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

Josie Ford
Toad in the hole
If we are looking a little lorn this week, with our mouth opening and closing to little effect, it is principally because we are staring at “Finding love in a hopeless place: A global database of misdirected amplexus in anurans”. This is a new paper in the journal Ecology by Filipe Serrano and his colleagues at the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil. No amount of science words can gloss over the fact that it amounts to a spreadsheet of all the instances recorded in the scientific literature in the past century of frogs attempting to mate with things that they shouldn’t.
It can’t be easy being an amphibian, as evidenced by the touching – in a very real, excessive sense – story recently reported in this magazine of male Santa Marta harlequin toads in Colombia that cling to females’ backs for up to five months in hope of mating (23 April, p 19).
The new database conveniently tags misdirected encounters with hour, month, year and geographical location. “We recorded a total of 282 interspecific amplexus, 46 necrophiliac amplexus and 50 amplexus with objects or non-amphibian species, with USA and Brazil being the countries with the highest number of records,” the authors report.Advertisement
“Why?” asks a colleague. Ah, well, if we knew why we were doing science in the first place, that wouldn’t be science, would it?
Broken-down wind
Many of us have a special place we go when we want to think. In Feedback’s case, we are often accompanied by Think, a journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy that promises “philosophy for everyone”.
We think it may be getting a little too Everyman with a contribution in the latest issue entitled “The metaphysics of farts”. If the last item brought the sound of the barrel scraping, listen to us now drill right through.
What is a fart? An act, that of breaking wind, or a thing, the resultant smell? Author Brian Capra tackles this question head on, highlighting contradictions between the “essential-bum-origin” and “phenomenological” views that, he submits, mean both can’t be true.
Via a thought experiment asking if two people fart in a lift, how many farts there are, and the obvious answer – does it matter? – he concludes that a fart-thing must proceed from a fart-act, but a fart-act doesn’t necessarily produce a fart-thing, and, so, “we are led to an outlook similar to Descartes’s view of the mind: on the phenomenological view, the essence of a fart is given to us in our olfactory experience”.
Desfartes, as a nameless colleague supplies indelicately. Ignore them, dear readers: this sort of thing is what makes philosophy and thinking such valuable activities. Now, could someone open that door? It is closer than two toads in the mating season in here.
Got my goat
We note in passing – noiselessly, of course – that the same author wrote an article in Philosophy Now that uses elementary principles of model logic to prove that everything is a goat. For those still asking “why?”, we merely note the goat’s genus is Capra, and there may be more than a hint of solipsism in the argument.
On a roll
We would personally prefer it if everything were cake. Our thanks to the very, very many of you who provided ever so slightly muffled feedback on our recent item on legal definitions of cake (30 April). Space fortunately does permit us to delve into the details, suffice to say that the rigour with which you treat the subject convinces us that Feedback is all one happy family with shared values and priorities.
We particularly savoured Liz Tucker’s tangential mention of a talk she went to on the history of the Lyons tea-and-cake empire that was a feature of the British landscape for many years, which stated that, at one time, the company produced 35 miles of Swiss roll a week. This conjures a mental image of a truly majestic, if slow-moving, machine. It prompts us to ask “How do you make a Swiss roll?”, to which we are sure you can supply the punchline.
Like a lead…
Carl Zetie is perplexed by the appearance in his Facebook feed of an advertisement from a software company called Zeplin, whose corporate logo is an airship of almost that name. “Companies ship 20% faster using Zeplin,” it promises. Historically speaking, this seems an odd choice of corporate metaphor, and we do hope there is no crashing and burning on arrival.
Talking tough
Those were unsettling times, as are these. So it is good to know that the defence of the realm is in no-nonsense hands, as per a tweet from the University Royal Naval Unit Edinburgh, sent to us by Ceri Brown. “Our first training evening after Easter was a very detailed and informative brief from the Defence Nuclear Organisation on the UK Nuclear Deterrent. Thank you to Captain Tough and his team for the briefing.” With that exemplar of The Name Thing That Shan’t be Mentioned, and to employ a military phrase whose correct usage has generated lively debate from you before (3 April, 24 April and 8 May 2021), it is, from this Feedback, over and out.
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

By Sam Wong
Shutterstock/Rozdemir
THE idea that we can improve our gut health by eating foods containing live “friendly” bacteria, or probiotics, dates back to the early 20th century. Ilya Mechnikov, a Russian biologist whose work on immunity led to a Nobel prize, postulated that consuming soured milk fostered beneficial bacteria in the intestines. He claimed that people in Bulgaria who ate yogurt lived longer as a result, and his ideas helped to popularise yogurt in western Europe and North America.
The main types of bacteria found in commercial yogurt are Lactobacillus delbrueckii subspecies bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus. Several studies have found that … More

CORNELIA PARKER
Visit
Cornelia Parker brings mesmerising, large-scale installations to London’s Tate Britain gallery. Expect frozen moments, exploded art (see above), perceptual games and glimpses into deep time. Open from 19 May.
HBO
Watch
The Time Traveler’s Wife is a mix of sci-fi and romance, in which protagonist Henry (Theo James) flitters uncontrollably through time, and his wife Clare (Rose Leslie) has to put up with him. Streaming on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV from 16 May.Advertisement
Artem Oleshko/Alamy
Listen
The Academy of Robotics, which has launched and tested some of Europe’s first self-driving cars, examines how tech is transforming its own funding structures in a six-part podcast on the Clubhouse audio app.

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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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