Science

Countries affected by severe climate change may also have a higher prevalence of violence against women, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

The research, published in PLOS Climate, examined how climate shocks—such as storms, landslides and floods—might be linked to higher rates of intimate partner violence in the two years following the event.

The researchers gathered data on intimate partner violence from 363 surveys conducted in 156 countries between 1993 and 2019, focusing on women who currently had a partner. Intimate partner violence was defined as any physical and/or sexual violence in the past year.

The team also gathered data on climate shocks from 1920 to 2022 in 190 countries. They then analyzed the relationship between climate shocks and intimate partner violence, while also considering the country’s economic status.

They found that there was a significant link between intimate partner violence and certain climate shocks (including storms, landslides and floods). Meanwhile, other types of climate shocks (such as earthquakes and wildfires) didn’t show a clear connection to intimate partner violence.

Countries with higher GDP had lower rates of intimate partner violence.

Lead author, Professor Jenevieve Mannell (UCL Institute for Global Health), said, “Existing evidence has found that when a woman experiences a climate-related event, she is more likely to experience violence in some countries and for some types of violence, but not others.

“We set out to explore what was happening at a national level to help inform international climate change policy.”

The researchers were unable to assess why different climate shocks have more of an impact on intimate partner violence. However, they believe that different shocks may take different amounts of time to have an effect on violence and this may not have been captured in the two-year window studied, due to data availability.

As a result, they are calling for more regular data collection by countries on measures of violence against women.

Professor Mannell added, “A small body of evidence shows that heat and humidity increases aggressive behaviors, including violence. Climate-related disasters increase stress and food insecurity in families in ways that can lead to increases in violence. They also reduce the social services often available for dealing with partner violence, such as police and civil society, who are more focused on the disaster.

“At the same time, governments may put in place shelters for disaster relief which are often overcrowded and unsafe, without thinking about the risks of sexual violence.

“All of this happens more often and with increased severity in countries that have patriarchal gender norms and where the use of violence against women is widely accepted as normal behavior.”

Importantly, the researchers believe that climate mitigation and adaptation efforts can and should play an important role in reducing violence against women.

This could include mentioning “violence against women” in Nationally Determined Contributions (the climate change commitments countries make) and allocating finances to address it, or developing Climate Change Gender Action Plans. Samoa and Fiji are two countries which have already done this.

The researchers also advise that violence against women needs to be a consideration in countries’ disaster planning processes.

Governments and other policymakers around the world wrestle with how to deal with people who are skeptical of official positions and guidelines, such as climate skeptics and antivaxxers.

Earlier research has linked such skepticism to distrust of scientists among members of the public, while other studies have shown that it is difficult to erode skeptical attitudes that are psychologically motivated by factors such as bias against elite institutions or a conservative world view.

New research from the University of Cambridge, reported in the journal PLOS ONE, suggests a more tailored approach could help dispel some of this skepticism, which could have implications for the way governments deal with skepticism among their constituents.

“The research shows that there are other approaches than addressing these issues in a one-size-fits-all manner,” said study co-author Dr. Zeynep Clulow from Cambridge Judge Business School. “There are different types of skeptics, so this requires different strategies aimed at dispelling skepticism.”

“These findings can help policymakers develop more targeted strategies and focus more attention on groups that are persuadable, rather than being resigned to considering every skeptic to be some consistent conspiracist on every issue,” said co-author Professor David Reiner, also from Cambridge Judge Business School.

The research analyzed the drivers of skepticism toward climate change and COVID-19 vaccination, based on a survey taken in early 2021 by polling firm Ipsos Mori, when most countries had been through the first wave of the pandemic and begun rolling out vaccination programs. Nationally-representative samples of 2,000 people were polled in each of eight countries: Australia, Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Africa, the UK and the US.

The study found that while the vast majority of people support COVID-19 vaccinations and recognize the threats posed by climate change, there were small groups who are skeptical of either climate change or COVID-19 vaccination, and an even smaller group who were skeptical of both.

