Philippa Kaur

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    in Space & Astronomy

    An early outburst portends a star’s imminent death

    A star’s death usually comes without warning. But an early sign of one star’s imminent demise hints at what happens before some stellar explosions.

    In a last hurrah before exploding, a star brightened, suggesting that it blasted some of its outer layers into space. It’s the first time scientists have spotted a pre-explosion outburst from a run-of-the-mill type of exploding star, or supernova, researchers report in the Jan. 1 Astrophysical Journal.

    Scientists have previously seen harbingers of unusual types of supernovas. But “what’s nice about this one is it’s a much more normal, vanilla … supernova that’s showing this eruption before explosion,” says astronomer Mansi Kasliwal of Caltech, who was not involved with the research.

    On September 16, 2020, scientists discovered the explosion of a star roughly 10 times as massive as the sun, located about 120 million light-years away. Thankfully, telescopes that regularly survey a swath of the sky, as part of an effort called the Young Supernova Experiment, had been observing the star well before it detonated. About 130 days before the explosion, the star brightened, the researchers found, the start of a pre-explosion eruption.

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    The final explosion was a commonplace type of stellar detonation called a type 2 supernova, which occurs when the core of an aging star collapses. Precursors to such explosions probably hadn’t been seen before because the early eruptions are faint. For this supernova, scientists had observations of the star sensitive enough to pick up the relatively weak eruption.

    Previous post-explosion observations of such supernovas have hinted that the stars slough off layers before death. In 2021, astronomers reported signs of a supernova’s shock wave plowing into material that the star had expelled (SN: 11/2/21). A similar sign of cast-off stellar material was also found in the new study.

    Scientists aren’t sure exactly what causes such early outbursts. They could be the result of events happening deep within a star, for example, as the star burns different types of fuel as it nears death. If more such events are found, scientists may eventually be able to predict which stars will go boom, and when.

    Precursor outbursts are a sign that stars experience inner turmoil before exploding, says study coauthor Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “The main message that we are getting from the universe is that these stars are really knowing that the end is coming.” More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Astronomers identified a second possible exomoon

    Some of the same researchers who found the first purported exomoon now say that they’ve found another.

    Dubbed Kepler 1708 b i, the satellite has a radius about 2.6 times that of Earth, and circles a Jupiter-sized exoplanet that orbits its parent star about once every two Earth years, the team reports January 13 in Nature Astronomy. That sunlike star lies about 5,700 light-years from Earth.

    To find this nugget, the team sorted through a database of more than 4,000 exoplanets detected by NASA’s now-retired Kepler space telescope. Because large planets orbiting far from their parent star are more likely to have moons large enough to be detected, the team focused on a subset of 70 exoplanets.

    Each of these planets is between half and twice the size of Jupiter. They all either take more than 400 Earth days to orbit their star or have an estimated average surface temperature less than 300 kelvins (around 27° Celsius), slightly higher than that of Earth.

    After further screening, including tossing out exoplanets that don’t have near-circular orbits (which are statistically less likely to host moons), the team identified a strong candidate for an exomoon. It, like its host planet, caused detectable dimming of the parent star’s light when moving across the face of the star.

    Discovery of the first possible exomoon, dubbed Kepler 1625 b, has faced a lot of skepticism (SN: 4/30/19). Both proposed exomoons need to be confirmed by further observations by other instruments, such as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, the team notes (SN: 10/6/21).

    But fresh observations will need to wait: The newfound exomoon candidate and its planet won’t pass in front of the parent star again until March 24, 2023, the researchers calculate. More

