Humans

Television often portrays researchers as lab coat-wearing weirdos who hate social interactions, but the name of the game is collaboration plus hoodies. We need to get better at showing the public what we do, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Humans

| Columnist

11 May 2022

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Hinterhaus Productions/Getty Images
I AM a person who likes things to be specific and accurate. In some ways, this is antithetical to being a communicator of science to general audiences. This requires helping non-experts understand complex ideas – like the idea of quantum fields – while deploying only a small fraction of the language we professionals use to talk among ourselves. It means glossing over details that can feel fundamentally important. Which is to say that I regularly have to grapple with what it means to talk to people about something when I know I’m not going to give them the full story.
I find it easier to be successful in writing. Here, I can choose my words carefully, and the “optics” of the work I am trying to get across are what I manage to evoke in the reader’s mind.
By contrast, one of my biggest frustrations is with how science is portrayed on television. There, it seems like a production mandate to have flashy graphics and representations of “what scientists do” that align with public expectations. The result? We get a lot of representation of people (often white men) in white lab coats, even though many (perhaps most?) scientists don’t wear a lab coat of any kind, ever.Advertisement
For theoretical physicists, the expectation is that we will have a chalkboard filled with equations. For some people that is accurate, but I dislike the feel of chalk on my fingers. I much prefer writing with a fountain or gel pen in a high-quality, bound notebook.
Part of what ends up being so off in popularisations of science is that we continue to get various versions of the lone genius: someone sitting at their desk or working at a chalkboard alone, thinking important thoughts.
The reality is that – as an introvert – I wish I got more time alone. My days are filled with meetings. Every single member of my dark matter and neutron star research group has at least one per week with me that is centred on their main research question. There is a member of my team who sees me in a meeting between two and five times a week. One of those is my group meeting, where everyone comes together and shares what they have accomplished since the previous week. They take turns asking each other questions. This allows us all to learn more and hone our question-asking skills, which is important for scientists.
I have other regular appointments that might seem peripheral and even boring – including to the participants – but that are quite important to the doing of science. These are the conversations in which we are planning for the future, navigating applying for grant money or lobbying for more grant money to be allocated so that our discipline is sustained in the future. Right now, I am spending a lot of time on the delayed Snowmass 2021 Particle Physics Community Planning Process.
This occurs about once a decade, and involves the US particle physics community getting together to determine what science in this field is plausible in the coming years and what experiments – maybe a new particle collider, maybe a new telescope focused on dark matter – should be built. The lengthy report we produce will be read by a government-appointed group that will determine what can be funded for the next decade or so. Participating in this process is time-consuming and doesn’t immediately advance my research, but it is also a key part of my job.
Ultimately, science is a collaborative enterprise, perhaps more so than any other area of academic endeavour. We depend on others to get our work done and interact a lot with other people, but, again, I don’t think this is well represented on television.
Instead, we get stereotypes of weirdos who can’t handle social interactions, when in fact we are a collection of weirdos who navigate social interactions just fine because our jobs depend on it.
Our work is also often messy. I don’t just mean that we argue, though we do. It is also the case that we often don’t think in pretty pictures. I wish we could show the public more often what our work actually looks like, so that we could help people understand what we actually do. At a time when anti-intellectualism passes for a mainstream political position, now more than ever, we need the public to be tuned into how our enterprise actually works.
Plus, in my corner of science, hoodies are a more standard uniform than lab coats. Shifting stereotypes about how scientists look could help younger people see themselves in us, to realise that we are everyday people, just like them. I understand the desire to dress things up for a bit of Hollywood drama, but I don’t think we have to try so hard to make science seem exciting. What matters is making sure we are able to explain why it is exciting. That is the hard part, and I won’t always succeed, but I do enjoy trying.

Chanda’s week
What I’m readingI finished Sara Nović’s novel True Biz in one sitting, and learned a lot of deaf history, including why American Sign Language is so different from the British version.
What I’m watchingBaseball season is back, and I bleed Dodger blue.
What I’m working onWrapping up a paper with colleagues on the unique structures made by a hypothetical dark matter particle, the axion.

