Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Bug Out review: A $50,000 insect heist gets the Tiger King treatment

    A true-crime series on IMDb TV takes a slightly too po-faced look into a theft from an invertebrate zoo where things weren’t quite as they seemed

    Humans

    23 March 2022

    By Elle Hunt
    Bug Out reveals the world of insect collectors like Steve LamondCourtesy of IMDb TV
    Bug Out
    Ben Feldman
    IMDb TVAdvertisement
    ONE morning in August 2018, the chief executive of an insectarium and butterfly house in Pennsylvania arrived at work to find all his live exhibits had disappeared. “Shelves and shelves and shelves that should have been filled with creatures aplenty were empty,” says John Cambridge.
    As tales of true crime go, the “Philadelphia bug heist” was immediately intriguing, not least because of the obvious question: what could anyone want with thousands of insects?
    Now, the hunt for the perpetrators has been given the Tiger King treatment in a four-part documentary series for IMDb TV. As with the 2020 sensation featuring Joe Exotic, the most eyebrow-raising moments in Bug Out come care of its subjects that walk on two legs.
    The Philadelphia Insectarium & Butterfly Pavilion grew out of a 1970s pest-control business called Bug Out that was run by an ex-cop who would display his “catch of the day”. Over the years, the displays got more elaborate and eccentric, and insect enthusiasts were drawn to them like moths to a porch light. It grew into the US’s first invertebrate zoo and, until the robbery, was a family-friendly attraction that chugged along seemingly without incident.
    [embedded content]
    The series follows a broadly chronological structure, starting with the theft before spiralling out into the strange (and surprisingly endearing) world of hobbyists, collectors and traders of creepy-crawlies. On one level, it is an eye-opening insight into an unfamiliar – and, to many, unappealing – pastime, where people are eager to share their enthusiasm for rare cockroaches ($500 a breeding pair) and African land snails the size of small dogs.
    A diversion into the booming illegal international trade in rare bugs and other wildlife shows the darker side of human nature, and our obsession with collecting and commodifying every aspect of the natural world.
    But just as you didn’t watch Tiger King to learn about big cat conservation, Bug Out‘s real intrigue comes from the people behind the insectarium. In many ways, it is a study of what was a dysfunctional workplace that put human nature, not insects, under the microscope. The most emotionally affecting moments come from employees who fervently wanted to indulge their passion through their work, only to have their dreams crushed by a toxic working environment.
    “Just as you didn’t watch Tiger King to learn about big cats, the real intrigue comes from the people”
    Until the robbery, these dramas played out on a small stage. Then, the heist was picked up by local media and then national media. Before long it was being discussed by late-night chat-show host Jimmy Kimmel. As a result, Cambridge became a mini-celebrity and the police operation hotted up, with an additional FBI investigation that scrutinised some of the then employees’ surprisingly shady backgrounds.
    The crime was more serious than it might sound: Cambridge put the value of the 7000-odd insects taken at as much as $50,000. But the loss of his exhibits was just the tip of the iceberg, as the seemingly wholesome family attraction was revealed to be beset by power struggles and financial mismanagement.
    The documentary-makers’ efforts to stoke the drama to true-crime levels are occasionally heavy-handed, suggesting an anxiety about letting the story speak for itself. A dramatically lit corkboard linking suspect mugshots with sticky notes labelled with things like “motive = bugs” is presumably intended to lend drama to the police investigation. The dry humour of the investigating officers, meanwhile, is wasted by the overall po-faced tone of the show.
    When the big reveal comes, in the fourth and final episode, it doesn’t quite deliver on the whodunnit promised in the first – in fact, it reveals the narrative to have been somewhat contrived. One gets the sense that the film-makers, having set out to tell the true story behind the Philadelphia bug heist, discovered a vastly different tale to the one they had anticipated and were forced to make the best of it.
    The result is a highly diverting although somewhat unsatisfying series: a can of worms that, despite Bug Out‘s best efforts, cannot be tidily contained.

