Humans

Analysis of pollen preserved in peat at Slieveanorra in the Antrim hills reveals the resilience of a rural community through environmental changes

Humans

27 April 2022

By Michael Marshall
The peat-covered uplands of the north of Ireland were once wooded and farmedHelen Essell, CC-BY 4.0
A rural Irish community survived a succession of climate shifts and other threats over the past 1000 years, a study of pollen preserved in peat has revealed. The finding suggests that societies can endure despite environmental changes, if they are flexible enough to adapt their way of life.
People in Ireland have experienced multiple upheavals over the past millennium. These include the European famine of 1315-17, the Black Death of 1348-49 and the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-52. There were also climatic shifts, notably the transition from the relatively warm Medieval climate anomaly to the marginally cooler Little Ice Age.
To find out more about how people handled these events, Gill Plunkett and Graeme Swindles at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK studied an archaeological site called Slieveanorra in the Antrim hills, now part of Northern Ireland. It is a bog in the uplands, surrounded on three sides by ridges.Advertisement
“If you go up today, it’s deserted,” says Plunkett, but there are abandoned houses and indications of farming.
Plunkett and Swindles studied pollen from a peat core from Slieveanorra to find out what plants grew there over the past 1000 years. They found evidence of human interference throughout, such as fewer trees than would be expected, more pasture plants plus cereal crops.

The team also saw pollen from plants in the cannabis family, which includes hemp. “I think we’ve probably got hemp being produced and flax as well,” says Plunkett, perhaps for the textile industry.
The little community weathered multiple crises. The famine and plague of the 1300s were associated with increased land use, suggesting that any reduction in the population was temporary. The only time the site was possibly abandoned was during a wet period in the mid-1400s, for a generation or two, but after that farming resumed and even increased.
Only in the early 1900s did farming cease. Plunkett thinks that was because people saw better opportunities elsewhere, rather than the area becoming uninhabitable.
It isn’t clear why the Slieveanorra community was so resilient, but Plunkett says one reason may be that there was no landlord or owner, at least until the late 1800s. This meant the people living there were free to change their lifestyle, for example doing more hunting when crops grew poorly – instead of having to send a certain quantity of grain to a feudal lord.
Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266680

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Archaeological work at Blick Mead, a site near Stonehenge, reveals that people were visiting the site thousands of years before the monument was built

Humans

27 April 2022

By Michael Marshall
The region around Stonehenge in the UK may have been important to people long before the monument was builtShutterstock / Steffen.E
The area surrounding Stonehenge, UK, may have acquired enormous significance for Stone Age humans thousands of years before the famous monument was built, suggest archaeologists working at a nearby site called Blick Mead.
The Stonehenge monument was built between 3000 and 2000 BC. It is a ring of standing stones, surrounded by an earth bank and ditch.
Lying more than a kilometre to the east of Stonehenge is Blick Mead, the … More

From the discovery of the first subatomic particle to the confirmation of the Higgs boson in 2012, Suzie Sheehy’s account of experiments that changed our world is detailed but lively

Humans

27 April 2022

By Elle Hunt

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, SwitzerlandMaximilien Brice/CERN
The Matter of Everything
Suzie Sheehy
BloomsburyAdvertisement

