Philippa Kaur

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Record-breaking gravitational waves reveal that midsize black holes do exist

    The biggest. The farthest. The most energetic. A new detection of gravitational waves from two colliding black holes has racked up multiple superlatives.
    What’s more, it also marks the first definitive sighting of an intermediate mass black hole, one with a mass between 100 and 100,000 times the sun’s mass. That midsize black hole was forged when the two progenitor black holes coalesced to form a larger one with about 142 solar masses. It significantly outweighs all black holes previously detected via gravitational waves, ripples that wrinkle spacetime in the aftermath of extreme events.
    “This is the big guy we’ve been waiting for, for the longest time,” says Emanuele Berti, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with the research. One of the behemoth’s two progenitors was itself so massive that scientists are pondering how to explain its existence.
    Detected on May 21, 2019, the gravitational waves originated from a source about 17 billion light-years from Earth, making this the most distant detection confirmed so far. It’s also the most energetic event yet seen, radiating about eight times the equivalent of the sun’s mass in energy, says astrophysicist Karan Jani of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. “I hope it deserves its own entry in the record book.”

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    The new event dethrones the previous record-holder, a collision that occurred about 9 billion light-years away that radiated about five solar masses worth of energy, and created a black hole of 80 solar masses (SN: 12/4/18).
    Researchers with LIGO, or the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, in the United States and Advanced Virgo in Italy reported the new detection September 2 in two papers in Physical Review Letters and the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
    While scientists know of black holes with tens of solar masses and others with millions or billions of solar masses, the intermediate echelon has remained elusive. Previous purported sightings of intermediate mass black holes have been questioned (SN:1/22/16).
    But, for the new event, “there’s no doubt,” says astrophysicist Cole Miller of University of Maryland at College Park, who was not involved with the study. “This demonstrates that there is now at least one intermediate mass black hole in the universe.”
    The black hole’s two progenitors were themselves heftier than any seen colliding before — at about 85 and 66 times the mass of the sun. That has scientists puzzling over how this smashup came to be.

    Normally, physicists expect that the black holes involved in these mergers would each have formed in the collapse of a dying star. But in the new event, the larger of the pair is so big that it couldn’t have formed that way. The known processes that go on within a star’s core mean that stars that are the right mass to form such a big black hole would blow themselves apart completely, rather than leaving behind a corpse.
    Instead, it might be that one or both of the colliding black holes formed from an earlier round of black hole mergers, within a crowded cluster of stars and black holes (SN: 1/30/17). That would make for a family tree that began with black holes lightweight enough to form from collapsing stars.
    But there’s a problem with the multiple-merger explanation. Each time black holes merge, that coalescence provides a kick to their velocity, which would normally launch the resulting black hole out of the cluster, preventing further mergers.
    However, mergers as massive as the new event seem to be very rare, given that LIGO and Virgo have detected only one. That means, Miller says, “my gosh, you’re allowed to invoke a tooth fairy,” a relatively unlikely process. Perhaps, he says, the kick might sometimes be small enough that the black holes could stay within their cluster and merge again.
    The May 21 gravitational wave event had previously been publicly reported as an unconfirmed candidate, to allow astronomers to look for flashes of light in the sky that might have resulted from the collision. Some researchers had suggested that the waves might have been associated with a flare of light from the center of a distant galaxy (SN: 6/25/20). But that galaxy is significantly closer than the distance now pinpointed in the new papers, at about 8 billion light-years from Earth rather than 17 billion, making the explanation less plausible.
    The longer LIGO and Virgo observe the heavens, the more the bounty of unusual events can be expected to grow, Miller says. “We are going to have a set of ‘gosh, didn’t expect that’ type of events, which are thrilling to think about and extremely informative about the universe.” More

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    in Humans

    How defining women as baby-makers backfired spectacularly on science

    In Guynecology, Rene Almeling argues that moving away from gendered ideas about reproduction could improve our health and transform our societies

    Health 26 August 2020
    By Jessica Hamzelou
    Men’s reproductive health is affected by their age and diet
    Jaunty Junto/Getty Images

    Guynecology: The missing science of men’s reproductive health
    Rene Almeling
    University of California Press