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Josie Ford
Toad in the hole
If we are looking a little lorn this week, with our mouth opening and closing to little effect, it is principally because we are staring at “Finding love in a hopeless place: A global database of misdirected amplexus in anurans”. This is a new paper in the journal Ecology by Filipe Serrano and his colleagues at the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil. No amount of science words can gloss over the fact that it amounts to a spreadsheet of all the instances recorded in the scientific literature in the past century of frogs attempting to mate with things that they shouldn’t.
It can’t be easy being an amphibian, as evidenced by the touching – in a very real, excessive sense – story recently reported in this magazine of male Santa Marta harlequin toads in Colombia that cling to females’ backs for up to five months in hope of mating (23 April, p 19).
The new database conveniently tags misdirected encounters with hour, month, year and geographical location. “We recorded a total of 282 interspecific amplexus, 46 necrophiliac amplexus and 50 amplexus with objects or non-amphibian species, with USA and Brazil being the countries with the highest number of records,” the authors report.Advertisement
“Why?” asks a colleague. Ah, well, if we knew why we were doing science in the first place, that wouldn’t be science, would it?
Broken-down wind
Many of us have a special place we go when we want to think. In Feedback’s case, we are often accompanied by Think, a journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy that promises “philosophy for everyone”.
We think it may be getting a little too Everyman with a contribution in the latest issue entitled “The metaphysics of farts”. If the last item brought the sound of the barrel scraping, listen to us now drill right through.
What is a fart? An act, that of breaking wind, or a thing, the resultant smell? Author Brian Capra tackles this question head on, highlighting contradictions between the “essential-bum-origin” and “phenomenological” views that, he submits, mean both can’t be true.
Via a thought experiment asking if two people fart in a lift, how many farts there are, and the obvious answer – does it matter? – he concludes that a fart-thing must proceed from a fart-act, but a fart-act doesn’t necessarily produce a fart-thing, and, so, “we are led to an outlook similar to Descartes’s view of the mind: on the phenomenological view, the essence of a fart is given to us in our olfactory experience”.
Desfartes, as a nameless colleague supplies indelicately. Ignore them, dear readers: this sort of thing is what makes philosophy and thinking such valuable activities. Now, could someone open that door? It is closer than two toads in the mating season in here.
Got my goat
We note in passing – noiselessly, of course – that the same author wrote an article in Philosophy Now that uses elementary principles of model logic to prove that everything is a goat. For those still asking “why?”, we merely note the goat’s genus is Capra, and there may be more than a hint of solipsism in the argument.
On a roll
We would personally prefer it if everything were cake. Our thanks to the very, very many of you who provided ever so slightly muffled feedback on our recent item on legal definitions of cake (30 April). Space fortunately does permit us to delve into the details, suffice to say that the rigour with which you treat the subject convinces us that Feedback is all one happy family with shared values and priorities.
We particularly savoured Liz Tucker’s tangential mention of a talk she went to on the history of the Lyons tea-and-cake empire that was a feature of the British landscape for many years, which stated that, at one time, the company produced 35 miles of Swiss roll a week. This conjures a mental image of a truly majestic, if slow-moving, machine. It prompts us to ask “How do you make a Swiss roll?”, to which we are sure you can supply the punchline.
Like a lead…
Carl Zetie is perplexed by the appearance in his Facebook feed of an advertisement from a software company called Zeplin, whose corporate logo is an airship of almost that name. “Companies ship 20% faster using Zeplin,” it promises. Historically speaking, this seems an odd choice of corporate metaphor, and we do hope there is no crashing and burning on arrival.
Talking tough
Those were unsettling times, as are these. So it is good to know that the defence of the realm is in no-nonsense hands, as per a tweet from the University Royal Naval Unit Edinburgh, sent to us by Ceri Brown. “Our first training evening after Easter was a very detailed and informative brief from the Defence Nuclear Organisation on the UK Nuclear Deterrent. Thank you to Captain Tough and his team for the briefing.” With that exemplar of The Name Thing That Shan’t be Mentioned, and to employ a military phrase whose correct usage has generated lively debate from you before (3 April, 24 April and 8 May 2021), it is, from this Feedback, over and out.
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A series of immersive installations, including Planet City, a film that imagines a “hyper-dense” city of 10 billion people, are part of Our Time on Earth, a new exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London encouraging people to reconnect with the natural world