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    in Humans

    Why everyone should learn some sign language

    By Bencie Woll
    Simone Rotella
    Not so long ago, deaf children were punished in the UK for using sign language in the classroom. Recounting his experience in the 1960s, one deaf person told one of my colleagues many years later: “I had a lot of punishments for signing in classrooms… One morning at assembly, I was caught again, then ordered to stand at the front of the class. The headmistress announced that I looked like a monkey [and that she would] put me in a cage in the zoo so the people will laugh at a stupid boy in the cage.”
    Thankfully, experiences like this are no longer as common. Sign languages have not only survived, but are now flourishing – so much so that many more people are getting the chance to learn them, which should be celebrated.Advertisement
    British Sign Language (BSL) is used by tens of thousands of people in the UK, including around 90,000 deaf signers. For some of them, such as children with deaf parents, it is the first language they acquire. In the US, more undergraduate and graduate students have enrolled on courses in American Sign Language (ASL) than German each year since 2013.
    Currently, the UK Department for Education has a draft BSL curriculum for England on its desk for GCSE students (14 to 16-year-olds), which could come into effect later this year. This would make it a modern language option alongside French, German, Spanish and Chinese. Both Scotland and Wales have BSL curricula in the works too.
    Elsewhere, sign languages are gaining both recognition as official languages and a place on the national curriculum. South Africa has hired 60 instructors to teach South African Sign Language as part of a state-run adult literacy programme, and Jamaican Sign Language was introduced into Jamaica’s national curriculum earlier this month.
    That sign languages are thriving should be welcomed for many reasons, including the cognitive benefits that learning them brings. Several studies have found that hearing people who learn sign languages perform better in tasks requiring spatial transformation abilities – which you might use when taking down directions. Space is an integral part of the grammar of a sign language, with verbs, nouns and pronouns using the space in which they are located as part of their meaning. A series of experiments by Mary Lou Vercellotti at Ball State University in Indiana also found that adult ASL students have enhanced face-processing skills, which are essential to reading emotions.
    Learning a sign language can be enlightening, too. In a year-long study of preschool children by Amy Brereton at Trinity Washington University in Washington DC, hearing children who were learning ASL attained a greater appreciation of cultural diversity, as determined via classroom observations and interviews.
    Part of the beauty of learning languages – both spoken and sign – is that you don’t need to be fluent to experience the benefits. In a recent British Academy project I led with my colleague Li Wei at University College London, we highlighted how learning languages shapes the mental functions you use in a range of other fields, from your social awareness to your creativity and grasp of mathematics.
    Sign languages today are rich with communities and culture. Up until the 1980s, many deaf people essentially had to exist in the 19th century: no telephones, no radio, no television. But in many countries, social clubs, networks and advocacy groups for deaf signers have given rise to a diverse range of vernaculars. With the internet and social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, content creators are now sharing these with the world, bringing greater awareness and respect – and increased interest in learning these languages.
    Bencie Woll is a professor of deaf studies at University College London

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    in Humans

    Emotional review: A new take on the importance of feelings

    By Gege Li

    HAVE you ever become angry about something that, in hindsight, had more to do with the fact that you were having a bad day? Most of us have had moments like this, where we let our emotions get the better of us or allow them to influence our decisions. It isn’t necessarily ideal, and we often assume that the involvement of emotions – intended or otherwise – is always detrimental to our ability to make good choices.
    Not so, says physicist and author Leonard Mlodinow in his book Emotional: The new thinking about feelings. He argues that while it might seem like getting emotional is a bad idea, our feelings actually play an essential role in shaping our thoughts and decisions, helping us to react flexibly to situations and motivating us to pursue our goals.
    Drawing on the latest research, Mlodinow guides us through the ways in which neuroscientists are changing their understanding of human feelings – what he calls “the emotion revolution”.
    One of the breakthroughs in the science of emotion is the finding that rational thought alone isn’t enough to process the masses of information that we are exposed to in our environment. To think effectively, we also need to feel. “Emotion is not at war with rational thought but rather a tool of it,” writes Mlodinow.
    This challenges two well-worn assumptions laid out long ago by some of history’s greatest thinkers, such as Plato: that the human mind can be split into rational and non-rational parts, reason and emotion, and that harnessing the former while taming the latter holds the key to success and making good decisions.
    But now that we have the technology to probe the human brain more deeply than ever before, modern science is uncovering the complex neural dynamics that are involved in generating our emotions, and in turn reshaping our knowledge of their importance.
    Mlodinow explores how and why feelings evolved in the first place, arising initially from purely reflexive behaviours to environmental stimuli before the “upgrade” of emotion occurred, which provided a more flexible and effective way for organisms to react to the challenges they encountered.
    The research also illustrates the universality of emotion and its benefits – scientists have seen emotion-guided behaviours at play in not only humans, but also rodents, fruit flies and bees.
    Towards the end of the book, readers are given the chance to determine and reflect on their own emotional profile, using various questionnaires that were developed for research into specific feelings like happiness and anxiety. This is one of the more provocative elements of the book: the idea that we can gain power over our emotions by learning to understand and navigate them better. It is a tantalising concept that Mlodinow backs up with numerous studies and anecdotes. He also gives advice on how we can better manage our own emotions and gain more control over our lives.
    Though the message of controlling your feelings to ultimately improve your well-being is an important one, it did get repetitive at times. What’s more, regular readers of New Scientist or of popular neuroscience in general may find the research and the solutions Mlodinow offers, such as meditation and exercise, to be a little predictable.
    Emotional may occasionally seem like a self-help book, but it is nevertheless an illuminating read that deals well with the complexity of emotion, the emerging science behind it and the fascinating workings of the brain itself. It might just help you remain calm and collected, even on a bad day.

