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

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

    Humans

    11 May 2022

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

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    Evidence finally collated of toads mating with things they shouldn’t

    Josie Ford
    Toad in the hole
    If we are looking a little lorn this week, with our mouth opening and closing to little effect, it is principally because we are staring at “Finding love in a hopeless place: A global database of misdirected amplexus in anurans”. This is a new paper in the journal Ecology by Filipe Serrano and his colleagues at the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil. No amount of science words can gloss over the fact that it amounts to a spreadsheet of all the instances recorded in the scientific literature in the past century of frogs attempting to mate with things that they shouldn’t.
    It can’t be easy being an amphibian, as evidenced by the touching – in a very real, excessive sense – story recently reported in this magazine of male Santa Marta harlequin toads in Colombia that cling to females’ backs for up to five months in hope of mating (23 April, p 19).
    The new database conveniently tags misdirected encounters with hour, month, year and geographical location. “We recorded a total of 282 interspecific amplexus, 46 necrophiliac amplexus and 50 amplexus with objects or non-amphibian species, with USA and Brazil being the countries with the highest number of records,” the authors report.Advertisement
    “Why?” asks a colleague. Ah, well, if we knew why we were doing science in the first place, that wouldn’t be science, would it?
    Broken-down wind
    Many of us have a special place we go when we want to think. In Feedback’s case, we are often accompanied by Think, a journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy that promises “philosophy for everyone”.
    We think it may be getting a little too Everyman with a contribution in the latest issue entitled “The metaphysics of farts”. If the last item brought the sound of the barrel scraping, listen to us now drill right through.
    What is a fart? An act, that of breaking wind, or a thing, the resultant smell? Author Brian Capra tackles this question head on, highlighting contradictions between the “essential-bum-origin” and “phenomenological” views that, he submits, mean both can’t be true.
    Via a thought experiment asking if two people fart in a lift, how many farts there are, and the obvious answer – does it matter? – he concludes that a fart-thing must proceed from a fart-act, but a fart-act doesn’t necessarily produce a fart-thing, and, so, “we are led to an outlook similar to Descartes’s view of the mind: on the phenomenological view, the essence of a fart is given to us in our olfactory experience”.
    Desfartes, as a nameless colleague supplies indelicately. Ignore them, dear readers: this sort of thing is what makes philosophy and thinking such valuable activities. Now, could someone open that door? It is closer than two toads in the mating season in here.
    Got my goat
    We note in passing – noiselessly, of course – that the same author wrote an article in Philosophy Now that uses elementary principles of model logic to prove that everything is a goat. For those still asking “why?”, we merely note the goat’s genus is Capra, and there may be more than a hint of solipsism in the argument.
    On a roll
    We would personally prefer it if everything were cake. Our thanks to the very, very many of you who provided ever so slightly muffled feedback on our recent item on legal definitions of cake (30 April). Space fortunately does permit us to delve into the details, suffice to say that the rigour with which you treat the subject convinces us that Feedback is all one happy family with shared values and priorities.
    We particularly savoured Liz Tucker’s tangential mention of a talk she went to on the history of the Lyons tea-and-cake empire that was a feature of the British landscape for many years, which stated that, at one time, the company produced 35 miles of Swiss roll a week. This conjures a mental image of a truly majestic, if slow-moving, machine. It prompts us to ask “How do you make a Swiss roll?”, to which we are sure you can supply the punchline.
    Like a lead…
    Carl Zetie is perplexed by the appearance in his Facebook feed of an advertisement from a software company called Zeplin, whose corporate logo is an airship of almost that name. “Companies ship 20% faster using Zeplin,” it promises. Historically speaking, this seems an odd choice of corporate metaphor, and we do hope there is no crashing and burning on arrival.
    Talking tough
    Those were unsettling times, as are these. So it is good to know that the defence of the realm is in no-nonsense hands, as per a tweet from the University Royal Naval Unit Edinburgh, sent to us by Ceri Brown. “Our first training evening after Easter was a very detailed and informative brief from the Defence Nuclear Organisation on the UK Nuclear Deterrent. Thank you to Captain Tough and his team for the briefing.” With that exemplar of The Name Thing That Shan’t be Mentioned, and to employ a military phrase whose correct usage has generated lively debate from you before (3 April, 24 April and 8 May 2021), it is, from this Feedback, over and out.
    Got a story for Feedback?
    You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

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

    State laws could restrict abortion in large parts of the US, and other reproductive healthcare offerings may be at stake if Roe v Wade is overturned

    Humans

    11 May 2022

    By Dana G. Smith
    Activists demonstrating in front of the US Supreme Court on 3 MayWin McNamee/Getty Images
    THE US Supreme Court appears to be on the brink of repealing Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that protects the right to an abortion in the country. Should the seminal case be overturned, it will be left to each state to decide whether abortion is legal for its residents.
    According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research group, 13 states have so-called trigger laws ready that would effectively ban all abortions as soon as the ruling … More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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    Privileged people misjudge effects of pro-equality policies on them