For this smaller group of “double skeptics,” their attitudes were motivated by an underlying skeptical mindset, which was distrustful of institutions in general, including scientists and mainstream media.

Single-issue skeptics, in contrast, were primarily distrustful of scientists. The research found that people who completely distrust scientists were approximately four times more likely to be antivaxxers and five times more likely to be climate skeptics than double skeptics.

According to the researchers, this distinction suggests that efforts to overcome isolated predictors of skepticism—such as building trust in scientists, economic support and information campaigns—are more likely to boost support for policies designed to create societal responses to global challenges.

The same is not true for double skeptics: such strategies are likely to be ineffective or even counter-productive for people whose skepticism is associated with a more generalized skeptical worldview.

Double skeptics tend to possess many of the typical skeptic characteristics, such as high distrust in social institutions and right-wing political orientation, which are collectively suggestive of an underlying skeptic mindset rather than a specific distrust of scientists.

Reasons why distrust in scientists might drive skepticism on climate change and COVID-19 vaccination include the complex nature of both issues that make it difficult for non-scientists to fully understand, and the financial and behavioral costs related to mitigation of these issues.

The surveys asked respondents to rate their trust in university scientists as part of a broader question that also probed trust in institutions and actors ranging from corporations to environmental NGOs to television news. They were also asked to rate trust in certain specific sources, including oil and gas companies, Greenpeace, Greta Thunberg, and social media.

While many respondents showed some degree of skepticism (35% did not consider climate change a major threat to their country, and 17% were unlikely to take a COVID-19 vaccine if offered one), only a very small minority (1.4%) chose the most skeptical response towards both issues.

Even in the United States, only 4% of respondents were skeptical towards both issues and that group was less than 2% of the sample in the other seven countries. Similarly, less than 5% of respondents in six countries completely dismissed the threat of climate change (Australia at 9% and the US at 14% were higher).

The research also found that skepticism is inversely related with education, science knowledge, and perceived responsibility for combating climate change. Skepticism was higher among men, people who distrust television, and those with right-wing political views.

The researchers also found that people who prioritized the economy over the mitigation of climate change or COVID-19, or both, were significantly more likely to distrust scientists.

The researchers note two important limitations of their study sample: respondents in emerging economies were recruited from urban centers, so the views of rural citizens may not be accurately reflected; and Chinese respondents were not asked about their political views.

The other caveat is that the survey was taken when almost no one had received the COVID-19 vaccine and when many countries were still under some form of lockdown.

“While acknowledging that this was a particularly unusual time, we expect the finding that double skeptics comprise a small fraction of total pool of skeptics to be robust and we would expect to see this finding extended to other topics,” said Clulow.

“Painting all skeptics as irredeemable conspiracists is both counterproductive and incorrect,” said Reiner.

“Most climate skeptics are not very concerned about taking a vaccine and vice versa. Most skeptics are single-issue skeptics and will need to be engaged on the specifics of the issue, which will, no doubt, be challenging, but they do not exhibit the more fundamental, all-encompassing skepticism we find among double-skeptics that extends to all societal institutions and media outlets.”

For the first issue in its new weekly print edition, the London Standard has run an experiment in the form of an AI-generated review of the National Gallery’s Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibition, written in the style of late art critic Brian Sewell.

Experiments of this nature typically aim to link real-world observations to general theories. For experiments to successfully confirm or reject big ideas, they need a clear design and purpose. Little has been shared about the design of the Standard’s experiment and details about the training data and algorithms used are unclear. But what about the purpose?

Is this a tentative exploration of the role of the art critic? Does it aim to kindle a broader social dialogue about those human jobs that are replaceable and those that are not? Is it an ethical experiment on how technology might help us deal with the loss of cherished human lives? Or just another Turing test to judge how far from human intelligence AI still is?

If the aim can’t be determined, perhaps the review can be seen as “experimental” in a different sense—as allowing a tentative exploration of a more philosophical question about the ways in which humans can be reduced to machines.

This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry—and celebrate the wins, too.

