The journey seemed simple enough, on the map anyway. Allison Fine left her home to drive to Vermont, just a few hours north on a major motorway.
She had studied the route and had a GPS gadget to help her.
She soon had absolutely no idea where she was.
"I don't know what happened," she says, "but I pulled over in tears, called my husband and said, 'find me on Google Maps and talk me to Vermont'." This he did, staying on the line for more than an hour.
Fine is an extreme case, but the feeling of getting hopelessly lost is something that most of us can relate to.
In fact, along with our flair for language and our unparalleled intelligence, less-than-stellar navigational skills are among the things that can be considered uniquely human.
While the vast majority of animals have no trouble finding their way around, most people, when stripped of maps or signs, are notoriously bad at it.
Until recently, little was known about how the human inner compass works.
This is partly because "sense of direction" is not one neatly defined ability. Instead, it is made up of many different skills, such as awareness and memory of your surroundings, sensing your speed and direction changes over time, and tracking the location of objects and places relative to you as you move through an environment.
These skills rely on many different parts of the brain, including those involved in vision, memory and imagination, which are tied together into a "cognitive map" by the hippocampus.
Researchers have begun to unravel how this system works, and to ponder whether we have lost our way somewhere in evolution, or whether our inner homing pigeon is simply lying dormant, waiting to be released.
The first person to explore the idea of a cognitive map - a mental representation of an individual's physical surroundings - was Edward Tolman, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1948. Tolman observed that rats could take novel routes to food hidden in a maze when their learnt route was blocked or they were moved to a new starting point. Since then, countless other species have shown an impressive talent for keeping track of where they are.
Equivalent tests with people, however, have seen our species come up seriously short. This weak innate ability to judge distance and direction makes for some pretty squishy mental maps, says William Warren, a cognitive neuroscientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Work that he presented at this year's Vision Science Society conference in Naples, Florida, suggests that human cognitive maps pay little heed to geometric realities. Instead, we remember webs of landmarks such as the shop, our office, the church where we turn left on our way home, yet have little sense of how these fit together spatially.
In a series of recent studies, Michael Kahana and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia studied the brains of epileptic people, who already had electrodes implanted in their brains, as they played a taxi-driving video game.
By noting which neurons fired when, the researchers discovered that human brains have specialised neurons dedicated to sense of direction, similar to those found in the hippocampus of rats, mice, monkeys and goldfish.
So why can't we compute geometric space in the same way?
It could be that we lost this ability at some point in our evolution, sacrificing the kind of precision that other animals enjoy in return for cognitive flexibility, which allows us to make sense of our surroundings and find our way using reasoning and experience rather than geometry.
Indeed, studies of people that live closest to the land, such as the Bedouin in the Sahara, Arctic Inuit and Australian Aborigines, show that reasoning and experience can be very useful for finding your way. Such people can navigate perfectly well using subtle, learnt directional cues from the landscape, even in what looks like the most barren expanse of snow or desert.
Trading a mental tally of distance and direction for real understanding of the landscape in this way may have given us an evolutionary boost.
That these skills are so easily lost could explain why the average westerner struggles to navigate without help. Most people now live in a world that has been made navigable by maps, street signs, transport networks and GPS.
There is no need to understand the environment to get around. Yet while these findings seem to show that we could all navigate like a Bedouin if we had to, other studies indicate that for some of us, substantial improvements may be impossible. In 2006, Daniel Montello and Toru Ishikawa at the University of California, Santa Barbara, taught 24 people two landmark-studded routes which were connected by a winding but landmark-free route in 10 weekly sessions.
After each session, they asked participants to point from one landmark to the others, which were always out of sight, and draw maps of the routes.
Three clear groups emerged: one that kept doing well throughout the experiment, one that did poorly from beginning to end and one that was intermediate.
This final group was the largest, and the volunteers within it all improved at the tasks as the experiment progressed, although only one third of this group became as good as the top performers.
Regardless of whether all or just some of us are a navigational lost cause, the psychologist Colin Ellard at the University of Waterloo in Canada, author of You Are Here, argues that there is an upside to our lack of natural navigation skills.
He suggests that losing our relationship with physical space, coupled with the unique human ability to imagine ourselves in another location, may have given us the freedom to create a reality of our own. What other species could comprehend the World Wide Web or contemplate exploring new worlds, he asks.
And while we may struggle to find our way back to the car after a shopping trip, we can take heart in the knowledge that, as a species, we have managed to find our way to the moon and back, and have sent satellites to just the right orbit so that we no longer need to think about where we are going. Show me a hamster that can do that.
www.newscientist.com
Specs
Engine: Duel electric motors
Power: 659hp
Torque: 1075Nm
On sale: Available for pre-order now
Price: On request
liverpool youngsters
Ki-Jana Hoever
The only one of this squad to have scored for Liverpool, the versatile Dutchman impressed on his debut at Wolves in January. He can play right-back, centre-back or in midfield.
Herbie Kane
Not the most prominent H Kane in English football but a 21-year-old Bristolian who had a fine season on loan at Doncaster last year. He is an all-action midfielder.