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    in Humans

    The Power of Fun review: A user guide to getting more fun in your life

    By Elle Hunt

    CHASTENED by the sight of her newborn baby’s face lit up by the blue light of her phone, Catherine Price set about limiting the time she spent in front of screens. The journalist and her husband stopped mindlessly scrolling on social media and started taking 24-hour “digital sabbaths”.
    By cutting down on her screen time, Price found that she had gained hours in her day – but now, she struggled to know how to pass them. What was missing from her life, she realised, was fun. But what was fun, if not bingeing on Netflix and playing games on her phone?
    Price has form in turning “personal issues into professional projects”. Her previous book, 2018’s How to Break Up With Your Phone, was the result of her attempts to quell her overuse. With that problem more or less in hand, she decided to investigate what fun was, so that she could fill her life with more of it. The result is The Power of Fun, a practical guide with lessons for all of us, especially as we live through a decidedly not-fun pandemic.
    This new book is a kind of spiritual sequel to How to Break Up With Your Phone, providing answers to the question of how to replace an all-encompassing habit.
    Price comes up with a definition of the most satisfying type of fun, what she calls “True Fun”: typically a serendipitous experience that brings together “playfulness, connection and flow”, adding a dose of much-needed meaningful engagement to our lives.
    It is this confluence of factors, Price argues, that distinguishes the most exhilarating, restorative fun from something fleeting and somewhat superficial, like getting a pedicure or going out to a bar.
    That said, less-sophisticated fun isn’t just a frivolous activity that we can simply do without. It, too, can serve as an antidote to stress, making it vital for our physical and psychological well-being.
    Price gives examples of True Fun from her own life, such as singing in the car with friends and learning guitar and playing in a group. “There is a reason that our moments of True Fun stand out in our memories: True Fun makes us feel alive,” she writes.
    As for how to get more of it, Price found it isn’t as simple as just spending less time on screens, or trying to squeeze more activities into schedules that are already stretched thin. In fact, it often involves doing less: prioritising rest or sleep, for instance. Or it might mean coming up with a plan to ensure that household tasks or childcare are shared evenly to make room for moments of pleasure and serendipity.
    Price draws from the science of positive psychology in her quest to have more fun, but rigorous research takes a back seat to her own exploration and the findings of her Fun Squad: a global group of about 1500 people that Price recruited from her newsletter subscribers and invited to share their fun-seeking exploits.
    Including less from this somewhat self-selecting group and adding more on new psychological research would have helped to bolster the book’s scientific standing. However, this might have come at the expense of its practical relevance. The strength of The Power of Fun is that it is approachable, anecdotal and inviting. After two years of living through a pandemic, many of us have spent more than enough time trying to force fun into our lives (Zoom quiz anyone?).
    “True Fun’ is typically a serendipitous experience that brings together playfulness, connection and flow”
    The success of Price’s self-experimentation provides motivation to at least try to seek out more activities that we actually take pleasure in. And her main point, that we should clear space in our lives for the things that truly mean something to us, is a sound one.
    Price quotes the author Michael Lewis: “If you get in the habit of life not being fun, you start to not even notice.” Once you have noticed and, more importantly, taken action, there is plenty of fun out there for the taking. Why waste your time on anything else?

