Philippa Kaur

More stories

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Humans

    Evolution explains why social distancing due to covid-19 is so hard

    Hugs, handshakes and air kisses serve the same crucial purposes as animal greetings like sniffing, eye poking and buttock grabbing

    Humans 11 November 2020
    By David Robson
    We crave physical contact with family to reaffirm our bonds
    Willie B. Thomas/Getty Images

    ON 9 MARCH, Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, called a press conference to discuss his country’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. “From now on, we stop shaking hands,” he declared – before promptly reaching out his hand to greet an expert on infectious diseases.
    Many of us can empathise. Social distancing sounds innocuous, but this year we have discovered how hard it can be in practice. Touchy-feely greetings, such as handshakes, hugs, kisses and nose rubbing, are deeply embedded in many cultures. These gestures aren’t merely learned, however. Look to the animal kingdom and you will see that many species – especially highly social ones – perform physical rituals when they approach each other. If our urges to touch one another in greeting seem instinctual, it is because they are.
    Greetings adopted by animals can be very different to our own – they include eye poking and other gestures that might make you squirm – but understanding these behaviours can give us an insight into human salutations. Examining the evolution of greetings throws light on the subtle ways they lubricate social interactions and also helps to explain why they are so diverse. As we are a super-social species, it isn’t surprising that many of us are struggling to adjust to the new normal. But the good news is that we are proven masters at adapting our greetings to fit new situations.
    Will our greetings change for good as a result of covid-19?
    Andreu Dalmau/Epa-Efe/Shutterstock

    Animal encounters
    Mammals tend to use scents to suss each other out, which explains why … More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    The Milky Way makes little galaxies bloom, then snuffs them out

    If you’re a small galaxy and want to mint new stars, come to the Milky Way — but don’t get too close if you want a long-lasting star-making career. New observations with the Gaia space telescope show that our galaxy is both friend and foe to the lesser galaxies that revolve around it.
    Some 60 known galaxies orbit the Milky Way. About a dozen of these satellite galaxies are dim dwarf spheroidals, which each emit just 0.0005 to 0.1 percent as much light as the Milky Way (SN: 12/22/14). Their few stars are spread out from one another, giving the galaxies such a ghostly appearance that the first one found was initially suspected to be only a fingerprint on a photographic plate.
    But these ghostly galaxies once sparkled with young stars. A new study finds that most of these galaxies lit up when they first crossed into our galaxy’s gravitational domain as fresh stars arose. But then, in most cases, the little galaxies stopped making stars soon afterward, because the Milky Way stripped the dwarf galaxies of gas, the raw material for star formation.
    Astronomer Masashi Chiba of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and his then-graduate student Takahiro Miyoshi studied seven of the dwarf spheroidal galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. The researchers used the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which had measured the galaxies’ motions, to compute their orbits around the Milky Way’s center. The orbits are elliptical, so the galaxies approach and then recede from our galaxy’s center. The astronomers then compared those paths to the times when the galaxies formed their stars.

    Sign Up For the Latest from Science News

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

    “We found that there’s a very nice coincidence between the timing of the first infall of the satellite [toward the Milky Way] and the peak in the star formation history,” Chiba says. In work posted online at arXiv.org on October 23, the astronomers attribute the burst of star formation in the small galaxies to the Milky Way. Encountering the giant galaxy squeezes the dwarf galaxies’ gas, causing that gas to collapse and spawn lots of new stars.
    As an example, the Draco dwarf galaxy first crossed into the Milky Way’s domain 11 billion years ago and formed numerous stars then — but never again. More recently, the Leo I dwarf galaxy entered our galaxy’s realm just 2 billion years ago, a time that coincided with its last burst of star birth. But today Leo I creates no new stars and, like Draco, has no gas to do so.
    Dwarf galaxies that kept their distance also kept their gas longer, the researchers found. The galaxies that came closest to the Milky Way’s center, such as Draco and Leo I, ceased all star formation soon after crossing the Milky Way’s frontier. However, the galaxies that entered our galaxy’s domain but remained farther out, such as Fornax and Carina, fared better.
    “Those two galaxies kept their interstellar gas inside them, so that the star formation still continued,” Chiba says. Both galaxies managed to eke out new stars for many billions of years after crossing into the Milky Way’s realm. Today, however, neither galaxy has any gas left.
    “I think it all makes sense,” says Vasily Belokurov, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, who notes how essential the Gaia spacecraft was to the discovery. “It’s a beautiful demonstration of what we’ve never been able to do before Gaia, and suddenly we can do these magical things.” More

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Humans

    Tumble review: A brilliant science podcast for children of all ages

    When inundated with disinformation, conspiracy theories and total nonsense, how can children learn about science? By listening to Tumble, a fantastic family podcast

    Humans 4 November 2020
    By Simon Ings
    Tumble is a science podcast aimed at children, but parents will enjoy it too
    Getty Images/Johner RF

    Tumble
    Tumble Science Podcast for Kids

    SHOULD we teach our children scientific facts about the world, or should we teach them to do science?
    The answer, obviously, is both. Yet when physics, chemistry and biology struggle for independent spaces in the school timetable, it may be too much to hope that, along with the facts, children are being given any real idea of what science is like.
    Teaching both the letter and spirit of science has always been difficult. I only acquired a … More

  • 150 Shares169 Views

    in Humans

    Don't Miss: Why laughter is contagious and being funny makes us sexier

    ReadThe Comedy of Error has evolutionary ecologist Jonathan Silvertown sharing old jokes and the latest science in his account of how humour evolved, why laughter is contagious and how being funny makes us sexier.

