Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Black Box review: Smart sci fi plays with identity, fate and death

    Black Box is an intelligent and melancholy sci-fi film in which a man who loses his memory in a car crash takes extreme steps to get his life back, writes Simon Ings

    Humans 21 October 2020
    By Simon Ings
    Nolan (Mamoudou Athie) turns to Lillian (Phylicia Rashad) for help
    Courtesy of Amazon Studios

    Black BoxEmmanuel Osei-Kuffour Amazon Prime
    NOLAN is trying to put his life back together after a car accident robbed him of his wife and his memory. His daughter Ava has to steer him about, though she is barely old enough for school. She encourages him to reapply for his old job. She sets the satnav for the supermarket. Three times now, Nolan (Mamoudou Athie) has forgotten to pick Ava (Amanda Christine) up from school. It is more than possible that he sometimes forgets her … More

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    in Humans

    US election 2020: Trump's impact on the environment, health and space

    By Chelsea Whyte
    Donald Trump signs an executive order on energy and infrastructure
    Evan Vucci/AP/Shutterstock

    AS US President Donald Trump prepares to face the ballot box in the hopes of winning a second term, his handling of the coronavirus pandemic will be at the forefront of voters’ minds. But Trump’s impact on health, space and environment policy during his time in office also warrants examining.
    In the past four years, Trump has promised to reverse environmental regulations and climate change policy, to repeal and replace his predecessor Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare policy and to revive the fortunes of NASA. Has he succeeded?
    A … More

  • 113 Shares199 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    Turning space images into music makes astronomy more accessible

    Put into music, telescope observations of the center of the Milky Way create a tranquil tune, glittering with xylophone and piano notes. The iconic Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, meanwhile, sound like an eerie sci-fi score. And the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A is a sweeping symphony.
    These musical renditions, or sonifications, were released on September 22 by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Center. “Listening to the data gives [people] another dimension to experience the universe,” says Matt Russo, an astrophysicist and musician at the astronomy outreach project SYSTEM Sounds in Toronto.
    Sonification can make cosmic wonders more accessible to people with blindness or visual impairments, and complement images for sighted learners. SYSTEM Sounds teamed up with Kimberly Arcand, a visualization scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., to create the new pieces.
    Christine Malec, a musician and astronomy enthusiast who is blind, vividly recalls the first sonification she ever heard — a rendering of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system that Russo played during a planetarium show in Toronto (SN: 2/22/17). “I had goosebumps, because I felt like I was getting a faint impression of what it’s like to perceive the night sky, or a cosmological phenomenon,” she says. Music affords data “a spatial quality that astronomical phenomena have, but that words can’t quite convey.”

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    The new renditions combine data from multiple telescopes tuned to different types of light. The sonification of an image of the Milky Way’s center, for instance, includes observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, optical images from the Hubble Space Telescope and infrared observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Users can listen to data from each telescope alone or the trio in harmony.
    [embedded content]
    New data “sonifications” translate telescope images into songs. Listen to observations of celestial objects around the Milky Way, from the galactic center to the star-forming Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula.
    As a cursor pans from left to right across the image of the galactic center, showing a 400-light-year expanse, Chandra X-ray observations, played on the xylophone, trace filaments of superhot gas. Hubble observations on the violin highlight pockets of star formation, and Spitzer’s piano notes illuminate infrared clouds of gas and dust. Light sources near the top of the image play at higher pitches, and brighter objects play louder. The song crescendos around a luminous region in the lower-right corner of the image, where glowing gas and dust shroud the galaxy’s supermassive black hole.
    Layering the instruments on top of each other gives the observations an element of texture, Malec says. “It appealed to my musical sense, because it was done in a harmonious way — it was not discordant.”
    That was on purpose. “We wanted to create an output that was not just scientifically accurate, but also hopefully nice to listen to,” Arcand says. “It was a matter of making sure that the instruments played together in symphony.”
    But discordant sounds can also can be educational, Malec says. She points to the new sonification of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A: The sonification traces chemical elements throughout this great plume of celestial debris using notes played on stringed instruments (SN: 2/19/14). Those notes make a pretty harmony, but they can be difficult to tell apart, Malec says. “I would have picked very different instruments” to make it easier for the ear to follow — perhaps a violin paired with a trumpet or an organ.
    While sonification is a valuable tool to get the public interested in astronomy, it also has untapped potential to help professional astronomers analyze data, says Wanda Díaz-Merced, an astronomer who is also at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics but was not involved in the project (SN: 10/22/14).
    Astronomers including Díaz-Merced, who is blind, have used sonifications to study stars, solar wind and cosmic rays. And in experiments, Díaz-Merced has demonstrated that sighted astronomers can better pick out signals in datasets by analyzing audio and visual information together rather than relying on vision alone.
    Still, efforts to sonify astronomy datasets for research have been rare. Making data sonification a mainstream research method would not only break down barriers to pursuing astronomy research, but may also lead to many new discoveries, she says. More

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    in Humans

    Climate change may have driven early human species to extinction

    By Donna Lu
    Was Homo erectus driven extinct by climate change?
    The Natural History Museum/Alamy

    Sudden climatic changes may have been a significant driver of the extinction of early human species.
    Pasquale Raia at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and his colleagues have used climate modelling and fossil records to determine the effect climate change had on the survival of the species in our Homo genus.
    The researchers used a database of 2754 archaeological records of the remains of several species alive over the past 2.5 million years, including Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens.

