Philippa Kaur

Television often portrays researchers as lab coat-wearing weirdos who hate social interactions, but the name of the game is collaboration plus hoodies. We need to get better at showing the public what we do, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Humans

| Columnist

11 May 2022

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Hinterhaus Productions/Getty Images
I AM a person who likes things to be specific and accurate. In some ways, this is antithetical to being a communicator of science to general audiences. This requires helping non-experts understand complex ideas – like the idea of quantum fields – while deploying only a small fraction of the language we professionals use to talk among ourselves. It means glossing over details that can feel fundamentally important. Which is to say that I regularly have to grapple with what it means to talk to people about something when I know I’m not going to give them the full story.
I find it easier to be successful in writing. Here, I can choose my words carefully, and the “optics” of the work I am trying to get across are what I manage to evoke in the reader’s mind.
By contrast, one of my biggest frustrations is with how science is portrayed on television. There, it seems like a production mandate to have flashy graphics and representations of “what scientists do” that align with public expectations. The result? We get a lot of representation of people (often white men) in white lab coats, even though many (perhaps most?) scientists don’t wear a lab coat of any kind, ever.Advertisement
For theoretical physicists, the expectation is that we will have a chalkboard filled with equations. For some people that is accurate, but I dislike the feel of chalk on my fingers. I much prefer writing with a fountain or gel pen in a high-quality, bound notebook.
Part of what ends up being so off in popularisations of science is that we continue to get various versions of the lone genius: someone sitting at their desk or working at a chalkboard alone, thinking important thoughts.
The reality is that – as an introvert – I wish I got more time alone. My days are filled with meetings. Every single member of my dark matter and neutron star research group has at least one per week with me that is centred on their main research question. There is a member of my team who sees me in a meeting between two and five times a week. One of those is my group meeting, where everyone comes together and shares what they have accomplished since the previous week. They take turns asking each other questions. This allows us all to learn more and hone our question-asking skills, which is important for scientists.
I have other regular appointments that might seem peripheral and even boring – including to the participants – but that are quite important to the doing of science. These are the conversations in which we are planning for the future, navigating applying for grant money or lobbying for more grant money to be allocated so that our discipline is sustained in the future. Right now, I am spending a lot of time on the delayed Snowmass 2021 Particle Physics Community Planning Process.
This occurs about once a decade, and involves the US particle physics community getting together to determine what science in this field is plausible in the coming years and what experiments – maybe a new particle collider, maybe a new telescope focused on dark matter – should be built. The lengthy report we produce will be read by a government-appointed group that will determine what can be funded for the next decade or so. Participating in this process is time-consuming and doesn’t immediately advance my research, but it is also a key part of my job.
Ultimately, science is a collaborative enterprise, perhaps more so than any other area of academic endeavour. We depend on others to get our work done and interact a lot with other people, but, again, I don’t think this is well represented on television.
Instead, we get stereotypes of weirdos who can’t handle social interactions, when in fact we are a collection of weirdos who navigate social interactions just fine because our jobs depend on it.
Our work is also often messy. I don’t just mean that we argue, though we do. It is also the case that we often don’t think in pretty pictures. I wish we could show the public more often what our work actually looks like, so that we could help people understand what we actually do. At a time when anti-intellectualism passes for a mainstream political position, now more than ever, we need the public to be tuned into how our enterprise actually works.
Plus, in my corner of science, hoodies are a more standard uniform than lab coats. Shifting stereotypes about how scientists look could help younger people see themselves in us, to realise that we are everyday people, just like them. I understand the desire to dress things up for a bit of Hollywood drama, but I don’t think we have to try so hard to make science seem exciting. What matters is making sure we are able to explain why it is exciting. That is the hard part, and I won’t always succeed, but I do enjoy trying.

Chanda’s week
What I’m readingI finished Sara Nović’s novel True Biz in one sitting, and learned a lot of deaf history, including why American Sign Language is so different from the British version.
What I’m watchingBaseball season is back, and I bleed Dodger blue.
What I’m working onWrapping up a paper with colleagues on the unique structures made by a hypothetical dark matter particle, the axion.

