Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    The female body is misunderstood and this is why, says Rachel E. Gross

    From non-consensual vaginal microbiome transplants to misconceptions about the G-spot, Rachel E. Gross discusses the sexism and biases that have led to our fragmented understanding of the female reproductive system

    Humans

    18 May 2022

    By Catherine de Lange
    Nabil Nezzar
    JOURNALIST Rachel E. Gross was working as the science editor at Smithsonian.com when she developed an “obnoxious” vaginal infection that set her on a mission to better understand her own body. It may have started with her genitals, but in her new book, Vagina Obscura: An anatomical voyage, Gross not only unravels many misunderstandings about the female body, but also rewrites the history of the science of gynaecology with women and LGBTQ+ researchers front and centre. She spoke to New Scientist about why this matters.
    Catherine de Lange: What made you want to write this book?
    Rachel E. Gross: I was doing a lot of coverage of women in the history of science. These themes kept coming up of women in scientific fields that had been left out of the conversation or blocked from attaining certain levels. And at the same time, there were all these questions about women’s bodies and bodies [of people] with a uterus and ovaries that weren’t being asked. I made the connection: the deceptively simple reason why these questions weren’t being asked was because women weren’t at the table.
    How did you find these incredible stories of women who were written out of the history books?
    The darkest section of the book is about James Marion Sims and the development of the speculum. It’s well known that he was a southern slaveholder who made his advancements on the bodies of enslaved Black women. But there is a lot more to that story. I relied a lot on historians who had excavated the stories of some of those women, namely Betsy, Lucy and Anarcha. Deirdre Cooper Owens is the historian … More

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    in Humans

    Night Sky review: Engaging show about a portal to another planet

    By Josh Bell
    Amazon Prime Video
    Night Sky
    Holden Miller, Daniel C. Connolly
    Amazon Prime Video, 20 MayAdvertisement

    GETTING older is never easy, but ageing couple Franklin and Irene York are able to take refuge from their ailments and frustrations by going out to “see the stars“.
    Played by J. K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek, the main characters of Amazon Prime Video’s Night Sky don’t just use a telescope to gaze at the heavens. Instead, they descend into a cellar hidden under the floorboards of a shed in their backyard, walk down a dank tunnel and open a bizarre, alien-looking door.
    There, they find a chamber that, somehow, transports them to a room on what appears to be another planet. They look out the window at a view that no one else on Earth gets to experience. Or so they believe.
    Night Sky, created by Holden Miller and Daniel C. Connolly, starts slowly, spending plenty of time with Franklin and Irene as they go about their daily business in small-town Illinois, with the sci-fi elements of the story often fading into the background.
    Simmons and Spacek are such strong actors that Night Sky would have been engrossing simply as a story about a loving couple headed into their twilight years, reckoning with nostalgia and regret. The first episode doesn’t deal with much more than that, at least until the end, when Irene discovers a mysterious man inside the underground portal.
    The interloper, Jude (Chai Hansen), both disturbs and invigorates the Yorks, leading them to new discoveries about the device they have been using for the past 20 years without ever questioning it. He also has an agenda of his own, which, just like everything else in Night Sky, unfolds slowly over the course of the first six episodes.
    The glacial plot progression can be frustrating, especially when the focus shifts away from the Yorks to other storylines whose connections to the main narrative take a while to coalesce.
    The second episode introduces a mother and daughter living in rural Argentina, protecting a strange chapel and reluctantly taking orders from a dangerous secret society. The dynamic between Stella (Julieta Zylberberg) and her teenage daughter Toni (Rocío Hernández) isn’t as emotionally rewarding as the Yorks’s lived-in relationship, but their direct involvement in the vague conspiracy lends their scenes a bit more excitement.
    Still, the character development is as incremental as that relating to the plot, and some of the show’s detours look more like dead ends. The Yorks’s nosy neighbour goes through an entire unrelated drama on his own just so he can circle back to poking around the shed and making an actual impact on the plot. There are plenty of scenes of similarly dubious relevance involving secondary characters that contribute to the lethargic pacing.
    Maybe there will be satisfying answers in the remaining two episodes of the eight-episode first series, but, for now, Night Sky is more about insinuations and atmosphere than explanations. There are references to “quantum entanglement” and “spooky action at a distance”, but nothing definitive about the origins or mechanics of the Yorks’s portal, or the related projects of the apparently globe-spanning ancient order that Stella and Toni belong to.
    There is usually enough enticement to keep watching until the next episode, though, and even when the show seems to be spinning its wheels, Simmons and Spacek find lovely grace notes in their performances.
    Night Sky‘s most affecting and engaging moments have nothing to do with intergalactic travel or transdimensional portals, however. No special effect matches Irene delivering a heartbreaking monologue about the death of the Yorks’s adult son, or Franklin comforting his granddaughter Denise (Kiah McKirnan) at her father’s grave.
    These characters are on their way to learning the secrets of the universe, but they have already lived long enough to know what truly matters.