Humans

11 May 2022

By Gege Li
Liam Young
THE complexity, community and precarity of the planet are highlighted in these works from Our Time on Earth, a new exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London. The show aims to “ignite a sense of hope and courage, and to shift people’s mindsets to reconnect with the natural world”, says co-curator Luke Kemp.
David Levene
The image above is a still from a video called Sanctuary of the Unseen Forest, a collaboration between immersive art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, Andres Roberts – co-founder of The Bio-Leadership Project – and artist James Bulley. It explores our intimate connection with trees and addresses “plant blindness”, a human tendency to ignore plants in favour of animals.Advertisement
The lead image is a video still from Planet City, a film directed by architect Liam Young that imagines a “hyper-dense” city of 10 billion people, allowing the rest of the world to be reclaimed by the wild. It shows a speculative solution for feeding the city’s population.
Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Barbican Centre
Above is an image from digital art installation Life Forces by art duo Tin & Ed, which aims to provide a portal to nature by using human body tracking to allow visitors to interact with digital landscapes.
The two below images are shots of Sharing Prosperity, a gaming experience created by DVTK in collaboration with the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London. Set in the near future, the game explores how collaboration could help the planet to flourish.
‘Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Barbican Centre
Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Barbican Centre
Our Time on Earth is on at the Barbican Centre until 29 August.

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State laws could restrict abortion in large parts of the US, and other reproductive healthcare offerings may be at stake if Roe v Wade is overturned

Humans

11 May 2022

By Dana G. Smith
Activists demonstrating in front of the US Supreme Court on 3 MayWin McNamee/Getty Images
THE US Supreme Court appears to be on the brink of repealing Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that protects the right to an abortion in the country. Should the seminal case be overturned, it will be left to each state to decide whether abortion is legal for its residents.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research group, 13 states have so-called trigger laws ready that would effectively ban all abortions as soon as the ruling … More

By Carissa Wong
Large houses by a lake in Orlando, FloridaEdwin Remsberg/Getty Images
People from privileged groups may misperceive equality-boosting policies as harmful to them, even if they would actually benefit.
Previous studies have found that advantaged people often don’t support interventions that redistribute their resources to others who are disadvantaged, in zero-sum scenarios where there are limited resources.
Now, researchers have explored the degree to which people from advantaged groups think equality-promoting policies would harm their access to resources, in scenarios where the strategies would benefit or have no effect on their group, while bolstering the resources of a disadvantaged group.Advertisement
Derek Brown at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a series of studies involving a total of more than 4000 volunteers.
In one study, they presented white people who weren’t Hispanic with policies that didn’t affect their own advantaged group and benefited a disadvantaged group that they did not belong to – people with disabilities, those who had committed a crime in the past, members of a racial minority group or women. Importantly, the team told participants that resources – in the form of jobs or money – were unlimited.
For example, one policy would direct more money to mortgage loans for Latino homebuyers without limiting how many mortgage loans were available for white people.
Participants were then asked to rank how they thought the policy would affect the advantaged group’s access to resources on a scale from greatly harmful to greatly beneficial. The team found that, on average, advantaged people perceived equality-boosting policies as harmful to their resource access, even though they were told that resources were boundless.
“We find that advantaged members misperceived these policies as a sacrifice to their group, even when that’s not the case,” says Brown.