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Here’s the best timeline yet for the Milky Way’s big events

    A new analysis of nearly a quarter million stars puts firm ages on the most momentous pages from our galaxy’s life story.

    Far grander than most of its neighbors, the Milky Way arose long ago, as lesser galaxies smashed together. Its thick disk — a pancake-shaped population of old stars — originated remarkably soon after the Big Bang and well before most of the stellar halo that envelops the galaxy’s disk, astronomers report March 23 in Nature.

    “We are now able to provide a very clear timeline of what happened in the earliest time of our Milky Way,” says astronomer Maosheng Xiang.

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    He and Hans-Walter Rix, both at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, studied almost 250,000 subgiants — stars that are growing larger and cooler after using up the hydrogen fuel at their centers. The temperatures and luminosities of these stars reveal their ages, letting the researchers track how different epochs in galactic history spawned stars with different chemical compositions and orbits around the Milky Way’s center.

    “There’s just an incredible amount of information here,” says Rosemary Wyse, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with the study. “We really want to understand how our galaxy came to be the way it is,” she says. “When were the chemical elements of which we are made created?”

    Xiang and Rix discovered that the Milky Way’s thick disk got its start about 13 billion years ago. That’s just 800 million years after the universe’s birth. The thick disk, which measures 6,000 light-years from top to bottom in the sun’s vicinity, kept forming stars for a long time, until about 8 billion years ago.

    During this period, the thick disk’s iron content shot up 30-fold as exploding stars enriched its star-forming gas, the team found. At the dawn of the thick disk era, a newborn star had only a tenth as much iron, relative to hydrogen, as the sun; by the end, 5 billion years later, a thick disk star was three times richer in iron than the sun.

    Xiang and Rix also found a tight relation between a thick disk star’s age and iron content. This means gas was thoroughly mixed throughout the thick disk: As time went on, newborn stars inherited steadily higher amounts of iron, no matter whether the stars formed close to or far from the galactic center.

    But that’s not all that was happening. As other researchers reported in 2018, another galaxy once hit our own, giving the Milky Way most of the stars in its halo, which engulfs the disk (SN: 11/1/18). Halo stars have little iron.

    The new work revises the date of this great galactic encounter: “We found that the merger happened 11 billion years ago,” Xiang says, a billion years earlier than thought. As the intruder’s gas crashed into the Milky Way’s gas, it triggered the creation of so many new stars that our galaxy’s star formation rate reached a record high 11 billion years ago.

    The merger also splashed some thick disk stars up into the halo, which Xiang and Rix identified from the stars’ higher iron abundances. These “splash” stars, the researchers found, are at least 11 billion years old, confirming the date of the merger.

    The thick disk ran out of gas 8 billion years ago and stopped making stars. Fresh gas around the Milky Way then settled into a thinner disk, which has given birth to stars ever since — including the 4.6-billion-year-old sun and most of its stellar neighbors. The thin disk is about 2,000 light-years thick in our part of the galaxy.

    “The Milky Way has been quite quiet for the last 8 billion years,” Xiang says, experiencing no further encounters with big galaxies. That makes it different from most of its peers.

    If the thick disk really existed 13 billion years ago, Xiang says, then the new James Webb Space Telescope (SN: 1/24/22) may discern similar disks in galaxies 13 billion light-years from Earth — portraits of the Milky Way as a young galaxy. More

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    in Humans

    How language evolved: A new idea suggests it’s all just a game

    Our mastery of language presents many mysteries, not least where grammar comes from and how children learn to speak so effortlessly. Now researchers argue that it all makes sense if you think of language as a game of charades