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    in Space & Astronomy

    High-energy neutrinos may come from black holes ripping apart stars

    When a star gets too close to a black hole, sparks fly. And, potentially, so do subatomic particles called neutrinos.

    A dramatic light show results when a supermassive black hole rips apart a wayward star. Now, for the second time, a high-energy neutrino has been spotted that may have come from one of these “tidal disruption events,” researchers report in a study accepted in Physical Review Letters.

    These lightweight particles, which have no electric charge, careen across the cosmos and can be detected upon their arrival at Earth. The origins of such zippy neutrinos are a big mystery in physics. To create them, conditions must be just right to drastically accelerate charged particles, which would then produce neutrinos. Scientists have begun lining up likely candidates for cosmic particle accelerators. In 2020, researchers reported the first neutrino linked to a tidal disruption event (SN: 5/26/20). Other neutrinos have been tied to active galactic nuclei, bright regions at the centers of some galaxies (SN: 7/12/18).

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    Discovered in 2019, the tidal disruption event reported in the new study stood out. “It was extraordinarily bright; it’s really one of the brightest transients ever seen,” says astroparticle physicist Marek Kowalski of Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, or DESY, in Zeuthen, Germany.

    Transients are short-lived flares in the sky, such as tidal disruption events and exploding stars called supernovas. Further observations of the brilliant outburst revealed that it shone in infrared, X-rays and other wavelengths of light.

    Roughly a year after the flare’s discovery, the Antarctic neutrino observatory IceCube spotted a high-energy neutrino. By tracing the particle’s path backward, researchers determined that the neutrino came from the flare’s vicinity.

    The matchup between the two events could be a coincidence. But when combined with the previous neutrino that was tied to a tidal disruption event, the case gets stronger. The probability of finding two such associations by chance is only about 0.034 percent, the researchers say.

    It’s still not clear how tidal disruption events would produce high-energy neutrinos. In one proposed scenario, a jet of particles flung away from the black hole could accelerate protons, which could interact with surrounding radiation to produce the speedy neutrinos.

    ‘We need more data … in order to say that these are real neutrino sources or not,” says astrophysicist Kohta Murase of Penn State University, a coauthor of the new study. If the link between the neutrinos and tidal disruption events is real, he’s optimistic that researchers won’t have to wait too long. “If this is the case, we will see more.”

    But scientists don’t all agree that the flare was a tidal disruption event. Instead, it could have been an especially bright type of supernova, astrophysicist Irene Tamborra and colleagues suggest in the April 20 Astrophysical Journal.

    In such a supernova, it’s clear how energetic neutrinos could be produced, says Tamborra, of the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Protons accelerated by the supernova’s shock wave could collide with protons in the medium that surrounds the star, producing other particles that could decay to make neutrinos.

    It’s only recently that observations of high-energy neutrinos and transients have improved enough to enable scientists to find potential links between the two. “It’s exciting,” Tamborra says. But as the debate over the newly detected neutrino’s origin shows, “at the same time, it’s uncovering many things that we don’t know.” More

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    in Humans

    'Funk fungus' is a funny phrase and scientists now know why

    A study looking at more than 55,000 pairs of words has found why word pairings like “gnome bone” and “spam scrotum” seem to be more amusing than their constituent parts

    Humans

    13 May 2022

    By Jesse Staniforth
    Some pairs of words are funnier than othersShutterstock / fizkes
    On their own there is nothing particularly funny about the words “gnome” and “bone”, but put them together and it is a different story. Pairings like “gnome bone” seem to make people chuckle, at least according to a study that looked at the funniness of thousands of pairs of words.
    Cynthia S. Q. Siew at the National University of Singapore and her colleagues generated random word pairings using a list of around 5000 words previously studied for their humour or lack thereof. … More

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    in Humans

    Why some words become funnier when paired together

    A study looking at more than 55,000 pairs of words has found why word pairings like “funk fungus” and “gnome bone” seem to be more amusing than their constituent parts

    Humans

    13 May 2022

    By Jesse Staniforth
    Some pairs of words are funnier than othersShutterstock / fizkes
    On their own there is nothing particularly funny about the words “gnome” and “bone”, but put them together and it is a different story. Pairings like “gnome bone” seem to make people chuckle, at least according to a study that looked at the funniness of thousands of pairs of words.
    Cynthia S. Q. Siew at the National University of Singapore and her colleagues generated random word pairings using a list of around 5000 words previously studied for their humour or lack thereof. … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    We finally have an image of the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way

    There’s a new addition to astronomers’ portrait gallery of black holes. 

