Philippa Kaur

New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

27 April 2022

Eyes as Big as Plates #Sinikka (Norway 2019) ? Karoline Hjorth & Riitta Ikonen
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Our Time on Earth at London’s Barbican Centre combines art, science, design and music to reveal how technology can connect us to the beauty and complexity of the natural world. From 5 May.

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Travels with Trilobites by palaeontologist Andy Secher explains how this versatile undersea arthropod came to dominate the oceans for more than 270 million years, and features hundreds of photos of unique fossilised specimens.Advertisement
Serpentine and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
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Alienarium 5, now at London’s Serpentine South Gallery, is artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s vision of what life would be like if first contact with aliens went superbly well – an “anti-War of the Worlds vision”, in her words.

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Keeping science and politics socially distanced from each other is the best way to ensure government spin doesn’t damage trust in the former, says Fiona Fox

Humans

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27 April 2022

By Fiona Fox
Michelle D’urbano
WHEN the BSE crisis deepened in the 1990s, John Gummer, then minister of agriculture, invited the press to photograph him trying to feed a beefburger to his 4-year-old daughter, claiming that scientists had advised it was perfectly safe to eat the meat. In fact, they had said there was a low but “theoretical” risk of getting BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a neurological disease of cattle.
But this more nuanced take didn’t reach the UK public at the time because the scientists giving it were hidden from view, just as they were during later crises, such as the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland or the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. Gummer was glossing over the scientific uncertainties to deliver a clear “message” that was convenient for the UK beef trade. As a result, the public were misled and trust in science suffered.
To avoid this in the future, there needs to be a clearer separation between science communication and government communication, so the public can hear science directly from those doing it.Advertisement
One of the few positives in the pandemic was seeing so many leading scientists on our TV screens. While the UK prime minister Boris Johnson used the Downing Street press conferences to deliver key policy decisions and “messaging”, he was flanked by chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance and chief medical officer Chris Whitty who summarised new data and answered media and public questions on the science. This was science communication at its best when most needed and it was a hit with the public. Trust in scientists topped 90 per cent at times as the pandemic unfolded.
Despite this, when the government spin machine got too involved, things got less sciency and more political. As head of the Science Media Centre, an independent organisation promoting scientific literacy in reporting, I lost count of the times I lined up briefings on pandemic-related findings with a panel of great researchers only to turn on a news broadcast and hear ministers announce those findings early. The result: coverage by political journalists with little science but often with government spin.
That wasn’t the only problem during the pandemic. Ministers got a rebuke from regulators for announcing major developments that would impact us all without making scientific data they relied on available for others to assess.
Even more worryingly, in a revealing essay about behind-the-scenes government strategy, Lee Cain, Johnson’s former director of communications, called for a more centralised structure to ensure clear single “messaging” on issues like covid-19. That comms officers are desperate to control the “narrative” in a national crisis is nothing new. But such calls only bolster the case for ensuring science is presented independent of government announcements.
Luckily, we have a precedent. After years of complaints about the way official UK statistics on everything from crime to unemployment were being spun by politicians, campaigners finally convinced the government to address this in the 2017 Code of Practice for Statistics. The result is that figures about our national life are first published as raw data by organisations like the Office for National Statistics. Politicians can comment on these figures like the rest of us, but taking the initial communication away from ministers means we see the numbers without political spin.
Applying this idea more widely would be good for all of us. Critically, the system would also establish the principle that science needs to be impartial and free from politicisation.
The loss of control might be painful for government, but the benefits in terms of public trust in science would be worth it. As the pandemic has shown, that really can be a matter of life and death.
Fiona Fox is head of the Science Media Centre and author of Beyond the Hype

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From the discovery of the first subatomic particle to the confirmation of the Higgs boson in 2012, Suzie Sheehy’s account of experiments that changed our world is detailed but lively

