Humans

Award-winner Sally Davies, a former chief medical officer for EnglandPaul Grover/Shutterstock
Suffrage Science
First Create the Media, with MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences

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ON 8 March every year, millions of people celebrate International Women’s Day, a slot in the global calendar that is both a unifying recognition of the achievements of women and an urgent warning that gender inequality is still rife.
Science, of course, is no exception to this. Women still make up just 28 per cent of the STEM workforce, while men dominate the highest-paying sectors, such as engineering. A decade ago, to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and to help address these crucial gaps, the Suffrage Science awards were born.
The Suffrage Science podcast, hosted weekly by science communicator Kat Arney, explains the prizes’ origins by shining a spotlight on past winners, women who have achieved extraordinary things in their careers despite facing an all-too-familiar bias and a lack of opportunities.
In the first episode, Arney talks to the founders of the project: Amanda Fisher, director of the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, and Vivienne Parry, a science writer and broadcaster. As Arney explains, the awards work by selecting the next winners based on nominations from previous ones, thereby helping to grow a global network of inspirational female role models. The awards, bespoke pieces of jewellery that pay homage to scientific research and the suffrage movement, are passed on to new winners every two years.
Since 2011, 148 women across many scientific disciplines and countries have won awards. Their impact and reach surprised Parry – as she tells Arney, they have seen some early nominees become fine scientists, heading their own departments and creating a new cohort of great scientists.
The episode also features women’s rights activist Helen Pankhurst, the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, who led the UK suffragette movement.
In episode two, Arney talks to Sally Davies, the first female master of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and former chief medical officer for England, who won a Suffrage Science award in 2011. Among Davies’s many achievements – and the one she is most proud of, she tells Arney – was putting the global threat of antimicrobial resistance firmly on the UK’s radar.
Her successes were accompanied by the difficulties of simply being a woman, as she explains: “I’ve always felt throughout my career that I had to be better than the men to get the job, not as good as [them].”
Listening to Fisher and other guests, I felt connected to them through our shared struggles as women and the recognition of how deeply gender discrimination is etched into every aspect of our experience. But underlying this solidarity, a tough message remains: we haven’t made the progress in improving prospects for women that we like to think we have, says Fisher. For example, there is much to be done in addressing issues faced by women from ethnic minority backgrounds.
The pandemic has widened the divide and even reversed progress in some cases, with women doing by far the majority of homeschooling and childcare, often putting their own jobs at risk. For Helen Pankhurst, there needs to be a new narrative. “Fundamentally, it’s about saying this isn’t good enough – this isn’t good enough for me, for the next generations, for those that came before us. We can and we must do better.”

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By Catherine de Lange

A study is looking at the effects of income on child developmentCavan Images/Getty Images
Growing up in poverty can have long-term negative consequences for children. Now, a study offering unconditional cash to a group of mothers on low-incomes in the US is beginning to discover the precise role of parental income in child development. It is the first randomised trial to look at whether a basic income might affect the way a child’s brain develops in this critical period.
Studies of children born into families with low income have found they tend to have more behavioural problems and … More

By Karina Shah

How we expect chocolate to taste depends on the colour of the wrapperTim Gainey/Alamy
People expect chocolate to taste more bitter if it is in black packaging, while yellow and pink packaging is associated with sweeter-tasting chocolate.
Iuri Baptista at the University of Campinas in Brazil and his colleagues wanted to investigate how people respond to the colour of chocolate packaging.
The researchers sent a survey to 420 people between the ages of 18 and 60. Half of the participants were in Brazil and the other half were in France. The survey contained two photos of milk chocolate bars … More

Josie Ford
Ever keeps on Given
The world rejoiced as the banking of the possibly good, but mainly just rather big, ship Ever Given at the southern end of the Suez Canal supplied an endless source of memes, a new unit for the horizontally stupidly oversized – about 0.5 Burj Khalifa – and a threat to global commerce and trade that wasn’t coronavirus. Or Brexit in UK parts, for that matter.
Our favourite related time-waster is a site brought to our attention by Elizabeth Barner from Leeds, UK: evergiven-everywhere.glitch.me.
Starting from a position that (shame on us) only by zooming out very, very far do we identify as the harbour of Boston, Massachusetts – whose famous tea parties were also some sort of statement about global trade practices back in the day – it allows us to “get the Ever Given stuck wherever you want it. Drag and zoom the map to move this big old boat somewhere else. Click the rotate button to get it wedged perfectly. Hit the ‘to scale’ button to make it approximately the right size. Or you can make it whatever size you feel like: get it stuck in a swimming pool or across the entire Atlantic Ocean.”