    Astronomers announced May 12 that they have finally assembled an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. 

    “This image shows a bright ring surrounding the darkness, the telltale sign of the shadow of the black hole,” astrophysicist Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona in Tucson said at a news conference announcing the result.

    The black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, appears as a faint silhouette amidst the glowing material that surrounds it. The image reveals the turbulent, twisting region immediately surrounding the black hole in new detail. The findings also were published May 12 in 6 studies in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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    A planet-spanning network of radio telescopes, known as the Event Horizon Telescope, worked together to create this much-anticipated look at the Milky Way’s giant. Three years ago, the same team released the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole (SN: 4/10/19). That object sits at the center of the galaxy M87, about 55 million light-years from Earth. 

    But Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, is “humanity’s black hole,” says astrophysicist Sera Markoff of the University of Amsterdam, and a member of the EHT collaboration. 

    At 27,000 light-years away, the behemoth is the closest giant black hole to Earth. That proximity means that Sgr A* is the most-studied supermassive black hole in the universe. Yet Sgr A* and others like it remain some of the most mysterious objects ever found. 

    That’s because, like all black holes, Sgr A* is an object so dense that its gravitational pull won’t let light escape. Black holes are “natural keepers of their own secrets,” says physicist Lena Murchikova of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who is not part of the EHT team. Their gravity traps light that falls within a border called the event horizon. EHT’s images of Sgr A* and the M87 black hole skirt up to that inescapable edge.

    [embedded content]
    This sonification is a translation into sound of the Event Horizon Telescope’s image of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. The sonification sweeps clockwise around the black hole image. Material closer to the black hole orbits faster than material farther away. Here, the faster-moving material is heard at higher frequencies. Very low tones represent material outside the black hole’s main ring. Louder volume indicates brighter spots in the image.

    Sgr A* feeds on hot material pushed off of massive stars at the galactic center. That gas, drawn toward Sgr A* by its gravitational pull, flows into a surrounding disk of glowing material, called an accretion disk. The disk, the stars and an outer bubble of X-ray light “are like an ecosystem,” says astrophysicist Daryl Haggard of McGill University in Montreal and a member of the EHT collaboration. “They’re completely tied together.”

    That accretion disk is where the action is — as the gas moves within immensely strong magnetic fields — so astronomers want to know more about how the disk works.

    Like the majority of supermassive black holes,  Sgr A* is quiet and faint (SN: 6/5/19 ). The black hole eats only a few morsels fed to it by its accretion disk. Still, “it’s always been a little bit of a puzzle why it’s so, so faint,” says astrophysicist Meg Urry of Yale University, who is not part of the EHT collaboration. M87’s black hole, in comparison, is a monster gorging on nearby material and shooting out enormous, powerful jets (SN: 11/10/21). But that doesn’t mean Sgr A* isn’t producing light. Astrophysicists have seen its region feebly glowing in radio waves, jittering in infrared and burping in X-rays.

    In fact, the accretion disk around Sgr A* seems to constantly flicker and simmer. This variability, the constant flickering, is like a froth on top of ocean waves, Markoff says. “​​And so we’re seeing this froth that is coming up from all this activity, and we’re trying to understand the waves underneath the froth.” 

    The big question, she adds, has been if astronomers would be able to see something changing in those waves with EHT. In the new work, they’ve seen hints of those changes below the froth, but the full analysis is still ongoing.

    By combining about 3.5 petabytes of data, or the equivalent of about 100 million TikTok videos, captured in April 2017, researchers could begin to piece together the picture. To tease out an image from the initial massive jumble of data, the EHT team needed years of work, complicated computer simulations and observations in various types of light from other telescopes. 

    [embedded content]
    Scientists created a vast library of computer simulations of Sagittarius A* (one shown) to explore the turbulent flow of hot gas that rings the black hole. That rapid flow causes the ring’s appearance to vary in brightness on timescales of minutes. Scientists compared these simulations with the newly released observations of the black hole to better understand its true properties.

    Those “multiwavelength” data from the other telescopes were crucial to assembling the image. “By looking at these things simultaneously and all together, we’re able to come up with a complete picture,” says theorist Gibwa Musoke of the University of Amsterdam. 

    Sgr A*’s variability, the constant simmering, complicated the analysis because the black hole changes on timescales of just a few minutes, changing as the researchers were imaging it. “It was like trying to take a clear picture of a running child at night,” astronomer José L. Gómez of Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain, said at a news conference announcing the result. M87 was easier to analyze because it changed over the course of weeks.