    Being Human

    Visit
    Being Human, the University of London’s annual festival of the humanities, moves partly online this year with digital exhibitions, workshops, quizzes, talks and debates from 12 to 22 November. This year’s theme is “New Worlds”.
    Listen
    The Seekers Podcast, a playful and interactive series from theatre group The Wardrobe Ensemble, lets children aged 3 to 8 and their families join explorers … More

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Humans

    Truth Seekers review: Ghost-hunting capers from Shaun of the Dead duo

    Amazon Prime’s Truth Seekers from Sean of the Dead duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is a mash up of British comedy and ghost hunting. Let’s hope the series becomes today’s Ghostbusters, says Emily Wilson

    Humans 4 November 2020
    By Emily Wilson
    Elton (Samson Kayo, left) and Gus (Nick Frost) hunt ghosts
    Colin Hutton/Stolen Pictures/Amazon Studios

    Truth Seekers
    Jim Field Smith
    Amazon Prime Video
    COMEDY duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have specialised at writing and starring in movies (Shaun of the Dead, The World’s End) that stir together warm, beautifully drawn British comedy and classic horror themes. Their latest outing, a TV series called Truth Seekers, arises from that same delightful tradition.
    The truth seekers of the title are a gang who rove around England investigating the paranormal. Given that, I queried with my editors at New Scientist why I … More

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Humans

    Wealthy US cities struggle to provide running water for all residents

    By Ian Morse
    Some residents of San Francisco are in water poverty
    Wenjie Dong/Getty Images

    Widening wealth gaps in some of the richest cities in the US have produced a rise in the number of households without running water.
    Public information suggests that about half a million households in the US – about 1.1 million people – live without piped water, which places them in “plumbing poverty”. Surveys also show that 73 per cent of these households are found in metropolitan areas.
    To investigate further, Katie Meehan at King’s College London – previously at the University of Oregon – and her colleagues analysed US census data, and information relating to the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas collected during the government’s American Community Survey between 2013 and 2017.

    Advertisement

    This showed that San Francisco in California, Portland in Oregon and Austin in Texas are among the cities with the highest rates of plumbing poverty. New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco – among the wealthiest US cities – recorded the most overall residents without complete plumbing.
    Meehan and her colleagues say there is a strong connection between this plumbing poverty and growing income inequality in cities.

    They found that for every 10 per cent increase in income inequality in the 50 largest metropolitan areas, measured using a standard statistical metric called the Gini coefficient, households were 1.5 times more likely to lack “complete plumbing” – defined as a house supplied by both hot and cold piped water with a bath or shower used only by the occupants.
    “In areas that are characterised by income inequality, we see some of the highest rates of plumbing poverty,” says Meehan.
    What’s more, people without access to piped water were significantly more likely to be living in rented accommodation and to be using more than of a third of their income to pay rent.

    Urban households headed by black people were almost 35 per cent more likely to lack piped water compared with households headed by non-Hispanic white people.
    Although surveys suggest that there are almost half a million US households without water access, Meehan says this is likely to be an undercount, because census surveys routinely have trouble recording renters, the homeless, and black people.
    “I think that conditions of water access will actually deteriorate, and the places where I think it will get worse are not the places we may first think of, like the San Franciscos, the Portlands or the Los Angeleses,” she says.
    Focusing on individual cities and households will help reveal what exactly is causing water insecurity, says Meehan. “That’s the next step in research.”
    Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2007361117
    More on these topics: More

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    LIGO and Virgo’s gravitational wave tally more than quadrupled in six months

    Earth is awash in gravitational waves.
    Over a six-month period, scientists captured a bounty of 39 sets of gravitational waves. The waves, which stretch and squeeze the fabric of spacetime, were caused by violent events such as the melding of two black holes into one.
    The haul was reported by scientists with the LIGO and Virgo experiments in several studies posted October 28 on a collaboration website and at arXiv.org. The addition brings the tally of known gravitational wave events to 50.
    The bevy of data, which includes sightings from April to October 2019, suggests that scientists’ gravitational wave–spotting skills have leveled up. Before this round of searching, only 11 events had been detected in the years since the effort began in 2015. Improvements to the detectors — two that make up the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, in the United States, and another, Virgo, in Italy — have dramatically boosted the rate of gravitational wave sightings.

    Sign Up For the Latest from Science News

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

    While colliding black holes produced most of the ripples, a few collisions seem to have involved neutron stars, ultradense nuggets of matter left behind when stars explode.
    Some of the events added to the gravitational wave register had been previously reported individually, including the biggest black hole collision spotted so far (SN: 9/2/20) and a collision between a black hole and an object that couldn’t be identified as either a neutron star or black hole (SN: 6/23/20).
    [embedded content]
    Gravitational waves are produced when two massive objects, such as black holes, spiral around one another and merge. These visualizations, which are based on computer simulations, show these merging objects for 38 of the 50 known gravitational wave events.
    What’s more, some of the coalescing black holes seem to be very large and spinning rapidly, says astrophysicist Richard O’Shaughnessy of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, a member of the LIGO collaboration. That’s something “really compelling in the data now that we hadn’t seen before,” he says. Such information might help reveal the processes by which black holes get partnered up before they collide (SN: 6/19/16).
    Scientists also used the smorgasbord of smashups to further check Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity, which predicts the existence of gravitational waves. When tested with the new data — surprise, surprise — Einstein came up a winner. More