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    MALE bodies have long been seen as the norm when it comes to science. It is men and male animals that have been studied to understand what good and poor health looks like, as well as how to treat disease – except, that is, when it comes to reproduction.
    Historically, baby-making has been viewed as the defining function of women’s bodies, so much so that other aspects of their health have been neglected. For example, heart attacks are less readily identified in women, who are 59 per cent more likely to be misdiagnosed despite the fact that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in women.
    Meanwhile, research into men’s reproductive health has lagged behind. Attempts to understand their contribution to fertility, miscarriage risk and long-term risk of a child developing some mental health conditions, for example, have only recently gained ground.
    In Guynecology, Rene Almeling, a sociologist at Yale University, explores how attempts to kick-start the study of men’s reproductive health failed. Even now, as the role of health in sperm function and in the well-being of future children becomes clear, information is still scarce and gendered notions about a woman’s role in making babies persist, she writes.
    Take the age-old notion of the coming together of “aggressive” sperm and “passive” eggs. The idea that conception is largely the role of the sperm cell is still a very popular one, but it isn’t true. We now know eggs release chemicals to sperm when they are ready to be fertilised, and recent research suggests that these might help select some sperm over others.

    When it comes to men’s role in reproduction, the focus has been on sex rather than fatherhood, centring on sexually transmitted infections and conditions like erectile dysfunction. While women’s reproductive health has long been seen as key to their well-being, “men’s genitals were never seen as core to their health and psychology as women’s genitals were [to women]”, says Almeling.
    “Shifts in how we understand gender might transform how reproduction and fertility are studied”
    Her book tackles an important subject, but there are some dry sections. Best to skip to her coverage of recent research. One of the most important findings is how lifestyle choices significantly influence the health of sperm, and consequently of children. Men, too, have a “biological clock”, and their age, diet and smoking habits have been linked to issues such as miscarriage and risks of low birth weight.
    These factors seem to have lasting “epigenetic” effects, conferring changes to the genome that mean new genetic risks of disease can be passed on to children. The field is still young, but there does appear to be a link between certain “paternal effects” and the risk of schizophrenia, for instance.
    Yet while dietary advice abounds for women trying to conceive, men may be less aware of the dos and don’ts, warns Almeling. She points out that there is little to no information on paternal effects offered to these would-be parents by US federal bodies and health agencies.
    Almeling rounds off her book with recommendations for scientists, healthcare providers and policy-makers. She thinks part of the problem is seeing gender as binary, with men and women as opposites, and that shifts in our understanding of gender might transform how reproduction and fertility are studied and treated.
    A greater understanding of men’s reproductive health could also “reshape gender politics in surprising ways” and change gendered expectations of women about reproduction, she writes. Almeling suggests such changes may help reduce the gender pay gap and inequalities caused by the assumption that women (but not men) with children are less committed to their jobs.
    Nice theory, but considering how long it has taken for women to get this far, I won’t hold my breath.

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    in Humans

    Don't Miss: Time loop horror film I'm thinking of ending things

    Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX
    Watch
    I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a time-looped psychological horror from cinema’s greatest living magician, Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). It will be on Netflix from 4 September.

    Read
    Net Zero: How we stop causing climate change sees economist Dieter Helm arguing that a carbon pricing system – one that applies to everything from flights to farming to food – is the only fair and sustainable way out of the climate crisis.
    Listen
    Science for the People, a long-running interview radio show and podcast, devotes a recent instalment to Eva Holland discussing her book Nerve: Adventures in the science of fear, inspired by her own traumas and phobias.
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    in Humans

    Netflix's John Was Trying to Contact Aliens is amazing and moving

    John Was Trying to Contact Aliens is a 16-minute film that brilliantly captures the eccentric 1970s world of UFO hunter John Shepherd, who built kit to hunt aliens, playing jazz and reggae to lure them

    Humans 26 August 2020
    By Simon Ings
    Beyond the UFO folk hero, Shepherd emerges as both sad and inspiring
    Courtesy of Netflix

