Humans

By Josh Bell
Amazon Prime Video
Night Sky
Holden Miller, Daniel C. Connolly
Amazon Prime Video, 20 MayAdvertisement

GETTING older is never easy, but ageing couple Franklin and Irene York are able to take refuge from their ailments and frustrations by going out to “see the stars“.
Played by J. K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek, the main characters of Amazon Prime Video’s Night Sky don’t just use a telescope to gaze at the heavens. Instead, they descend into a cellar hidden under the floorboards of a shed in their backyard, walk down a dank tunnel and open a bizarre, alien-looking door.
There, they find a chamber that, somehow, transports them to a room on what appears to be another planet. They look out the window at a view that no one else on Earth gets to experience. Or so they believe.
Night Sky, created by Holden Miller and Daniel C. Connolly, starts slowly, spending plenty of time with Franklin and Irene as they go about their daily business in small-town Illinois, with the sci-fi elements of the story often fading into the background.
Simmons and Spacek are such strong actors that Night Sky would have been engrossing simply as a story about a loving couple headed into their twilight years, reckoning with nostalgia and regret. The first episode doesn’t deal with much more than that, at least until the end, when Irene discovers a mysterious man inside the underground portal.
The interloper, Jude (Chai Hansen), both disturbs and invigorates the Yorks, leading them to new discoveries about the device they have been using for the past 20 years without ever questioning it. He also has an agenda of his own, which, just like everything else in Night Sky, unfolds slowly over the course of the first six episodes.
The glacial plot progression can be frustrating, especially when the focus shifts away from the Yorks to other storylines whose connections to the main narrative take a while to coalesce.
The second episode introduces a mother and daughter living in rural Argentina, protecting a strange chapel and reluctantly taking orders from a dangerous secret society. The dynamic between Stella (Julieta Zylberberg) and her teenage daughter Toni (Rocío Hernández) isn’t as emotionally rewarding as the Yorks’s lived-in relationship, but their direct involvement in the vague conspiracy lends their scenes a bit more excitement.
Still, the character development is as incremental as that relating to the plot, and some of the show’s detours look more like dead ends. The Yorks’s nosy neighbour goes through an entire unrelated drama on his own just so he can circle back to poking around the shed and making an actual impact on the plot. There are plenty of scenes of similarly dubious relevance involving secondary characters that contribute to the lethargic pacing.
Maybe there will be satisfying answers in the remaining two episodes of the eight-episode first series, but, for now, Night Sky is more about insinuations and atmosphere than explanations. There are references to “quantum entanglement” and “spooky action at a distance”, but nothing definitive about the origins or mechanics of the Yorks’s portal, or the related projects of the apparently globe-spanning ancient order that Stella and Toni belong to.
There is usually enough enticement to keep watching until the next episode, though, and even when the show seems to be spinning its wheels, Simmons and Spacek find lovely grace notes in their performances.
Night Sky‘s most affecting and engaging moments have nothing to do with intergalactic travel or transdimensional portals, however. No special effect matches Irene delivering a heartbreaking monologue about the death of the Yorks’s adult son, or Franklin comforting his granddaughter Denise (Kiah McKirnan) at her father’s grave.
These characters are on their way to learning the secrets of the universe, but they have already lived long enough to know what truly matters.

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A study looking at more than 55,000 pairs of words has found why word pairings like “gnome bone” and “spam scrotum” seem to be more amusing than their constituent parts

Humans

13 May 2022

By Jesse Staniforth
Some pairs of words are funnier than othersShutterstock / fizkes
On their own there is nothing particularly funny about the words “gnome” and “bone”, but put them together and it is a different story. Pairings like “gnome bone” seem to make people chuckle, at least according to a study that looked at the funniness of thousands of pairs of words.
Cynthia S. Q. Siew at the National University of Singapore and her colleagues generated random word pairings using a list of around 5000 words previously studied for their humour or lack thereof. … More

A study looking at more than 55,000 pairs of words has found why word pairings like “funk fungus” and “gnome bone” seem to be more amusing than their constituent parts

Humans

13 May 2022

By Jesse Staniforth
Some pairs of words are funnier than othersShutterstock / fizkes
On their own there is nothing particularly funny about the words “gnome” and “bone”, but put them together and it is a different story. Pairings like “gnome bone” seem to make people chuckle, at least according to a study that looked at the funniness of thousands of pairs of words.
Cynthia S. Q. Siew at the National University of Singapore and her colleagues generated random word pairings using a list of around 5000 words previously studied for their humour or lack thereof. … More

The Research Excellence Framework, an assessment of UK universities’ research output, has found that “world-leading” research is distributed across the country rather than concentrated in a few elite institutions

