Science (Page 74)

How the brains of people with extreme views work. Aexandros Michailidis The characteristics of peoples’ brains might offer clues about the political beliefs they hold dear. In a study of around 350 US citizens, we examined the relationship between individuals’ cognitive traits – the unconscious ways in which their brains learn and process information from the environment – and their ideological worldviews. We found parallels between how those with extreme views perform in brain games and the kind of political, religious and dogmatic attitudes they adhere to. Brain games Each participant in our study completed a large variety of personality tests and were then given neuropsychological tasks designed to tap into implicit individual differences in how we learn from theContinue Reading

mundissima/Alamy Stock Photo, CC BY-NC Facebook’s recent decision to block its Australian users from sharing or viewing news content has provoked a worldwide backlash and accusations of hubris and bullying. The row has also exposed the fragility of Facebook’s founding myth: that Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild is a force for good, providing a public space for people to connect, converse and cooperate. An inclusive public space in the good times, Facebook has yet again proved willing to eject and exclude in the bad times – as a private firm ultimately has the right to do. Facebook seems to be a bastion of free speech up to and until the moment its revenue is endangered. At that point, as in the caseContinue Reading

Rost9/Shutterstock When President Bill Clinton took to a White House lectern 20 years ago to announce that the human genome sequence had been completed, he hailed the breakthrough as “the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind”. The scientific achievement was placed on par with the moon landings. It was hoped that having access to the sequence would transform our understanding of human disease within 20 years, leading to better treatment, detection and prevention. The famous journal article that shared our genetic ingredients with the world, published in February 2001, was welcomed as a “Book of Life” that could revolutionise medicine by showing which of our genes led to which illnesses. But in the two decades since, theContinue Reading

Shutterstock/Chendongshan There’s an old stereotype about the difference between cats and dogs. Dogs are loving and fiercely loyal, they say, while cats are aloof and indifferent. Most cat people probably disagree – I certainly find it hard to believe, with my cat purring away in my lap, that she doesn’t care about me. Overall, cat cognition research suggests cats do form emotional bonds with their humans. Cats seem to experience separation anxiety, are more responsive to their owners’ voices than to strangers’ and look for reassurance from their owners in scary situations. But a new study, by researchers in Japan, complicates the picture of our relationship with cats. Adapting a method previously used to study dogs, the researchers found catsContinue Reading

A prototype of our novel plasma-based particle accelerator EuPRAXIA Conceptual Design Report In 2010, when scientists were preparing to smash the first particles together within the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), sections of the media fantasised that the EU-wide experiment might create a black hole that could swallow and destroy our planet. How on Earth, columnists fumed, could scientists justify such a dangerous indulgence in the pursuit of abstract, theoretical knowledge? But particle accelerators are much more than enormous toys for scientists to play with. They have practical uses too, though their sheer size has, so far, prevented their widespread use. Now, as part of a large-scale European collaboration, my team has published a report that explains in detail how aContinue Reading

Artist's impression of 'Oumuamua. ESO/M. Kornmesser , CC BY-SA A highly unusual object was spotted travelling through the solar system in 2017. Given a Hawaiian name,ʻOumuamua, it was small and elongated – a few hundred metres by a few tens of meters, travelling at a speed fast enough to escape the Sun’s gravity and move into interstellar space. I was at a meeting when the discovery of ʻOumuamua was announced, and a friend immediately said to me, “So how long before somebody claims it’s a spaceship?” It seems that whenever astronomers discover anything unusual, somebody claims it must be aliens. Nearly all scientists believe that ʻOumuamua probably originates from outside the solar system. It is an asteroid- or comet-like objectContinue Reading

Inna Bigun/Shutterstock Once, holograms were just a scientific curiosity. But thanks to the rapid development of lasers, they have gradually moved centre stage, appearing on the security imagery for credit cards and bank notes, in science fiction movies – most memorably Star Wars – and even “live” on stage when long-dead rapper Tupac reincarnated for fans at the Coachella music festival in 2012. Holography is the photographic process of recording light that is scattered by an object, and presenting it in a three-dimensional way. Invented in the early 1950s by the Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor, the discovery later earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971. Beyond banknotes, passports and controversial rappers, holography has become an essential tool forContinue Reading

Current view of the steppe mammoth, an ancestor to the woolly mammoth. Beth Zaiken/Centre for Palaeogenetics, Author provided Most people think of mammoths as the iconic woolly species from the last Ice Age, which ended around 12,000 years ago. But mammoths originated in Africa around 5 million years ago, then spread and diversified across Eurasia and North America. About a million years ago there was one known species of mammoth inhabiting Siberia, the steppe mammoth. This was thought to be the ancestor of later species such as the woolly and Columbian mammoths. But was it? In a new study, we show mammoth DNA as old as 1.2 million years can be recovered from remains found in permafrost deposits. By sequencingContinue Reading

Future astronauts will visit Mars. Shutterstock/Vadim Sadovski For the first time in 11 years, the European Space Agency (Esa) is recruiting new astronauts. Applications will open on the 31 March 2021 for eight weeks, followed by a six-stage selection process to identify the next generation of European astronauts. By 2030, humans will once again walk on the surface of the Moon, travel to Mars and potentially enjoy sub-orbital holidays. The new space era will provide enormous benefits to all of us. It will push technologies as we find ways to live sustainably beyond planet Earth, it will create exciting jobs and it will generate new socioeconomic opportunities. Recruiting new astronauts is the first step into this new era of humanContinue Reading

Jaruwan Jaiyangyuen/Shutterstock In the past five years, ransomware attacks have evolved from rare misfortunes into common and disruptive threats. Hijacking the IT systems of organisations and forcing them to pay a ransom in order to reclaim them, cybercriminals are freely extorting millions of pounds from companies – and they’re enjoying a remarkably low risk of arrest as they do it. At the moment, there is no coordinated response to ransomware attacks, despite their ever-increasing prevalence and severity. Instead, states’ intelligence services respond to cybercriminals on an ad-hoc basis, while cyber-insurance firms recommend their clients simply pay off the criminal gangs that extort them. Neither of these strategies is sustainable. Instead, organisations need to redouble their cybersecurity efforts to stymie theContinue Reading