One possibility is that this new technology might lead to what Israeli academic and author Yuval Noah Harari has called “de-individuation.” Because so much about ourselves as human beings—what we think, what we believe, what we love or whom we love—can be reduced to AI data points, we are in a sense broken apart or fragmented by it. As such, training an AI system on Sewell’s collected writing splinters the person he once was.

Critics have scoffed at the AI-written review, deeming it a pale copy that fails to capture “the waspishness and hauteur of Sewell’s writing.” But this view obscures a greater realization of the philosophical threat this technology poses—the reduction of the human to the machine.

What philosophers say about this threat

The philosopher Hannah Arendt offered a chilling argument against such reductionism in her 1958 book The Human Condition. She warned of a world where powerful computing machines seem to approach independent thinking and consciousness. However, she argued that whether this could count as thought depends on whether we are willing to reduce our own thinking to mere calculation and computation.

Arendt believed that we can and should resist such a reduction, as humans have diverse ways of engaging with the world. In The Human Condition, she distinguishes between what she calls “labor,” “work” and “action.” If labor is natural and work is artificial, for Arendt, action is closer to the sphere of unconstrained human creativity.

“Action” is what people do when they use language to tell the stories of their lives. It is a form of communication: by means of language we are able to articulate the meaning of our actions and to coordinate our actions with those of others, different from us.

But Arendt worried that this kind of creative, human interchange through language and storytelling, might be reduced to mechanical construction—to something artificial. She also insisted that if the telling of the story needs the individual to take a stance and act in the world, its persistence depends on there being other people to hear and to retell it, perhaps in different forms. It depends, to a certain extent, on trust. But this trust bond is threatened if human action is reduced to what can be produced by a machine.

Another philosopher, closer to our times, who worried about the erosion of trust brought about by the wide, unreflective development and adoption of AI was Daniel Dennett, who died earlier this year. In his most alarmist moments, Dennett argued that the most pressing problem is not that AI will take jobs or change warfare, but that they are going to destroy human trust.

Even if large language models (AI systems that are capable of understanding and generating human language by processing vast amounts of text data) will never think like humans think, even if they won’t be able to tell their own stories, there is still the very real possibility, according to Dennett, that they will move us into a world where we won’t be able to tell truth from falsehood—where we won’t know who to trust. And that is a scary thought experiment that the Standard might (unintentionally) have brought to our attention.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Inspired by the half-human, half-horse creatures that are part of Ancient Greek mythology, the field of astronomy has its own kind of centaurs: distant objects orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Neptune. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has mapped the gases spewing from one of these objects, suggesting a varied composition and providing new insights into the formation and evolution of the solar system.

Centaurs are former trans-Neptunian objects that have been moved inside Neptune’s orbit by subtle gravitational influences of the planets in the last few million years, and may eventually become short-period comets. They are “hybrid” in the sense that they are in a transitional stage of their orbital evolution: Many share characteristics with both trans-Neptunian objects (from the cold Kuiper Belt reservoir), and short-period comets, which are objects highly altered by repeated close passages around the sun.

Since these small icy bodies are in an orbital transitional phase, they have been the subject of various studies as scientists seek to understand their composition, the reasons behind their outgassing activity—the loss of their ices that lie underneath the surface—and how they serve as a link between primordial icy bodies in the outer solar system and evolved comets.

A team of scientists recently used Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument to obtain data on Centaur 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 (29P for short), an object that is known for its highly active and quasi-periodic outbursts. It varies in intensity every six to eight weeks, making it one of the most active objects in the outer solar system. They discovered a new jet of carbon monoxide (CO) and previously unseen jets of carbon dioxide (CO₂) gas, which give new clues to the nature of the centaur’s nucleus.

These findings have been published in Nature Astronomy.

“Centaurs can be considered as some of the leftovers of our planetary system’s formation. Because they are stored at very cold temperatures, they preserve information about volatiles in the early stages of the solar system,” said Sara Faggi of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and American University in Washington, DC, lead author of the study.

“Webb really opened the door to a resolution and sensitivity that was impressive to us—when we saw the data for the first time, we were excited. We had never seen anything like this.”