    John Was Trying to Contact Aliens
    Matthew Killip

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    YOU have to admire Netflix’s ambition. As well as producing Oscar-winning short documentaries of its own (The White Helmets won in 2017; Period. End of Sentence. won in 2019), the streaming giant makes a regular effort to bring festival-winning factual films to a global audience.
    The latest is John Was Trying to Contact Aliens by New York-based UK director Matthew Killip, which won the Jury Award for a non-fiction short film at this year’s Sundance festival in Utah. In little over 15 minutes, it manages to turn the story of John Shepherd, an eccentric inventor who spent 30 years trying to contact extraterrestrials by broadcasting music millions of kilometres into space, into a tear-jerker of epic (indeed, cosmological) proportions.
    Never much cared for by his parents, Shepherd was brought up by adoptive grandparents in rural Michigan. A fan of classic science-fiction shows like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, Shepherd never could shake off the impression that a UFO sighting made on him as a child, and in 1972 the 21-year-old set about designing and constructing electronic equipment to launch a private search for extraterrestrial intelligence. His first set-up, built around an ultra-low frequency radio transmitter, soon expanded to fill over 100 square metres of his long-suffering grandparents’ home. It also acquired an acronym: Project STRAT – Special Telemetry Research And Tracking.
    “In 1972, 21-year-old John Shepherd set about building equipment to hunt for extraterrestrials”

    A two-storey high, 1000-watt, 60,000-volt, deep-space radio transmitter required a house extension – and all so Shepherd could beam jazz, reggae, Afro-pop and German electronica into the sky for hours every day, in the hope any passing aliens would be intrigued enough to come calling. He could also monitor any returning signals and UFOs.
    It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Killip to play up Shepherd’s eccentricity. Until now, Shepherd has been a folk hero in UFO-hunting circles. His photo portrait, surrounded by bizarre broadcasting kit of his own design, appears in Douglas Curren’s In Advance of the Landing: Folk concepts of outer space – the book TV producer Chris Carter says he raided for the first six episodes of his series The X-Files.
    Instead, Killip listens closely to Shepherd, discovers the romance, courage and loneliness of his life, and shapes it into a paean to our ability to out-imagine our circumstances and overreach our abilities. There is something heartbreakingly sad, as well as inspiring, about the way Killip pairs Shepherd’s lonely travails in snow-bound Michigan with footage, assembled by teams of who knows how many hundreds, from the archives of NASA.
    Shepherd ran out of money for his project in 1998, and having failed to make a connection with ET, quickly found a life-changing connection much closer to home.
    I won’t spoil the moment, but I can’t help but notice that, as a film-maker, Killip likes these sorts of structures. In one of his earlier works, The Lichenologist, about Kerry Knudsen, curator of lichens at the University of California, Riverside, Knudsen spends most of the movie staring at very small things before we are treated to the money shot: Knudsen perched on top of a mountain, whipped by the wind and explaining how his youthful psychedelic experiences inspired a lifetime of intense visual study. It is a shot that changes the meaning of the whole film.

    Simon also recommends…
    Films
    The Diatomist (2014)
    Matthew Killip
    An introduction to Klaus Kemp, whose fascination with German microscopist J. D. Möller inspired him to recreate the Victorian art of arranging diatoms in extraordinary patterns.
    Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
    Steven Spielberg
    Ufology was a global phenomenon by the time this blockbuster arrived. Countless imitations followed, but none with the charm and sincerity of the original.

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    in Humans

    Insights into the neural roots of bias suggest ways to fix the problem

    All of us harbour biases resulting from the associations we learn implicitly from the societies we live in and how our brains work, but there are ways to overcome them

    Humans | Leader 26 August 2020
    Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

    FEW ideas from social psychology have captured public attention in recent years as much as unconscious bias, the catch-all term for the assumptions we make about other people without being consciously aware of the process.
    That reach is partly down to the Implicit Association Test (IAT) created by researchers at Harvard University in the 1990s. Available online, it is widely seen as a quick and easy way to see how implicitly biased you are. The results can be unsettling: you may not think you are racist or sexist or ageist, but, in many cases, your unconscious preferences, … More

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    in Humans

    We all have hidden prejudices – here’s how to override them

    Confronting our unconscious biases requires concerted effort. Fortunately, there are simple things everyone can do to avoid the cognitive shortcuts that underpin them

