Humans

Ilka & Franz/Getty Images
ALMOST every month, a new piece of research emerges linking diets high in processed “junk” foods with obesity and poor health. It isn’t yet clear if the relationship is causal, and if so, what the mechanisms behind it may be. But insights are starting to emerge from trials that compare diets that are based on either ultra-processed foods or wholefoods, yet are carefully matched for nutrients in all other ways.
The links need investigating as a matter of urgency. If these processed foods really do carry intrinsic health risks, it could mean that official advice about healthy eating has been … More

By Vijaysree Venkatraman

Hakeem Oluseyi, speaking at NASA’s Earth Day event in 2017NASA/Joel Kowsky
A Quantum Life: My unlikely journey from the street to the stars
Hakeem Oluseyi and Joshua Horwitz
Ballantine BooksAdvertisement

THEY called him “the professor” because, by the age of 10, he was already reading every book he could lay his hands on. In the sixth grade, he scored 162 on an IQ test at school. Still, by the time he was in his teens, the certified genius was dealing weed and carrying a gun for protection.
“If anyone had told me I’d grow up to be an actual professor at MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Cape Town, I wouldn’t have believed them,” writes astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi in his inspiring memoir A Quantum Life. The book follows his “unlikely journey from the street to the stars”.
Born James Edward Plummer Jr, Oluseyi was often uprooted as a child, and learned to survive in some of the toughest urban neighbourhoods across the US. He also lived in rural Mississippi, a state where older African American people still addressed white people, including children, as “ma’am” and “sir”.
“Albert Einstein and I would have been friends,” he recalls thinking when he read about the scientist. Einstein, too, was told to “stop staring into space”, and his family moved often. He also featured when Oluseyi taught himself to program at high school. He coded concepts of Einstein’s theory of special relativity into a game and won first place in physics in the Mississippi State Science Fair.
To fund college, he joined the navy. But after two years, he was discharged with atopic dermatitis, which barred him from serving on ships. An old friend encouraged him to enrol at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. The pair sold drugs there and dropped out, but Oluseyi re-enrolled.
This time, David Teal, a white, Harvard-educated professor in the historically Black college, took an interest in Oluseyi, urging him to attend a meeting of African American physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The experience felt like an “alien abduction”, writes Oluseyi, but it gave him a clear goal: to apply to graduate programmes.
“Every year,” he writes, “the Stanford physics department took in one student like me – a diversity admission who wasn’t at the same level of academic preparation as the rest of the class.” It would take a lot more than hard work alone to earn his PhD there, but he was up for the challenge (and later a change of name).
“It would take a lot more than hard work to earn his PhD, but Hakeem Oluseyi was up for the challenge”
Besides, his doctoral adviser was Arthur B. C. Walker. The African American astrophysicist, whose telescopes gave unprecedented views of the sun, had mentored students from under-represented groups in physics. Sally Ride, the first US woman in space, was his first doctoral student.
Walker told Oluseyi that some still believed that while Black scientists could build ingenious gadgets, they weren’t gifted enough to make insights in pure physics or in the analyses of data and observations. While Walker got credit for his novel technology to study the sun, doubters said he had few pure science publications. Oluseyi worked with his mentor to seal his legacy before Walker died in 2001.
Today, Oluseyi is one of a handful of Black astrophysicists, but he has been working to change that. In 2008, he received a grant from the Kellogg Foundation to set up a mentoring programme for Black astronomy students in South Africa. They were brilliant, but felt second-class at university, says Oluseyi. He shared his struggles as he taught the students advanced topics. They passed in the top 20 per cent of the class.
South Africa will eventually co-host the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the world’s most powerful radio telescope cluster. Four of Oluseyi’s students are in the front row of a SKA team photo. He wasn’t there, but says “believe me, I’m standing tall and proud… next to them”.
Vijaysree Venkatraman is a Boston-based science journalist

More on these topics: More

Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images
Watch
The Art Of Data is explored by statistician David Spiegelhalter and data artist Stefanie Posavec at Cheltenham Science Festival, in a talk that will be live-streamed on YouTube on 13 June at 9.15pm BST.