    By Carissa Wong
    Large houses by a lake in Orlando, FloridaEdwin Remsberg/Getty Images
    People from privileged groups may misperceive equality-boosting policies as harmful to them, even if they would actually benefit.
    Previous studies have found that advantaged people often don’t support interventions that redistribute their resources to others who are disadvantaged, in zero-sum scenarios where there are limited resources.
    Now, researchers have explored the degree to which people from advantaged groups think equality-promoting policies would harm their access to resources, in scenarios where the strategies would benefit or have no effect on their group, while bolstering the resources of a disadvantaged group.Advertisement
    Derek Brown at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a series of studies involving a total of more than 4000 volunteers.
    In one study, they presented white people who weren’t Hispanic with policies that didn’t affect their own advantaged group and benefited a disadvantaged group that they did not belong to – people with disabilities, those who had committed a crime in the past, members of a racial minority group or women. Importantly, the team told participants that resources – in the form of jobs or money – were unlimited.
    For example, one policy would direct more money to mortgage loans for Latino homebuyers without limiting how many mortgage loans were available for white people.
    Participants were then asked to rank how they thought the policy would affect the advantaged group’s access to resources on a scale from greatly harmful to greatly beneficial. The team found that, on average, advantaged people perceived equality-boosting policies as harmful to their resource access, even though they were told that resources were boundless.
    “We find that advantaged members misperceived these policies as a sacrifice to their group, even when that’s not the case,” says Brown.

    The researchers then asked participants to consider a win-win scenario involving equality-promoting policies that benefited both the disadvantaged and advantaged groups – but the latter to a lesser extent. People were also asked to consider inequality-enhancing policies that would reduce access to resources for everyone.
    In this case, the team found that most advantaged people thought equality-enhancing policies with benefits for all would be more harmful to them than inequality-enhancing polices that came at a cost to the advantaged group.
    “We thought, maybe if we make a win-win or mutual-benefit situation, then maybe [advantaged people] will see the equality-enhancing policies as helpful. But they didn’t,” says Brown.
    Advantaged people tended to see equality-promoting policies as less harmful to their resource access if they benefitted people who were disadvantaged but who shared an identity with them. For example, white participants generally thought they would lose less from a policy that directed relatively more money to disadvantaged white people, compared with a policy that gave disadvantaged Black people the same benefits.
    “Advantaged people saw these policies more accurately when we made salient a disparity within their own group versus one that occurs between different groups,” says Brown. “This suggests that when we identify ourselves with a certain group, and see a disparity occurring within our group, we are motivated to reduce that in-group disparity.”

    In another experiment, the researchers asked a diverse group of participants to take a bogus personality test and then assigned them into a made-up advantaged group. Again, they found that people tended to misperceive equality-promoting policies as harmful even when they benefitted the advantaged group. This suggests that anyone at an advantage – for any reason – may misperceive beneficial equality-boosting policies as harmful.
    “It’s pretty troubling what we found. [But] I think people have the capacity to believe in these policies. And I think there’s a way forward, we just have to find it,” says Brown.
    Education could help to tackle inequalities by making people more aware of this tendency to misperceive equality-boosting policies that would actually benefit them, says Brown.
    “It was an ambitious series of studies that did an excellent job of ruling out alternative explanations,” says Dan Meegan at the University of Guelph, Canada. “The work paints a pretty dark picture for those trying to convince people to support policies designed to reduce intergroup inequality. The authors gave their participants every opportunity to see that helping disadvantaged groups need not come at the expense of advantaged groups, to no avail.”
    “In terms of reliability and importance, this research checks all the boxes. What I would say is the fact that [the findings] aren’t surprising is alarming to me,” says Shai Davidai at Columbia University in New York.
    Further work will need to establish if the same behaviour applies to people outside the US, although Brown and Davidai think it probably will.
    “My own and others’ work has already shown that zero-sum beliefs replicate in many cultural contexts and across different nations, and I would not be surprised if this is the case for the current work as well,” says Davidai.
    Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2385

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    Glitterati review: Compelling sci-fi satire with hints of Black Mirror

    By Sally Adee

    Memories are subject to the same pressures as fashion in Glitterationurdongel/Getty Images
    Eversion
    Alastair Reynolds
    GollanczAdvertisement