Humans

12 May 2022

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Research around the UK has been called “world-leading”Muhammet Camdereli/Getty Images
The UK’s “world-leading” research isn’t just limited to a select few elite universities, but rather is distributed across the country, according to the latest UK government analysis of the country’s academic output.
The analysis by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) team is based on seven years’ worth of work conducted by universities. It assesses the quality of a university’s research output in terms of how highly cited it is and the impact it has had in both academia and the wider world. Unlike in 2014, the last time this analysis was conducted, the REF team put a greater emphasis on the wider long-term impact that a piece of research has had on the UK’s economy, environment and quality of life.
The results will help UK government funding bodies decide how to allocate £2 billion worth of grant money between universities each year.Advertisement
“There’s lots of myths about where our research excellence is, but the truth is that it is more broadly distributed, as the results from this exercise show,” says Steven Hill at Research England, chair of the REF steering group.
More than 185,000 pieces of research were submitted by 157 universities to the REF team, which were reviewed by 34 expert panels. The panels were split into four main categories: life and medical sciences, physical sciences, social sciences and arts and humanities.

The team found that 41 per cent of the research submitted was considered of the highest quality, which the REF team termed “world-leading”. Meanwhile, 43 per cent of the research was ranked “internationally excellent”. More than 80 per cent of the research assessed at both these levels of quality was found in every region and nation in the UK.
Nearly all universities who submitted research to the REF team were found to have at least some of their activity judged as “world-leading”. “There’s a really even distribution of research excellence across the UK,” says Hill.
Comparisons with previous analyses made by REF are difficult to make due to methodological changes, but the 2014 REF report found that only 30 per cent of research submitted was “world-leading”.
“Universities play a key role in providing the ideas and skills to fuel the regional economy that surrounds them,” says Brian Walker at Newcastle University, UK. “In less prosperous regions, these contributions from universities are disproportionately important.”

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CORNELIA PARKER
Visit
Cornelia Parker brings mesmerising, large-scale installations to London’s Tate Britain gallery. Expect frozen moments, exploded art (see above), perceptual games and glimpses into deep time. Open from 19 May.
HBO
Watch
The Time Traveler’s Wife is a mix of sci-fi and romance, in which protagonist Henry (Theo James) flitters uncontrollably through time, and his wife Clare (Rose Leslie) has to put up with him. Streaming on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV from 16 May.Advertisement
Artem Oleshko/Alamy
Listen
The Academy of Robotics, which has launched and tested some of Europe’s first self-driving cars, examines how tech is transforming its own funding structures in a six-part podcast on the Clubhouse audio app.

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Waste from Swedish firm Boliden was dumped near a town in ChileARICA LAIKA FILM AND TELEVISION
Arica
Lars Edman and William Johansson
Selected UK cinemasAdvertisement
FORTY years ago, Boliden, a Swedish multinational metals, mining and smelting company, sold nearly 200,000 tonnes of smelter sludge rich in mercury, arsenic, lead and other heavy metals to the Chilean reprocessing company Promel. The latter dumped most of it next to a row of houses in Arica in northern Chile.
Over the years, this community of low-income families swelled until it surrounded the site of contamination. A generation of children grew up playing in the sludge. In 1999, the Chilean government struck an uneasy peace with those affected by this avoidable catastrophe. Promel no longer exists. Families closest to the site have been evacuated.
Swedish film-maker Lars Edman returns to the country of his birth and the site of his 2010 Toxic Playground documentary for a follow-up. Arica concentrates on the legal case against Boliden, whose due diligence on toxic materials has come under serious question. Boliden denies responsibility, saying it followed applicable regulations and believed the waste would be processed safely. Any negligence, it argues, is attributable to Promel and the Chilean authorities.
The chief protagonist of Edman’s first film was Rolf Svedberg, Boliden’s former head of environmental issues. It was his site visit and report that green-lit the sale and transport of what Boliden’s legal team calls “material of negative value”.
Brought face to face with the consequences of that decision, and hosted by a community riddled with cancer and congenital conditions, Svedberg’s distress was visible. A decade on, though, he has the legal case to think of, not to mention his current role as a judge at Sweden’s environmental supreme court.
Boliden’s legal consultants bring in experts who assemble arcane explanations and a ludicrous wind-tunnel experiment to show that living next to tailings containing 17 per cent arsenic couldn’t possibly have affected anyone’s health. Opposing them are 800 plaintiffs (out of a community of 18,000) armed with a few urine tests from 2011 and evidence that would be overwhelming were it not so frustratingly anecdotal.
One interviewee, Elia, points out houses from her gate. “The lady who lived in the house with the bars,” she says, “sold the house and died of cancer. Next door is Dani Ticona. She had aggressive cancer in her head and died too. And her son’s wife had a baby who died…”
Boliden’s team performs a familiar trick, sowing doubt by suggesting that lab and field science are the same thing, with identical standards of proof. If the company had to address average consumers rather than Arica’s low-income residents, it would long since have saved money and its reputation by owning the problem. But Boliden deals with corporations and governments. Its image rests on problem-free operations; it pays to stay silent.
In the end, the community loses, but in 2021 the UN sent experts into Arica. Their findings shamed both the company and the Swedish government.
Law is a rhetorical art. We like to think justice can be scientifically determined, but that is to misunderstand science and the law. Tragedy, poverty, blame and shame cannot be reduced to numbers. Protest, eloquence and argument are as essential for justice as they were in the making of this elegiac film.
Simon also recommends… More