The researchers then asked participants to consider a win-win scenario involving equality-promoting policies that benefited both the disadvantaged and advantaged groups – but the latter to a lesser extent. People were also asked to consider inequality-enhancing policies that would reduce access to resources for everyone.
In this case, the team found that most advantaged people thought equality-enhancing policies with benefits for all would be more harmful to them than inequality-enhancing polices that came at a cost to the advantaged group.
“We thought, maybe if we make a win-win or mutual-benefit situation, then maybe [advantaged people] will see the equality-enhancing policies as helpful. But they didn’t,” says Brown.
Advantaged people tended to see equality-promoting policies as less harmful to their resource access if they benefitted people who were disadvantaged but who shared an identity with them. For example, white participants generally thought they would lose less from a policy that directed relatively more money to disadvantaged white people, compared with a policy that gave disadvantaged Black people the same benefits.
“Advantaged people saw these policies more accurately when we made salient a disparity within their own group versus one that occurs between different groups,” says Brown. “This suggests that when we identify ourselves with a certain group, and see a disparity occurring within our group, we are motivated to reduce that in-group disparity.”

In another experiment, the researchers asked a diverse group of participants to take a bogus personality test and then assigned them into a made-up advantaged group. Again, they found that people tended to misperceive equality-promoting policies as harmful even when they benefitted the advantaged group. This suggests that anyone at an advantage – for any reason – may misperceive beneficial equality-boosting policies as harmful.
“It’s pretty troubling what we found. [But] I think people have the capacity to believe in these policies. And I think there’s a way forward, we just have to find it,” says Brown.
Education could help to tackle inequalities by making people more aware of this tendency to misperceive equality-boosting policies that would actually benefit them, says Brown.
“It was an ambitious series of studies that did an excellent job of ruling out alternative explanations,” says Dan Meegan at the University of Guelph, Canada. “The work paints a pretty dark picture for those trying to convince people to support policies designed to reduce intergroup inequality. The authors gave their participants every opportunity to see that helping disadvantaged groups need not come at the expense of advantaged groups, to no avail.”
“In terms of reliability and importance, this research checks all the boxes. What I would say is the fact that [the findings] aren’t surprising is alarming to me,” says Shai Davidai at Columbia University in New York.
Further work will need to establish if the same behaviour applies to people outside the US, although Brown and Davidai think it probably will.
“My own and others’ work has already shown that zero-sum beliefs replicate in many cultural contexts and across different nations, and I would not be surprised if this is the case for the current work as well,” says Davidai.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm2385

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A terrific book by Sam Knight about a bizarre, real-life attempt to collect people’s premonitions is beautifully written, but goes too easy on the pseudoscience

Humans

4 May 2022

By James McConnachie
The Aberfan disaster in Wales was caused by a colliery spoil tip collapseMario De Biasi per Mondadori Portfolio
The Premonitions Bureau
Sam Knight
FaberAdvertisement

