Humans

Nathan Keay © MCA Chicago. Image courtesy of Carolina Caycedo
Visit
Caroline Caycedo fills the Baltic Centre in Gateshead, UK, with art exploring environmental justice, biodiversity and cultural diversity. There’s also a new commission to look at, inspired by the neighbouring river Tyne. Open from 28 May.

Advertisement
Read
The Elephant in the Universe is dark matter. In this new book, popular science writer Govert Schilling describes the century-long attempt by theoreticians to make sense of an elusive, unobservable world. Available from 31 May.
a taste of whale/Greenwich Entertainment
Watch
A Taste of Whale starts a gripping conversation between activists and whalers from the Faroe Islands, as they prepare for the “grind”, a hunt of whales and dolphins. Watch on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+ from 27 May.

More on these topics: More

By Rowan Hooper

BE WARNED: George Monbiot will put you off your dinner. But that is a good thing – indeed, a vital thing. Our diets have to change. More to the point, the way we farm has to change. “Farming,” says Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper and an environmental activist, “is the most destructive human activity ever to have blighted the Earth.”Advertisement
It is a deliberately provocative statement, of course, but it shows how the myth of the green and pleasant farm is deeply ingrained. Even after reading this comprehensive, devastating and rousing book, that statement still took me aback. But Monbiot lays out his case with statistics and backs it up with citations – the destruction, the ecocide, the suffering, the exploitation, the economic senselessness. It is undeniable.
Here is a sample. Human habitations, we learn, cover 1 per cent of the world’s land surface. Crops cover 12 per cent. Areas given over to grazing farm animals account for 28 per cent of the world’s land. Only 15 per cent is protected for nature. And that 28 per cent given to grazing animals? It delivers just 1 per cent of the world’s protein.
How about crops? Almost 60 per cent of the calories produced by farmers come from four crops: soya, maize, wheat and rice. Most of the world’s soya – some 86 per cent – is grown in Brazil, Argentina and the US, and three-quarters of soya, much of it grown on former rainforest or the savannah of Brazil’s Cerrado region goes to feed farm animals. Meat is murder? Meat is also destructively profligate.

The first half of Regenesis, in which Monbiot sets out the facts about the planet’s teetering life-support systems, is deeply distressing. The sheer damage caused by farming – the ploughing, the fertilisers, the pesticides and herbicides, the antibiotics, the irrigation and the greenhouse gases, but most of all the extirpation of species and the horrific clearance of land – has pushed those life-support systems to breaking point. Land use, says Monbiot, is “the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish”.
Your reward is the book’s second half, where he offers a treasure trove of hope and solutions, and a vision for a sustainable, healthy, equitable world. Monbiot knows that in transitioning from our destructive practices, we must bring farmers with us. We meet inspiring farmers who pioneer ways to grow food that don’t destroy the soil’s fertility and allow other species to thrive too, as well as some radical solutions. One of the most exciting is using bacteria to make protein. Monbiot eats a pancake made from the stuff, and proclaims it “the beginning of the end of most agriculture”. Well, that would be nice.
Does Monbiot overestimate not only the willingness of the general public to eat bacteria as their main source of protein, but to entirely change food habits – something at the heart of all cultures?
Maybe, but change can happen quickly. Some social scientists argue that a decent-sized minority, around 25 per cent, can trigger society-level tipping points in attitude. Look at the worldwide shift in support for LGBTQ+ rights and same-sex marriage. A few years ago, no one had heard of Greta Thunberg; now she is world famous and the Fridays for Future climate movement may change the world.
So yes, this essential book really should put you off your dinner. It should put you on to something sustainable, equitable, ecologically beneficial and, hopefully, delicious. More

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.

More on these topics: More

Girls are just as capable as boys in science and mathematics, but ingrained attitudes are stopping female students from engaging, says Maria Rossini

Humans

| Comment

18 May 2022

By Maria Rossini
Simone Rotella
FROM Katherine Johnson, known for her pioneering work at NASA, to Nobel prizewinning physicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell and epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, women have contributed hugely to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). But that contribution often remains undervalued, and in the UK a false narrative persists that science is a boys’ subject and that girls lack the aptitude for study or work in STEM disciplines.
These long-standing negative assumptions were displayed recently at an inquiry on diversity in STEM by the UK parliament’s Science and Technology Committee. Katharine Birbalsingh, head of Michaela Community School in London and chair of the Social Mobility Commission, said that girls in her school have a “natural” aversion to physics and that it involves “hard maths”, which girls would “rather not do”.
Contrary to Birbalsingh’s comments, evidence shows that girls are just as capable as boys: girls outperform their male peers in GCSE maths and science qualifications, taken from age 14, with 68 per cent getting grades A*-C in 2015 versus 65 per cent for boys.Advertisement
Yet despite this, only around 23 per cent of entrants for the A level qualification in physics, taken from age 16, are girls. There are clearly underlying reasons behind these statistics, but Birbalsingh’s comments highlight exactly the kind of harmful stereotypes that have led many young women to disengage from these subjects.
Research has found that, despite being very capable, many girls lack proportionate confidence in their maths and physics abilities because they feel they aren’t “naturally” clever enough.
This is partly due to a notion within popular culture of the “effortlessly clever physicist” (whereby physics is presented as something that comes naturally, rather than something to work at), as well as the view that physics is “masculine and hard”: the very same troubling narrative that Birbalsingh was espousing.
It is also much harder for girls to aspire to STEM careers if there are no female role models for them to look up to in their studies. Representation of inspiring female scientists could be a crucial part of raising aspirations and dismantling harmful stereotypes. However, in an analysis of double science GCSE specifications from major exam boards, only Rosalind Franklin and Mary Leakey are mentioned. By contrast, 40 male scientists’ names can be found.
It is clear that the design of exam specifications, ingrained societal attitudes and potential gatekeeping practices in some of the UK’s schools need to be re- evaluated and addressed.
As research from Julie Moote at University College London has highlighted, greater support for teachers is needed so that they can better understand the complex and invisible ways in which gender, class and racial inequalities are reinforced through teaching.
Some studies also suggest that girls place a greater value on seeing the social relevance of the work they do, and engage better with a project-based approach to STEM. I can identify with this. Despite my A grades, I dropped physics and maths after GCSE. I later went on to be part of a team doing a physics-based project, where I had the opportunity to work on a real-life physics challenge. This sparked a new-found love of the subject, sadly too late to study it further.
If ingrained attitudes about science and misplaced cultural gender stereotypes lead to systemic barriers that dissuade girls from engaging, then, as a community, we need to examine our own attitudes and failings. It is time to call out opinions like Birbalsingh’s, and create a learning environment that actively breaks down stereotypes, in order to support girls and other under-represented groups to thrive in STEM subjects.
Maria Rossini is head of education at the British Science Association. @MariaTKRossini

More on these topics: 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

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.”

More on these topics: More