IN 1930, Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli set out to solve a mystery. The variability of energy values for beta particles, defying the basic scientific principles of conservation of energy and momentum, had been confounding physicists since the turn of the century.
Pauli – a physicist so rigorous in his approach that he had been called “the scourge of God” – seemed well-placed to address it. And yet, when he put his mind to finding a theoretical solution for the problem of beta decay, Pauli created only further ambiguity.
He proposed the existence of an entirely new, chargeless and near-massless particle that would allow for energy and momentum to be conserved, but would be almost impossible to find. “I have done a terrible thing,” he wrote. “I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.”
Pauli, a pioneer of quantum physics, is one of many names to cross the pages of The Matter of Everything, Suzie Sheehy’s lively account of “experiments that changed our world”. Through 12 significant discoveries over the course of the 20th century, Sheehy shows how physics transformed the world and our understanding of it – in many cases, as a direct result of the curiosity and dedication of individuals.
Sheehy is an experimental physicist in the field of accelerator physics, based at the University of Oxford and the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her own expertise makes The Matter of Everything a more technical book than the framing of 12 experiments might suggest, and certainly more so than the average popular science title, but it is nonetheless accessible to the lay reader and vividly described.
From experiments with cathode rays in a German lab in 1895, leading to the detection of X-rays and to the discovery of the first subatomic particle, to the confirmation of the Higgs boson in 2012, The Matter of Everything is an opportunity to learn not just about individual success stories, but the nature of physics itself.
Sheehy does well to set out the questions that these scientists wanted to answer and what lay at stake with their discoveries, on the macro level as well as the micro one, showing how physics not only helped us to understand the world, but shaped it. These early “firsts” came from small-scale experiments, with researchers operating their own equipment and even building it from scratch.
The Matter of Everything also highlights those whose contributions might have historically been overlooked, such as Lise Meitner, dubbed the “German Marie Curie” by Albert Einstein. Her work on nuclear fission went unacknowledged for some 50 years after her colleague Otto Hahn was solely awarded the Nobel prize in 1944.
The commitment and collaboration of physicists and engineers through the second world war showed what was possible – for good and evil. Sheehy describes how the development of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki awakened a social conscience in the field, paving the way to the international cooperation we see today, such as on the Large Hadron Collider.
United behind a common goal, and with cross-government support, answers that had never before seemed possible suddenly appeared within grasp. To Sheehy, this is evidence of the potential for physics to overcome the challenges that face science and society now – from the nature of dark matter to tackling the climate crisis.
At the start of the 20th century, she points out, it was said that we knew everything there was to know about the universe; by the end of the century, the world had changed beyond recognition.
The terrible particles Pauli proposed – which he called neutrons, but we now know as neutrinos – were finally confirmed in 1956. His response was quietly triumphant: “Everything comes to him who knows how to wait.”
A sweeping but detailed and pacy account of 100 years of scientific advancement, The Matter of Everything has a cheering takeaway. What such leaps lie ahead? What questions seem intractable now that we won’t give a thought to in the future?
Sheehy mounts the case that – with persistence, curiosity and collaboration – we may yet overcome challenges that now seem impossible.

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Keeping science and politics socially distanced from each other is the best way to ensure government spin doesn’t damage trust in the former, says Fiona Fox

Humans

| Comment

27 April 2022

By Fiona Fox
Michelle D’urbano
WHEN the BSE crisis deepened in the 1990s, John Gummer, then minister of agriculture, invited the press to photograph him trying to feed a beefburger to his 4-year-old daughter, claiming that scientists had advised it was perfectly safe to eat the meat. In fact, they had said there was a low but “theoretical” risk of getting BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a neurological disease of cattle.
But this more nuanced take didn’t reach the UK public at the time because the scientists giving it were hidden from view, just as they were during later crises, such as the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland or the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. Gummer was glossing over the scientific uncertainties to deliver a clear “message” that was convenient for the UK beef trade. As a result, the public were misled and trust in science suffered.
To avoid this in the future, there needs to be a clearer separation between science communication and government communication, so the public can hear science directly from those doing it.Advertisement
One of the few positives in the pandemic was seeing so many leading scientists on our TV screens. While the UK prime minister Boris Johnson used the Downing Street press conferences to deliver key policy decisions and “messaging”, he was flanked by chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance and chief medical officer Chris Whitty who summarised new data and answered media and public questions on the science. This was science communication at its best when most needed and it was a hit with the public. Trust in scientists topped 90 per cent at times as the pandemic unfolded.
Despite this, when the government spin machine got too involved, things got less sciency and more political. As head of the Science Media Centre, an independent organisation promoting scientific literacy in reporting, I lost count of the times I lined up briefings on pandemic-related findings with a panel of great researchers only to turn on a news broadcast and hear ministers announce those findings early. The result: coverage by political journalists with little science but often with government spin.
That wasn’t the only problem during the pandemic. Ministers got a rebuke from regulators for announcing major developments that would impact us all without making scientific data they relied on available for others to assess.
Even more worryingly, in a revealing essay about behind-the-scenes government strategy, Lee Cain, Johnson’s former director of communications, called for a more centralised structure to ensure clear single “messaging” on issues like covid-19. That comms officers are desperate to control the “narrative” in a national crisis is nothing new. But such calls only bolster the case for ensuring science is presented independent of government announcements.
Luckily, we have a precedent. After years of complaints about the way official UK statistics on everything from crime to unemployment were being spun by politicians, campaigners finally convinced the government to address this in the 2017 Code of Practice for Statistics. The result is that figures about our national life are first published as raw data by organisations like the Office for National Statistics. Politicians can comment on these figures like the rest of us, but taking the initial communication away from ministers means we see the numbers without political spin.
Applying this idea more widely would be good for all of us. Critically, the system would also establish the principle that science needs to be impartial and free from politicisation.
The loss of control might be painful for government, but the benefits in terms of public trust in science would be worth it. As the pandemic has shown, that really can be a matter of life and death.
Fiona Fox is head of the Science Media Centre and author of Beyond the Hype

