Humans

By Gege Li

Getty Images/Cavan Images

Podcast
Inventive Podcast
Overtone ProductionsAdvertisement

PICTURE an engineer and you may well imagine a white, university-educated man in a hard hat with a roll of blueprints under his arm.
The Inventive Podcast aims to flip these conceptions by highlighting inspirational and influential engineers who don’t fit this constricted, outdated mould.
Host Trevor Cox, an acoustic engineer at the University of Salford, UK, chats with a different guest in each episode before asking a writer to come up with an original story inspired by those conversations. That makes the podcast itself an innovation of sorts, in that it marries fact and fiction to demonstrate there is far more to engineering than people might think.
It is a welcome addition considering the lack of diversity and uptake that still plagues engineering. In the UK, only 12 per cent of engineers are women, and 186,000 new engineers are needed each year until 2024 to make up for the country’s skills shortfall in the profession.
Reassuringly, the podcast’s first three episodes feature women, the first of whom is electronics engineer and activist Shrouk El-Attar. Part of her day job involves designing and developing technologies for women’s health, including silent breast pumps and a pelvic floor trainer. El-Attar also performs as a belly-dancing drag king by night to challenge societal conventions and raise money for the LGBTQ+ community.
As a woman and asylum seeker from Egypt, El-Attar knows first-hand how being denied opportunities, such as going to university, can cause engineering to suffer – not only by being less diverse, but also at the expense of innovation. “How many amazing, creative technologies are we missing out on today as a society because we’re telling these people with the amazing ideas that they don’t belong here?” she asks.
In response to El-Attar’s work and her account of being inspired into engineering by the “magic” people living inside her TV as a child, writer Tania Hershman incorporates poetry to create a thought-provoking story that reflects El-Attar’s life. It uses the idea of a human being as a circuit board and emphasises the importance of language.
In the second episode, Cox meets Roma Agrawal, a structural engineer who was part of the team that designed The Shard, one of London’s most iconic landmarks. Agrawal also wrote the book Built: The hidden stories behind our structures. She did so to encourage people to become engineers by showing that it is “so utterly an intrinsic part of humans and the way we’ve lived right from the beginning”, she tells Cox.
“ShroukEl-Attar also performs as a belly-dancing drag king by night to challenge societal conventions”
The accompanying story by C. M. Taylor draws on Agrawal’s self-confessed love for concrete (“I have been known to stroke concrete – I love feeling it!”), as a mysterious figure known as the Night Builder begins to secretly create colossal concrete structures in cities.
Cox’s third guest is aerospace engineer Sophie Robinson, who works on a type of drone-inspired aircraft called eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing), with the idea of developing widely accessible air taxis that cut road congestion and carbon emissions.
Robinson is also an avid swimmer, having once swam across the English Channel, a fact that is at the centre of novelist Tony White’s story about an engineer who grapples with the ethical dilemmas of her job while on a cold water swimming trip.
As you would expect from the experience of the personnel, the podcast is built on strong foundations. Cox asks perceptive questions that get to the heart of what it means to be an engineer, as well as helping to flesh out the details of the work itself, while each writer’s take on the interviews adds an interesting and different element to the show.
The guests’ enthusiasm is also infectious. “Being an engineer is my superpower,” replies El-Attar, when Cox asks her which superpower she would like. “I hope people see that and that it can be your superpower too.”