This column appears monthly. Up next week: Graham Lawton More

Waste from Swedish firm Boliden was dumped near a town in ChileARICA LAIKA FILM AND TELEVISION
Arica
Lars Edman and William Johansson
Selected UK cinemasAdvertisement
FORTY years ago, Boliden, a Swedish multinational metals, mining and smelting company, sold nearly 200,000 tonnes of smelter sludge rich in mercury, arsenic, lead and other heavy metals to the Chilean reprocessing company Promel. The latter dumped most of it next to a row of houses in Arica in northern Chile.
Over the years, this community of low-income families swelled until it surrounded the site of contamination. A generation of children grew up playing in the sludge. In 1999, the Chilean government struck an uneasy peace with those affected by this avoidable catastrophe. Promel no longer exists. Families closest to the site have been evacuated.
Swedish film-maker Lars Edman returns to the country of his birth and the site of his 2010 Toxic Playground documentary for a follow-up. Arica concentrates on the legal case against Boliden, whose due diligence on toxic materials has come under serious question. Boliden denies responsibility, saying it followed applicable regulations and believed the waste would be processed safely. Any negligence, it argues, is attributable to Promel and the Chilean authorities.
The chief protagonist of Edman’s first film was Rolf Svedberg, Boliden’s former head of environmental issues. It was his site visit and report that green-lit the sale and transport of what Boliden’s legal team calls “material of negative value”.
Brought face to face with the consequences of that decision, and hosted by a community riddled with cancer and congenital conditions, Svedberg’s distress was visible. A decade on, though, he has the legal case to think of, not to mention his current role as a judge at Sweden’s environmental supreme court.
Boliden’s legal consultants bring in experts who assemble arcane explanations and a ludicrous wind-tunnel experiment to show that living next to tailings containing 17 per cent arsenic couldn’t possibly have affected anyone’s health. Opposing them are 800 plaintiffs (out of a community of 18,000) armed with a few urine tests from 2011 and evidence that would be overwhelming were it not so frustratingly anecdotal.
One interviewee, Elia, points out houses from her gate. “The lady who lived in the house with the bars,” she says, “sold the house and died of cancer. Next door is Dani Ticona. She had aggressive cancer in her head and died too. And her son’s wife had a baby who died…”
Boliden’s team performs a familiar trick, sowing doubt by suggesting that lab and field science are the same thing, with identical standards of proof. If the company had to address average consumers rather than Arica’s low-income residents, it would long since have saved money and its reputation by owning the problem. But Boliden deals with corporations and governments. Its image rests on problem-free operations; it pays to stay silent.
In the end, the community loses, but in 2021 the UN sent experts into Arica. Their findings shamed both the company and the Swedish government.
Law is a rhetorical art. We like to think justice can be scientifically determined, but that is to misunderstand science and the law. Tragedy, poverty, blame and shame cannot be reduced to numbers. Protest, eloquence and argument are as essential for justice as they were in the making of this elegiac film.
Simon also recommends… More

State laws could restrict abortion in large parts of the US, and other reproductive healthcare offerings may be at stake if Roe v Wade is overturned

Humans

11 May 2022

By Dana G. Smith
Activists demonstrating in front of the US Supreme Court on 3 MayWin McNamee/Getty Images
THE US Supreme Court appears to be on the brink of repealing Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that protects the right to an abortion in the country. Should the seminal case be overturned, it will be left to each state to decide whether abortion is legal for its residents.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research group, 13 states have so-called trigger laws ready that would effectively ban all abortions as soon as the ruling … More

By Carissa Wong
Large houses by a lake in Orlando, FloridaEdwin Remsberg/Getty Images
People from privileged groups may misperceive equality-boosting policies as harmful to them, even if they would actually benefit.
Previous studies have found that advantaged people often don’t support interventions that redistribute their resources to others who are disadvantaged, in zero-sum scenarios where there are limited resources.
Now, researchers have explored the degree to which people from advantaged groups think equality-promoting policies would harm their access to resources, in scenarios where the strategies would benefit or have no effect on their group, while bolstering the resources of a disadvantaged group.Advertisement
Derek Brown at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a series of studies involving a total of more than 4000 volunteers.
In one study, they presented white people who weren’t Hispanic with policies that didn’t affect their own advantaged group and benefited a disadvantaged group that they did not belong to – people with disabilities, those who had committed a crime in the past, members of a racial minority group or women. Importantly, the team told participants that resources – in the form of jobs or money – were unlimited.
For example, one policy would direct more money to mortgage loans for Latino homebuyers without limiting how many mortgage loans were available for white people.
Participants were then asked to rank how they thought the policy would affect the advantaged group’s access to resources on a scale from greatly harmful to greatly beneficial. The team found that, on average, advantaged people perceived equality-boosting policies as harmful to their resource access, even though they were told that resources were boundless.
“We find that advantaged members misperceived these policies as a sacrifice to their group, even when that’s not the case,” says Brown.