Webb and the jets

Centaurs’ distant orbits and consequent faintness have inhibited detailed observations in the past. Data from prior radio wavelength observations of Centaur 29P showed a jet pointed generally toward the sun (and Earth) composed of CO.

Webb detected this face-on jet and, thanks to its large mirror and infrared capabilities, also sensitively searched for many other chemicals, including water (H₂O) and CO₂. The latter is one of the main forms in which carbon is stored across the solar system. No clear indication of water vapor was detected in the atmosphere of 29P, which could be related to the extremely cold temperatures present in this body.

The telescope’s unique imaging and spectral data revealed never-before-seen features: two jets of CO₂ emanating in the north and south directions, and another jet of CO pointing toward the north. This was the first definitive detection of CO₂ in Centaur 29P.

Based on the data gathered by Webb, the team created a 3D model of the jets to understand their orientation and origin. They found through their modeling efforts that the jets were emitted from different regions on the centaur’s nucleus, even though the nucleus itself cannot be resolved by Webb. The jets’ angles suggest the possibility that the nucleus may be an aggregate of distinct objects with different compositions; however, other scenarios can’t yet be excluded.

“The fact that Centaur 29P has such dramatic differences in the abundance of CO and CO₂ across its surface suggests that 29P may be made of several pieces,” said Geronimo Villanueva, co-author of the study at NASA Goddard.

“Maybe two pieces coalesced together and made this centaur, which is a mixture between very different bodies that underwent separate formation pathways. It challenges our ideas about how primordial objects are created and stored in the Kuiper Belt.”

Persisting unanswered questions (for now)

The reasons for Centaur 29P’s bursts in brightness, and the mechanisms behind its outgassing activity through the CO and CO₂ jets, continue to be two major areas of interest that require further investigation.

In the case of comets, scientists know that their jets are often driven by the outgassing of water. However, because of the centaurs’ location, they are too cold for water ice to sublimate, meaning that the nature of their outgassing activity differs from comets.

“We only had time to look at this object once, like a snapshot in time,” said Adam McKay, a co-author of the study at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

“I’d like to go back and look at Centaur 29P over a much longer period of time. Do the jets always have that orientation? Is there perhaps another carbon monoxide jet that turns on at a different point in the rotation period? Looking at these jets over time would give us much better insights into what is driving these outbursts.”

The team is hopeful that as they increase their understanding of Centaur 29P, they can apply the same techniques to other centaurs. By improving the astronomical community’s collective knowledge of centaurs, we can simultaneously better our understanding on the formation and evolution of our solar system.

A new paper, “Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions,” published today in Nature suggests that the higher quantity of social media policy enforcement (such as account suspensions) for conservative users could be explained by the higher quantity of misinformation shared by those conservative users—and so does not constitute evidence of inherent biases in the policies from social media companies or in the definition of what constitutes misinformation.

Written by researchers from MIT Sloan School of Management, the University of Oxford, Cornell University, and Yale University, co-authors of the paper include Mohsen Mosleh, Qi Yang, Tauhid Zaman, Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand.

The spread of misinformation has become an increasing concern, especially as the 2024 presidential election in the United States approaches. Many Americans who disagree on political issues agree that the sharing of false information is a substantial problem; sixty-five percent of Americans say that technology companies should take action to restrict the spread of false information. However, there is great dissension as to whether tech companies are actually moderating platforms fairly.

“Accusations of political bias are often based largely on anecdotes or noteworthy cases, such as the suspension from Twitter and Facebook of former President Trump,” said MIT Sloan professor Rand. “This study allows us to systematically evaluate the data and better understand the differential rates of policy enforcement.”

The asymmetry of conservative sanctions versus liberal sanctions should not be attributed to partisan bias on the part of social media companies and those determining what counts as misinformation, Rand and the co-authors noted.

The research began by looking at Twitter’s suspension of users following the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Researchers identified 100,000 Twitter users from October 2020 who shared hashtags related to the election, and randomly sampled 9,000—half of whom shared at least one #VoteBidenHarris2020 hashtag and half of whom shared at least one #Trump2020 hashtag.