Luis Longstaff
Signed from Newcastle but no relation to United’s brothers Sean and Matty, Luis is a winger. An England Under-16 international, he helped Liverpool win the FA Youth Cup last season.
Yasser Larouci
An 18-year-old Algerian-born winger who can also play as a left-back, Larouci did well on Liverpool’s pre-season tour until an awful tackle by a Sevilla player injured him.
Adam Lewis
Steven Gerrard is a fan of his fellow Scouser, who has been on Liverpool’s books since he was in the Under-6s, Lewis was a midfielder, but has been converted into a left-back.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
Developer: Treyarch, Raven Software
Publisher: Activision
Console: PlayStation 4 & 5, Windows, Xbox One & Series X/S
Rating: 3.5/5
SCORES IN BRIEF
Lahore Qalandars 186 for 4 in 19.4 overs
(Sohail 100,Phil Salt 37 not out, Bilal Irshad 30, Josh Poysden 2-26)
bt Yorkshire Vikings 184 for 5 in 20 overs
(Jonathan Tattersall 36, Harry Brook 37, Gary Ballance 33, Adam Lyth 32, Shaheen Afridi 2-36).
What the law says
Micro-retirement is not a recognised concept or employment status under Federal Decree Law No. 33 of 2021 on the Regulation of Labour Relations (as amended) (UAE Labour Law). As such, it reflects a voluntary work-life balance practice, rather than a recognised legal employment category, according to Dilini Loku, senior associate for law firm Gateley Middle East.
“Some companies may offer formal sabbatical policies or career break programmes; however, beyond such arrangements, there is no automatic right or statutory entitlement to extended breaks,” she explains.
“Any leave taken beyond statutory entitlements, such as annual leave, is typically regarded as unpaid leave in accordance with Article 33 of the UAE Labour Law. While employees may legally take unpaid leave, such requests are subject to the employer’s discretion and require approval.”
If an employee resigns to pursue micro-retirement, the employment contract is terminated, and the employer is under no legal obligation to rehire the employee in the future unless specific contractual agreements are in place (such as return-to-work arrangements), which are generally uncommon, Ms Loku adds.
The specs
Engine: 2.0-litre 4cyl turbo
Power: 261hp at 5,500rpm
Torque: 405Nm at 1,750-3,500rpm
Transmission: 9-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 6.9L/100km
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh117,059
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
More on animal trafficking
Museum of the Future in numbers
- 78 metres is the height of the museum
- 30,000 square metres is its total area
- 17,000 square metres is the length of the stainless steel facade
- 14 kilometres is the length of LED lights used on the facade
- 1,024 individual pieces make up the exterior
- 7 floors in all, with one for administrative offices
- 2,400 diagonally intersecting steel members frame the torus shape
- 100 species of trees and plants dot the gardens
- Dh145 is the price of a ticket
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
F1 The Movie
Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Rating: 4/5
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
Studying addiction
This month, Dubai Medical College launched the Middle East’s first master's programme in addiction science.
Together with the Erada Centre for Treatment and Rehabilitation, the college offers a two-year master’s course as well as a one-year diploma in the same subject.
The move was announced earlier this year and is part of a new drive to combat drug abuse and increase the region’s capacity for treating drug addiction.
Specs
Engine: Dual-motor all-wheel-drive electric
Range: Up to 610km
Power: 905hp
Torque: 985Nm
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UK-EU trade at a glance
EU fishing vessels guaranteed access to UK waters for 12 years
Co-operation on security initiatives and procurement of defence products
Youth experience scheme to work, study or volunteer in UK and EU countries
Smoother border management with use of e-gates
Cutting red tape on import and export of food
FIXTURES
Thu Mar 15 – West Indies v Afghanistan, UAE v Scotland
Fri Mar 16 – Ireland v Zimbabwe
Sun Mar 18 – Ireland v Scotland
Mon Mar 19 – West Indies v Zimbabwe
Tue Mar 20 – UAE v Afghanistan
Wed Mar 21 – West Indies v Scotland
Thu Mar 22 – UAE v Zimbabwe
Fri Mar 23 – Ireland v Afghanistan
The top two teams qualify for the World Cup
Classification matches
The top-placed side out of Papua New Guinea, Hong Kong or Nepal will be granted one-day international status. UAE and Scotland have already won ODI status, having qualified for the Super Six.
Thu Mar 15 – Netherlands v Hong Kong, PNG v Nepal
Sat Mar 17 – 7th-8th place playoff, 9th-10th place playoff
What are the main cyber security threats?
Cyber crime - This includes fraud, impersonation, scams and deepfake technology, tactics that are increasingly targeting infrastructure and exploiting human vulnerabilities.
Cyber terrorism - Social media platforms are used to spread radical ideologies, misinformation and disinformation, often with the aim of disrupting critical infrastructure such as power grids.
Cyber warfare - Shaped by geopolitical tension, hostile actors seek to infiltrate and compromise national infrastructure, using one country’s systems as a springboard to launch attacks on others.
Start times
5.55am: Wheelchair Marathon Elites
6am: Marathon Elites
7am: Marathon Masses
9am: 10Km Road Race
11am: 4Km Fun Run