Humans

27 April 2022

By Elle Hunt

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, SwitzerlandMaximilien Brice/CERN
The Matter of Everything
Suzie Sheehy
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IN 1930, Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli set out to solve a mystery. The variability of energy values for beta particles, defying the basic scientific principles of conservation of energy and momentum, had been confounding physicists since the turn of the century.
Pauli – a physicist so rigorous in his approach that he had been called “the scourge of God” – seemed well-placed to address it. And yet, when he put his mind to finding a theoretical solution for the problem of beta decay, Pauli created only further ambiguity.
He proposed the existence of an entirely new, chargeless and near-massless particle that would allow for energy and momentum to be conserved, but would be almost impossible to find. “I have done a terrible thing,” he wrote. “I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.”
Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics, is one of many names to cross the pages of The Matter of Everything, Suzie Sheehy’s lively account of “experiments that changed our world”. Through 12 significant discoveries over the course of the 20th century, Sheehy shows how physics transformed the world and our understanding of it – in many cases, as a direct result of the curiosity and dedication of individuals.
Sheehy is an experimental physicist in the field of accelerator physics, based at the University of Oxford and the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her own expertise makes The Matter of Everything a more technical book than the framing of 12 experiments might suggest, and certainly more so than the average popular science title, but it is nonetheless accessible to the lay reader and vividly described.
From experiments with cathode rays in a German lab in 1895, leading to the detection of X-rays and to the discovery of the first subatomic particle, to the confirmation of the Higgs boson in 2012, The Matter of Everything is an opportunity to learn not just about individual success stories, but the nature of physics itself.
Sheehy does well to set out the questions that these scientists wanted to answer and what lay at stake with their discoveries, on the macro level as well as the micro one, showing how physics not only helped us to understand the world, but shaped it. These early “firsts” came from small-scale experiments, with researchers operating their own equipment and even building it from scratch.
The Matter of Everything also highlights those whose contributions might have historically been overlooked, such as Lise Meitner, dubbed the “German Marie Curie” by Albert Einstein. Her work on nuclear fission went unacknowledged for some 50 years after her colleague Otto Hahn was solely awarded the Nobel prize in 1944.
The commitment and collaboration of physicists and engineers through the second world war showed what was possible – for good and evil. Sheehy describes how the development of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki awakened a social conscience in the field, paving the way to the international cooperation we see today, such as on the Large Hadron Collider.
United behind a common goal, and with cross-government support, answers that had never before seemed possible suddenly appeared within grasp. To Sheehy, this is evidence of the potential for physics to overcome the challenges that face science and society now – from the nature of dark matter to tackling the climate crisis.
At the start of the 20th century, she points out, it was said that we knew everything there was to know about the universe; by the end of the century, the world had changed beyond recognition.
The terrible particles Pauli proposed – which he called neutrons, but we now know as neutrinos – were finally confirmed in 1956. His response was quietly triumphant: “Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.”
A sweeping but detailed and pacy account of 100 years of scientific advancement, The Matter of Everything has a cheering takeaway. What such leaps lie ahead? What questions seem intractable now that we won’t give a thought to in the future?
Sheehy mounts the case that – with persistence, curiosity and collaboration – we may yet overcome challenges that now seem impossible.

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Elisabeth Moss is after a killer who is defying all known laws of reality in Shining Girls, an unsettling Apple TV+ adaptation of Lauren Beukes’s science-fiction thriller

