Science (Page 101)

GoodStudio/Shutterstock This article contains examples of racist, Islamophobic and threatening language Twitter has finally permanently removed right-wing commentator Katie Hopkins from its platform for violating its “hateful conduct” policy. Many would ask why it took so long for Twitter to ban someone with such a long record of offensive comments. Yet for every right-winger like Hopkins, there are many more people on social media who don’t command such a large following and might be seen in some respects as ordinary people, but who are in fact equally as dangerous. They may not share the motivation of the far right, but they still express and incite racial and religious hatred, often through social creativity and online manipulation. As Black Lives MatterContinue Reading

People Image Studio Many people suspect they’ve been infected with COVID-19 by now, despite the fact that only 0.5% of the UK’s population has actually been diagnosed with it. Similar numbers have been reported in other countries. Exactly how many people have actually had it, however, is unclear. There is also uncertainty around what proportion of people who get COVID-19 die as a result, though many models assume it is around 1%. We believe there has been over-confidence in the reporting of infection prevalence and fatality rate statistics when it comes to COVID-19. Such statistics fail to take account of uncertainties in the data and explanations for these. In our new paper, published in the in the Journal of RiskContinue Reading

German authorities have had to take the difficult decision of reimposing a pandemic lockdown in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia after a resurgence of the coronavirus. This comes after the country’s R number, a measure of how quickly new cases of the disease are emerging, almost tripled over the course of few days. Germany has been widely praised for its response to the pandemic. It has had far fewer deaths than most similar sized western countries, its national lockdown was relaxed after just six weeks, and new cases recently reached a low of about 500 a day in a country of more than 80 million. Daily new cases of COVID-19 (seven-day average) Data downloaded on June 26th, 2020. Adam KleczkowskiContinue Reading

Archaeologists studying the monument site from above ground. University of Bradford The chances of finding another major archaeological monument near Stonehenge today are probably very small given the generations of work that has gone into studying the site. Stumbling across such a monument that measured more than 2km across must be highly unlikely. And yet that is exactly what our team from the Anglo-Austrian “Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes” research project has done. We discovered a circle of pits, each ten metres or more in diameter and at least five metres deep, around Stonehenge’s largest prehistoric neighbour, the so-called super henge at Durrington Walls. More amazingly, the initial evidence for this discovery was hidden away in terabytes of remote sensing data andContinue Reading

Rotating black holes suck up anything that gets near enough. muratart/shutterstock A rotating black hole is such an extreme force of nature that it drags surrounding time and space around with it. So it is only natural to ask whether black holes could be used as some sort of energy source. In 1969, mathematical physicist Roger Penrose proposed a method to do just this, now known as the “Penrose Process”. The method could be used by sophisticated civilisations (aliens or future humans) to harvest energy by making “black hole bombs”. Some of the physics required to do so, however, had never been experimentally verified – until now. Our study confirming the underlying physics has just been published in Nature Physics.Continue Reading

Pexels Many of us have been spending more time at home than ever before, and chances are unless you live by yourself in the middle of nowhere, at some point unwanted noise will have infiltrated your lockdown. Whether it’s cars passing nearby, a neighbour’s blaring music or the constant drone of a lawnmower, the trouble with sound is that – unlike light – it can be hard to block out completely. This is because it’s a pressure wave in air that readily diffracts around objects and easily passes through porous obstacles such as trees and shrubs. The wind and temperature gradient in the atmosphere also affects transmission of noise. This is why we may hear the noise from a distantContinue Reading

Is coronavirus over in some cities? StreetVJ/Shutterstock More than half a million people have died from COVID-19 globally. It is a major tragedy, but perhaps not on the scale some initially feared. And there are finally signs that the pandemic is shuddering in places, as if its engine is running out of fuel. This has encouraged many governments to relinquish lockdowns and allow everyday life to restart, albeit gingerly. The spread of SARS-CoV-2 has been difficult to predict and understand. On the Diamond Princess cruise ship, for example, where the virus is likely to have spread relatively freely through the air-conditioning system linking cabins, only 20% of passengers and crew were infected. Data from military ships and cities such asContinue Reading

Pixel-Shot/Shutterstock What would happen if gravity was reduced by half? – Phoebe, aged 13, London UK Gravity is a force that pulls things towards each other. It is the reason we walk on the surface of the Earth and don’t float off into space. The gravitational pull of the Earth keeps us on its surface, and makes objects fall towards it – like an apple falling from a tree. The way gravity works is that it pulls at space, not at you. An object that has mass – that’s made of stuff – changes the shape of the space around it. This creates a shape a bit like a bowl, meaning things would naturally roll towards the middle, where theContinue Reading

Grooming is the key to positive relationships. tratong/Shutterstock The world may be reopening in some places, with people looking forward to pubs, restaurants and haircuts. Many of us will no doubt also be looking forward to some time away from home – alone – once more. Spending such prolonged time in close quarters with others puts strain on relationships and increases social tension. Tempers can flare and arguments erupt. But we can increase our understanding about how to cope in these situations by looking at how our closest relatives – non-human primates – manage social relationships during similar periods. For many different animals, forming friendly relationships that endure can influence health, survival and reproduction. Though of course, living in aContinue Reading

Shutterstock China announced in 2017 its ambition to become the world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. While the US still leads in absolute terms, China appears to be making more rapid progress than either the US or the EU, and central and local government spending on AI in China is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. The move has led – at least in the West – to warnings of a global AI arms race and concerns about the growing reach of China’s authoritarian surveillance state. But treating China as a “villain” in this way is both overly simplistic and potentially costly. While there are undoubtedly aspects of the Chinese government’s approach to AIContinue Reading