Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    How four big industries are driving the exploitation of our oceans

    From deep-sea mines to aquaculture, bioprospecting and energy generation, humanity’s accelerating expansion into the high seas has potentially huge consequences for its health

    Humans

    20 April 2022

    By Graham Lawton
    Wind power could require 45,000 km2 of European waters by 2050Miguel Navarro/Getty Images
    BLUE BUSINESS: Power and comms
    The world’s first offshore wind farm opened off the coast of Lolland, Denmark, in 1991. Since then, the global installed capacity has grown to nearly 35 gigawatts – enough to power the entire UK – almost all of it in European (25 GW) and Chinese (9 GW) waters. Other sources of ocean renewable energy are also being eyed up, including waves, tides, currents, salinity gradients, thermal gradients and marine biomass. The EU has a target of installing 1 GW of these alternative sources by 2030, says Benjamin Lehner at the Dutch Marine Energy Centre in The Hague.
    All these figures are a drop in the ocean compared with the world’s 1840 GW of gas-fired power capacity. Yet with wind power generation getting cheaper all the time – costs declined 70 per cent between 2012 and 2021 – rapid growth looks like a foregone conclusion. The trade association Wind Europe estimates that, by 2050, Europe will have 450 GW of offshore wind.
    That brings its own challenges. It will require about 45,000 square kilometres of ocean, most of it between 11 and 22 kilometres from shore, the goldilocks zone for offshore wind. Europe has 550,000 square kilometres of this real estate in total, but more than 60 per cent is earmarked for marine protected areas, says António Sarmento at consultancy firm WavEC Offshore Renewables in Lisbon, Portugal. Building, operating and maintaining offshore wind farms can damage the seabed, while the power cables that carry electricity to shore … More

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    in Humans

    Explorer: The Last Tepui review: A thrilling trek up a remote mountain

    A suspense-filled documentary sees Free Solo’s Alex Honnold and 80-year-old ecologist Bruce Means set out to climb a remote table-top mountain deep in Guyana’s Amazon rainforest

    Humans

    20 April 2022

    By Gregory Wakeman
    Federico Pisani, part of the documentary team, on the cliff face of Weiassipu in GuyanaNational Geographic/Renan Ozturk
    Explorer: The Last Tepui
    Renan Ozturk, Drew Pulley, Taylor Rees
    Disney+Advertisement
    THOSE of you who have seen the astounding National Geographic documentary Free Solo will know just how mesmerising it can be to watch a professional climber scale the side of a mountain.
    A new documentary, Explorer: The Last Tepui, shares a lot with Free Solo, which won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Not only does it also star rock climber Alex Honnold, it shows him dangling off the side of a mountain in precarious positions that will make your stomach drop in terror.
    While his athletic feats are astounding, Honnold isn’t the most captivating character in the film. That honour goes to Bruce Means, who has spent his academic career finding and cataloguing new species throughout South America to prove to the world and its governments that the area is a biodiversity hotspot to be protected at all costs.
    In Explorer: The Last Tepui, the 80-year-old ecologist and conservationist is intent on climbing the 300-plus metres to the peak of a remote table-top mountain, or tepui, deep in Guyana’s Amazon rainforest.
    Means, Honnold, expedition leader Mark Synnott and a world-class team of climbers have to hike 56 kilometres over 10 days across increasingly treacherous terrain to reach the base of the tepui. This is a very big deal because Means has problems just bending his knees.
    Once at the tepui, team members plan to climb to the top and then pull Means up, which will allow him to explore the cliff wall for novel animal and plant species.
    Directors Taylor Rees, Renan Ozturk and Drew Pulley do a superb job of setting up the aim of the expedition, as well as the myriad difficulties that could blight it. Fully aware of the extraordinary visuals and fascinating characters that they have at their disposal, they take a step back and allow the majesty of the rainforest to take over, while giving the highly intelligent and passionate specialists room to describe what makes it so special.
    Some of the shots that Matthew Irving, director of photography, captures are awe-inspiring, and the directors also provide plenty of long, lingering views of mountains, creatures, streams and waterfalls, which allow viewers to soak up the natural beauty, listen to the sounds of the animals and get lost in the frame.
    What makes the documentary so riveting is Means’s detailed explanations as he walks with the team through the forest, which is dense with trees and vegetation. The ecologist’s positive and self-deprecating nature makes him instantly likeable, while his endless knowledge and devotion to nature and science are so contagious that they will make viewers of all ages appreciate the diversity of our environment.
    His efforts are made all the more valiant by his admission that if he makes it to the summit, it will be the culmination of his life’s work. Unsurprisingly, because of the unforgiving terrain they must cross to reach the tepui, various major obstacles soon get in the way of the party. Means’s strain at holding up the expedition because of his age and health doesn’t just make him more lovable, it injects real suspense into the documentary, which will debut on Disney+ on 22 April for Earth Day.
    The constantly changing viewpoints and potentially life-threatening issues ensure that Explorer: The Last Tepui remains compelling to the very last frame. Even though it is just 54 minutes long, you will still feel utterly exhausted, as well as inspired, by the time it is over.

