Humans

By Donna Lu

Nonglak Bunkoet/Legrand/Alamy

With the coronavirus pandemic causing a sharp rise in unemployment, one idea is rapidly growing in popularity: universal basic income (UBI), in which the government pays people a regular sum, no strings attached.
A Finnish study published in May (although carried out in 2017 and 2018) with 2000 unemployed people found that UBI boosted recipients’ financial well-being, mental health and cognitive functioning, and also modestly improved employment rates.
People who received €560 per month, rather than regular unemployment benefits, reported higher levels of confidence in being able to control their future. The researchers involved say that regular guaranteed … More

By Colin Barras
The type of beads used in Chumash necklaces may also have been currency
Alamy Stock Photo

PEOPLE living in what is now California may have been the first Americans to invent money, according to a new analysis of shell beads produced 2000 years ago by the Chumash, a Native American community.
There is general agreement that money existed in the Americas before Europeans arrived. The Chumash’s beads, fashioned from the shells of purple dwarf olive sea snails (Olivella biplicata), are seen as a classic example of this.
“Almost all the scholars who focus on the Chumash have agreed that the shell beads were money,” says Lynn … More

This year, scientists took action to support Black Lives Matter. Let 2021 be your year to advance race justice, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Humans | Comment 16 December 2020
By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Michelle D’Urbano

ON MY desk in my home office I have a few items that keep me focused and inspired. I have an autographed photo of myself with Star Trek: Discovery star Sonequa Martin-Green, the first Black woman to helm a Star Trek series. Next to that, I have a Barbie Uhura in the box, autographed by Nichelle Nichols, the Black woman who played the first Black Star Trek character, along with an autographed, black-and-white picture of Nichols in costume. I also have a woodcarving of a famous Toni Morrison quote, “The function of freedom is to free someone …
Article amended on 21 December 2020
We have clarified the number of statements posted by P4J. More

The pandemic may have stolen many of the headlines of 2020, but this year has been a bumper year for other science, too. Can you remember it? Find out in our covid-free quiz

Humans 16 December 2020
By Bethan Ackerley

The Thwaites glacier in Antarctica
NASA

1 We kicked off 2020 with the cheery news that the “doomsday” Thwaites glacier in Antarctica is losing about 35 billion tonnes of ice per year. It is currently about the same size as which island?
A Ireland
B Great Britain
C New Guinea
D Java
2 On a lighter note, in June, we published pictures of Uraba lugens, a caterpillar that wears its old heads as a hat. How many times can it moult its head?
A 4
B 7
C 9
D 13
3 In September, we reported that astronomers may have … More

By Adam Vaughan
There is increasing awareness of racial inequality in science funding
Skynesher/Getty Images

Just 10 senior researchers who received public funding in the UK during 2018-19 were Black, the first breakdown of UK science funding by individual ethnic groups reveals. The number, just 0.5 per cent of the total, was described as “profoundly upsetting” by the government body in charge of funding.
Racial inequalities in funding by the UK’s seven research councils, which coordinate around £8 billion of government cash, have come under growing scrutiny in the past year. But the disparities between ethnic minorities have been masked by lumping individual ethnicities together under the banner of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME).
Researchers can apply for three categories of funding, in descending seniority: principal investigator (PI), co-investigator or fellow. Today, data published by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which coordinates the research councils, shows that just 10 Black researchers were awarded PI funding. Out of the total 2045 PI roles funded, 210 went to people from an ethnic minority.

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Of the fellows who received funding, just 60 were from an ethnic minority, compared with 250 white fellows. The number of Black fellows is so low – between one and four – that UKRI didn’t release the number for fear of identifying individuals. That picture isn’t new, the organisation says: between 2014 and 2019 there has always been fewer than five Black fellows each year.
As the UKRI points out, both of these proportions are below the proportion of Black people in academia and the wider labour market, while the figures for co-investigator were more in line.
“It shows that funded Black applicants are vanishingly small,” says Izzy Jayasinghe at the University of Sheffield, UK, who is a member of The Inclusion Group for Equity in Research in STEMM (TIGERS). The figures show that Black applicants are underfunded by at least three times what would be expected given their wider labour market proportion, she says.
Michael Sulu at University College London, also a member of TIGERS, says: “It tells you everything you would assume, which is essentially that black staff must work with others to gain funding as a co-investigator and are unlikely to be leaders.”

