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    A city of 10 billion: Speculative image paints a vision of the future

    A series of immersive installations, including Planet City, a film that imagines a “hyper-dense” city of 10 billion people, are part of Our Time on Earth, a new exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London encouraging people to reconnect with the natural world

    Humans

    11 May 2022

    By Gege Li
    Liam Young
    THE complexity, community and precarity of the planet are highlighted in these works from Our Time on Earth, a new exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London. The show aims to “ignite a sense of hope and courage, and to shift people’s mindsets to reconnect with the natural world”, says co-curator Luke Kemp.
    David Levene
    The image above is a still from a video called Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest, a collaboration between immersive art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, Andres Roberts – co-founder of The Bio-Leadership Project – and artist James Bulley. It explores our intimate connection with trees and addresses “plant blindness”, a human tendency to ignore plants in favour of animals.Advertisement
    The lead image is a video still from Planet City, a film directed by architect Liam Young that imagines a “hyper-dense” city of 10 billion people, allowing the rest of the world to be reclaimed by the wild. It shows a speculative solution for feeding the city’s population.
    Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Barbican Centre
    Above is an image from digital art installation Life Forces by art duo Tin & Ed, which aims to provide a portal to nature by using human body tracking to allow visitors to interact with digital landscapes.
    The two below images are shots of Sharing Prosperity, a gaming experience created by DVTK in collaboration with the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London. Set in the near future, the game explores how collaboration could help the planet to flourish.
    ‘Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Barbican Centre
    Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Barbican Centre
    Our Time on Earth is on at the Barbican Centre until 29 August.

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    Don't Miss: Time-hopping new sci-fi romance The Time Traveler's Wife

    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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    Arica review: Gut-wrenching documentary about a toxic waste lawsuit

    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

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    How to make your own yogurt

    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

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    The lab coat and lone genius – science's most infuriating stereotypes

    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

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    What is at risk if Roe v Wade is repealed in the US?

    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

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    The sun’s searing radiation led to the shuffling of the solar system’s planets

    In the solar system’s early years, the still-forming giant planets sidestepped, did a do-si-do and then swung one of their partners away from the sun’s gravitational grasp. Things settled, and our planetary system was in its final configuration.

    What triggered that planetary shuffle has been unknown. Now, computer simulations suggest that the hot radiation of the young sun evaporating its planet-forming disk of gas and dust led to the scrambling of the giant planets’ orbits, researchers report in the April 28 Nature.

    As a result, the four largest planets may have been in their final configuration within 10 million years of the solar system’s birth about 4.6 billion years ago. That’s much quicker than the 500 million years that previous work had suggested.

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    The planetary-shuffling mechanism that the team uncovered in the computer simulations is very innovative, says Nelson Ndugu, an astrophysicist who studies forming planetary systems at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa, and Muni University in Arua, Uganda. “It has huge potential.”

    Heaps of evidence, including observations of extrasolar planetary systems forming (SN: 7/2/18), had already indicated that something in our solar system’s early history jumbled the giant planets’ orbits, which scientists call the giant-planet instability (SN: 5/25/05).

    “The evidence for the giant-planet instability is really robust,” says Seth Jacobson, a planetary scientist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “It explains many features of the outer solar system,” he says, like the large number of rocky objects beyond Neptune that make up the Kuiper Belt (SN: 12/31/09).

    To figure out what triggered that instability, Jacobson and colleagues ran computer simulations of the thousands of ways that the early solar system could have developed. All started with a young star and a planet-forming disk of gas and dust surrounding the star. The team then altered the disk parameters, such as its mass, density and how fast it evolved.

    The simulations also included the still-forming giant planets — five of them, in fact. Astronomers think a third ice giant, in addition to Uranus and Neptune, was originally a solar system member (SN: 4/20/12). Jupiter and Saturn round out the final tally of these massive planets.

    When the sun officially became a star, that is, the moment it began burning hydrogen at its core — roughly 4.6 billion years ago — its ultraviolet emission would have hit the disk’s gas, ionizing it and heating it to tens of thousands of degrees. “This is a very well-documented process,” Jacobson says. As the gas heats, it expands and flows away from the star, beginning with the inner portion of the disk.

    “The disk disperses its gas from inside out,” says Beibei Liu, an astrophysicist at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. He and Jacobson collaborated with astronomer Sean Raymond of Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux in France in the new research.

    In the team’s simulations, as the inner part of the disk dissolves, that area loses mass, so the embedded, still-forming planets feel less gravity from that region, Jacobson says. But the planets still feel the same amount of pull from the disk’s outer region. This gravitational torquing, as the team calls it, can trigger a rebound effect: “Originally, the planets migrate in, and they reach the [inner] edge of this disk, and they reverse their migration,” Liu says.

    Because of Jupiter’s large mass, it’s mostly unaffected. Saturn, though, moves outward and into the region, which, in the simulations, holds the three ice giant planets. That area becomes crowded, Liu says, and close planetary interactions follow. One ice giant gets kicked out of the solar system entirely, Uranus and Neptune shift a bit farther from the sun, and “they gradually form the orbits close to our solar system’s configuration,” Liu says.

    In their computer simulations, the researchers found that as the sun’s radiation evaporates the disk, a planetary reshuffle nearly always ensues. “We can’t avoid this instability,” Jacobson says.

    Now that the researchers have an idea of what may have caused this solar system shuffle, the next step is to simulate how the evaporation of the disk could affect other objects.

    “We’ve focused really heavily on the giant planets, because their orbits were the original motivation,” Jacobson says. “But now, we have to do the follow-up work to show how this trigger mechanism relates to the small bodies.” More

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    Privileged people misjudge effects of pro-equality policies on them

    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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