Humans

27 April 2022

By Bethan Ackerley
Filing clerk Kirby (Elisabeth Moss) finds her sense of reality starting to shift as she looks for a killerAPPLE TV+
Shining Girls
Silka Luisa
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CAN a bee live without its wings? And what does it mean to survive against all odds? It is unlikely that the sadistic serial killer in Shining Girls, a new sci-fi thriller from Apple TV+, had considered these questions before mutilating a young girl’s pet bee in the series’ opening scene. What is clear, though, is that he sees the women he attacks as broken-winged, robbed of their perfection – and that this misconception will be his downfall.
Shining Girls stars Elisabeth Moss as Kirby Mazrachi, a filing clerk at a Chicago newspaper in 1992 who is still recovering from a horrific assault six years earlier. Her assailant was never caught, but when the body of a young woman is found with similar injuries, Kirby enlists strung-out reporter Dan Velazquez (Wagner Moura) to help her track down the murderer.
Their investigation is complicated by Kirby’s ever-shifting sense of reality: first, small things change, like whether she owns a cat or a dog. Then, in the blink of an eye, she finds she has been married for years and her rock-star mother is a born-again Christian.
As the bodies stack up, Kirby and Dan learn that the timeline of the killings can’t possibly make sense. While investigating the murder of a woman in 1972, they discover she had a locker key from 1992 in her possession. The more they uncover about the connections between the victims, the more impossible the killings seem.
Fans of The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes’s 2013 novel on which the show is based, should note that the series is considerably different. It largely eschews the grisliness of its source material, which devoted much of its narrative to the killer’s perspective. Instead, it has been transformed into a cerebral, mind-bending puzzle, with the murderer (Jamie Bell) and his methods left a cipher. All we know is that he is a clean-cut man with an almost omnipotent level of control over his victims – the “shining girls” – to the point where he seems to defy all known laws of reality.
For the most part, this restraint is wise: TV is hardly in need of more gruesome depictions of violence against women, after all. But losing the jagged mastery of the novel draws attention to the series’ deficiencies. The violence in the book was extreme but never gratuitous, designed to paint a picture of the noirish world Kirby inhabits. By contrast, aside from a few vivid montages, Shining Girls is often lacking in visual flair. And while many details of the other women’s murders have been expunged, so have the stories of their lives and dreams – only Kirby and a couple of other “shining girls” are fleshed out.
What can’t be faulted, though, are the performances of the show’s three leads. As Kirby, Moss really does shine. She is fragile and furious by turns, taking the increasingly large shifts in her reality in her stride. Moura, too, is hugely charismatic, making Dan’s aptitude for reporting clear even as his dependency on alcohol worsens.
And despite the dearth of information about his character, the killer avoids feeling one-note thanks to Bell. Shining Girls is careful to show the smaller-scale ways in which he harasses and demeans his victims before killing them. In this sense, he is a garden-variety misogynist, and Bell skilfully conveys how these small seeds could have grown and put him on a path to murder.
The first four episodes of Shining Girls set up a satisfying mystery, filled with unsettling twists that pull at the edges of reality. But it is the themes of trauma and renewal – at once more mundane and more remarkable than any sci-fi conceit could hope to be – that make the series worth watching. Far from a broken-winged bee, Kirby is so much more than a single reality could ever capture.

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By Jason Arunn Murugesu
An abandoned inflatable boat used by migrants to reach Dover, UK, in 2020BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images
HEALTH bodies and charity workers fear that the UK government’s plan to send adult asylum seekers to settle in Rwanda, rather than allowing them to settle in the UK, will inadvertently lead to unaccompanied children being deported. This is because, despite the government’s proposed Nationality and Borders Bill calling for “scientific methods” to confirm that child asylum seekers aren’t adults, experts say there is no such way to determine someone’s age.
Age assessments aren’t mere form filling. Unaccompanied children arriving in the UK need to enter education and be found a foster family as soon as possible. There are also fears that adults may claim they are children in the hope of being treated more favourably by the UK’s asylum system.
“There is no medical or psychological test which can definitively state a person’s age”Advertisement
But many people who flee their home countries can’t prove their age. They may have lost their documentation in conflict, never had a birth certificate in the first place or simply be from a culture that doesn’t celebrate birthdays.
Last year, there were 3762 claims for asylum in the UK made by unaccompanied children, but officials from the country’s Border Force or local councils disputed 2517 of them and ordered an age assessment. Around 60 per cent of these were judged to be at least 18, and so adults.
Such assessments are controversial. Several charity workers and lawyers have told New Scientist that caseworkers are using pseudoscience to help justify their decisions on whether an asylum seeker is a child or an adult. Lawsuits have been brought against the UK’s Home Office in the past few years due to officials judging child asylum seekers to be adults and putting them into hotels unsupervised, without safeguarding measures.
Current age assessments in the UK are largely conducted by local government social workers and are based on a series of interviews with the asylum seeker as well as judging their appearance and demeanour. This process can be subjective and lacking evidence.