More on these topics: More

Josie Ford
Solar system agronomy
Could we grow endangered plants on other planets? We pause and consider this question. No.
Still, since this query is the subject line of a PR email from an online flower-delivery service, handed to us by a colleague with a pair of tongs and a disparaging look, we find it worthy of further consideration. Even more so since we are promised conclusions reached “using research and working with a designer”.
“Today, nearly 40% of the world’s plants are endangered, according to a report from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew,” we read. Sad, sad science fact. But never fear, once we have destroyed Earth’s ecosystems, a bright, green future exists elsewhere in the solar system, at least in the world of whirly-eyed PR.Advertisement
“As the soil on Mars has double the amount of iron than soil on planet earth, leafy green vegetables and microgreens would easily thrive there,” we learn. Dandelions, too, apparently – a species far from endangered on Feedback’s small patch of terra firma. “Hops vine [sic], trees, shrubs and poison ivy might be able to survive the challenging temperatures on this moon”, it opines of Jupiter’s satellite Europa, where days struggle to rise above -135°C and surface radiation levels are around 2000 times those on Earth. “One of the only things that can kill poison ivy is boiling water – so the cold and wet conditions on Europa seem to be the ideal environment for this plant.”
The outlook is even rosier on Titan, the Saturnian moon where water ice at around -180°C fulfils the function of bedrock, and great surface lakes are filled with liquid natural gas. “Titan’s surface is sculpted by methane and ethane, which only one other planet in the solar system has: Earth. Therefore, tobacco plants should grow on this moon too”, our correspondent concludes, non-sequentially.
“Please let me know if you have any questions”, the email ends. So, so many, including where we get some of the wacky Europa baccy too. Optimism is a fine, fine thing, but as far as the future of life on Earth is concerned, we fear the rationalist’s counterstatement applies: il faut cultiver notre jardin.
Bog standards
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”, as one of the usual suspects once wrote. Or we are all in the gutter, sending in responses to our recent item on peculiar toilet signage (31 July).
“Toilets and viewing area” was an unfortunate juxtaposition that confronted Richard Ellam at an Aberdeen Science Festival some years back, while Chris Evans relays that “A lay-by eatery near where I live (on the A59 between Skipton and Clitheroe) for some years displayed a sign reading ‘Sit-in or take-away toilet’” – neither of which seems particularly practicable or desirable.
Hazardous fore play
Our item on the newly introduced crocodile hazard at the Royal Port Moresby Golf Club in Papua New Guinea (14 August) reminds Stuart Reeves in Wake Forest, North Carolina, of playing at the Skukuza Golf Club in Kruger National Park in South Africa – a sentence that exhausts us even typing it.
Its “local rules” include such gems as “Burrowing animals – Rough/Fairway drop without penalty from holes made by burrowing animals and termites, NOT HOOF MARKS. Burrowing animals include warthogs, moles and termites”.
Other rules (“formal and informal”) that Stuart has encountered on his travels include “Give way to a herdsman and his cows crossing the fairway; free drop from a hippopotamus footprint; free drop about 3 club lengths if the ball lands in the coils of a snake (no need to be precise); if a monkey steals your ball it is a lost ball”. Strong stuff – and further congratulations on your self-confessed status as a “recovering golfer”.
Transcendental number
Mentions in Almost the last word (14 August) of “interesting numbers, numbers with their own Wiki page and the fine-structure constant (approximately 1/137) prompted me to recheck the Wiki page for 137″, writes Mike Sargent, displaying the talent for the tangent that we so admire among Feedback readers. “It has for several years now informed us that ‘Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics, died in a hospital room numbered 137, a coincidence that disturbed him’.”
“It is difficult to know which is more surprising, that Pauli’s consciousness transcended death, or that he then contrived to communicate his feelings on his demise to a Wiki page editor,” he continues. We don’t wish to sound too woo, but it is a fundamental tenet of quantum mechanics that information cannot be destroyed, and “Physics might create a backdoor to an afterlife – but don’t bank on it” is the headline of an article we see in our webspace starting from that basis. We would say that’s living proof, but that’s possibly not quite right.
Last laugh
Casting our all-seeing eye over our shoulder, we see that our neighbours and friends in Almost the last word (backwards readers: you’ll find it towards the front) are discussing how a photon “knows” to travel at the speed of light.
With the privilege of having the actual last word, we must give the obvious missing answer: because it is very bright.
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
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

By Swapna Krishna

In Star Trek: Lower Decks, we see what life is like for low-ranking members of Starfleet2021 CBS Interactive, Inc.
TV
Star Trek: Lower Decks
Amazon Prime Video

WHEN Star Trek: Lower Decks first premiered in the US last August, it presented a perspective we had rarely seen within the Star Trek universe. While we had traditionally focused on the “upstairs” bridge crew boldly going where no one had gone before, Lower Decks turned its sharp eye towards the “downstairs”: the workers responsible for the least glamorous tasks on the ship. That it was … More

By Michael Marshall

Fragments of a human skull found on the island of Sulawesi in IndonesiaUniversity of Hasanuddin
For the first time, DNA has been obtained from the bones of a Stone Age person who lived on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The genetic information sheds light on the prehistory of the South-East Asian islands – including what happened when our species, Homo sapiens, first reached the area.
Sulawesi is one of the largest islands in South-East Asia, the region between the Asian mainland and Australia. On the island’s South Peninsula, researchers have excavated a cave called … More

By Michael Marshall

Based on the average height of humans, we should have longer stridesJohnnyGreig/Getty Images
Humans have lost their swing. Chimpanzees and other great apes swing their hips when they walk, but modern humans do not. This means our strides are shorter than those of chimpanzees, even though our legs are proportionally longer.
“We’ve always had this idea that evolution has been acting on fossil humans to make strides longer and longer,” says Nathan Thompson at the New York Institute of Technology in the US. But in fact, he says, “humans right … More