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    in Humans

    Goliath review: Tourism to a ruined Earth explores the idea of home

    By Sally Adee

    Even a post-apocalyptic Earth retains a certain charm for humankindgremlin/Getty Images
    Goliath
    Tochi Onyebuchi
    TordotcomAdvertisement

    SCI-FI dystopias of a ruined Earth are thick on the ground these days, filled with the wreckage of climate change: drowned continents, great extinctions and air that is no longer safe to breathe. In the more hopeful, people leave the planet in search of another world where they can start again, with lessons learned and a determination not to repeat the same mistakes.
    In Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath, human nature is eternal. So, while the rich predictably leave for pristine space colonies, abandoning those who can’t afford to escape, there is money to be made from tourism to the ruins left behind. Some tourists find themselves captivated by the communities that have emerged, and decide to return to Earth. Gentrification ensues.
    The premise is wry and au courant. In a lesser writer’s hands, it could lead to lazy and cynical caricatures, but Onyebuchi uses it only as a jumping off point into a deeper examination of the idea of home, and what we will do to get there.
    Onyebuchi started out writing sci-fi for young adults before reaching a wider audience with the multi-award gobbling novella Riot Baby in 2020. He has a master’s degree in screenwriting, which is on vivid display in his hypnotic descriptions of Goliath’s two new human worlds.
    We explore these through the eyes of several characters, including colony-dweller Jonathan, who looks out into star-spangled black space from a window in a sterile space station straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. On Earth, we meet Sydney, who watches a dandelion’s seeds get nibbled away by wind under a poisoned red sky.
    “By detailing the two worlds, Onyebuchi makes it obvious why people start yearning for Earth”
    The style is more than matched by the substance of the story, in which Onyebuchi takes his time to explore the main themes. The gentrification issue, for example, is treated not as an easy punchline but as a way into deeper questions about what we need.
    When Jonathan travels from the colonies to Earth, he tours destroyed homes looking for one to fix up. Onyebuchi shows us what he starts with – a shell of a house filled with geological layers of detritus. Then, months later, Jonathan is accepted into the community, which allows him to connect to the lone cable still bringing electricity to the neighbourhood. His wonder and joy at something so ordinary as a working light switch is infectious, especially after the technological marvels he has been taking for granted in the colonies.
    By detailing the contrasting textures of the two worlds, Onyebuchi makes it obvious why colony-dwellers start yearning for Earth. Home inspires such longing that people living in the clean, metallic colonies pay handsomely for individual bricks to be salvaged from demolished houses on Earth and sent into space. They fight on auction sites for tiny cacti.
    Back on Earth, there are different tensions. Returning residents bring back things that Earth’s citizens were only too happy to see the back of, not least social inequality. Even in space, the richest live in the part of the space station with a view of the galaxies, while everyone else faces the unrecyclable detritus – including dead bodies – that surrounds the colonies in a ring.
    What will the prodigal Jonathans bring back to Earth apart from their longing for home? And will the people they left behind be interested in anything they have to offer?
    Sally also recommends…

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    in Humans

    Don't Miss: The Anomaly, a mind-bending French bestseller

    Read
    Spark is medical physicist Timothy Jorgensen’s story of electricity as an essential force in biological life. It features tales of game-changing historical discoveries and the latest uses of electricity in medicine.
    blickwinkel/Alamy
    Watch
    The Case for Conservation Optimism is made by conservationist Martin Harper in this online talk from the Linnean Society of London at 6pm GMT on 20 January. We can prevent extinctions, he argues, if we take the right action now.Advertisement

    Read
    The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier sold a million copies and won the Prix Goncourt in its original French-language edition. Now translated, it is an ingenious sci-fi thriller about an Air France flight that enters a storm and is changed forever.