IN OCTOBER 1966, around the time a colliery spoil heap in Aberfan in Wales collapsed, burying a school and homes and killing 116 children and 28 adults, an English psychiatrist called John Barker was working on a book about people who appeared to have scared themselves to death.
In some ways, it was a precursor to the work of writers such as Oliver Sacks: Barker was boldly but thoughtfully exploring the odder reaches of the psyche. In other ways, however, his research was sensationalist and foolish – Barker was also a member of the Society for Psychical Research and he had suggested that people could become aware of the moment of their death. By telepathy, perhaps.
In the aftermath of the Aberfan disaster, Barker heard that a boy who had escaped the wave of coal slurry had later died of shock. Barker drove 160 kilometres from a psychiatric hospital where he was a consultant to investigate. But while touring Aberfan, he heard stories of forebodings and warnings, and he had a new idea.
Within a week, in collaboration with Peter Fairley, the Evening Standard‘s science journalist, he was inviting the newspaper’s readers to contact him with their “dreams and forebodings”. These would be recorded and, in the event of ensuing disaster, verified. This was the “premonitions bureau”, and its story (and Barker’s) is the subject of a book by journalist Sam Knight.
Barker was certainly an interesting man. Intellectually ambitious, he researched Munchausen’s syndrome and experimented with aversion therapy, claiming to have cured a man of desire for an extramarital affair by administering 70-volt electric shocks. He was a pioneer of longboard surfing. And he kept a crystal ball on his desk.
In the 15 months it existed, the bureau collected 723 predictions, of which 18 were recorded as “hits”, with 12 coming from just two correspondents. One was a London music teacher, Kathy Middleton. She saw pictures, with words flashing as if in neon lights. The other “human seismometer”, as Fairley put it, was a switchboard operator called Alan Hencher, who worked at the Post Office. His visions were accompanied by distress and headaches.
In one “major hit” for the bureau, Hencher predicted a plane crash involving 123 people. Nine days later, a plane came down near Nicosia in Cyprus, killing 126 people, 124 of them on impact.
In another, Middleton wrote to Barker detailing a vision of a petrified astronaut. Earlier that day – although it wasn’t reported until later – Vladimir Komarov’s Soyuz 1 capsule had crash-landed in Russia, burning him to death.
Knight finds that Barker could be “credulous, or laconic; doubtful, yet insinuating”. Something similar is true of Knight. Now a staff writer at The New Yorker, his non-fiction heroes include sophisticated literary storytellers such as W. G. Sebald and Joan Didion. He likes jump cuts, internal resonances and leaving things unstated.
Take the section where he segues from a discussion of entropy to a tragic outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in England and then to a campaign to shut Victorian-era asylums – by a woman who dreamed of the winning horses in the Epsom Derby.
Or another where he moves from the origin of the word embolism to the nocebo effect and Sweden’s uppgivenhetssyndrom (resignation syndrome), a condition in which refugee children appear to retreat into near-comas of hopelessness.
With such manoeuvres, Knight builds a subtle, allusive study of his subject, and his evocation of the frowsty yet aspirational mid-1960s England feels just right. But it is Barker who dominates the book, with his “contained, quietly belligerent energy”, and Knight treats him with generosity, and delivers a great deal of pathos.
Too much generosity and too much pathos, because premonitions aren’t true. If you deal in them, you are deluded or a charlatan. Barker was mostly the former. Knight, I am sure, is neither – but he still allows the possibility to play, as a kind of mood music. And for all that this is a compelling, beautifully written book, it feels like bad faith.

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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans

4 May 2022

Love in the metaverse
A PR writes in a breathless tone that suggests they are just back from doing something else. “For the next generation dating in the metaverse won’t be optional,” we read. “There will be a blurry line between an in-person date and being on video. The audio will be spatial. The video will be immersive. And video dating will change as we know it.”
And Mark Zuckerberg will be hiding round a corner holding a big bucket for your most intimate secrets, ka-ching. We would bet on at least some people keeping the physical dating option open, if only because not all sensory experiences are fully available in the metaverse as yet. But never say never. History is littered with intrinsically real-world experiences we never expected to go virtual: shopping for shoes, boring people with holiday snaps, hurling abuse at strangers.
But the spatial audio bit sounds interesting. We weren’t aware the metaverse equated to full-on synaesthesia. More prosaically, the PR turns out to be offering a hook-up with the CEO of a video speed-dating app for hot chat with topics including “Requirements for dating in the metaverse” – a large headset and wide turning circle, we presume – and “Cheating in the metaverse”.
We are unsure whether this last one is in the sense of a “how to”, or just informing us how to tell if an avatar is cheating. There must be ways. Perhaps guilty feet have got no algorithm, to misquote a poet.Advertisement
What the doctor ordered
Possibly fresh from a consultation in what we are now joining the world in misbranding as the metaverse, Andy Howe writes in concern at his doctor prescribing something that sounded very like “die, mister”. We are happy to confirm that this is a nasal spray for the treatment of hay fever, one Dymista, and merely homophonically alarming.
We are altogether more exercised by the advice his daughter finds in a Google preview window under the rubric “What to do when your baby poops in the bath”. “We recommend removing them from the tub and making sure to get rid of any excess water which might contain fecal matter. Once they’re completely dry, give them a wash with baby-safe disinfectant or boil them in water in the same way you would sterilize a pacifier before returning them to the bath.” And then be sure to throw away the baby with the… no, wait a moment. Following the trail back to its source, the advice turns out to be about bath toys, but still.
Like the sun going down
There are few more disheartening ideas for those who believe in human agency than Isaac Newton’s conception of a preordained clockwork universe. This is why we are vicariously pleased as Kathy Haskard, consulting some celestial runes in her neck of the woods, discovers a website promising that the “next planned solar eclipse that will be visible from Adelaide, will take place on April 20, 2023″.
We like the idea of throwing in the odd unplanned one every now and again to keep people on their toes. The errant adjective reminds Feedback of a report we once spotted in a small-town newspaper in Germany, that a spontaneous demonstration would occur on the main square at 11am on the following Tuesday, and of another clockwork certainty in keeping with our own native country’s aptitude for genteel chaos: disruption for anyone so foolhardy as to attempt to travel by train on a weekend or public holiday. We are still unsure whether the dread “planned engineering works” are any less annoying than the spontaneous, self-nucleating variety, or which authority ordains they should always be precisely in our way.
Testicle tans
US TV commentator and all-round… egg Tucker Carlson has been teasing his new documentary film, The End of Men, with a trailer of such startling homoeroticism that it will possibly soon be banned in Florida.
Carlson’s premise is that male testosterone levels are declining, that this is a bad thing and that the best way to combat it is to get your testicles tanned. Feedback’s level of hormonal outrage remains middling about all of this. We are unsure of the last part, however, which seems to involve exposing private parts to infrared radiation. Hot, we suspect, and not in a good way.
Doing our due diligence, we do run across well-founded research reported in this organ in 2018 – no sniggering at the back, there – that “The higher your testosterone levels, the more you love soft rock”. On that basis, anything that accidentally ends up reducing them is probably all to the good.
Woke-o-saurus
Meanwhile, in the UK, The Sun reports that David Attenborough’s new one-off CGI-enhanced documentary Dinosaurs: The Final Day features a “softer ‘woke’ version of the T-Rex”. “Predators tend to just fight all the time and we wanted to show them pooing,” the article quotes executive producer Helen Thomas as saying. This mystifies us, as that wasn’t on our list as a specifically woke activity.
We suspect this might annoy those dinosaurs who like their T. rex raw in tooth and claw and think the world’s gone to the dogs since the mammals have been in charge, or whatever. We also suspect the final day of the dinosaurs would have been a good one for a spot of testicle tanning. Doesn’t seem to have done them any good, mind.
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This still from The Boat People, a film shot in the Philippines following five children as they travel by sea, collecting objects, is one of many evocative artworks on display at Seattle Art Museum’s exhibition Our Blue Planet: Global visions of water

Humans

4 May 2022

By Gege Li
Tuan Andrew Nguyen 2021. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York
Seattle Art Museum
FROM its pure essence to its significance in culture and society, water takes on rousing and inventive forms in these artworks from Our Blue Planet: Global visions of water, an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in Washington. The show explores one of the world’s most crucial resources through more than 80 artistic interpretations.
Raqib ShawAdvertisement
At top is a still from The Boat People by Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Shot in the Philippines, the film follows five children as they travel by sea, collecting objects. Above is The Garden of Earthly Delights V, Raqib Shaw’s mixed-media depiction of mystical underwater creatures, inspired by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.
Claude Zervas
Adrienne Elise Tarver
Above shows: Nooksack, a sculpture by Claude Zervas made from wire and cold-cathode fluorescent lamps that mimics the form of the Nooksack river in Washington state; Mirage 24 by Adrienne Elise Tarver, part of her watercolour series of nude women lounging and swimming in tropical environments; and below, Mask of Kumugwe’ (Chief of the Sea), an alder and red-cedar-bark mask made around 1880 by the Kwakwaka’wakw Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast, whose culture and traditions are centred on the natural environment.
Mask of Ḱumugwe’ (Chief of the Sea), ca. 1880 Native American
Our Blue Planet is on display at the Seattle Art Museum until 30 May.

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