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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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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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.

This column appears monthly. Up next week: Graham Lawton More

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.
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

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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