Researchers analyzed each user’s data from the month before the election to quantify their tendency to share news from low-quality domains (as well as other potentially relevant characteristics), and then checked nine months later to determine which users were suspended by Twitter.

Accounts that had shared #Trump2020 before the election were 4.4 times more likely to have been subsequently suspended than those who shared #VoteBidenHarris2020. Only 4.5% of the users who shared Biden hashtags had been suspended as of July 2021, while 19.6% of the users who shared Trump hashtags had been suspended.

“We found that there were political differences in behavior, in addition to the political differences in enforcement,” said Rand. “The fact that the social media accounts of conservatives are suspended more than those of liberals is therefore not evidence of bias on the part of tech companies, and shouldn’t be used to pressure tech companies to abandon policies meant to reduce the sharing of misinformation.”

To better understand this difference, the researchers examined what content was shared by these politically active Twitter users in terms of the reliability of the sources through two different methods. They used a set of 60 news domains (the 20 highest volume sites within the categories of mainstream, hyper-partisan and fake news), and collected trustworthiness ratings for each domain from eight professional fact-checkers.

In an effort to eliminate concern about potential bias on the part of journalists and fact-checkers, the researchers also collected ratings from politically-balanced groups of laypeople. Both approaches indicated that people who used Trump hashtags shared four times more links to low-quality news outlets than those who used Biden hashtags.

“Prior work identifying political differences in misinformation sharing has been criticized for relying on the judgment of professional fact-checkers. But we show that conservative Twitter users shared much lower quality news, even when relying on ratings from politically-balanced groups of laypeople,” said co-author Dr. Mohsen Mosleh, Associate Professor, Oxford Internet Institute, part of the University of Oxford.

“This can’t be written off as the result of political bias in the ratings, and means that preferential suspension of conservative users is not necessarily the result of political bias on the part of social media companies.”

The study also discovered similar associations between conservatism and low-quality news sharing (based on both expert and politically-balanced layperson ratings) were present in seven other datasets from Twitter, Facebook, and survey experiments, spanning 2016 to 2023 and including data from 16 different countries.

For example, the researchers found cross-cultural evidence of conservatives sharing more unambiguously false claims about COVID-19 than liberals, with conservative political elites sharing links to lower quality new sources than liberal political elites in the U.K. and Germany as well.

“The social media users analyzed in this research are not representative of Americans more broadly, so these findings do not necessarily mean that conservatives in general are more likely to spread misinformation than liberals. Also, we’re just looking at this particular period in time,” said Rand.

“Our basic point would be the same if it was found that liberal users shared more misinformation and were getting suspended more. Such a pattern of suspension would not be enough to show bias on the part of the companies, because of the differences in users’ behavior.”

Even under politically neutral anti-misinformation policies, the researchers expect that there would be political asymmetries in enforcement. While the analyses do not rule out the possibility of any bias on the part of platforms, the inequality of sanctions is not diagnostic of bias one way or the other.

Policy-makers need to be aware that even if social media companies are working in an unbiased way to manage misinformation on their platforms, there will still be some level of differential treatment across groups.

Across the United States, the second Monday of October is increasingly becoming known as Indigenous Peoples Day. In the push to rename Columbus Day, Christopher Columbus himself has become a metaphor for the evils of early colonial empires, and rightly so.

The Italian explorer who set out across the Atlantic in search of Asia was a notorious advocate for enslaving the Indigenous Taínos of the Caribbean. In the words of historian Andrés Reséndez, he “intended to turn the Caribbean into another Guinea,” the region of West Africa that had become a European slave-trading hub.

By 1506, however, Columbus was dead. Most of the genocidal acts of violence that defined the colonial period were carried out by many, many others. In the long shadow of Columbus, we sometimes lose sight of the ideas, laws and ordinary people who enabled colonial violence on a large scale.

As a historian of colonial Latin America, I often begin such discussions by pointing to a peculiar document drafted several years after Columbus’ death that would have greater repercussions for Indigenous peoples than Columbus himself: the Requerimiento, or “Requirement.”