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  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Humans

    What psychology is revealing about 'ghosting' and the pain it causes

    Ending a relationship by disappearing without explanation, known as “ghosting”, seems to be a distinct form of social rejection – and psychologists are discovering why it is so painful

    Humans

    20 April 2022

    By Amelia Tait
    Offwhite
    IT WAS 2015 when Jennice Vilhauer’s clients started telling her ghost stories. The Los Angeles-based psychotherapist had more than 10 years of experience helping people with their depression, anxiety and relationship issues – but suddenly, clients began telling her about a new problem, one that left them extremely distressed.
    They were victims of ghosting, where one person ends all communication with another, disappearing like a phantom. Messages are ignored and just like that, the person you had a connection with – typically a romantic partner, but sometimes a friend or colleague – chooses to disengage with no explanation. But when Vilhauer searched for more information, she found little research on this phenomenon. So she started publishing her own observations online and was soon inundated with emails from people who had been ghosted. “There’s been an enormous explosion of interest in this because it’s happening so frequently,” she says.
    Which begs the question, what is uniquely painful about ghosting? After all, it nearly always hurts when a relationship ends. Is being ghosted any more distressing in the information age than, say, in the Wild West, when your lover hopped on their horse and left you in a trail of dust without so much as a forwarding address? We are now beginning to find out, as well as building a picture of why people ghost, how quirks of the brain can make it feel worse than it ought to and how, counter-intuitively, ghosting may be getting less painful.
    Unexpected disappearance
    Back in 2015, ghosting hurt so badly because it was completely unexpected, says Vilhauer – it wasn’t something people mentally prepared for when entering a … More

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    in Humans

    How to spot Vega, the North Star of the future

    The heavens wheel above us, but at least we can rely on the North Star, aka Polaris, to provide eternal stability, right? Afraid not, says Abigail Beall

    Space

    20 April 2022

    By Abigail Beall
    Igordabari/Alamy
    ONE of the most iconic stars in the northern hemisphere is Polaris, also known as the North Star. If you can spot this star, you will always know which direction is north, because it is a steady point of light in a changing sky. No matter where you are in the northern hemisphere, it will never move. Or will it?
    The North Star hasn’t always been, and won’t always be, Polaris. At the moment, it is our North Star because of the tilt of Earth: the north pole faces the same direction in space – towards Polaris – even as Earth moves around the sun … More

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    in Humans

    Don't miss: The Velvet Queen searches for a snow leopard in wild Tibet

    New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

    Humans

    20 April 2022

    Watch
    The Velvet Queen herself – the snow leopard – comes to selected UK and Irish cinemas on 29 April, accompanied by wolves, bears, yaks, birds and the fabulous and untouched landscapes of the Tibetan plateau.

    Read
    Wild by Design by environmental historian Laura Martin examines how we ended up casting ourselves as the “managers” of wild spaces, and goes on to ask whether we can design natural places without destroying wildness.

    Watch
    The philosophy and science of the disrupted mind are explored by philosopher Noga Arikha and neuroscientist Katerina Fotopoulou in this online talk by The Royal Institution at 7pm BST on 26 April.Advertisement More

  • 125 Shares169 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    ‘Goldilocks’ stars may pose challenges for any nearby habitable planets

    If you’re an aspiring life-form, you might want to steer clear of planets around orange dwarf stars.

    Some astronomers have called these orange suns “Goldilocks stars” (SN: 11/18/09). They are dimmer and age more slowly than yellow sunlike stars, thus offering an orbiting planet a more stable climate. But they are brighter and age faster than red dwarfs, which often spew large flares. However, new observations show that orange dwarfs emit lots of ultraviolet light long after birth, potentially endangering planetary atmospheres, researchers report in a paper submitted March 29 at arXiv.org.

    Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomer Tyler Richey-Yowell and her colleagues examined 39 orange dwarfs. Most are moving together through the Milky Way in two separate groups, either 40 million or 650 million years old.

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    To Richey-Yowell’s surprise, she and her team found that the ultraviolet flux didn’t drop off from the younger orange stars to the older ones — unlike the case for yellow and red stars. “I was like, `What the heck is going on?’” says Richey-Yowell, of Arizona State University in Tempe.

    In a stroke of luck, another team of researchers supplied part of the answer. As yellow sunlike stars age, they spin more slowly, causing them to be less active and emit less UV radiation. But for orange dwarfs, this steady spin-down stalls when the stars are roughly a billion years old, astronomer Jason Lee Curtis at Columbia University and colleagues reported in 2019.

    “[Orange] stars are just much more active for a longer time than we thought they were,” Richey-Yowell says. That means these possibly not-so-Goldilocks stars probably maintain high levels of UV light for more than a billion years.

    And that puts any potential life-forms inhabiting orbiting planets on notice. Far-ultraviolet light — whose photons, or particles of light, have much more energy than the UV photons that give you vitamin D — tears molecules in a planet’s atmosphere apart. That leaves behind individual atoms and electrically charged atoms and groups of atoms known as ions. Then the star’s wind — its outflow of particles — can carry the ions away, stripping the planet of its air.