The researchers then asked participants to consider a win-win scenario involving equality-promoting policies that benefited both the disadvantaged and advantaged groups – but the latter to a lesser extent. People were also asked to consider inequality-enhancing policies that would reduce access to resources for everyone.
In this case, the team found that most advantaged people thought equality-enhancing policies with benefits for all would be more harmful to them than inequality-enhancing polices that came at a cost to the advantaged group.
“We thought, maybe if we make a win-win or mutual-benefit situation, then maybe [advantaged people] will see the equality-enhancing policies as helpful. But they didn’t,” says Brown.
Advantaged people tended to see equality-promoting policies as less harmful to their resource access if they benefitted people who were disadvantaged but who shared an identity with them. For example, white participants generally thought they would lose less from a policy that directed relatively more money to disadvantaged white people, compared with a policy that gave disadvantaged Black people the same benefits.
“Advantaged people saw these policies more accurately when we made salient a disparity within their own group versus one that occurs between different groups,” says Brown. “This suggests that when we identify ourselves with a certain group, and see a disparity occurring within our group, we are motivated to reduce that in-group disparity.”

In another experiment, the researchers asked a diverse group of participants to take a bogus personality test and then assigned them into a made-up advantaged group. Again, they found that people tended to misperceive equality-promoting policies as harmful even when they benefitted the advantaged group. This suggests that anyone at an advantage – for any reason – may misperceive beneficial equality-boosting policies as harmful.
“It’s pretty troubling what we found. [But] I think people have the capacity to believe in these policies. And I think there’s a way forward, we just have to find it,” says Brown.
Education could help to tackle inequalities by making people more aware of this tendency to misperceive equality-boosting policies that would actually benefit them, says Brown.
“It was an ambitious series of studies that did an excellent job of ruling out alternative explanations,” says Dan Meegan at the University of Guelph, Canada. “The work paints a pretty dark picture for those trying to convince people to support policies designed to reduce intergroup inequality. The authors gave their participants every opportunity to see that helping disadvantaged groups need not come at the expense of advantaged groups, to no avail.”
“In terms of reliability and importance, this research checks all the boxes. What I would say is the fact that [the findings] aren’t surprising is alarming to me,” says Shai Davidai at Columbia University in New York.
Further work will need to establish if the same behaviour applies to people outside the US, although Brown and Davidai think it probably will.
“My own and others’ work has already shown that zero-sum beliefs replicate in many cultural contexts and across different nations, and I would not be surprised if this is the case for the current work as well,” says Davidai.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2385

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This still from The Boat People, a film shot in the Philippines following five children as they travel by sea, collecting objects, is one of many evocative artworks on display at Seattle Art Museum’s exhibition Our Blue Planet: Global visions of water

Humans

4 May 2022

By Gege Li
Tuan Andrew Nguyen 2021. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York
Seattle Art Museum
FROM its pure essence to its significance in culture and society, water takes on rousing and inventive forms in these artworks from Our Blue Planet: Global visions of water, an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in Washington. The show explores one of the world’s most crucial resources through more than 80 artistic interpretations.
Raqib ShawAdvertisement
At top is a still from The Boat People by Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Shot in the Philippines, the film follows five children as they travel by sea, collecting objects. Above is The Garden of Earthly Delights V, Raqib Shaw’s mixed-media depiction of mystical underwater creatures, inspired by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.
Claude Zervas
Adrienne Elise Tarver
Above shows: Nooksack, a sculpture by Claude Zervas made from wire and cold-cathode fluorescent lamps that mimics the form of the Nooksack river in Washington state; Mirage 24 by Adrienne Elise Tarver, part of her watercolour series of nude women lounging and swimming in tropical environments; and below, Mask of Kumugwe’ (Chief of the Sea), an alder and red-cedar-bark mask made around 1880 by the Kwakwaka’wakw Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, whose culture and traditions are centred on the natural environment.
Mask of Ḱumugwe’ (Chief of the Sea), ca. 1880 Native American
Our Blue Planet is on display at the Seattle Art Museum until 30 May.

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Having studied chimps and bonobos for decades, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that variation in gender-typical behaviour is likely to be more common than we thought in humans

Humans

4 May 2022

By Rowan Hooper
Nabil Nezzar
WHERE once we thought of ape behaviour only in terms of sex and war, we now understand that our closest relatives live a much more nuanced life. A huge part of that understanding comes from the work of primatologist Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Over the past five decades, he has shown that cooperation is at least as important as competition in explaining primate behaviour and society. His work has revealed that the great apes might fight, but they also reconcile their differences. They have a capacity for empathy and a concept of fairness that de Waal proposes is the foundation of the human moral compass. He believes that chimps, bonobos and humans are simply different types of ape and that empathetic and cooperative behaviours are continuous between these species. Now, he has turned his attention to gender and identity in his new book Different: What apes can teach us about gender. We spoke to de Waal to find out what he has learned.
Rowan Hooper: You are well known for writing about the inner lives of chimpanzees and bonobos, but your new book is a bit different, because it discusses gender roles, gender identity and biological sex differences in both apes and us. What do we mean by gender in non-human primates?
Frans de Waal: Well, some people insist that we have genders and chimps and bonobos have sexes, and that is the end of the discussion. I think that is nonsense. Gender as a concept exists mainly because we are a sexually reproducing species. Sex is predominantly … More