Catch-22

In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas infamously divided much of the world beyond Europe into two halves: one for the Spanish crown, the other for the Portuguese. Spaniards lay claim to almost the entirety of the Americas, though they knew almost nothing about this vast domain or the people who lived there.

In order to inform Indigenous people that they had suddenly become vassals of Spain, King Ferdinand and his councilors instructed colonizers to read the Requerimiento aloud upon first contact with all Indigenous groups.

The document presented them with a choice that was no choice at all. They could either become Christians and submit to the authority of the Catholic Church and the king, or else, “With the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can … we shall take you and your wives and your children and shall make slaves of them … the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault.”

It was a catch-22. According to the document, Indigenous people could either voluntarily surrender their sovereignty and become vassals or bring war upon themselves—and perhaps lose their sovereignty anyway, after much bloodshed. No matter what they chose, the Requerimiento supplied the legal pretext for forcibly incorporating sovereign Indigenous peoples into the Spanish domain.

At its core, the Requerimiento was a legal ritual, a performance of possession—and it was unique to early Spanish imperialism.

‘As absurd as it is stupid’

But for all of its seeming authority, the reading of the Requerimiento was an absurd exercise. It first occurred at what is now Santa Marta, Colombia, during the expedition led by Pedrarias Dávila in 1513. An eyewitness, the chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, stated the obvious, “We have no one here who can help [the Indigenous people] understand it.”

Even with a translator, though, the document—with its lofty references to the Biblical creation of the world and papal authority—would hardly be intelligible to people unfamiliar with the Spaniards’ religion. Explaining the convoluted document would require nothing less than a long recitation of Catholic history.

Oviedo suggested that to deliver such a lecture, you’d have to first capture and cage an Indigenous person. Even then, it would be impossible to verify whether the document had been fully understood.

However, for the Requerimiento’s greatest critic, Bartolomé de las Casas, translation was merely one of many problems. A missionary from Spain, Las Casas criticized the spurious requirement itself: that a people should be expected to immediately convert to a religion they have only just learned exists, and “swear allegiance to a king they have never heard of nor clapped eyes on, and whose subjects and ambassadors prove to be cruel, pitiless and bloodthirsty tyrants. … Such a notion is as absurd as it is stupid and should be treated with the disrespect, scorn and contempt it so amply deserves.”

Las Casas, who documented abuses against Indigenous people in multiple books and speeches, was one of the most outspoken denouncers of Spanish cruelty in the Americas. While he believed Spaniards had a right and even an obligation to convert Indigenous people to Catholicism, he did not believe that conversion should be done under the threat of violence.

Wars and forced settlement

Indigenous people responded to the Requerimiento in numerous ways. When the Chontal Maya of Potonchan—a Maya capital now part of Mexico—heard the conquistador Hernando Cortés read the document three consecutive times, they answered with arrows. After Cortés captured the town, they agreed to become Christian vassals of Spain on the condition that the Spaniards “leave their land.” When Cortés’ men remained after three days, the Chontal Maya attacked again.

Farther north, Spanish expeditioners Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Melchior Díaz used the Requerimiento to forcibly relocate various Indigenous groups.

A bloodthirsty governor of the province, Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán—so violent that the Spanish themselves imprisoned him for abuses of power—had driven Indigenous residents out of the Valley of Culiacan in a series of brutal wars. But in 1536, Cabeza de Vaca and Díaz forced several groups, including the Tahue, to repopulate the valley after convincing them to accept the terms of the Requerimiento.

Resettlement would enable the collection of tribute and conversion to Catholicism. It was simply easier to assign missionaries and tribute collectors to established Hispanic townships than to mobile communities spread out across vast territories.

Cabeza de Vaca encouraged Indigenous leaders to accept the proposition by claiming that their god, Aguar, was the same as the Christians,” and so they should “serve him as we commanded.” In such cases, conversion to Catholicism was just as farcical as the Requerimiento itself.

