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    Don't Miss: Star Trek parody The Orville is back for a third season

    Ornette Made In America, USA, 1985. Courtesy of Barbican Centre.
    Visit
    Journeys across Afro-futurism traces Black futures through the medium of film, featuring Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Nyokabi Gethaiga and others. At the Barbican Centre, London, from 2 to 30 June.

    Read
    Beyond Measure documents humanity’s attempts to claw dependable truths from a chaotic universe. James Vincent’s gripping story of how and why we measure just about everything, from radiation to happiness, is published on 2 June.
    Michael Desmond/Hulu
    Watch
    The Orville begins its third season. Starring Adrianne Palicki as Commander Kelly Grayson and Seth MacFarlane as Captain Ed Mercer, they’re out to find strange … More

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    How to analyse your garden soil and choose the plants to suit it

    Finding out how acidic or alkaline your soil is means you can select the right plants for it, and maximise their chance of thriving, says Clare Wilson

    Humans

    25 May 2022

    By Clare Wilson
    mblickwinkel / Alamy Stock Photo
    HAVE you ever wondered why some plants in your garden thrive, while others barely grow no matter how tenderly they are nurtured? It may not come down to your green fingers, but to whether you have chosen the right plant for that spot.
    Most people know they need to consider their local climate and how much sunshine any particular site gets. But you should also choose the right plant for your soil type, which depends on your area’s geology and history. You can find maps of soil type online, but gardens can differ at a local level.
    A first step … More

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    Ice Age Footprints review: Ancient humans’ arrival in North America

    This documentary tracks the quest for the oldest human footprints in North America, and what they can tell us about when people first arrived on the continent

    Humans

    23 May 2022

    By Carissa Wong
    Ancient footprints in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park.GBH/NOVA/WGBH
    Ice Age Footprints
    Directed by Bella Falk and David Dugan
    On PBS on 25 May at 9PM EST, then streaming at pbs.org/nova
    IN January 2020, in a secret location within White Sands Park, New Mexico, geologists Kathleen Springer and Jeffrey Pigati began to dig out a trench in search of ancient human footprints. They hoped to shed light on two long-standing questions about the history of humans in North America: how long ago did people first arrive, and did humans … More

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    Pulsars may power cosmic rays with the highest-known energies in the universe

    The windy and chaotic remains surrounding recently exploded stars may be launching the fastest particles in the universe.

    Highly magnetic neutron stars known as pulsars whip up a fast and strong magnetic wind. When charged particles, specifically electrons, get caught in those turbulent conditions, they can be boosted to extreme energies, astrophysicists report April 28 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. What’s more, those zippy electrons can then go on to boost some ambient light to equally extreme energies, possibly creating the very high-energy gamma-ray photons that led astronomers to detect these particle launchers in the first place.

    “This is the first step in exploring the connection between the pulsars and the ultrahigh-energy emissions,” says astrophysicist Ke Fang of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in this new work.

    Last year, researchers with the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory, or LHAASO, in China announced the discovery of the highest-energy gamma rays ever detected, up to 1.4 quadrillion electron volts (SN: 2/2/21). That’s roughly 100 times as energetic as the highest energies achievable with the world’s premier particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. Identifying what’s causing these and other extremely high-energy gamma rays could point, literally, to the locations of cosmic rays — the zippy protons, heavier atomic nuclei and electrons that bombard Earth from locales beyond our solar system.

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    Some gamma rays are thought to originate in the same environs as cosmic rays. One way they’re produced is that cosmic rays, shortly after being launched, can slam into relatively low-energy ambient photons, boosting them to high-energy gamma rays. But the electrically charged cosmic rays are buffeted by galactic magnetic fields, which means they don’t travel in a straight line, thus complicating efforts to trace the zippy particles back to their source. Gamma rays, however, are impervious to magnetic fields, so astrophysicists can trace their unwavering paths back to their origins — and figure out where cosmic rays are created.

    To that end, the LHAASO team traced the hundreds of gamma-ray photons that it detected to 12 spots on the sky. While the team identified one spot as the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova about 6,500 light-years from Earth, the researchers suggested that the rest could be associated with other sites of stellar explosions or even young massive star clusters (SN: 6/24/19).