    Ultimately, a better understanding of what is happening in the disk so close to Sgr A* could help scientists learn how many other similar supermassive black holes work. 

    The new EHT observations also confirm the mass of Sgr A* at 4 million times that of the sun. If the black hole replaced our sun, the shadow EHT imaged would sit within Mercury’s orbit. 

    The researchers also used the image of Sgr A* to put general relativity to the test (SN: 2/3/21). Einstein’s steadfast theory of gravity passed: The size of the shadow matched the predictions of general relativity. By testing the theory in extreme conditions — like those around black holes — scientists hope to pinpoint any hidden weaknesses.

    Scientists have previously tested general relativity by following the motions of stars that orbit very close to Sgr A* — work that also helped confirm that the object truly is a black hole (SN: 7/26/18). For that discovery, researchers Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel won a share of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020 (SN: 10/6/20).

    The two types of tests of general relativity are complementary,  says astrophysicist Tuan Do of UCLA. “With these big physics tests, you don’t want to use just one method.” If one test appears to contradict general relativity, scientists can check for a corresponding discrepancy in the other.

    The Event Horizon Telescope, however, tests general relativity much nearer to the black hole’s edge, which could highlight subtle effects of physics beyond general relativity. “The closer you get, the better you are in terms of being able to look for these effects,” says physicist Clifford Will of the University of Florida in Gainesville.

    However, some researchers have criticized a similar test of general relativity made using the EHT image of M87’s black hole (SN: 10/1/20). That’s because the test relies on relatively shaky assumptions about the physics of how material swirls around a black hole, says physicist Sam Gralla of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Testing general relativity in this way “would only make sense if general relativity were the weakest link,” but scientists’ confidence in general relativity is stronger than the assumptions that went into the test, he says.

    The observations of Sgr A* provide more evidence that the object is in fact a black hole, says physicist Nicolas Yunes of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “It’s really exciting to have the first image of a black hole that is in our own Milky Way. It’s fantastic.” It sparks the imagination, like early pictures astronauts took of Earth from the moon, he says.

    This won’t be the last eye-catching image of Sgr A* from EHT. Additional observations, made in 2018, 2021 and 2022, are still waiting to be analyzed. 

    “This is our closest supermassive black hole,” Haggard says. “It is like our closest friend and neighbor. And we’ve been studying it for years as a community. [This image is a] really profound addition to this exciting black hole we’ve all kind of fallen in love with in our careers.” More

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    in Humans

    'World-leading' research not confined to elite universities, says REF

    The Research Excellence Framework, an assessment of UK universities’ research output, has found that “world-leading” research is distributed across the country rather than concentrated in a few elite institutions

    Humans

    12 May 2022

    By Jason Arunn Murugesu
    Research around the UK has been called “world-leading”Muhammet Camdereli/Getty Images
    The UK’s “world-leading” research isn’t just limited to a select few elite universities, but rather is distributed across the country, according to the latest UK government analysis of the country’s academic output.
    The analysis by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) team is based on seven years’ worth of work conducted by universities. It assesses the quality of a university’s research output in terms of how highly cited it is and the impact it has had in both academia and the wider world. Unlike in 2014, the last time this analysis was conducted, the REF team put a greater emphasis on the wider long-term impact that a piece of research has had on the UK’s economy, environment and quality of life.
    The results will help UK government funding bodies decide how to allocate £2 billion worth of grant money between universities each year.Advertisement
    “There’s lots of myths about where our research excellence is, but the truth is that it is more broadly distributed, as the results from this exercise show,” says Steven Hill at Research England, chair of the REF steering group.
    More than 185,000 pieces of research were submitted by 157 universities to the REF team, which were reviewed by 34 expert panels. The panels were split into four main categories: life and medical sciences, physical sciences, social sciences and arts and humanities.

    The team found that 41 per cent of the research submitted was considered of the highest quality, which the REF team termed “world-leading”. Meanwhile, 43 per cent of the research was ranked “internationally excellent”. More than 80 per cent of the research assessed at both these levels of quality was found in every region and nation in the UK.
    Nearly all universities who submitted research to the REF team were found to have at least some of their activity judged as “world-leading”. “There’s a really even distribution of research excellence across the UK,” says Hill.
    Comparisons with previous analyses made by REF are difficult to make due to methodological changes, but the 2014 REF report found that only 30 per cent of research submitted was “world-leading”.
    “Universities play a key role in providing the ideas and skills to fuel the regional economy that surrounds them,” says Brian Walker at Newcastle University, UK. “In less prosperous regions, these contributions from universities are disproportionately important.”

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    in Humans

    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