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Great fun, and all in the good cause of encouraging donations to the Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, we see.
Stressed out
Something has agitated the citizens of Leeds, as Martin Pitt also writes in from that city to add ire to our disparagement of “experiential” units of measurements rooted in no one’s experience (27 March).
The example we highlighted from The Wall Street Journal of an elephant suspended by a rope the diameter of a table tennis ball is meaningless for its stated purpose of measuring tension, or tensile force, he fulminates. “What the analogy should express is the tensile stress, which is the force per unit area, which would have been clear if they had also expressed it in conventional units such as Newtons per square metre.”
We are far from demurring, Martin. Mind you, the whole thing reminds us of the entry that used to stand in the good old Yellow Pages telephone directory under “Boring”: “See civil engineers”.
Don’t drink the water
We mean that only in self-referential jest, of course, as we do when we also say that our natural inclination on encountering any message beginning with the words “as a chemist” is to avert our eyes and hurry onwards in the hope we haven’t been seen.
Bill Appelbe writes in from Toronto, Canada, to take issue with our ridiculing of hydrogenated water as a facial exfoliation agent (13 March). Hydrogenated water, or H3O+, Bill points out, also using equations, is in fact a natural product of the ionisation of water in most environments save interstellar space – an environment where, he rightly points out too, few New Scientist readers are to be found, enjoying a facial scrub or not.
We stand corrected, Bill. We aren’t so sure about your advice to use a concentrated solution of sulphuric or hydrofluoric acid to get a really good dose of hydrogenated water with all its exfoliation benefits, but we understand you were writing as a chemist, not a beautician.
Oversight oversight
What we can only moodily and obliquely refer to as “other duties” leads Feedback to the website of the Oversight Board (motto: “Independent Judgment. Transparency. Legitimacy”), a body whose mission is so transparent it is apparently not necessary to state in its name what its independent judgement is lending legitimacy to.
To fill in the gaps, it has to do with a well-known social media company, which by appointing said board hopes to convince the world – we paraphrase, slightly – that while its medium may sometimes seem antisocial, it isn’t actually media, so doesn’t need regulating as such.
Not increasing our faith about the outfit’s resourcing is that, approaching its website using a well-known open-source browser, we see a confused mishmash of text and hyperlinks resembling the web circa 1999. Repeated links saying things like “A person scrutinizing a sphere she’s holding in her hand, while shapes and clouds float around her”, suggest images, yet lead to more text. The only thing that isn’t entirely 20th century is a warning that appears hovering above a “Share” link saying that if we click on it, a well-known social media company will be able to track our visit.
Oddly, when we use a well-known web browser associated with a well-known search company, we are transported back to the third decade of the 21st century, drawings of people scrutinising spheres surrounded by other geometry included. The power of big tech, eh?
Shining example
In a policy violation that our own Oversight Board shall investigate forthwith, we highlight Marc Abraham’s discovery of a paper from 2005. Very much in the spirit of a paper on incontinence by J. W. Splatt and D. Weedon that brought to life the monster of nominative determinism the best part of three decades ago – 5 November 1994, to be precise, we remember it as if it were yesterday – “Transparent Organic Light-Emitting Devices With LiF/Mg:Ag Cathode” is by B. J. Chen, X. W. Sun and S. C. Tan.
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POLYMORF
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Symbiosis is a virtual reality trip to a post-human world teeming with tech hybrids. Dutch design collective Polymorf took inspiration from the ideas of biologist and postmodern feminist Donna Haraway. Catch it on the group’s website from 10 to 18 April.

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Them, Amazon Prime Video’s new anthology series created by Little Marvin and Lena Waithe, explores terror in the US. It begins with “Covenant”, set in 1953, about a black couple threatened by forces both real and supernatural. More

From rewinding time in Prince of Persia to fighting alongside past selves in Super Time Force, there is lots to enjoy in pure time travel says Jacob Aron

Humans

7 April 2021

By Jacob Aron

In Prince of Persia, a magical dagger lets you rewind timeUbisoft
NEARLY all video games involve a form of time travel: if you die in a game, or even simply mess up, most will let you reload and have another go. But some games make a real feature of it, and this month I’m looking at my favourites.
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and its sequels literally turn reloading your game into a feature. The titular prince has a magical dagger that allows you to rewind time for a few seconds, perfect for jumping sections that involve dodging traps with split-second timing. The dagger can only be used a few times before it has to be recharged, so you need to choose carefully when to use it.

