Philippa Kaur

A young woman, buried with stone weapons 9000 years ago in what is now Peru, has led to a reassessment of the role women played as hunters across the Americas in prehistory More

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

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

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

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

Carlo Rovelli’s bestsellers saw him dubbed the poet of physics and showed a mind seeking knowledge for its own sake. His new book, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, reminds us why we need more minds like his

Space 28 October 2020
By Richard Webb

Victor Habbick Visions/Science Photo Library

I APPROACHED Carlo Rovelli’s latest book with trepidation, bordering on dread. The Italian quantum gravity researcher’s previous bestsellers – Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Reality Is Not What It Seems, The Order of Time – have seen him playing on home territory, where his lucid, lyrical touch won him a reputation as “the poet of physics”.
But his new book’s title, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, suggested it might have gone … More

Thanks to virtual reality, we can run experiments that test what people will do in situations where lives are on the line. We often find people act against what they claim to regard as morally acceptable, says Sylvia Terbeck

Humans | Comment 28 October 2020
By Sylvia Terbeck

Michelle D’urbano

YOU probably aren’t as moral as you think. Philosophers have often asked people how they would act in a given situation when lives are on the line, but it is hard to test what they would do in practice. Now, thanks to virtual reality, we are starting to find out – and what people say doesn’t match up with what they do.
There are many thought experiments and dilemmas for breaking down ethical decisions, and perhaps none is more famous than the trolley problem. The scenario begins with a runaway trolley that is on course to … More