    In the new study, astrophysicist Emma de Oña Wilhelmi and colleagues zeroed in one of those possible points of origin: pulsar wind nebulas, the clouds of turbulence and charged particles surrounding a pulsar. The researchers weren’t convinced such locales could create such high-energy particles and light, so they set out to show through calculations that pulsar wind nebulas weren’t the sources of extreme gamma rays. “But to our surprise, we saw at the very extreme conditions, you can explain all the sources [that LHAASO saw],” says de Oña Wilhelmi, of the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg.

    The young pulsars at the heart of these nebulas — no more than 200,000 years old — can provide all that oomph because of their ultrastrong magnetic fields, which create a turbulent magnetic bubble called a magnetosphere.

    Any charged particles moving in an intense magnetic field get accelerated, says de Oña Wilhelmi. That’s how the Large Hadron Collider boosts particles to extreme energies (SN: 4/22/22). A pulsar-powered accelerator, though, can boost particles to even higher energies, the team calculates. That’s because the electrons escape the pulsar’s magnetosphere and meet up with the material and magnetic fields from the stellar explosion that created the pulsar. These magnetic fields can further accelerate the electrons to even higher energies, the team finds, and if those electrons slam into ambient photons, they can boost those particles of light to ultrahigh energies, turning them into gamma rays.

    “Pulsars are definitely very powerful accelerators,” Fang says, with “several places where particle acceleration can happen.”

    And that could lead to a bit of confusion. Gamma-ray telescopes have pretty fuzzy vision. For example, LHASSO can make out details only as small as about half the size of the full moon. So the gamma-ray sources that the telescope detected look like blobs or bubbles, says de Oña Wilhelmi. There could be multiple energetic sources within those blobs, unresolved to current observatories.

    “With better angular resolution and better sensitivity, we should be able to identify what [and] where the accelerator is,” she says. A few future observatories — such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array and the Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory — could help, but they’re several years out. More

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    The people who built Stonehenge may have eaten raw cattle organs

    By Corryn Wetzel
    Fossilised human faeces from Durrington Walls, EnglandLisa-Marie Shillito
    The people who built Stonehenge probably ate cattle organs and shared leftovers with dogs, according to an analysis of parasites trapped in ancient faeces.
    Fossilised excrement roughly 4500 years old was discovered several years ago at Durrington Walls, a Neolithic settlement in England thought to have housed the people who built Stonehenge. Previous research suggests the village held a few thousand residents who travelled to the location seasonally to erect the stone pillars.
    Piers Mitchell at the University of Cambridge and his team analysed 19 faecal fossils, determining that some were from humans and some from dogs. When they examined the faeces under a microscope, they saw the eggs of a type of parasite called a capillariid worm, which they could identify from its lemon-like shape. This led them to conclude that the sample came from someone who had eaten raw organs of an infected bovine.Advertisement
    “We know they must have been eating internal organs such as the liver, where this parasite would normally live, and they were also feeding it to their dogs, because the dogs had the same kind of parasite,” says Mitchell.
    The villagers probably ate raw, parasite-laden organs when a cow wasn’t cooked thoroughly. “We can see these beautiful parasite eggs from thousands of years ago, which haven’t been damaged by the cooking process,” says Mitchell.
    One sample of dog excrement contained eggs from a freshwater fish tapeworm, which Mitchell says is an especially intriguing find because fish were not a common food at the settlement. He suspects the raw fish was transported from a faraway village for a feast at Stonehenge then consumed by the dog.
    “[The results] show a really interesting way that humans were living with their companion animals thousands of years ago – they were still treating their dogs as one of the family even back then,” says Mitchell. “It’s given us this wonderful window of evidence that we didn’t have before.”
    Journal reference: Parasitology, DOI: 10.1017/S0031182022000476

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    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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    Everything Everywhere All At Once review: Multiverse sci-fi adventure

