Humans

From non-consensual vaginal microbiome transplants to misconceptions about the G-spot, Rachel E. Gross discusses the sexism and biases that have led to our fragmented understanding of the female reproductive system

Humans

18 May 2022

By Catherine de Lange
Nabil Nezzar
JOURNALIST Rachel E. Gross was working as the science editor at Smithsonian.com when she developed an “obnoxious” vaginal infection that set her on a mission to better understand her own body. It may have started with her genitals, but in her new book, Vagina Obscura: An anatomical voyage, Gross not only unravels many misunderstandings about the female body, but also rewrites the history of the science of gynaecology with women and LGBTQ+ researchers front and centre. She spoke to New Scientist about why this matters.
Catherine de Lange: What made you want to write this book?
Rachel E. Gross: I was doing a lot of coverage of women in the history of science. These themes kept coming up of women in scientific fields that had been left out of the conversation or blocked from attaining certain levels. And at the same time, there were all these questions about women’s bodies and bodies [of people] with a uterus and ovaries that weren’t being asked. I made the connection: the deceptively simple reason why these questions weren’t being asked was because women weren’t at the table.
How did you find these incredible stories of women who were written out of the history books?
The darkest section of the book is about James Marion Sims and the development of the speculum. It’s well known that he was a southern slaveholder who made his advancements on the bodies of enslaved Black women. But there is a lot more to that story. I relied a lot on historians who had excavated the stories of some of those women, namely Betsy, Lucy and Anarcha. Deirdre Cooper Owens is the historian … More

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 “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

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

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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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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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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