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As time travel goes, simple rewinding is pretty mundane. The puzzle game Braid takes a more interesting approach. Each set of levels involves using some form of time manipulation to traverse a Super Mario-esque world. The first set follows the same rules as Prince of Persia, but subsequent levels introduce more complications, such as tying the passage of time to your movement in space, so that moving left rewinds time but moving right lets it flow forwards. You soon find yourself holding the past, present and future in your head at once.
One set of levels in Braid lets you record your actions, then rewind to replay the level in tandem with your recording – handy if, say, you need to be in two places at once to both activate a switch and go through a door.
Other titles have spun this concept into entire games. The jauntily titled The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom lets you create multiple recordings and even move them about with a whack of an umbrella.
“You jump between time periods, including a dinosaur-dominated deep past and a post-apocalyptic future”
Taking this even further is Super Time Force, a cartoonish shooter game that sees you rewinding time to fight alongside past selves and even stop them being killed, creating paradoxes that translate into power-ups. Speaking at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2014, Kenneth Yeung, one of Super Time Force‘s developers, explained they were inspired by science to solve some of the challenges that arise when you create such a game, though that might be a stretch.
For example, Yeung said they looked to quantum physics for the idea that objects can only interact with the world if they have an observer, allowing the developers to avoid creating enemies who are shot off-screen by one of your past selves – nothing to do with the quantum mechanics I understand!
Of course, developers can just ignore paradoxes and the like and focus on using time travel to create a great story. The best game of this type is Chrono Trigger, a Japanese role-playing game from 1995 with an amazing soundtrack. Initially set in a fairly typical fantasy world, you play as a band of misfits trying to stop the end of the world and jump between periods, including a dinosaur-dominated deep past and a post-apocalyptic future.
Chrono Trigger indulges in all the classic time-travel tropes. Early in the game, the party travels back 400 years, where one character is mistaken for her similar-looking ancestor, ultimately leading to her never being born. Later, you pick up a robot companion in the future, travel back to the past and leave it to spend centuries growing a forest before reuniting in the present – an example of the “going the long way round” time travel much beloved by Doctor Who.
As befits a game about time travel, I have enjoyed revisiting Chrono Trigger many times over the years, even if nothing ever really changes.
Braid
Number None
PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Android
Chrono Trigger
Square
SNES, PlayStation, Nintendo DS, PC, Android, iOS
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Ubisoft Montreal
PC, PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox
Super Time Force
Capybara Games
PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4
The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom
The Odd Gentlemen
PC, Xbox 360

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Tasty and tender meat takes a good marinade. Testing theories behind them in the kitchen shows that it’s a trickier than it seems – but there is a clear winner, says Sam Wong

Humans

7 April 2021

By Sam Wong

Getty Images/iStockphoto
AS WELL as adding flavour, marinades are supposed to tenderise meat before it is cooked and make it more juicy. There is plausible scientific theory and evidence to back up these claims, but when I tested some marinades, they weren’t all successful.
Salt is common to most marinades, in the main to improve flavour. But it affects texture too, dissolving some muscle proteins. Once salt has diffused into the meat, it draws moisture in from the marinade and ensures less moisture is lost during cooking.
Some marinades include acids such as citrus juice. Acids cause muscle proteins to … More

By Matthew Sparkes

A test using Lego found people were likely to overlook simple solutionsNiels Quist/Alamy
Leonardo da Vinci said that a poet recognises perfection when there is nothing left to remove. In other words, less is more. But when solving problems, people tend to think the other way, adding elements rather than removing them.
Gabrielle Adams at the University of Virginia and colleagues asked people to complete several tasks where solutions involved either adding or subtracting parts. All of the experiments were designed so that subtraction would be one of the most efficient options.

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In one, around 200 people had to alter a Lego building to support a weight in order to gain a $1 bonus. The roof of the building was balancing precariously on just one support. A solution would be to add several bricks to better support the roof, which they were told would cost 10 cents each.
Another way of shoring up the structure was to simply remove one brick. Only 41 per cent of the control group opted to remove a brick, but when another group was prompted that removing bricks incurred no cost, this rose to 61 per cent. The team didn’t collect any demographic data for this part of the test.
In another task, around 300 people had to make a grid of 100 squares symmetrical by either adding or removing green tiles. When asked to take the test with no practice, only 49 per cent of people opted to remove tiles, but when given three practice runs before taking the test, this rose to 63 per cent. In this test, just over 40 per cent of participants were women.

During the research, the team spoke to a company with a newly appointed leader who asked staff for improvement suggestions. For every idea to remove a policy or rule, the leader received eight to add one.
In a pre-prepared Q&A, Adams said that balance bikes are a great example of the subtractive approach. “These are kids’ bikes without the pedals or the chain. Most people who have seen a toddler zipping down the street on a balance bike instantly recognise that subtractive invention as superior to the clunky additive change of training wheels.”
She said that this tendency to add complexity may cause us to miss potentially superior options and designs. “Addition may be culturally valued. It’s easier to demonstrate your contribution with an addition than a subtraction, and additions might get more praise.”
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03380-y

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