    By Robyn Chowdhury
    A24
    Everything Everywhere All At Once
    Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert
    Now playing in cinemasAdvertisement
    CHAOTIC sci-fi adventure is the heart of Everything Everywhere All At Once, a movie as touching as it is thrilling. It follows Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) as she takes on the burden of saving the multiverse. On her journey, she meets, fights and loves the many different versions of those closest to her, showing us that family isn’t just one-dimensional.
    We are introduced quickly to the mania of Evelyn’s life: her damaged relationships with daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) and husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), not to mention the pile of receipts she must get audited. But Evelyn’s balancing act between family and business is only a fraction of the chaos to come.
    Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who wrote, directed and produced the film, waste no time before throwing us into a host of absurd scenarios.
    Warned she may be in grave danger during a trip to declare her taxes, Evelyn flees into another dimension, while tax auditor Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis) tries in vain to keep her attention. We discover that quirky supervillain Jobu Tupaki has created a sort of “black hole” that threatens the multiverse – and she is hunting Evelyn down.
    This film catapults you so quickly between universes that you barely have time to be confused. It flirts with existentialism and Chinese culture in a bizarre Rick and Morty/ The Matrix hybrid.
    Kwan uses his experience as the son of immigrants to create a family that feels real. The chaos in Evelyn’s life and mind represents attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which Kwan was diagnosed with as an adult. The film portrays neurodiversity with nuance, showing Evelyn as someone who really is feeling everything, everywhere, all at once.
    The cinematography is beautiful, and the music is cleverly used to add humour, tension and sentimentality. Though the film mostly centres on the Wang family and Beaubeirdra, there are so many versions of each character that you never get bored – and the cast have the perfect chance to demonstrate their range.
    Everything Everywhere All At Once grounds a cosmic plot about interdimensional travel with its story of a broken family trying their best to love each other. The film is simultaneously poignant and playful – with more fight scenes involving sex toys than you would expect. It is one to watch for anyone who enjoys laughing and crying in equal measure.

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    Claims that girls have a 'natural' aversion to physics are harmful

    Girls are just as capable as boys in science and mathematics, but ingrained attitudes are stopping female students from engaging, says Maria Rossini

    Humans

    | Comment

    18 May 2022

    By Maria Rossini
    Simone Rotella
    FROM Katherine Johnson, known for her pioneering work at NASA, to Nobel prizewinning physicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, women have contributed hugely to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). But that contribution often remains undervalued, and in the UK a false narrative persists that science is a boys’ subject and that girls lack the aptitude for study or work in STEM disciplines.
    These long-standing negative assumptions were displayed recently at an inquiry on diversity in STEM by the UK parliament’s Science and Technology Committee. Katharine Birbalsingh, head of Michaela Community School in London and chair of the Social Mobility Commission, said that girls in her school have a “natural” aversion to physics and that it involves “hard maths”, which girls would “rather not do”.
    Contrary to Birbalsingh’s comments, evidence shows that girls are just as capable as boys: girls outperform their male peers in GCSE maths and science qualifications, taken from age 14, with 68 per cent getting grades A*-C in 2015 versus 65 per cent for boys.Advertisement
    Yet despite this, only around 23 per cent of entrants for the A level qualification in physics, taken from age 16, are girls. There are clearly underlying reasons behind these statistics, but Birbalsingh’s comments highlight exactly the kind of harmful stereotypes that have led many young women to disengage from these subjects.
    Research has found that, despite being very capable, many girls lack proportionate confidence in their maths and physics abilities because they feel they aren’t “naturally” clever enough.
    This is partly due to a notion within popular culture of the “effortlessly clever physicist” (whereby physics is presented as something that comes naturally, rather than something to work at), as well as the view that physics is “masculine and hard”: the very same troubling narrative that Birbalsingh was espousing.
    It is also much harder for girls to aspire to STEM careers if there are no female role models for them to look up to in their studies. Representation of inspiring female scientists could be a crucial part of raising aspirations and dismantling harmful stereotypes. However, in an analysis of double science GCSE specifications from major exam boards, only Rosalind Franklin and Mary Leakey are mentioned. By contrast, 40 male scientists’ names can be found.
    It is clear that the design of exam specifications, ingrained societal attitudes and potential gatekeeping practices in some of the UK’s schools need to be re- evaluated and addressed.
    As research from Julie Moote at University College London has highlighted, greater support for teachers is needed so that they can better understand the complex and invisible ways in which gender, class and racial inequalities are reinforced through teaching.
    Some studies also suggest that girls place a greater value on seeing the social relevance of the work they do, and engage better with a project-based approach to STEM. I can identify with this. Despite my A grades, I dropped physics and maths after GCSE. I later went on to be part of a team doing a physics-based project, where I had the opportunity to work on a real-life physics challenge. This sparked a new-found love of the subject, sadly too late to study it further.
    If ingrained attitudes about science and misplaced cultural gender stereotypes lead to systemic barriers that dissuade girls from engaging, then, as a community, we need to examine our own attitudes and failings. It is time to call out opinions like Birbalsingh’s, and create a learning environment that actively breaks down stereotypes, in order to support girls and other under-represented groups to thrive in STEM subjects.
    Maria Rossini is head of education at the British Science Association. @MariaTKRossini

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