Read
The Glitter in the Green catches the eye of naturalist Jon Dunn, who writes about his travels the length and breadth of the Americas in search of hummingbirds, from woodlands to deserts, mangrove swamps to sub-polar islands.Advertisement
The National Museum of Computing
Watch
The Polish Cyclometer, an Enigma-cracking machine built by Polish mathematicians, is the subject of a virtual talk by Jerry McCarthy at the UK’s National Museum of Computing on 13 June at 5pm BST and 14 June at 11am BST. More

By Laura Spinney

Rocio Montoya
YOU have probably seen the annual rankings of the world’s cities by “liveability” or “quality of life”. It is intriguing to discover which come out top – and which bottom. After all, most of us have skin in this game: more than half of people around the world live in urban environments, and that number is growing. But you may also have wondered what “quality of life” really means. Which qualities? Whose life?
These same questions occupy Anu Ramaswami. Trained initially as a chemical engineer, she is now a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the M. S. Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton University, New Jersey. Her research focuses on what we can do to improve the urban environment, and she works closely with US cities as well as with the United Nations and national governments. It is fiendishly difficult to compare cities, she says – or even, for that matter, to define them.
Ramaswami wants to persuade people that cities aren’t concrete jungles that stop abruptly at their official limits, but complex, dynamic systems that extend much further and, like living organisms, have their own metabolism. Only by thinking of them in this way can we start to make them more liveable, she says.
Laura Spinney: Urbanisation is accelerating as global population grows. Is that a good thing?
Anu Ramaswami: Many people point to cities as villains. I prefer a more nuanced narrative that says cities offer an opportunity for innovation. This typically generates more wealth and, to some extent, more well-being, but also inequality, which has its own implications for well-being. More than 90 … More

By Annalee Newitz

Helen Sessions/Alamy
IN LATE May, Amazon bought 97-year-old movie studio MGM for $8.45 billion. Although that is a huge amount of money, there is something almost routine about the transaction at this point. MGM owns some of the rights to James Bond and a few other popular franchises, so there is talk about how big tech is about to ruin more nice things.
Obviously, Amazon is trying to lure more customers to MGM’s catalogue, and sure, it is possible that Amazon will ruin our love for Agent 007 with a romcom about wacky high jinks when James Bond marries a surveillance drone. … More

By Simon Ings

FOR most of us, buildings are functional. We live, work and store things in them. They are as much a part of us as the nest is a part of a community of termites.
Were this all there was to say about buildings, architectural historian Barnabas Calder might have found his book easier to write. He is asking “how humanity’s access to energy has shaped the world’s buildings through history”.
Had his account remained so straightforward, we might have ended up with an eye-opening mathematical description of the increased energy available (derived from wood, charcoal and straw, then from coal and then from oil) and how it transformed and now, through global warming, threatens our civilisation.
But, of course, buildings are also aspirational acts of creative expression. However debased it seems, the most ordinary structure is the product of an artist of sorts, and to get built at all, it must be bankrolled by people who are (relatively) wealthy and powerful.
This was as true of Uruk – perhaps the first city, founded in the area now called Iraq around 3200 BC – as it is in Shenzhen, the Chinese former fishing hamlet that is now a city of nearly 13 million people.
While the economics of the built environment are crucial, they don’t make sense without sociology and even psychology. This is particularly the case when it comes to what Calder calls “the mutual stirring, the hysteria between architect and client” that gave us St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, the world’s biggest building by floor area.
Calder knows this: “What different societies chose to do with [their] energy surplus has produced endless variation and brilliance.” So if his account seems to wander, this is why: architecture isn’t a wholly economic activity, and certainly not a narrowly rational one.
At the end of an insightful, often impassioned journey through the history of buildings, Calder does his best to explain how architecture can address the climate emergency. But his advice and encouragement vanishes under the enormity of the crisis. The construction and running of buildings account for 39 per cent of human greenhouse gas emissions. Concrete is the most used material on Earth after water. And while there is plenty of sustainability talk in construction sectors, Calder finds precious little sign of real change. We demolish too often, build too often and use unsustainable materials.
There may be solutions, but we won’t find many clues in the archaeological record. As Calder points out, “entire traditions of impressive tent-like architecture are known mainly from pictures rather than physical remnants”. The remains of civilisation before the days of fossil fuel only offer a partial guide to future architecture. Perhaps we should look to existing temporary structures – even to some novel ones used in refugee camps.
Rather paradoxically, Calder’s love poem to buildings left me thinking about the Mongols, for whom a walled city was a symbol of bondage and barbarism. They would have no more settled in a fixed house than become enslaved. And their empire, which covered 23 million square kilometres, demolished more architecture than it raised.