    Humans 26 August 2020
    By Pragya Agarwal

    People Images/Getty Images

    We are still getting to grips with the most effective ways to identify and address bias. What is clear is that it is a difficult task that requires concerted, consistent effort. But there are strategies that make a difference.
    A first step is to make biases visible. This can include taking the Implicit Association Test to raise awareness, but this needs to be complemented by active reflection – including recognising triggers for bias and examining how our life experiences have shaped our biases.
    Research has shown that using blind or anonymised hiring practices may help weaken biases that can limit opportunities for women and minority groups. One study found that using blind auditions increased the likelihood that women musicians were hired by an orchestra by up to 46 per cent. Research in France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands has showed that removing names from applications increases the likelihood that candidates from minority groups will be invited to interview.
    We can tackle generalised assumptions by being clear that a particular attribute is associated with an individual rather than their whole group, for example “This boy is good at maths”. This approach can help to diminish stereotypes and the pressure to conform to them.
    Taking our time with important decisions can also help us avoid cognitive shortcuts that perpetuate bias. When this isn’t possible, rehearsing reactions to high stress situations can help prevent biased snap decisions, research with police has shown.
    Finding ways to identify with members of different groups by forging links with your own sense of self can diminish bias. In one study, nurses from diverse … More

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    in Humans

    What do unconscious bias tests really reveal about racism?

    Psychologists have shown that reflexive biases influence our perceptions of others, potentially explaining the persistence of various forms of prejudice. But reliably measuring our implicit biases is trickier than it first appeared

    Humans 26 August 2020
    By Pragya Agarwal

    Timo Kuilder

    YOU are biased. So am I. We all discriminate. It is both a source of concern and comfort that we don’t necessarily do so deliberately and that our prejudices aren’t always wilful.
    If societies are to truly confront the pernicious effects of racism and prejudice, the importance of examining these biases and how they become etched into the brain is becoming increasingly clear. The death of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis on 25 May shook the world to attention, but it was no isolated incident. Every day there are stories of people being treated with suspicion – or far worse – based on their skin colour while going about their daily lives.
    This is in spite of the fact that, for the past 40 years, opinion polls show a steady decline in racist views in the US, UK and other countries. That has led some researchers to suspect that, as explicit racism has been driven underground, unconscious bias is playing a critical role. This suspicion inspired the creation of the Implicit Association Test, a tool that aims to reveal unconscious biases with a few clicks of the mouse.
    Unfortunately, the accuracy and reliability of this widely celebrated test isn’t what it once seemed. Pinning down the nature and extent of hidden bias is proving to be extraordinarily complicated. Eradicating it is far from straightforward, too – and it turns out that some efforts to do so may further entrench the very prejudices they are meant to uproot. But we are making progress, not least in understanding the processes in our brains that perpetuate … More

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    in Humans

    Lasana Harris interview: How your brain is conditioned for prejudice

    We are more aware of how “unconscious” biases work than ever before, says neuroscientist Lasana Harris – and we can use our conscious brains to override them

    Humans 26 August 2020
    By Lasana Harris

    Stephanie Singleton

    WHY are we prejudiced? What happens in our brains when we make assumptions about people who look or speak differently to us? As movements such as Black Lives Matter work to expose the systemic racism in the US and Europe, such questions are taking on new and long overdue urgency. If we are to overcome our biases, we need to understand their neural and psychological roots.
    Lasana Harris, a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at University College London, is among those striving for such an understanding. His research focuses on how we think about other people’s minds, known as social cognition, and more specifically on how we perceive others. Working with Susan Fiske at Princeton University, his research on the brain mechanisms underlying dehumanisation has revealed the surprising ease with which we can stop ourselves from having empathy for the plights of others.
    Such insights have informed his thinking on racism, too. Harris views what many people call unconscious bias as an inevitable result of the associations we learn and the way our brains react to perceived threats. Rather than something we engage in unconsciously, he argues that it is something we know we are doing but struggle to control.
    Here he tells New Scientist why societies condition people to be prejudiced and what the science says we can do about it.
    Daniel Cossins: Dehumanisation is a horrifying word and yet your work suggests it is something we all do. Why is that?
    Lasana Harris: Firstly, if I want to do something to another human being that is something I don’t typically like doing to human beings, then I’m … More