“I was so stressed [by the whole process],” says Jerome*, an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK in 2020 with no identification. Jerome says he was 16 when he arrived in the country, but Border Force didn’t believe him.
After three months and four separate interviews, two social workers claimed that Jerome was lying about his age and judged that he was aged between 19 and 22. New Scientist has seen documents produced by the social workers to justify this assessment. In the “appearance and demeanour” section, they claim that because Jerome’s skin didn’t look youthful, he was unlikely to be 17.
The report also suggests that because Jerome had broad shoulders and a pronounced Adam’s apple, it was likely that he had “completed puberty”. In order to claim that Jerome’s broad shoulders were a sign of adulthood, the report linked to a website that instructs readers on how best to draw the human body.
“It’s complete pseudoscience,” says Jerome’s independent charity social worker*. “It’s medieval.”
But Jerome’s case isn’t unusual. Bob*, a charity worker, says he worked with a 15-year-old asylum seeker* last year who was asked to tell social workers where exactly his body hair was. In another case, a woman* from an East African country was told she couldn’t be 17 because her hips were too wide for teenage women from that region.
Bob also had a case in which the facial hair of an asylum seeker* from a north-eastern African country was taken as evidence that he was over 18 because the assessors judged that men from the region don’t develop facial hair until adulthood. “It’s just plain wrong and racist,” says Bob. “I believe age assessments are one of the most disturbing aspects of the entire asylum system [in the UK].”
Bob says the UK’s new migration plans risk children being wrongly assessed as over 18 and quickly moved to Rwanda. “The Home Office could decide to take the precautionary approach not to remove anyone whose age has been disputed – but I can’t see this happening,” he says. “They’d say that everyone will then claim to be a child at the border.”
The Home Office told New Scientist that it won’t send unaccompanied children to Rwanda. “Everyone considered for relocation will be screened, interviewed and have access to legal advice,” says a Home Office spokesperson. “Decisions will be taken on a case-by-case basis and nobody will be removed if it is unsafe or inappropriate for them.”
The spokesperson also said the current age assessment method is “very subjective” and that measures put in place through the Nationality and Borders Bill will stop adults who are seeking asylum claiming to be children.
Wrist X-rays are used for age assessments in the European UnionMarco Ohmer/Alamy
In January, the Home Office launched a scientific committee to look at alternative age assessment techniques. The committee is looking at three main methods, according to a source with knowledge of the matter who spoke to New Scientist on condition of anonymity.
The first method, dental X-rays, works on the assumption that teeth mature at a constant rate and that all teeth, except the third molars – also called wisdom teeth – are fully mature by the age of 20. The technique is used in countries like France and Sweden to assess the ages of asylum seekers.
But the British Dental Association (BDA) has called the methodology inaccurate, saying that children as young as 16 can have mature wisdom teeth, while some people never develop them at all.
“Dental age checks fail basic standards on accuracy and ethics,” says Eddie Crouch at the BDA. “If ministers go down this path, it seems inevitable that some child refugees risk being handed a one-way ticket to Rwanda.”
The second method involves taking X-rays of the wrist bone and comparing the image to the X-rays of other similarly aged people. A briefing note on the topic published on 15 March by the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology said the method should be used with caution because we don’t really know how trauma or malnourishment, both common in asylum seekers, may affect wrist bone density.
“There is no medical or psychological test which can definitively state a person’s age,” says Zoë Greaves at the British Medical Association (BMA). “In addition, the use of procedures such as radiographs of bones and teeth to determine age is not only unreliable but also poses a risk [from X-ray exposure] to individuals forced to undergo the procedure.”
“The BMA believes that it is not ethical for doctors to use their clinical skills to take part in an age-assessment process that results in vulnerable and traumatised people being sent to an offshore facility,” says Greaves.
The scientific committee is also investigating whether DNA methylation can be used to assess a person’s age. This is the chemical modification of DNA that happens throughout our lives and studies have shown that the “biomarkers” of this process, found in blood or saliva samples, can be used to estimate a person’s age. But Eugénia Cunha at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, who studies the technique, says the results aren’t accurate enough to be used in real-world age assessments.