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    They cross-referenced these records with a climate emulator, which modelled temperature, rainfall and other weather data over the past 5 million years. The aim was to determine the climatic niche for each species – a range of conditions including temperature and precipitation that are optimal for survival – and how widely distributed the niche area was through time.
    The team found that H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis and H. neanderthalensis all lost a significant portion of their climatic niche area just before they became extinct.

    “Species are good at surviving when they have a large area at their disposal to live in,” says Raia. But when liveable areas decrease and the result is small patches that are geographically isolated from each other, species enter what is known as an extinction vortex.
    The reductions in liveable area resulted from sudden climatic changes, the team found. H. erectus, for example, went extinct during the last glacial period, which began about 115,000 years ago. The researchers suggest this was the coldest period the species had ever experienced.
    The team found that for the Neanderthals, competition with H. sapiens was also a factor, but that even without the presence of our species the effect of climate change alone may have been enough to lead to extinction. Even species with the ability to control their local environment – such as by wearing clothes or creating fires – were susceptible to the effects of climate change, says Raia.

    But gaps in data may compromise the certainty of the conclusion that climate change was the primary extinction driver, say researchers who weren’t involved in the study.

    Aside from Neanderthals, there is scarcely any fossil evidence for the other species studied, says Bernard Wood at George Washington University in Washington DC. “Individuals belonging to these taxa lived at times, and in places, not sampled by the existing fossil record,” he says.
    “Plus, the first appearance date of a taxon almost certainly underestimates when a taxon appeared, and its last appearance date almost certainly underestimates when a taxon became extinct,” he says.
    As species approach extinction, regardless of the cause – whether it be competition, being hunted or breeding problems – their range necessarily declines, says Corey Bradshaw at Flinders University in Australia. If a species’ range was already in decline, that could give the false impression that the climate niche area was also declining, he says.
    “No species that we know of has ever gone extinct from a single mechanism. It’s always a combination,” says Bradshaw. “For example, in the case of many megafauna species in the late Pleistocene, it’s coming to light that there were a lot of interaction effects between human hunting and climate change.”
    Journal reference: One Earth, DOI: 10.1016/j.oneear.2020.09.007
    More on these topics: More

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    A spherical star cluster has surprisingly few heavy elements

    A strange, newly measured clump of stars orbiting the nearby Andromeda galaxy has the lowest level of heavy chemical elements ever seen in one of these mysterious star clusters. Named RBC EXT8, this globular cluster is also surprisingly massive, challenging theories for how such clusters and some galaxies form, astronomers report online October 15 in Science.
    “It’s a very unusual object,” says astrophysicist Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not involved in the new discovery.
    Globular clusters are crowded, spherical collections of stars that orbit a galaxy’s center, though most, including RBC EXT8, live in the galactic outskirts. The clusters are typically billions of years old, so their stars tend to be chemically pristine, meaning they formed before the universe had time to create much of any of the elements heavier than hydrogen or helium, which astronomers lump together as “metals.”
    Previous observations of these clusters in the Milky Way and other galaxies had suggested that there’s a limit to how low a globular cluster’s metal content can be. The most metal-poor clusters were about 300 times less rich in heavy elements like iron than the sun, but no less.
    But spectra of RBC EXT8, some 2.5 million light-years away, show that the cluster’s metal content is about 800 times less than the sun’s. The globular cluster that held the previous record for lowest “metallicity” has three times that amount.
    “It was completely unexpected that we would find a globular cluster that is so metal poor,” says astronomer Søren Larsen of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
    The bigger, fuzzy blob in the inset image at left is RBC EXT8, a globular cluster that orbits about 88,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy Andromeda (shown at right). The cluster has surprisingly few heavy elements for its size, a new study finds.© 2020 ESASky, CFHT
    What’s more, given its metal-poor status, this cluster is surprisingly massive, weighing about 1.14 million times the mass of the sun. (A mid-weight globular cluster is about 100,000 solar masses, but some clusters reach 3 million solar masses. RBC EXT8 is heavy, but not the heaviest.)
    That mass makes the cluster even harder to explain because across the cosmos, the more massive a galaxy or cluster is, the more heavy elements it normally has.
    There are several potential explanations for that trend, but one is simply that more massive galaxies or globular clusters have more stars. A star fuses heavy elements in its core and sprinkles them around its host cluster or galaxy as it ages. Sufficiently massive stars can explode in a supernova, spreading those metals to become part of the next generation of stars (SN: 8/9/19). So more stars means more opportunity for metals to accumulate locally.
    More massive objects also have the advantage of gravity, which lets them better hold on to the metals that they do have and remain a cohesive group for billions of years. Less massive globular clusters dissolve into their host galaxies over time.
    Those trends together could have explained the apparent “metallicity floor” for globular clusters — all of the less massive, more metal-poor clusters have broken apart over the eons.
    RBC EXT8 turns that conventional wisdom on its head. “It’s too big to have as low metallicity as it has,” Gnedin says. “That’s the conundrum.”