    But not all hope is lost for aspiring life-forms that have an orange dwarf sun. Prolonged exposure to far-ultraviolet light can stress planets but doesn’t necessarily doom them to be barren, says Ed Guinan, an astronomer at Villanova University in Pennsylvania who was not involved in the new work. “As long as the planet has a strong magnetic field, you’re more or less OK,” he says.

    Though far-ultraviolet light splits water and other molecules in a planet’s atmosphere, the star’s wind can’t remove the resulting ions if a magnetic field as strong as Earth’s protects them. “That’s why the Earth survived” as a life-bearing world, Guinan says. In contrast, Venus might never have had a magnetic field, and Mars lost its magnetic field early on and most of its air soon after.

    “If the planet doesn’t have a magnetic field or has a weak one,” Guinan says, “the game is over.”

    What’s needed, Richey-Yowell says, is a study of older orange dwarfs to see exactly when their UV output declines. That will be a challenge, though. The easiest way to find stars of known age is to study a cluster of stars, but most star clusters get ripped apart well before their billionth birthday (SN: 7/24/20). As a result, star clusters somewhat older than this age are rare, which means the nearest examples are distant and harder to observe. More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Crumbling planets might trigger repeating fast radio bursts

    Fragmenting planets sweeping extremely close to their stars might be the cause of mysterious cosmic blasts of radio waves.

    Milliseconds-long fast radio bursts, or FRBs, erupt from distant cosmic locales. Some of these bursts blast only once and others repeat. A new computer calculation suggests the repetitive kind could be due to a planet interacting with its magnetic host star, researchers report in the March 20 Astrophysical Journal.

    FRBs are relative newcomers to astronomical research. Ever since the first was discovered in 2007, researchers have added hundreds to the tally. Scientists have theorized dozens of ways the two different types of FRBs can occur, and nearly all theories include compact, magnetic stellar remnants known as neutron stars. Some ideas include powerful radio flares from magnetars, the most magnetic neutron stars imaginable (SN: 6/4/20). Others suggest a fast-spinning neutron star, or even asteroids interacting with magnetars (SN: 2/23/22).

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    “How fast radio bursts are produced is still up for debate,” says astronomer Yong-Feng Huang of Nanjing University in China.

    Huang and his colleagues considered a new way to make the repeating flares: interactions between a neutron star and an orbiting planet (SN: 3/5/94). Such planets can get exceedingly close to these stars, so the team calculated what might happen to a planet in a highly elliptical orbit around a neutron star. When the planet swings very close to its star, the star’s gravity pulls more on the planet than when the planet is at its farthest orbital point, elongating and distorting it. This “tidal pull,” Huang says, will rip some small clumps off the planet. Each clump in the team’s calculation is just a few kilometers wide and maybe one-millionth the mass of the planet, he adds.

    Then the fireworks start. Neutron stars spew a wind of radiation and particles, much like our own sun but more extreme. When one of these clumps passes through that stellar wind, the interaction “can produce really strong radio emissions,” Huang says. If that happens when the clump appears to pass in front of the star from Earth’s perspective, we might see it as a fast radio burst. Each burst in a repeating FRB signal could be caused by one of these clumps interacting with the neutron star’s wind during each close planet pass, he says. After that interaction, what remains of the clump drifts in orbit around the star, but away from Earth’s perspective, so we never see it again.

    Comparing the calculated bursts to two known repeaters — the first ever discovered, which repeats roughly every 160 days, and a more recent discovery that repeats every 16 days, the team found the fragmenting planet scenario could explain how often the bursts happened and how bright they were (SN: 3/2/16).

    The star’s strong gravitational “tidal” pull on the planet during each close pass might change the planet’s orbit over time, says astrophysicist Wenbin Lu of Princeton University, who was not involved in this study but who investigates possible FRB scenarios. “Every orbit, there is some energy loss from the system,” he says. “Due to tidal interactions between the planet and the star, the orbit very quickly shrinks.” So it’s possible that the orbit could shrink so fast that FRB signals wouldn’t last long enough for a chance detection, he says.

    But the orbit change could also give astronomers a way to check this scenario as an FRB source. Observing repeating FRBs over several years to track any changes in the time between bursts could narrow down whether this hypothesis could explain the observations, Lu says. “That may be a good clue.” More

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    in Humans

    People tend to believe populations are more diverse than they are

    In 12 psychological experiments with a total of 942 participants, 82 per cent overestimated the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups

    Humans

    14 April 2022

    By Jason Arunn Murugesu
    A stock image of a group of people of a range of ethnicitiesShutterstock/Rawpixel.com
    People may subconsciously overestimate the presence of individuals from minority ethnic groups, even if they belong to those groups, which could create illusions of diversity within populations.
    “Individuals from the minority group are by definition less frequent,” says Rasha Kardosh at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. “Therefore, we are more likely to notice them and so are more likely to remember their presence, and so we end up overestimating their presence.”
    Previous studies suggest people in … More