    Humans

    23 March 2022

    By Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater
    Harriet noble
    IN THE early afternoon of 16 January 1769, HMS Endeavour dropped anchor in the Bay of Good Success on Tierra del Fuego. When Captain James Cook and his crew came ashore, they were met by a group of Indigenous people, probably Haush hunter-gatherers. Two of Cook’s party advanced. Soon, two of the Haush also stepped forward, displayed small sticks and threw them aside. Cook’s men interpreted this as an indication of peaceful intentions. They were right: the groups were soon exchanging gifts and sharing food. With no common language and inhabiting utterly different worlds, they could nonetheless communicate through a high-stakes game of cross-cultural charades.
    Most of us have faced our own communication challenges, perhaps resorting to pointing and gesturing when abroad. And yet in daily life, we rarely give language a second thought – never mind its many perplexing mysteries. How can noises convey meaning? Where do the complex layers of linguistic patterns come from? How come children learn language so easily, whereas chimpanzees can scarcely learn it at all?
    We believe these questions have remained unanswered because scientists have been looking at language all wrong. A growing body of research undermines prevailing ideas that humans possess an innate language ability somehow wired into our brains, encoding grammatical rules. In our new book, The Language Game, we argue that language isn’t about rules at all. As Cook’s encounter illustrates, it is about improvisation, freedom and the desire to be understood, constrained only by our imaginations. This radical idea helps to explain those long-standing mysteries about language – as well as how language evolved and why it makes humans special.
    For … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Levitating plastic beads mimic the physics of spinning asteroids

    Some asteroids can barely hold it together.

    Rather than solid lumps of rock, ‘rubble pile’ asteroids are loose collections of material, which can split apart as they rotate (SN: 3/16/20). To understand the inner workings of such asteroids, one team of scientists turned to levitating plastic beads. The beads clump together, forming collections that can spin and break up, physicist Melody Lim of the University of Chicago reported March 15 at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Chicago.

    It’s an elegant dance that mimics the physics of asteroid formation, which happens too slowly to observe in real-life space rocks. “These ‘tabletop asteroids’ compress phenomena that take place over kilometers [and] over hundreds of thousands of years to just centimeters and seconds in the lab,” Lim said. The results are also reported in a paper accepted in Physical Review X.

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    Lim and colleagues used sound waves to levitate the plastic beads, which arranged themselves into two-dimensional clumps. Acoustic forces attract the beads to one another, mimicking the gravitational attraction between bits of debris in space. Separate clumps then coalesced similarly to how asteroids are thought to glom onto one another to grow.

    [embedded content]
    Levitated by sound waves, plastic beads, which are about 150 micrometers across, clump together into a loosely bound 2-D conglomeration (shown at 1/50th the original speed). When spun too fast, one such structure deforms then splits apart (shown at 1/70th the original speed).

    When the experimenters gave the structures a spin using the sound waves, the clumps changed shape above a certain speed, becoming elongated. That could help scientists understand why ‘rubble pile’ asteroids, can have odd structures, such as the ‘spinning tops’ formed by asteroids Bennu and Ryugu (SN: 12/18/18).

    Eventually, the fast-spinning clumps broke apart. This observation could help explain why asteroids are typically seen to spin up to a certain rate, but not beyond: Speed demons get split up. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    NASA’s exoplanet count surges past 5,000

    It’s official: The number of planets known beyond our solar system has just passed 5,000.

    The exoplanet census surpassed this milestone with a recent batch of 60 confirmed exoplanets. These additional worlds were found in data from NASA’s now-defunct K2 mission, the “second life” of the prolific Kepler space telescope, and confirmed with new observations, researchers report March 4 at arXiv.org.

    As of March 21, these finds put NASA’s official tally of exoplanets at 5,005.

    It’s been 30 years since scientists discovered the first planets orbiting another star — an unlikely pair of small worlds huddled around a pulsar (SN: 1/11/92). Today, exoplanets are so common that astronomers expect most stars host at least one (SN: 1/11/12), says astronomer Aurora Kesseli of Caltech.