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

4 May 2022

Love in the metaverse
A PR writes in a breathless tone that suggests they are just back from doing something else. “For the next generation dating in the metaverse won’t be optional,” we read. “There will be a blurry line between an in-person date and being on video. The audio will be spatial. The video will be immersive. And video dating will change as we know it.”
And Mark Zuckerberg will be hiding round a corner holding a big bucket for your most intimate secrets, ka-ching. We would bet on at least some people keeping the physical dating option open, if only because not all sensory experiences are fully available in the metaverse as yet. But never say never. History is littered with intrinsically real-world experiences we never expected to go virtual: shopping for shoes, boring people with holiday snaps, hurling abuse at strangers.
But the spatial audio bit sounds interesting. We weren’t aware the metaverse equated to full-on synaesthesia. More prosaically, the PR turns out to be offering a hook-up with the CEO of a video speed-dating app for hot chat with topics including “Requirements for dating in the metaverse” – a large headset and wide turning circle, we presume – and “Cheating in the metaverse”.
We are unsure whether this last one is in the sense of a “how to”, or just informing us how to tell if an avatar is cheating. There must be ways. Perhaps guilty feet have got no algorithm, to misquote a poet.Advertisement
What the doctor ordered
Possibly fresh from a consultation in what we are now joining the world in misbranding as the metaverse, Andy Howe writes in concern at his doctor prescribing something that sounded very like “die, mister”. We are happy to confirm that this is a nasal spray for the treatment of hay fever, one Dymista, and merely homophonically alarming.
We are altogether more exercised by the advice his daughter finds in a Google preview window under the rubric “What to do when your baby poops in the bath”. “We recommend removing them from the tub and making sure to get rid of any excess water which might contain fecal matter. Once they’re completely dry, give them a wash with baby-safe disinfectant or boil them in water in the same way you would sterilize a pacifier before returning them to the bath.” And then be sure to throw away the baby with the… no, wait a moment. Following the trail back to its source, the advice turns out to be about bath toys, but still.
Like the sun going down
There are few more disheartening ideas for those who believe in human agency than Isaac Newton’s conception of a preordained clockwork universe. This is why we are vicariously pleased as Kathy Haskard, consulting some celestial runes in her neck of the woods, discovers a website promising that the “next planned solar eclipse that will be visible from Adelaide, will take place on April 20, 2023″.
We like the idea of throwing in the odd unplanned one every now and again to keep people on their toes. The errant adjective reminds Feedback of a report we once spotted in a small-town newspaper in Germany, that a spontaneous demonstration would occur on the main square at 11am on the following Tuesday, and of another clockwork certainty in keeping with our own native country’s aptitude for genteel chaos: disruption for anyone so foolhardy as to attempt to travel by train on a weekend or public holiday. We are still unsure whether the dread “planned engineering works” are any less annoying than the spontaneous, self-nucleating variety, or which authority ordains they should always be precisely in our way.
Testicle tans
US TV commentator and all-round… egg Tucker Carlson has been teasing his new documentary film, The End of Men, with a trailer of such startling homoeroticism that it will possibly soon be banned in Florida.
Carlson’s premise is that male testosterone levels are declining, that this is a bad thing and that the best way to combat it is to get your testicles tanned. Feedback’s level of hormonal outrage remains middling about all of this. We are unsure of the last part, however, which seems to involve exposing private parts to infrared radiation. Hot, we suspect, and not in a good way.
Doing our due diligence, we do run across well-founded research reported in this organ in 2018 – no sniggering at the back, there – that “The higher your testosterone levels, the more you love soft rock”. On that basis, anything that accidentally ends up reducing them is probably all to the good.
Woke-o-saurus
Meanwhile, in the UK, The Sun reports that David Attenborough’s new one-off CGI-enhanced documentary Dinosaurs: The Final Day features a “softer ‘woke’ version of the T-Rex”. “Predators tend to just fight all the time and we wanted to show them pooing,” the article quotes executive producer Helen Thomas as saying. This mystifies us, as that wasn’t on our list as a specifically woke activity.
We suspect this might annoy those dinosaurs who like their T. rex raw in tooth and claw and think the world’s gone to the dogs since the mammals have been in charge, or whatever. We also suspect the final day of the dinosaurs would have been a good one for a spot of testicle tanning. Doesn’t seem to have done them any good, mind.
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