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    in Humans

    Not so lightweight: Hamsters handle their drink better than elephants

    Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

    Humans

    12 January 2022

    Josie Ford
    Boozing hamsters
    Feedback has a soft spot for hamsters, whose hoarding and nesting behaviours are similar to our own. Our feeling of oneness only increases with an article in The Atlantic forwarded to us by Peter Hamer: “You have no idea how hard it is to get a hamster drunk”.
    Hamsters have a high tolerance for strong alcohol, we read, scoring low on a special scale of falling over sideways no matter how much they imbibe. We wonder how the statistics are skewed if you’re just going round and round on a wheel at the time, but nevertheless we add hamsters to our pile, accumulated over aeons, of animals that science says can take their booze.
    This list includes bonobos, chimpanzees and bats, which is just as well, because getting entangled with an inebriated bat is a thought that doesn’t bear much thinking about. It most definitely doesn’t include cows, horses, rampaging elephants and the cedar waxwing bird. Their frequent collisions with fences and glass windows in the Los Angeles area were shown in 2012 to be down to the fruit of the Brazilian pepper tree fermenting in their internal food storage pouches.Advertisement
    Don’t try that at home. This being Dry January, we burrow deeper into our extensive piling system and root out a 1995 paper from the journal Physiology & Behavior that we were saving for bedding material. Entitled “Tomato juice, chocolate drink, and other fluids suppress volitional drinking of alcohol in the female Syrian golden hamster”, it provides a way to get your hamster off the wheel and onto the wagon: ply it with calorie-rich hot chocolate. We rarely say no to that, either.
    What’s in a name?
    “I know it’s a bit early to get up this year, but nominative determinism won’t go away just because you’re having a lie-in,” writes Mike Egan from County Meath in Ireland, ignoring the squeaking of our treadmill. We have only ever expressed that as a hope, Mike, not an expectation.
    Elizabeth Economy is a senior adviser at the US Department of Commerce, he writes. Others point out that Mark Rocket is the chief executive of Kea Aerospace based in New Zealand, and duck lover Alan Gosling was named last week as the first person known to have contracted bird flu in the UK. Vegetation of the Peak District is a book passably reviewed by Nature on publication in 1913 that remarkably appears still to be in print, authored by C. E. Moss. Our sincere thanks to all as ever.
    Big in Basingstoke
    A tweet from Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council sent in by Gwynneth Page indicates that we may have followers in that jewel of northern Hampshire. “Our street cleansing team have been sweeping leaves from the borough’s streets as part of our annual leaf clearance schedule,” they announced on 5 January. “Since October, the team have collected 560 tonnes of leaves – the equivalent to 112 adult elephants!”
    Gwynneth confesses difficulty in visualising a pile of leaves equal to an elephant in weight. Us too, but we reckon that, spread out thinly, the whole lot would cover an area about the size of Basingstoke.
    Pitch perfect
    How much is that in football pitches? Courtesy, in a convoluted way, of an exchange of letters about measurement standards in the Financial Times drawn to our attention by Michael Zehse, we find ourselves consulting the The FA Guide to Pitch and Goalpost Dimensions for a steer.
    If that sounds like fun, it is, revealing a line-up of recommended football pitch sizes ranging from 40 by 30 yards for the little ‘uns to 110 by 70 yards for the fully sized. Pre-revolutionary units still reign supreme in this corner of Merrie Olde England. We make that a full factor 6.4 range in football pitch sizes, which is a satisfyingly variable measurement standard. Just don’t complain about shifting the goalposts, they can be anything from 12 to 24 feet apart.
    Ashes to ashes…
    Congratulations to “Huntingdon in Bloom” – the Cambridgeshire town has received an Outstanding commendation in the Green Solutions category of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Community Awards 2021. Our thanks to Ralph Platten for pointing out that “of particular note is the recycling of heat generated by the UK’s first electric crematorium to warm a glasshouse that will be used to propagate and grow plants for the town’s flowerbeds, containers and community projects”. Charming.
    Elementary, again
    “And finally” is a phrase that strikes fear into the hearts of UK TV news viewers, indicating the imminent arrival of Whimsy. So, and finally, Dave Hawke from Devizes, UK, wins some form of kudos, not just for rocking one of the few English place names not stressed on its first syllable (Penzance; Carlisle; the -hamptons; feel free to go on your own mental journey), but for a late-breaking reply to our call for elementary names (11 December 2021).
    He introduces us to the Um siblings, Ray D, Barry, (H)erbi, Ceri, Reni, Ruby and Moly B. D., “lastly not to forget Uncle Nick Hall”. Thank you, Dave, although if you’re looking for Pseudo Names, it is Private Eye you’re after. But frankly it’s Dry January, and we’ll do anything for laughs.
    Got a story for Feedback?
    Send it to feedback@newscientist.com or New Scientist, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TTConsideration of items sent in the post will be delayed More