More on these topics: More

By Clare Wilson

Fun, cheap and tasty, but perhaps not the healthiest optionSharon Pruitt/EyeEm/Getty Images
CUT down on fatty food. No, sugar. Aim for a Mediterranean diet. And remember to eat more plants…
The variability of healthy eating advice has become a cliché in itself. Yet despite all the contradictions, there is one thing that many agree on: we should avoid junk food. Until recently though, no one could give you a decent reason why. Gastronomic snobbery aside, science lacked an agreed definition of what junk food actually is, and that has made it difficult to know whether we should be avoiding it and, if so, why.
It has long been assumed that processed junk foods are bad because they tend to contain too much fat, salt and sugar. Recent studies, though, suggest that other mechanisms could be at work to make these foods harmful to our health. Getting to grips with what these are could help us not only make healthier choices, but also persuade the food industry to come up with healthier ways of giving us what we like to eat.
One thing’s for sure: we certainly do like it. Factory-made food makes up between 50 and 60 per cent of the average person’s calorie intake in the UK, and around 60 per cent in the US. But while junk food has a bad name among many food lovers, dietary health research and the public health advice that stems from it have so far concentrated either on individual food groups, like meat and dairy products, or the relative amounts of the three macronutrients … More

By Karina Shah

Consumers shop differently when they buy from online supermarketsMaskot/Getty Images
Consumers in the US spend more money when grocery shopping online, but spend less on sweets and desserts than when they shop in store.
In recent years, online grocery shopping has grown massively. Since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, the amount that consumers spend through online shopping has more than doubled in the US.
Laura Zatz at Harvard University and her colleagues have investigated how people’s habits change when they are spending in store versus shopping online. They recruited 137 participants from two supermarkets of the same chain in the US state of Maine. Each participant was the key shopper for their household, and they also had experience shopping both online and in-store.Advertisement
The researchers studied each participant for a total of 44 non-consecutive weeks and tracked what items they purchased between 2015 to 2017. They collected data from a total of 5573 transactions, 1062 of which were made online and 4511 in store.
“We found differences in both the quantity of foods that people purchased and the types of foods that people purchase when they’re shopping online versus in store,” says Zatz.
People spent more money on sweets and desserts when shopping in store, spending on average $2.50 more per transaction. However, there was no difference in spending on sugary drinks or salty snacks, such as crisps.

“They purchase more items [when shopping online], both in terms of overall number of items but also a greater variety of unique items,” says Zatz. On average, participants spend 44 per cent more per transaction when shopping online than in store.
It seems that in-store shopping entices shoppers to unhealthier food choices. “When you are in store, you are exposed to all sorts of stimuli that could encourage you to buy unhealthy impulse-sensitive food groups when you might not have otherwise planned to,” says Zatz. Unhealthy food choices are often displayed in supermarkets at the end of aisles and at checkouts to encourage unplanned purchases.
The findings could help to inform us about how to encourage healthier food purchasing choices, especially as sophisticated marketing is coming online, says Zatz.
Charles Spence at the University of Oxford is surprised there was no difference in the purchases of “olfactorily-tempting foods”, such as freshly baked bread and coffee. “[They did not] suffer in the online environment, given the absence of smell,” says Spence.
Journal reference: Journal of Nutrition Education and Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.jneb.2021.03.001

More on these topics: More