    YOUR autobiographical memory can’t be trusted, and science has determined that this isn’t a bug, but a feature. The remembered stories from which we braid our identity bend and swerve to serve the narrative needs of our circumstances because our minds happily trade veracity for coherence and narrative. This strange space between recollection and construction is explored in two mesmerising books out this month.
    Eversion by Alastair Reynolds concerns itself with how this constant process of layering and recasting can create meaning and purpose in the most desolate circumstances. The story starts on a ship dodging icebergs in the North Sea during the 17th century, and unfolds into a virtuoso genre-hopping puzzle.
    It isn’t every day you get to experience a perfect collision of the Romantic macabre of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft with The Usual Suspects and 2001: A Space Odyssey. So much of the book’s joy is working out which bits are real and which are misdirection on the way to unlocking the final mystery. Trust me, you don’t want this spoiled by more plot details.
    It is no spoiler to say that Reynolds shows how such stories can be moulded to make us better humans. But memories can also be weaponised to keep our identities in stupefied thrall to capitalism, and this darker aspect gets an ample airing in Oliver Langmead’s Glitterati.
    The star of this speculative satire is Simone. He is a fashionite, a rarefied type of super influencer whose every whim is lavishly catered for and documented by magazines read only by fashionites. For example, during a brief hospitalisation, he spies a regular proletarian gown among the haute couture medical gowns available to him. He complains and the item is summarily burned.
    Simone and his fabulous friends and enemies are suspended in a vicious, never-ending battle for status, fought through clothes, make-up and accessories, sometimes leaving literal fashion victims in their wake. This sense of dangerously pointy high stakes beneath the ruffles and froth recalls writers like Edith Wharton, whose stories dissect the mores of the very rich who lived and schemed during the so-called Gilded Age of the 19th-century US.
    Beyond a deft, wicked skewering of influencer culture, Langmead inhabits his protagonists’ fetishistic delight with the material world. His deliciously sensory prose puts you inside that colossal closet, running your fingers through the gossamer folds of a spider-silk gown.
    Glitterati starts like puff pastry, a comedy of manners stuffed with buffoonery and characters whose trivial, self-inflicted miseries you can chortle at with abandon. But it ends like a shot of Black Mirror.
    Simone’s lifestyle isn’t without costs. Along with the right clothes, he needs the right memories. And that is when a darker reality emerges, showing why these fluffy idiots can’t care about anything more than matching their outrageously expensive outfits to their false eyelashes.
    At this point, it becomes clear that rather than being privileged scions, people like Simone are just pretty cogs in a vast apparatus that grinds humanity into capital. The reader begins to sympathise and have a stake in Simone’s ability to escape – and perhaps also starts to wonder which forces bend our own (flawed) memories.
    Sally also recommends…

    The This
    Adam Roberts
    Gollancz

    Memory also plays a starring role in The This by Adam Roberts, but the utility of an individual’s identity itself is called into question in this mash-up of the sum of Nick Bostrom’s worst fears in Superintelligence and the alien weirdness of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

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    Don't Miss: In the Air explores long-held concerns about air quality

    Horniman Museum and Gardens
    Visit
    In the Air at London’s Wellcome Collection traces concerns about air quality back to the 17th century, revealing how the air we breathe influences well-being. The exhibition opens on 19 May.

    Read
    Chimpanzee Memoirs, edited by Stephen Ross and Lydia Hopper, tells the personal stories of chimpanzee experts and shows the effort that has gone into understanding and saving our chimp relatives in forests, sanctuaries and zoos.Advertisement
    Shutterstock/Enna8982
    Watch
    How the science of dogs changed the science of life captivates zoologist Jules Howard. His talk, which streams from London’s Royal Institution on 12 May at 7pm BST, explores what we know about dogs.

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    Remarkable images bring water's myriad meanings to life

    This still from The Boat People, a film shot in the Philippines following five children as they travel by sea, collecting objects, is one of many evocative artworks on display at Seattle Art Museum’s exhibition Our Blue Planet: Global visions of water

    Humans

    4 May 2022

    By Gege Li
    Tuan Andrew Nguyen 2021. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York
    Seattle Art Museum
    FROM its pure essence to its significance in culture and society, water takes on rousing and inventive forms in these artworks from Our Blue Planet: Global visions of water, an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in Washington. The show explores one of the world’s most crucial resources through more than 80 artistic interpretations.
    Raqib ShawAdvertisement
    At top is a still from The Boat People by Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Shot in the Philippines, the film follows five children as they travel by sea, collecting objects. Above is The Garden of Earthly Delights V, Raqib Shaw’s mixed-media depiction of mystical underwater creatures, inspired by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.
    Claude Zervas
    Adrienne Elise Tarver
    Above shows: Nooksack, a sculpture by Claude Zervas made from wire and cold-cathode fluorescent lamps that mimics the form of the Nooksack river in Washington state; Mirage 24 by Adrienne Elise Tarver, part of her watercolour series of nude women lounging and swimming in tropical environments; and below, Mask of Kumugwe’ (Chief of the Sea), an alder and red-cedar-bark mask made around 1880 by the Kwakwaka’wakw Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, whose culture and traditions are centred on the natural environment.
    Mask of Ḱumugwe’ (Chief of the Sea), ca. 1880 Native American
    Our Blue Planet is on display at the Seattle Art Museum until 30 May.

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