The source with knowledge of the Home Office’s scientific committee says they believe the department intends to go ahead with some of these methods in the coming year, especially dental X-rays. The Home Office didn’t confirm or deny this before publication.
Using these kinds of biological signs to determine age may appear to be accurate and impartial, but they aren’t, says the source. The main benefit is cost. “If you ignore the fact that they get the answer wrong quite a lot of the time, it’s much cheaper than a social worker assessment,” says the source.
So if current age assessments are flawed, and the government’s proposed scientific methods are also unreliable, what is the solution? Jo Schofield has 10 years’ experience conducting age assessments for local councils. She has since set up an independent firm called Immigration Social Work Services in the UK for whenever someone wants to challenge an official assessment.
“I believe social workers can do this work if they are trained properly,” she says. “We do 9-hour assessments which are trauma-informed and give the asylum seeker the benefit of the doubt.” She says budget cuts, a lack of training, overwhelming caseloads and a culture of disbelief have led to social workers conducting age assessments too hastily. Schofield estimates that a properly carried out assessment can cost a few thousand pounds, while those that may have been done incorrectly, resulting in legal challenges, can cost £45,000.
In February, Schofield set up a qualification for age assessment that any social worker can take. She believes that such holistic assessments are the best way to assess a young person’s age. “It just needs to be done properly,” she says.
*names have been changed and specifics left out to protect people’s identities and because legal cases are ongoing

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New insight into how we age suggests it may be driven by a failure to switch off the forces that build our bodies. If true, it could lead to a deeper understanding of ageing – and the possibility of slowing it

Humans

27 April 2022

By Claire Ainsworth
Shutterstock/Microone
IT WAS as if someone had turned back time. Once-faltering paws gripped objects with renewed strength. Hearts and livers regained their youthful vitality. Fuzzy memories sharpened. And according to Steve Horvath’s experiments, the biological age of his rats had been cut in half. “I was stunned,” he says.
Horvath, an anti-ageing researcher at the University of Los Angeles, California, saw these startling effects in 2020 after injecting old rats with blood extract from younger rodents. And he isn’t alone. A growing number of labs are reporting findings that indicate we might have been thinking about ageing the wrong way.
Rather than the result of the accumulation of wear and tear as time ticks by, ageing could be driven by the forces that build our bodies in the uterus and maintain them after we are born. In youth, they help us, but a failure to switch them off brings the deterioration of old age. This new view offers a deeper understanding of what ageing actually is and the possibility of slowing or even partly reversing it.
While the processes that drive ageing are a matter of debate, biogerontologists do agree on one thing – what it looks like: the progressive decline in physical function that most creatures experience with the passage of time. They have catalogued the cellular changes accompanying this decline, which include crumbling chromosome ends, damaged and unstable genomes and changes in the way that cells sense nutrients.
For many years, biologists have favoured the idea that these hallmarks were the result of damage such as that wrought by reactive molecules called free radicals produced by our … More

Oscar winners alive today are expected to die aged 81.3, on average, compared with 76.4 for their fellow nominees and 76.2 for their unnominated co-stars

Health

26 April 2022

By Alice Klein
Katharine Hepburn in the 1981 film On Golden Pond, for which she won the Best Actress Oscar, aged 74Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy
­­Oscar-winning actors are expected to live five years longer than thespians who never take home an Academy Award.­
While watching the Oscars one year, Donald Redelmeier at the University of Toronto in Canada noticed the actors on stage appeared more vivacious than people of the same age who he treats.
Together with his colleague Sheldon Singh, Redelmeier looked at the 934 actors who were nominated for an Oscar, from the award’s … More