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    “One of the most exciting things that I think has happened in the last 30 years is that we’ve really started to be able to fill out the diversity of exoplanets,” Kesseli says

    Some look like Jupiter, some look — perhaps — like Earth and some look like nothing familiar. The 5,005 confirmed exoplanets include nearly 1,500 giant gassy planets, roughly 200 that are small and rocky and almost 1,600 “super-Earths,” which are larger than our solar system’s rocky planets and smaller than Neptune (SN: 8/11/15).

    Astronomers can’t say much about those worlds beyond diameters, masses and densities. But several projects, like the James Webb Space Telescope, are working on that, Kesseli says (SN: 1/24/22). “Not only are we going to find tons and tons more exoplanets, but we’re also going to start to be able to actually characterize the planets,” she says.

    And the search is far from over. NASA’s newest exoplanet hunter, the TESS mission, has confirmed more than 200 planets, with thousands more yet to verify, Kesseli says (SN: 12/2/21). Ongoing searches from ground-based telescopes keep adding to the count as well.

    “There’s tons of exoplanets out there,” Kesseli says, “and even more waiting to be discovered.” More

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    in Humans

    Last Exit Space review: An unusual take on the race to colonise space

    Rudolph Herzog’s documentary swerves the usual space experts to give an unexpected view of humanity’s efforts to live among the stars, says Simon Ings

    Humans

    16 March 2022

    By Simon Ings

    Interstellar travel will need human ingenuity, and a lot of patienceDiscovery Inc.
    Last Exit: Space
    Rudolph Herzog
    Discovery+Advertisement

    HOW will people copulate in space? How much antimatter would it take to get to Proxima Centauri b? How much skin would each of us need if we could somehow bioengineer humans to photosynthesise? These are just some of the challenges examined by documentary-maker Rudolph Herzog in Last Exit: Space, a peculiar dash through humanity’s ambition to colonise space.
    A traditional documentary might look for answers via the press offices of the European Space Agency or NASA. Not so Rudolph Herzog, whose father, fellow film-maker Werner Herzog, narrated and executive-produced this film. Instead, the film zooms in on those who are dedicated to solving the conundrums of space travel, one challenge at a time.
    The result is a charming, yet unfocused and slightly odd, take on space exploration. In Denmark, we meet volunteers at the non-profit organisation Copenhagen Suborbitals who are crowdfunding to build a full-size rocket to send the world’s first amateur astronaut into space.
    Meanwhile, in the Negev desert in Israel, citizen scientists from the Austrian Space Forum are putting a not-too-sophisticated-looking Mars spacesuit through its paces.
    “The possible future living conditions on Mars are compared to working in an Amazon fulfilment centre”
    As well as looking at the technical barriers to moving off-planet, the film ponders whether it is a good idea in the first place. Among the naysayers is space anthropologist Taylor Genovese, who compares the possible future living conditions on Mars to working in an Amazon fulfilment centre. Judith Lapierre, the sole female crew member of the Sphinx-99 isolation experiment in the late 1990s, describes how this study in close-proximity living ended with her alleging sexual harassment against another crew member. It does beg the question, if we can’t get along on Earth, what chance do we have in space?
    These issues will only grow with more extreme distances travelled. Interstellar travel will require a ship capable of supporting entire generations of humans. Lapierre’s testimony, says Werner Herzog’s narration, suggests that any such mission will be plagued with “strife, crime and depravity”.
    In that case, we might be better off staying put. This, surprisingly, is the advice of a cleric from the Valley of the Dawn community in Planaltina, Brazil, who believe they receive energies from visiting extraterrestrials from the Capella star system. These apparently advise against interstellar travel, which I’m sure NASA would be interested to hear.
    Last Exit: Space suffers from its wide-eyed, catch-all approach to the subject; I found the lack of critical analysis frustrating. We are regaled with tales of “the human pioneering spirit”, as though humans were destined to explore and become somewhat less than human when not exploring. This is an opinion not established fact. Many human cultures have made a great success of staying put. Set in false opposition to this are an astonishing assortment of dystopian fantasies: space corporations will control our water! Space corporations will control our air!
    Astronaut Mike Foale and astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz provide the documentary with small but penetrating moments of reason. Space is an additional field of human endeavour, they point out, not an escape route from a wrecked home planet. “Do we need to seek our destiny among the stars?”, asks the documentary early on. Let’s hope not.