By comparison, researchers of Asian ethnicity received a higher proportion of funding compared to the proportion of Asian people in academia and the wider jobs market. This appears to be the driving force behind the proportion of ethnic minority co-investigators growing between 2014 and 2015. From 2016-17 onwards, those researchers exceeded the ethnic minority proportion of academia and the labour market.

Ottoline Leyser at UKRI said in a statement: “These data spotlight the stark reality of the persistent systemic racial inequalities experienced in the research and innovation system. They are profoundly upsetting, but perhaps the most upsetting thing about them is that they are not surprising.”
More on these topics: More

According to the laws of physics, everything we do follows inevitably from what happened before – and yet we’re convinced we can change the world. Can we?

Humans 9 December 2020
By Richard Webb
If you don’t want to read this, put the magazine down now
Getty Images/Image Source

Are you predetermined?
WHAT are you doing right now? Reading these words. Why? Presumably because you chose to. Even if you didn’t – if you are encountering them years in the future lining a forgotten box of crockery in the attic, say – you can always choose to look away now. You possess the nebulous quality of human free will.
Nebulous because, despite debating it for millennia, philosophers have been unable to pin it down – and although we are pretty convinced we have it, at some level it must be an illusion, rather like our sense of self is (see “Are you always the same person?”).
Let’s start with the physics. Whenever you decide something, a certain pattern of neurons fires in your brain to turn your thought into action – moving towards the kitchen to make coffee, perhaps, or formulating an utterance you will come to regret. Ultimately, that is all down to pulses of electrons – fundamental particles that follow the cast-iron laws of physics, under which everything is determined by what happened immediately before.
That doesn’t leave much room for free will, apparently. “Physical laws, if they’re deterministic, tell me that everything that I do, everything that happens in the world, including everything that I do, including every decision I ever made, follows logically from the laws of nature [and] the initial conditions of the universe,” says philosopher of physics Jenann Ismael at Columbia University in New York. Since we control neither the laws of nature nor the initial conditions of the universe, we … More

It’s easy to be disheartened by the puniness of our existence – yet perhaps for the first time in human history, everything depends on decisions each one of us makes

Humans 9 December 2020
By Joshua Howgego

JohnnyGreig/Getty Images

Do you matter?
LET’S start with the big picture: if it is significance on this Earth you are looking for, then the numbers are increasingly against you.
Go back 2000 years and there were fewer than 200 million people on the planet. When the industrial revolution kicked in from the 18th century, however, new methods emerged of feeding vastly more people and combating the infectious diseases that had kept our numbers in check. Our numbers began to shoot up, reaching nearly 7.7 billion now. Today, you are, to a greater extent than in all history, just a face in a crowd.
That doesn’t mean you matter any less to your closest friends and family. And perhaps you or your offspring may be one of those few who change the world for better (or for worse). But that is statistically unlikely. Even in spheres where we like to think we are important, such as parenting, the evidence suggests individuals don’t matter that much. Geneticist Robert Plomin at King’s College London has pointed out, for instance, that identical twins brought up in different families generally end up with the same level of cognitive ability.
It isn’t just about you
But there is another, contrary, line of thinking, that collectively all of us can make a difference on a grand scale. In the broad sweep of human history, these are pivotal times. With the development of nuclear weapons in the mid-20th century, humanity reached a point where we can destroy ourselves. In this century, existential risks have only increased thanks to the threat of catastrophic climate change, … More

Covid-19 continues to split some people along party lines. We are now beginning to work out why, writes Graham Lawton

Humans | Comment 9 December 2020
By Graham Lawton

REUTERS/Mike Blake

LIKE the majority of people in my local area, I follow the rules on face coverings. It’s an inconvenience, but I consider putting on a mask a small sacrifice to protect my health and that of other people. Every day, I see many people – more than could possibly have a legitimate exemption – flagrantly flouting the rules and it really gets up my nose.
The refuseniks annoy me on multiple levels. They are selfishly putting me and other people at risk. They think they know better than experts. They often fall for conspiracy theories. And even if they are … More