Philippa Kaur

More stories

  • 75 Shares99 Views

    in Humans

    How to perfectly pickle your cucumbers

    By Sam Wong
    StockFood/Scherer, Jim
    ALL over the world, people use acid to preserve fruit and vegetables, creating the sour and delicious foods we call pickles. The microbes that spoil our food have a hard time growing if the pH is lower than 4.5, but we can eat foods with a pH as low as 2 (the lower the pH, the more acidic the substance).
    Some pickles are made by salting vegetables or fruit, encouraging the growth of bacteria that produce lactic acid. These include kimchi, which I described in a previous issue (29 February 2020). A quicker and simpler way to make … More

  • 175 Shares199 Views

    in Humans

    Hard to Be a God: An 80s classic shows modern sci-fi how it’s done

    Peter Fleischmann’s Hard to Be a God (1989) is a vintage sci-fi gemPhoto 12/Alamy
    Film
    Hard to Be a God (1989)
    Peter FleischmannAdvertisement
    THE scrabble for dominance in sci-fi and fantasy streaming continues to heat up. At the time of writing, Paramount had decided to pull season four of Star Trek: Discovery from Netflix and screen it instead on its own platform; HBO has cancelled one Game of Thrones spin-off to concentrate on another, writing off $30 million in the process; and Amazon Studios’ prequel to The Lord of the Rings, set millennia before the events of The Hobbit, is reputed to cost almost five times as much per season to produce as Game of Thrones.
    All of this upheaval in the production of new sci-fi and fantasy has an unexpected benefit for viewers. While the wheels of production slowly turn, channel programmers are turning to historical material to feed our appetite for the genre. For obvious reasons, David Lynch’s 1984 film Dune is streaming on every major service, while on Amazon Prime Video, you can – and absolutely should – find Peter Fleischmann’s 1989 classic, Hard to Be a God. It is a West German-Soviet-French-Swiss co-production based on the 1964 novel of the same name by Soviet sci-fi writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
    The story is set in the “Noon Universe”, when humanity has evolved beyond money, crime and warfare to achieve an anarchist techno-utopia. Self-appointed “progressors” cross interstellar space to secretly guide the fate of other, less sophisticated humanoid civilisations.
    “Progressors have evolved past their propensity for violence, but have lost the knack of human connection”
    Anton, an agent of Earth’s Institute of Experimental History, is sent to spy on the city of Arkanar on a far-flung Earth-like planet that is falling under the sway of Reba, the kingdom’s reactionary first minister. Palace coups, mass executions and a peasant war drive Anton from his initial position of professional indifference, first to depression, drunkenness and despair, then ultimately to a fiery and controversial commitment to Arkanar’s revolution.
    It isn’t an expected turn of events, given that progressors like Anton are supposed to have evolved past their propensity for violence. But this isn’t the only problem that comes to light during Anton’s mission. The supposedly advanced humans also seem to have lost the knack of human connection.
    Anton, portrayed by Edward Zentara, eventually comes to realise this for himself. “We were able to see everything that was happening in the world,” he tells an Arkanaran companion, breaking his own cover as he does so. “We saw all the misery, but couldn’t feel sympathy any more.”
    Anton’s intense and horrifying experiences in Arkanar, where every street and rock outcrop has a dangling corpse as a warning from Reba, don’t only affect him. His mission is being watched from orbit by Earth’s other progressors, who struggle to learn from his example and make up for their shortcomings.
    The overall message of the film is a serious one: virtue is something we have to strive for in our lives; goodness doesn’t always come naturally.
    Comparable to Lynch’s Dune in its ambition, and far more articulate, Fleischmann’s upbeat but moving Hard to Be a God reminds us that sci-fi cinema in the 1980s set a very high bar indeed. We can only hope that this year’s TV epics and cinema sequels put as much effort into their stories as they do their production design and special effects.
    Simon also recommends… More