By Sam Wong
Shutterstock/Rozdemir
THE idea that we can improve our gut health by eating foods containing live “friendly” bacteria, or probiotics, dates back to the early 20th century. Ilya Mechnikov, a Russian biologist whose work on immunity led to a Nobel prize, postulated that consuming soured milk fostered beneficial bacteria in the intestines. He claimed that people in Bulgaria who ate yogurt lived longer as a result, and his ideas helped to popularise yogurt in western Europe and North America.
The main types of bacteria found in commercial yogurt are Lactobacillus delbrueckii subspecies bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus. Several studies have found that … More

A moving exhibition at Bletchley Park shows women’s crucial contribution to the success of the UK’s wartime intelligence centre

Humans

11 May 2022

By Nicholas Wroe

THROUGH movies like Enigma and The Imitation Game, we think we know all about Bletchley Park, the UK government intelligence centre in Buckinghamshire that broke the codes and cyphers of the Axis powers and changed the course of the second world war. But there are, it turns out, still plenty more stories to tell.Advertisement
The Intelligence Factory, a permanent new exhibition on the Bletchley Park site, which has been a museum since 1993, mostly steers clear of the achievements of the likes of Alan Turing. Instead, it seeks to recreate the unsung work, also invaluable to the war effort, undertaken by the large and largely anonymous cast of more junior workers. This was predominantly young women, who enabled Bletchley to gather and disseminate “the product”, as it described its intelligence, to Allied forces and politicians.
Visitors can see historic objects – often in the rooms where they were used in wartime – such as a Hollerith tabulating machine and its punch cards, which became a stepping stone to modern computing. There are huge maps and charts on which analysts tracked shipping convoys in near real time, interactive elements to illustrate the problem-solving that took place, and impressive examples of early analogue data management, storage and visualisation systems – all of which have direct parallels today.
But The Intelligence Factory also features diaries, home movies and even teddy bears belonging to workers, mixing the intensely personal with the wider picture of ordinary people taking on an extraordinary task.
The sheer scale of the endeavour is overwhelming: you even enter through a large loading bay built to accommodate the delivery of 2 million punch cards every week to feed the Hollerith machines.
When war began, Bletchley was likened to a small university. It succeeded in cracking codes, but the sheer weight of information it received became ever more unmanageable. Over the years, it dramatically scaled up to something closer to a factory. By the end of the war, 9000 people were on site, 75 per cent of them women. Their work – such as punching those cards – was often mind-numbingly repetitive, and they had little or no idea where they fitted into the bigger picture.
They were also forbidden to speak about their work, even to colleagues. Unsurprisingly, morale was a major concern for Bletchley’s leadership, and its famous tennis courts as well as its concerts and societies were a stab at addressing the issues. But logistics were even more of a headache
Feeding, housing and transporting the workforce became as much a focus as the logistics of collating, sharing and making retrievable the vast swathes of information (all on paper) across the site. The exhibition shows both activities, with food playing a prominent role. A newfangled idea – the canteen, copied from the Kodak factory in Harrow – was introduced to improve efficiency.
Scattered across the exhibition are modern applications of ideas developed at Bletchley in the 1940s. These include an Encrochat phone used by criminal gangs, whose encryption was cracked by international crime agencies, and algorithms that identify suspicious shipping movements.
Another new exhibition on the site, The Art of Data, also explores data visualisation through strikingly visualised 21st-century uses, from heat maps tracking swimmers in an Ironman race to the movements of the local Milton Keynes Dons football team during a match.
Behind all this, the human element shines out, as it did in wartime. It was the quiet skills of organisation and resilience as well as genius minds and cutting-edge innovation that allowed Bletchley to succeed. In the end, The Intelligence Factory is a moving and inspiring story of a myriad small jobs being done by ordinary people that together amounted to something very special.

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