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Remote working might sound enticing, but a two-tier system is emerging, in which it is valued less by employers. This division is only set to grow, says Annalee Newitz

Humans

| Columnist

27 April 2022

By Annalee Newitz
Shutterstock/DimaBerlin
HERE in the US, stay-at-home orders evaporated long ago, and many companies are demanding that workers return to the office. Yet we are still being inundated with news about people who are lucky enough to continue working remotely. Books, articles and software packages promise to help us navigate a new era of “hybrid offices”. It sounds enticing. No more commutes and foul office smells! But the future of working from home may be a lot darker than anyone realises.
I am not worried about what is going to happen to remote working over the next year or two. Many white-collar workers and techies have been doing it for years now – I haven’t had a job that requires me to go into the office for nearly 15 years. In the noughties, I communicated with colleagues via group chat apps and email lists; in the teens, we used Campfire and Slack. Now we use Zoom and other video chat systems. The only thing that has changed since the pandemic is that my outlier experience has become the norm for certain groups of workers.
Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, Square and Slack have all announced that they will allow employees to work from home permanently. But for all their talk of boosting productivity and creating a better work-life balance, the move to hybrid work can come with a cost – literally. Facebook and Twitter will pay less for certain work-at-home staff, and Google could slash their salaries by up to 25 per cent.Advertisement
Along with such pay cuts comes a new generation of home surveillance software, which tracks employees’ online activities, while sometimes using live video feeds to measure how long they sit at their desks. And you can forget about organising a union in a virtual workplace where every private message you send can be read by your boss.
So far, these companies haven’t received much pushback, because most employees think of remote working as a perk. In one survey, nearly half of workers said they would accept a pay cut if they never had to go into the office again. Tayo Bero has pointed out in The Guardian that this isn’t just because people hate to commute: “For Black women, staying at home has meant a reprieve from some of the microaggressions that they would typically face in an in-person work environment.”
Still, we are witnessing the emergence of a two-tiered system, where working from home is valued less by employers. I suspect that the class divisions here will only grow more stark as the years go by, especially when you consider that a great deal of remote working is done by people who are picking up micro-jobs from TaskRabbit, Fiverr and dozens of other sites where you can do 5-minute jobs for pennies.
These gigs can be horrifying: a lot of content moderation is done by home workers who have to evaluate reams of violent videos and hateful comments. Frequently, these micro-tasks take longer than the time allotted. If you spend 10 minutes doing a supposedly 5-minute task, you won’t get paid extra – and your ranking will sink, making it harder to get another micro-job.
How long before Twitter or Spotify start to carve up their cosy work-at-home jobs into micro-tasks for gig workers? And consider what else may soon be expected of home workers. In 20 years, employers may want staff to come with their own computer purpose-built for work, along with a virtual reality rig, 3D printer and perhaps even a drone set-up for delivering prototypes.
But, you might protest, that would never happen to a fancy front-end designer or architect. Their work will always be valuable, even if they get paid less and have to buy more equipment than their in-office colleagues. Will it, though?
There is a persistent bias against work done in the home. Domestic tasks such as cleaning and childcare have been unpaid for centuries. As Rachele Dini at the University of Roehampton, UK, noted recently on the BBC’s Arts & Ideas programme, it has been nearly impossible to gain public support for the idea that homemakers should be compensated for their work. Even when people do it for money, domestic work is consistently undervalued.
This is partly the result of prejudice: women and immigrants tend to do most domestic work. But it is also a function of what cognitive scientists call “distance bias”, in which managers place more value on work done by people in closer proximity to them. Remote workers are out of sight, out of mind. Even if they pop up on Zoom, their work will be consistently devalued as time goes on, just as housework has been.
I am not saying that we should embrace going into an office every day. But we should be wary when companies use our desire to work from home as a trick to get us to accept second-class status.

Annalee’s week
What I’m reading
“All-Electric” Narratives by Rachele Dini. All about homemakers who paid for expensive appliances to do unpaid labour!
What I’m watching
Abbott Elementary, a charming sitcom about teachers trying to get by at a US school with no funding.
What I’m working on
A story set in the early universe, when stars were just starting to form.