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    in Humans

    Get Rich or Lie Trying review: A pacy scroll through influencer life

    Living for likes and subscribers can be a poisoned chalice or a dream come true, according to Get Rich or Lie Trying by journalist Symeon Brown

    Humans

    16 March 2022

    By Chris Stokel-Walker

    THE influencer economy, fuelled by the ability of social media to instantly reach millions of people, has changed the way we work, rest and play. For some, the rise of this new way to make a living has been a boon – demolishing gatekeepers, minting a new era of celebrities and making millionaires of people who might otherwise be trapped in a dead-end job.
    But this has been far from a uniformly good thing for society. As Channel 4 News journalist Symeon Brown uncovers in Get Rich or Lie Trying, the seedy side of social media can be as harmful as it is helpful.
    Brown’s reporting sees him go back to the streets of London where he grew up to hear from school friends who have fallen prey to pyramid schemes dressed up as online cryptocurrency investments. He also heads to Los Angeles, where he meets nipped and tucked influencers seeking the perfect body, often ruining their health in the process.
    Get Rich or Lie Trying is a chastening read, clearly showing that the lowlights of online fame are as depressing as its highlights are inspiring. Brown races through the influencer economy and the different industries it touches, from the sweatshops churning out poor-quality clothing to ensure that scrolling teenagers can keep up with the latest red carpet looks on a budget, to the surgeons that perform Brazilian butt lifts, a risky procedure where fat is taken from other parts of the body and injected into the buttocks.
    At times, Brown hurtles through first-person stories so fast that there is hardly a chance to blink. Those he highlights as exploiting social media – or being exploited by it – sometimes pass by too quickly for us to remember who they are or why we should care. It feels a bit like the relentless hamster wheel of the algorithms that drive social media platforms, and the whole experience can become a bit discombobulating.
    At times, you struggle to see who to feel sorrier for: the young woman cajoled into performing a sex act on camera, or the man who is paid to receive insults online. Sometimes, they blur into a catalogue of horrors that becomes difficult to unpick and reflect on.
    The book’s stronger sections are those that bring the action closer to home and address some deeper, more systemic issues. A chapter on how social media’s unique voice is often driven by authentic Black voices that are then co-opted and copied by richer, white entrepreneurs without qualms is particularly powerful, and begins to tackle wider problems entrenched in social media.
    Elsewhere in the book, the bigger picture is lacking, however. We know, for example, that the drive to achieve physical “perfection” is an issue, and research has made clear both the role that social media platforms play in perpetuating this and the effects of such ideals on mental and physical health. Yet Brown spends surprisingly little time questioning what can be done about the broken bodies and livelihoods left behind in the race to get famous on social media, or even who is to blame.
    The book does a much better job of highlighting just how perilous living a life designed to go viral can be – and how quickly the thing that made you famous can become passé. It raises important questions about the value we place on superficial appearances, and how social media all too often encourages us to sacrifice thinking deeply in favour of a neat sound bite.
    Overall, Get Rich or Lie Trying is well worth reading – but, like social media, at times it would do well to go deeper and dwell a little longer.