  • 125 Shares149 Views

    in Humans

    The happiness revolution: How to boost the well-being of society

    We now know that economic growth doesn’t necessarily translate into greater well-being. A closer look at Nordic countries such as Finland reveals surprising truths about what really makes a happy society and how other governments can emulate their success

    Humans

    19 January 2022

    By David Robson
    Matt Dartford
    IF YOU want to maximise your chances of living a happy and fulfilled life, you might consider moving to one of the coldest, darkest countries in the world. Since 2012, The World Happiness Report has ranked the average life satisfaction of more than 150 nations. In the past four years, the top slot has been taken by one country: Finland.
    No one was more surprised than the Finns. “The Finnish self-image is that we are this introverted, melancholic people,” says Frank Martela, a philosopher and psychologist at Aalto University in Finland. More surprising, at first glance, is the fact that as the country has ascended to the top of the well-being charts, its economic development has remained remarkably flat.
    This seeming paradox confirms what many people have long suspected – that our traditional focus on economic growth doesn’t translate into greater well-being. While gross domestic product (GDP) continues to be the default proxy for people’s welfare, many economists and governments are waking up to the fact that our fixation on money is distracting us from policies that could actually improve the quality of people’s lives. Indeed, various nations, from the UK to New Zealand and Costa Rica, have now publicly stated their intention to track measures designed to better capture human happiness.
    Clearly, this is no trivial task. So what can we learn from the evidence emerging from psychology, and the social sciences more broadly, about the various factors that contribute to our emotional well-being? And what, if anything, can that tell us about how other countries can emulate Finland’s success?
    One of the biggest problems is that happiness is … More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Humans

    Unknown voices spark more brain activity in sleep than familiar ones

    Unfamiliar voices seem to put the sleeping brain on alert in a way that familiar voices don’t

    Humans

    17 January 2022

    By Jason Arunn Murugesu
    Electroencephalography (EEG) is used to monitor brain activityShutterstock / NPS_87
    The sleeping brain is more active if it hears unfamiliar voices rather than familiar ones. The finding suggests that we can process information about our environments even in the depths of sleep.
    Manuel Schabus at the University of Salzburg in Austria and his colleagues monitored 17 people, with an average age of 23, in a sleep lab over two nights. Brain activity was monitored using an electroencephalography (EEG) machine.
    “The first night was so that the subjects could get comfortable with their new environment,” says Schabus.Advertisement
    During the second night, while the participants were asleep, they played an audio recording of human speech on loop. The voice was either unfamiliar to the sleeper or belonged to a familiar person, such as a parent or a romantic partner.
    In either case, the voice repeatedly uttered three first names: two random but common names and the name of the sleeper. The audio recordings were played for four 90-minute periods during the night. There was a 30-minute gap between each audio recording so that it would be easier for people to stay asleep.
    The audio was played at a volume so as not to wake the participants up. “We adjusted the sound levels individually,” says Schabus.

    The researchers found that unfamiliar voices generated more brain activity in the sleepers than familiar voices. In particular, they found an increase in the number of K-complexes – a type of brainwave that is slow and isolated – when the subjects heard unfamiliar voices.
    “K-complexes are interesting because they show the immediate response to a disturbance,” says Schabus. That response is divided into two parts, he says: first, the brain processes the information, then it inhibits the information so it doesn’t wake up the sleeping individual.
    If the participant’s brain activity suggested that they were on the verge of waking up, the researchers lowered the volume of the recordings to help them stay asleep.
    Schabus says it makes sense evolutionarily why unfamiliar voices generate stronger brain activity than familiar ones. “Unfamiliar voices should not be speaking to you at night – it sets off an alarm,” he says.
    The finding may be part of the reason why we sometimes struggle to sleep in new environments, such as hotel rooms, says Schabus.
    “This study shows that unfamiliar voices disturb sleeping people more than familiar ones,” says Julie Darbyshire at the University of Oxford. “We see these effects when hospital patients find it very hard to sleep.”
    “Partly, this is because almost nothing in the environment is familiar. As well as unfamiliar voices, patients will also be surrounded by equipment with unfamiliar and unpredictable pings, bongs and beeps.”
    Unfamiliar voices also triggered fewer K-complexes in the second half of the night compared with the first half. “It means we can learn something new in the near-unconscious state,” says Schabus.
    But he notes that this doesn’t mean we can learn new words during sleep. “You need the night to sleep and rest and if you don’t sleep properly, it does more harm than good for learning,” he says.
    Journal reference: Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.2524-20.2021

