frequencies in the output sound,” said Smith. “The remaining strong bands of frequencies, called formants, are noticed by our hearing because they fall in the same ranges as the formants we use in speech. It’s a bit like a sculptor removing marble, and we observe the bits that are left behind.”
Smith et al. also noted that the variations in timbre arise from the player singing while playing, or imitating animal sounds (such as the dingo or the kookaburra), which produces many new frequencies in the output sound. To measure the contact between vocal folds, they placed electrodes on either side of a player’s throat and zapped them with a small high frequency electric current. They simultaneously measured lip movement with another pair of electrics above and below the lips. Both types of vibrations affect the flow of air to produce the new frequencies.
As for what makes a desirable didgeridoo that appeals to players, acoustic measurements on a set of 38 such instruments—with the quality of each rated by seven experts in seven different subjective categories—produced a rather surprising result. One might think players would prefer instruments with very strong resonances but the opposite turned out to be true. Instruments with stronger resonances were ranked the worst, while those with weaker resonances rated more highly. Smith, for one, thinks this makes sense. “This means that their own vocal tract resonance can dominate the timbre of the notes,” he said.
With all the technological advances humans have made, it may seem like we’ve lost touch with nature—but not all of us have. People in some parts of Africa use a guide more effective than any GPS system when it comes to finding beeswax and honey. This is not a gizmo, but a bird.
The Greater Honeyguide (highly appropriate name), Indicator indicator (even more appropriate scientific name), knows where all the beehives are because it eats beeswax. The Hadza people of Tanzania and Yao people of Mozambique realized this long ago. Hadza and Yao honey hunters have formed a unique relationship with this bird species by making distinct calls, and the honeyguide reciprocates with its own calls, leading them to a hive.
Because the Hadza and Yao calls differ, zoologist Claire Spottiswoode of the University of Cambridge and anthropologist Brian Wood of UCLA wanted to find out if the birds respond generically to human calls, or are attuned to their local humans. They found that the birds are much more likely to respond to a local call, meaning that they have learned to recognize that call.
Come on, get that honey
To see which sound the birds were most likely to respond to, Spottiswoode and Wood played three recordings, starting with the local call. The Yao honeyguide call is what the researchers describe as “a loud trill followed by a grunt (‘brrrr-hm’) while the Hadza call is more of “a melodic whistle,” as they say in a study recently published in Science. The second recording they would play was the foreign call, which would be the Yao call in Hadza territory and vice versa.
The third recording was an unrelated human sound meant to test whether the human voice alone was enough for a honeyguide to follow. Because Hadza and Yao voices sound similar, the researchers would alternate among recordings of honey hunters speaking words such as their names.
So which sounds were the most effective cues for honeyguides to partner with humans? In Tanzania, local Hadza calls were three times more likely to initiate a partnership with a honeyguide than Yao calls or human voices. Local Yao calls were also the most successful in Mozambique, where, in comparison to Hadza calls and human voices, they were twice as likely to elicit a response that would lead to a cooperative effort to search for a beehive. Though honeyguides did sometimes respond to the other sounds, and were often willing to cooperate when hearing them, it became clear that the birds in each region had learned a local cultural tradition that had become just as much a part of their lives as those of the humans who began it.
Now you’re speaking my language
There is a reason that honey hunters in both the Hadza and Yao tribes told Wood and Spottiswoode that they have never changed their calls and will never change them. If they did, they’d be unlikely to gather nearly as much honey.
How did this interspecies communication evolve? Other African cultures besides the Hadza and Yao have their own calls to summon a honeyguide. Why do the types of calls differ? The researchers do not think these calls came about randomly.
Both the Hadza and Yao people have their own unique languages, and sounds from them may have been incorporated into their calls. But there is more to it than that. The Hadza often hunt animals when hunting for honey. Therefore, the Hadza don’t want their calls to be recognized as human, or else the prey they are after might sense a threat and flee. This may be why they use whistles to communicate with honeyguides—by sounding like birds, they can both attract the honeyguides and stalk prey without being detected.
In contrast, the Yao do not hunt mammals, relying mostly on agriculture and fishing for food. This, along with the fact that they try to avoid potentially dangerous creatures such as lions, rhinos, and elephants, and can explain why they use recognizably human vocalizations to call honeyguides. Human voices may scare these animals away, so Yao honey hunters can safely seek honey with their honeyguide partners. These findings show that cultural diversity has had a significant influence on calls to honeyguides.
While animals might not literally speak our language, the honeyguide is just one of many species that has its own way of communicating with us. They can even learn our cultural traditions.
“Cultural traditions of consistent behavior are widespread in non-human animals and could plausibly mediate other forms of interspecies cooperation,” the researchers said in the same study.
Honeyguides start guiding humans as soon as they begin to fly, and this knack, combined with learning to answer traditional calls and collaborate with honey hunters, works well for both human and bird. Maybe they are (in a way) speaking our language.