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    Astronomers aren’t sure how globular clusters form in general, but they probably grow within galaxies, rather than forming outside of them and being pulled in later. And so the clusters reflect the characteristics of their galaxies: small, metal-poor galaxies end up with small metal-poor globular clusters, and vice versa. But based on RBC EXT8’s metal content, it’s galactic birthplace would be less than a million solar masses, so smaller than the globular cluster itself – which is a paradox.
    As a result, the cluster challenges some simplified models of galaxy formation. But it doesn’t completely break them, Gnedin says. “It’s one object, it’s not going to overturn things,” he says. “It just makes us people working on these issues have to work harder” and be more open-minded about other ways that galaxies could form.
    Open-mindedness and willingness to explore is perhaps responsible for the new finding about RBC EXT8’s metals. Larsen and colleagues spotted the globular cluster at the beginning of a night of observing with the Keck telescope in Hawaii in October 2019. “It was really a serendipitous discovery,” he says. He had a spare hour before the globular clusters in galaxy M33 that his team was planning to look at rose above the horizon, so the observers picked another cluster “more or less at random” to fill the time.
    “At first, I couldn’t really believe that what was coming out [in the observations] was right,” Larsen says. “But I kept working on it, and it turned out to hold up.” More

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    in Humans

    'Ums' and 'ers' are a hidden code that helped complex language evolve

    Filler words such as uh, mmm and huh may seem inarticulate, but without them human communication would be far less sophisticated

    Humans 14 October 2020
    By David Robson

    Andy Smith

    YOU might expect it to take more than a two-letter word to sink a politician’s credibility. But one did just that for Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, in June 2016. With a huge wildfire burning in the province of Alberta, he had been asked about the country’s capacity to cope. “Uh, certainly, I think we’re, uh, all aware that, uh, uh, a prime minister, uh, showing up at Fort McMurray, when firefighters are busy trying to, uh, uh, contain a massive raging wildfire is, uh, not a particularly helpful thing,” he began. Trudeau went on to use a total of 50 uhs in a statement lasting little more than a minute.
    A video soon went viral, and online commentators were universally scathing. “Canada’s dumbest, uh, Prime Minister” wrote one viewer. Reading the unedited transcript, you may well have questioned Trudeau’s intelligence yourself. Surely such hesitation is a sign of sloppy thinking and ineloquence. Weren’t we taught as children to eliminate uhs from our conversation?
    Yet the latest research shows that this is an unfounded prejudice. Far from being an inarticulate waste of breath, filler words like um, uh, mmm and huh are essential for efficient communication, sending important signals about the words we are about to say so that two speakers can better understand each other. “They streamline our interactions, smooth the flow of the conversation and manage our social relations,” says Mark Dingemanse, who studies language and social interaction at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Indeed, he argues that the complexity of our language today couldn’t have emerged without them. To which the obvious response … More

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    in Humans

    The Book of Malachi is darkly unmissable science fiction

    The Book of Malachi by T. C. Farren centres on a young man whose tongue has been cut out during a brutal civil war. It’s a tough, mind-bending morality tale

    Humans 14 October 2020

    Victor Moussa/Alamy

    The Book of Malachi
    T. C. Farren
    Titan
    THE main problem with this book is you aren’t going to want to read it. But it’s good and you should.
    Malachi Dakwaa, the eponymous character in T. C. Farren’s novel, is a young man whose tongue was cut out in a brutal civil war. In the years since, he has eked out a half-life as a quality control manager at a chicken processing plant, ensuring the uniform compliance of shrink-wrapped body parts.
    One day, he gets an offer for a job he didn’t apply for, with a payment he … More

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Humans

    Stone Age people in Ireland had dark skin and were lactose-intolerant

    By Michael Marshall
    View from the chamber entrance on Bengorm mountain, Ireland
    Thorsten Kahlert

    Some Stone Age people in Ireland left the bodies of their dead to decompose in a natural rocky chamber on a mountain. Genetic analysis of two of these bodies shows they had darker skin, like many people in Europe at the time, and suggests they lived in fairly large communities.
    The boulder chamber was accidentally discovered in 2016 by a hillwalker exploring Bengorm mountain in north-west Ireland. Finding human bones on the floor, he called the police. The bones turned out to be thousands of years old and the … More