    More on these topics: More

  • 100 Shares129 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    An early outburst portends a star’s imminent death

    A star’s death usually comes without warning. But an early sign of one star’s imminent demise hints at what happens before some stellar explosions.

    In a last hurrah before exploding, a star brightened, suggesting that it blasted some of its outer layers into space. It’s the first time scientists have spotted a pre-explosion outburst from a run-of-the-mill type of exploding star, or supernova, researchers report in the Jan. 1 Astrophysical Journal.

    Scientists have previously seen harbingers of unusual types of supernovas. But “what’s nice about this one is it’s a much more normal, vanilla … supernova that’s showing this eruption before explosion,” says astronomer Mansi Kasliwal of Caltech, who was not involved with the research.

    On September 16, 2020, scientists discovered the explosion of a star roughly 10 times as massive as the sun, located about 120 million light-years away. Thankfully, telescopes that regularly survey a swath of the sky, as part of an effort called the Young Supernova Experiment, had been observing the star well before it detonated. About 130 days before the explosion, the star brightened, the researchers found, the start of a pre-explosion eruption.

    Sign Up For the Latest from Science News

    Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox

    Thank you for signing up!

    There was a problem signing you up.

    The final explosion was a commonplace type of stellar detonation called a type 2 supernova, which occurs when the core of an aging star collapses. Precursors to such explosions probably hadn’t been seen before because the early eruptions are faint. For this supernova, scientists had observations of the star sensitive enough to pick up the relatively weak eruption.

    Previous post-explosion observations of such supernovas have hinted that the stars slough off layers before death. In 2021, astronomers reported signs of a supernova’s shock wave plowing into material that the star had expelled (SN: 11/2/21). A similar sign of cast-off stellar material was also found in the new study.

    Scientists aren’t sure exactly what causes such early outbursts. They could be the result of events happening deep within a star, for example, as the star burns different types of fuel as it nears death. If more such events are found, scientists may eventually be able to predict which stars will go boom, and when.

    Precursor outbursts are a sign that stars experience inner turmoil before exploding, says study coauthor Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “The main message that we are getting from the universe is that these stars are really knowing that the end is coming.” More

  • 75 Shares159 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    Astronomers identified a second possible exomoon

    Some of the same researchers who found the first purported exomoon now say that they’ve found another.

    Dubbed Kepler 1708 b i, the satellite has a radius about 2.6 times that of Earth, and circles a Jupiter-sized exoplanet that orbits its parent star about once every two Earth years, the team reports January 13 in Nature Astronomy. That sunlike star lies about 5,700 light-years from Earth.

    To find this nugget, the team sorted through a database of more than 4,000 exoplanets detected by NASA’s now-retired Kepler space telescope. Because large planets orbiting far from their parent star are more likely to have moons large enough to be detected, the team focused on a subset of 70 exoplanets.

    Each of these planets is between half and twice the size of Jupiter. They all either take more than 400 Earth days to orbit their star or have an estimated average surface temperature less than 300 kelvins (around 27° Celsius), slightly higher than that of Earth.

    After further screening, including tossing out exoplanets that don’t have near-circular orbits (which are statistically less likely to host moons), the team identified a strong candidate for an exomoon. It, like its host planet, caused detectable dimming of the parent star’s light when moving across the face of the star.

    Discovery of the first possible exomoon, dubbed Kepler 1625 b, has faced a lot of skepticism (SN: 4/30/19). Both proposed exomoons need to be confirmed by further observations by other instruments, such as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, the team notes (SN: 10/6/21).