Nino Marcutti/Alamy
THE tale of human origins continues to throw up surprises. For many years, the generally accepted narrative was that our species emerged on the continent of Africa, before spreading to other continents around 60,000 years ago. It is certainly true that our origins lie primarily in Africa. But in this issue, we explore the crucial role that nearby Arabia played in human evolution.
Evidence unearthed in Stone Age Arabia points to a much richer story, in which human populations ebbed and flowed in this region over hundreds of thousands  of years as the climate shifted.
The remarkable discoveries from … More

By Simon Ings

sasilsolutions/Getty Images
Book

Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and mapping desirable futures
Katy BörnerAdvertisement
MIT Press

MY LEAFY, fairly affluent corner of south London has a congestion problem, and to solve it, there is a plan to close certain roads. You can imagine the furore: the trunk of every kerbside tree sports a protest sign. How can shutting off roads improve traffic flows?
German mathematician Braess answered this question back in 1968, showing that adding a road to a network can actually increase travel times due to a boost in drivers using the same routes and therefore increasing traffic. Now a new book, Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and mapping desirable futures by Katy Börner, uses it as a fine example of how a mathematical model predicts and can be used to resolve a real-world problem.
This and more than 1300 other models, maps and forecasts are referenced in Börner’s latest atlas, the third to be derived from Indiana University’s travelling exhibit Places & Spaces: Mapping science.
Her first, Atlas of Science: Visualizing what we know revealed the power of maps in science, while the second, Atlas of Knowledge: Anyone can map, focused on visualisation. In her latest foray, Börner wants to show how models, maps and forecasts inform decision-making in education, science, technology and policy-making.
It is a well-structured, heavyweight argument, supported by descriptions of more than 300 applications. Some entries, like Bernard H. Porter’s Map of Physics of 1939, earn their place purely because of their beauty and the insights they offer. Mostly, though, Börner chooses models that were applied in practice and made a positive difference.
Her range is impressive. We begin at equations, revealing that Newton’s law of universal gravitation has been applied to human migration patterns, and move through the centuries. We tip a wink to Jacob Bernoulli’s 1713 book The Art of Conjecturing –which introduced probability theory – and James Clerk Maxwell’s 1868 paper “On governors”, which was an early nod towards cybernetics. Finally, we arrive at our current era of massive computation and ever-more complex model building.
It is here that interesting questions start to surface. To forecast the behaviour of complex systems, especially those that contain a human component, many current researchers reach for modelling (ABM) in which discrete autonomous agents interact with each other and with their common (digitally modelled) environment.
But, warns Börner, “ABMs in general have very few analytical tools by which they can be studied, and often no backward sensitivity analysis can be performed because of the large number of parameters and dynamical rules involved”. In other words, an ABM model offers us an exquisitely detailed forecast, but no clear way of knowing why the model has drawn the conclusions it has – a risky state of affairs, given that its data came from foible-ridden humans.
Her sumptuous, detailed book tackles issues of error and bias head-on, but she left me tugging at a different problem, represented by those irate protest signs smothering my neighbourhood.
In over 50 years since Braess’s research was published, reasonably wealthy, mostly well-educated people in comfortable surroundings have remained ignorant of how traffic flows work. So what are the chances that the rest of us, busy and preoccupied as we are, will ever really understand, or trust, the other models that increasingly dictate our civic life?
Börner argues that modelling data can counteract tribalism, misinformation, magical thinking, authoritarianism and demonisation. I can’t for the life of me see how. What happens when a model reaches such complexity that only an expert can understand it, or when even the expert can’t be sure why the forecast is saying what it is saying?
We have enough difficulty understanding climate forecasts, let alone explaining them. To apply these technologies to the civic realm begs a host of problems that are nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with whether anyone will listen.

More on these topics: More

T:Stocktrek Images/Alamy
Watch
Are viruses alive? asks New York Times science columnist Carl Zimmer in this Royal Institution talk. Can viruses and other difficult to pin down microbes help us answer the question: what is life? Streaming live on 26 August at 7pm BST.

Advertisement
Read
The Nature Seed by Lucy Jones and Kenneth Greenway is a handy guide to raising adventurous, nature-loving children, full of fires, potions, foraging and make-believe. Discover the awe in a humble cracked pavement or your local park.
oxinoxi/Getty Images
Watch
Jamming the Signal is a live conversation at FACT Liverpool on 28 August from 2pm BST that asks whether social media and instant messaging can be used to effect meaningful change in an age of digital unrest. It will also be streamed online. More