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    in Humans

    Radioactive gummy bears, renewable trams and moon geese

    Josie Ford
    Hybrid learning
    A man in a hide jerkin and disposable face mask sits knapping flints against the backdrop of an unaccountably large, bright red tractor. Rounding a corner, a 3-metre-high luminous yellow grinning gummy bear suddenly looms over us, from which we flee through a door into a side room where Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham is talking soulfully about 100 per cent renewable trams.
    Not Feedback’s latest cheese dream – although close – but sure signs we were on the shop floor at New Scientist Live Manchester, as part of our drive to bring the office stationery cupboard to you.
    Like many people, Feedback currently finds being in real places with real people a discombobulating experience that requires several deep-breathing exercises and us remembering to wear something on our bottom half. Many attendees in Manchester weren’t actually in Manchester, but watching it all from the safety of their own underpants at home, which brings its own challenges, it turns out. When digital attendees complain that the main stage is freezing, getting someone to turn up the thermostat in the hall doesn’t cut it. Lesson learned as the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds slowly melt, as indeed the people in the hall did.Advertisement
    The truth is out there
    “Don’t think of a black hole as a Hoover, think of it as a couch cushion”. Astrophysicist Becky Smethurst – Dr Becky to her legion of YouTube fans – won the prize for the most unexpected metaphor of the event, her point being that you are less likely to get sucked into a black hole than to lose your car keys down the side of one. Or something like that.
    Meanwhile, we were delighted to learn from Dallas Campbell and Suzie Imber’s talk on how to leave Earth about the 1638 book The Man in the Moone, written by Church of English bishop Francis Godwin, in which the protagonist flies to the moon in a chariot towed by moon geese. We would take this option, which strikes us as classier than the unspeakably vulgar rockets favoured by today’s billionaire class.
    We also now know the current location of the first sandwich in space, what an industrial vacuum does to a marshmallow and how to make a rocket with half an Alka-Seltzer and a 35-millimetre film canister. That’s definitely one not to try at home. For anyone tempted, all the talks are available in the metaverse.
    Going nuclear
    The 3-metre-high mutant gummy bear was, it turns out, advertising the benefits of nuclear power. Feedback regards this as brave, as we also do the UK Atomic Energy Authority titling a talk “Nuclear Fusion: Forever 30 years away”.
    Still, we learn that a gummy bear is about the same size as a uranium fuel pellet, that one fuel pellet produces enough power to drive an electric car 20,000 miles and so a 3-metre-high gummy bear would make enough electricity to power 2 million electric cars for a year in the UK. This makes us happy.
    Blowing in the wind
    Meanwhile, out in the real world, the real world was still going on. The gummy bear is possibly a more appropriate unit of power for a family magazine than that contained in a tweet from the Victorian Trades Hall Council that Paul Campbell forwards us following our session on “how big is a gigawatt?” in last week’s Feedback.
    It celebrates the announcement of 2 gigawatts of wind power capacity to be installed off the Australian state’s coast in the coming 10 years, or as the tweet has it in an accompanying picture: “SH**LOADS OF POWER. SH**LOADS OF JOBS”.
    Clue: it wasn’t “shed”. We idly wonder if this is now a unit of power and how many horses it would take to produce it. Around 2.7 million, we make it. They would be a truly magnificent sight riding in the waves, although we do wonder whether any of this counts as clean energy.
    Butt out
    While our back was turned, we also discover that a portion of Twitter declared 1 to 8 March InverteButt Week in celebration of the backsides of creatures without backbones.
    We doubt the world truly needed this, but then again, with past headlines in this august publication such as “Comb jelly videos are rewriting the history of your anus”, perhaps people in glass houses shouldn’t throw… slugs.
    This leads us to delve rather more deeply than we might otherwise have done into the lifestyle and morphology of the bristle worm Ramisyllis multicaudata, a detailed study of which, published last year, seems to have been a prime mover of InverteButt Week. The worm lives, with delightful specificity, within sponges in Darwin Harbour, northern Australia. Its single head is buried deep within the sponge, but its body randomly branches out into up to 1000 rear ends that poke hopefully out of it. The gut is continuous throughout all these branches, yet doesn’t seem to process any food, leading to speculation that the worm has “adopted a fungal lifestyle”.
    This sounds pleasingly louche, like flying with the moon geese. Even more fun is that, when it comes to reproduction, new heads – complete with brains and eyes – start forming and bud off from the worm’s butts. Cute.
    Got a story for Feedback?Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TTConsideration of items sent in the post will be delayed
    You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More