    But fresh observations will need to wait: The newfound exomoon candidate and its planet won’t pass in front of the parent star again until March 24, 2023, the researchers calculate. More

  • 88 Shares119 Views

    in Humans

    Why everyone should learn some sign language

    By Bencie Woll
    Simone Rotella
    Not so long ago, deaf children were punished in the UK for using sign language in the classroom. Recounting his experience in the 1960s, one deaf person told one of my colleagues many years later: “I had a lot of punishments for signing in classrooms… One morning at assembly, I was caught again, then ordered to stand at the front of the class. The headmistress announced that I looked like a monkey [and that she would] put me in a cage in the zoo so the people will laugh at a stupid boy in the cage.”
    Thankfully, experiences like this are no longer as common. Sign languages have not only survived, but are now flourishing – so much so that many more people are getting the chance to learn them, which should be celebrated.Advertisement
    British Sign Language (BSL) is used by tens of thousands of people in the UK, including around 90,000 deaf signers. For some of them, such as children with deaf parents, it is the first language they acquire. In the US, more undergraduate and graduate students have enrolled on courses in American Sign Language (ASL) than German each year since 2013.
    Currently, the UK Department for Education has a draft BSL curriculum for England on its desk for GCSE students (14 to 16-year-olds), which could come into effect later this year. This would make it a modern language option alongside French, German, Spanish and Chinese. Both Scotland and Wales have BSL curricula in the works too.
    Elsewhere, sign languages are gaining both recognition as official languages and a place on the national curriculum. South Africa has hired 60 instructors to teach South African Sign Language as part of a state-run adult literacy programme, and Jamaican Sign Language was introduced into Jamaica’s national curriculum earlier this month.
    That sign languages are thriving should be welcomed for many reasons, including the cognitive benefits that learning them brings. Several studies have found that hearing people who learn sign languages perform better in tasks requiring spatial transformation abilities – which you might use when taking down directions. Space is an integral part of the grammar of a sign language, with verbs, nouns and pronouns using the space in which they are located as part of their meaning. A series of experiments by Mary Lou Vercellotti at Ball State University in Indiana also found that adult ASL students have enhanced face-processing skills, which are essential to reading emotions.
    Learning a sign language can be enlightening, too. In a year-long study of preschool children by Amy Brereton at Trinity Washington University in Washington DC, hearing children who were learning ASL attained a greater appreciation of cultural diversity, as determined via classroom observations and interviews.
    Part of the beauty of learning languages – both spoken and sign – is that you don’t need to be fluent to experience the benefits. In a recent British Academy project I led with my colleague Li Wei at University College London, we highlighted how learning languages shapes the mental functions you use in a range of other fields, from your social awareness to your creativity and grasp of mathematics.
    Sign languages today are rich with communities and culture. Up until the 1980s, many deaf people essentially had to exist in the 19th century: no telephones, no radio, no television. But in many countries, social clubs, networks and advocacy groups for deaf signers have given rise to a diverse range of vernaculars. With the internet and social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, content creators are now sharing these with the world, bringing greater awareness and respect – and increased interest in learning these languages.
    Bencie Woll is a professor of deaf studies at University College London

    More on these topics: More

  • 100 Shares189 Views

    in Humans

    Don't Miss: The Anomaly, a mind-bending French bestseller

    Read
    Spark is medical physicist Timothy Jorgensen’s story of electricity as an essential force in biological life. It features tales of game-changing historical discoveries and the latest uses of electricity in medicine.
    blickwinkel/Alamy
    Watch
    The Case for Conservation Optimism is made by conservationist Martin Harper in this online talk from the Linnean Society of London at 6pm GMT on 20 January. We can prevent extinctions, he argues, if we take the right action now.Advertisement

    Read
    The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier sold a million copies and won the Prix Goncourt in its original French-language edition. Now translated, it is an ingenious sci-fi thriller about an Air France flight that enters a storm and is changed forever.

    More on these topics: More