This column appears monthly. Up next week: Beronda L. Montgomery

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By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Jonathan Buckley
ANYONE who is just starting to grow their own vegetables might want to consider sweetcorn, especially if they are keen to get children involved. It is, for the most part, easy to grow and the end result of corn on the cob is usually appreciated by all, no matter their age.
At first, I tried the “three sisters” companion planting method, developed by Indigenous groups in North America. This means growing sweetcorn with two other types of plants, squash and beans, and they help each other thrive.
Beans improve soil fertility because, as a legume (like peas and lentils), they … More

Elisabeth Moss is after a killer who is defying all known laws of reality in Shining Girls, an unsettling Apple TV+ adaptation of Lauren Beukes’s science-fiction thriller

Humans

27 April 2022

By Bethan Ackerley
Filing clerk Kirby (Elisabeth Moss) finds her sense of reality starting to shift as she looks for a killerAPPLE TV+
Shining Girls
Silka Luisa
Apple TV+Advertisement

CAN a bee live without its wings? And what does it mean to survive against all odds? It is unlikely that the sadistic serial killer in Shining Girls, a new sci-fi thriller from Apple TV+, had considered these questions before mutilating a young girl’s pet bee in the series’ opening scene. What is clear, though, is that he sees the women he attacks as broken-winged, robbed of their perfection – and that this misconception will be his downfall.
Shining Girls stars Elisabeth Moss as Kirby Mazrachi, a filing clerk at a Chicago newspaper in 1992 who is still recovering from a horrific assault six years earlier. Her assailant was never caught, but when the body of a young woman is found with similar injuries, Kirby enlists strung-out reporter Dan Velazquez (Wagner Moura) to help her track down the murderer.
Their investigation is complicated by Kirby’s ever-shifting sense of reality: first, small things change, like whether she owns a cat or a dog. Then, in the blink of an eye, she finds she has been married for years and her rock-star mother is a born-again Christian.
As the bodies stack up, Kirby and Dan learn that the timeline of the killings can’t possibly make sense. While investigating the murder of a woman in 1972, they discover she had a locker key from 1992 in her possession. The more they uncover about the connections between the victims, the more impossible the killings seem.
Fans of The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes’s 2013 novel on which the show is based, should note that the series is considerably different. It largely eschews the grisliness of its source material, which devoted much of its narrative to the killer’s perspective. Instead, it has been transformed into a cerebral, mind-bending puzzle, with the murderer (Jamie Bell) and his methods left a cipher. All we know is that he is a clean-cut man with an almost omnipotent level of control over his victims – the “shining girls” – to the point where he seems to defy all known laws of reality.
For the most part, this restraint is wise: TV is hardly in need of more gruesome depictions of violence against women, after all. But losing the jagged mastery of the novel draws attention to the series’ deficiencies. The violence in the book was extreme but never gratuitous, designed to paint a picture of the noirish world Kirby inhabits. By contrast, aside from a few vivid montages, Shining Girls is often lacking in visual flair. And while many details of the other women’s murders have been expunged, so have the stories of their lives and dreams – only Kirby and a couple of other “shining girls” are fleshed out.
What can’t be faulted, though, are the performances of the show’s three leads. As Kirby, Moss really does shine. She is fragile and furious by turns, taking the increasingly large shifts in her reality in her stride. Moura, too, is hugely charismatic, making Dan’s aptitude for reporting clear even as his dependency on alcohol worsens.
And despite the dearth of information about his character, the killer avoids feeling one-note thanks to Bell. Shining Girls is careful to show the smaller-scale ways in which he harasses and demeans his victims before killing them. In this sense, he is a garden-variety misogynist, and Bell skilfully conveys how these small seeds could have grown and put him on a path to murder.
The first four episodes of Shining Girls set up a satisfying mystery, filled with unsettling twists that pull at the edges of reality. But it is the themes of trauma and renewal – at once more mundane and more remarkable than any sci-fi conceit could hope to be – that make the series worth watching. Far from a broken-winged bee, Kirby is so much more than a single reality could ever capture.

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These detailed images from photographer Roland Miller’s new book Orbital Planes offer a privileged peek inside NASA’s space shuttle programme

Humans

27 April 2022

By Gege Li
Roland Miller
Photographer Roland Miller
THESE intimate and detailed photos of space shuttles and the International Space Station (ISS) offer a privileged peek inside one of the biggest programmes in space flight.
Roland MillerAdvertisement
They come from the new book Orbital Planes: A personal vision of the space shuttle by photographer Roland Miller (see cover below), published by Damiani Editore. It depicts spacecraft from NASA’s space shuttle programme, which flew 135 crewed missions from 1981 to 2011 using five spacecraft: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour.
Roland Miller
The space shuttles were designed to provide backup for space travel and maintenance, including building the ISS, transporting cargo and launching, recovering and repairing satellites.
Roland Miller
Miller started work on Orbital Planes as the craft were being decommissioned. The image above shows the launch of the STS-133 mission in February 2011, in which Discovery docked with the ISS. The trio of smaller images show: the airlock and hatch of the ISS as seen from Discovery, the ceramic tiles lining the exterior of Atlantis (to protect the shuttle from the heat of re-entry), and the commander’s console on board Endeavour.

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