Violence and colonial legacy

Even when Indigenous people accepted the Requerimiento, however, Las Casas wrote that “they are (still) harshly treated as common slaves, put to hard labor and subjected to all manner of abuse and to agonizing torments that ensure a slower and more painful death than would summary execution.” In most cases, the Requerimiento was simply a precursor to violence.

Dávila, the conquistador of present-day northern Colombia, once read it out of earshot of a village just before launching a surprise attack. Others read the Requerimiento “to trees and empty huts” before drawing their swords. The path to vassalage was paved in blood.

These are the truest indications of what the Requerimiento became on the ground. Soldiers and officials were content to violently deploy or discard royal prerogatives as they pleased in their pursuit of the spoils of war.

And yet, despite the viciousness, many Indigenous peoples survived by stringing their bows like the Chontal Maya, or negotiating a new relationship with Spain like the Tahue of Culiacan. Tactics varied greatly and changed over time.

Many Indigenous nations that exercised them survive today, long outliving the Spanish Empire—and the people who carried the Requerimiento on their crusade across the Americas.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Professional and amateur astronomers have made a groundbreaking discovery with the help of artificial intelligence, identifying a unique triple star system named TIC 290061484. This stellar trio was uncovered through cosmic “strobe lights” observed by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

TIC 290061484 features a pair of twin stars that orbit each other every 1.8 days, along with a third star that orbits the duo in just 25 days. This remarkable finding breaks the previous record for the shortest outer orbital period in such systems, which was established in 1956 with a third star orbiting an inner pair in 33 days.

“Thanks to the compact, edge-on configuration of the system, we can measure the orbits, masses, sizes, and temperatures of its stars,” said Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “And we can study how the system formed and predict how it may evolve.”

A paper, led by Kostov, describing the results was published in The Astrophysical Journal Oct. 2.

Flickers in starlight helped reveal the tight trio, which is located in the constellation Cygnus. The system happens to be almost flat from our perspective. This means the stars each cross right in front of, or eclipse, each other as they orbit. When that happens, the nearer star blocks some of the farther star’s light.

Using machine learning, scientists filtered through enormous sets of starlight data from TESS to identify patterns of dimming that reveal eclipses. Then, a small team of citizen scientists filtered further, relying on years of experience and informal training to find particularly interesting cases.

These amateur astronomers, who are co-authors on the new study, met as participants in an online citizen science project called Planet Hunters, which was active from 2010 to 2013. The volunteers later teamed up with professional astronomers to create a new collaboration called the Visual Survey Group, which has been active for over a decade.

“We’re mainly looking for signatures of compact multi-star systems, unusual pulsating stars in binary systems, and weird objects,” said Saul Rappaport, an emeritus professor of physics at MIT in Cambridge. Rappaport co-authored the paper and has helped lead the Visual Survey Group for more than a decade. “It’s exciting to identify a system like this because they’re rarely found, but they may be more common than current tallies suggest.” Many more likely speckle our galaxy, waiting to be discovered.

Partly because the stars in the newfound system orbit in nearly the same plane, scientists say it’s likely very stable despite their tight configuration (the trio’s orbits fit within a smaller area than Mercury’s orbit around the sun). Each star’s gravity doesn’t perturb the others too much, like they could if their orbits were tilted in different directions.

But while their orbits will likely remain stable for millions of years, “no one lives here,” Rappaport said. “We think the stars formed together from the same growth process, which would have disrupted planets from forming very closely around any of the stars.” The exception could be a distant planet orbiting the three stars as if they were one.

As the inner stars age, they will expand and ultimately merge, triggering a supernova explosion in around 20 to 40 million years.

In the meantime, astronomers are hunting for triple stars with even shorter orbits. That’s hard to do with current technology, but a new tool is on the way.

Images from NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be much more detailed than TESS’s. The same area of the sky covered by a single TESS pixel will fit more than 36,000 Roman pixels. And while TESS took a wide, shallow look at the entire sky, Roman will pierce deep into the heart of our galaxy where stars crowd together, providing a core sample rather than skimming the whole surface.

“We don’t know much about a lot of the stars in the center of the galaxy except for the brightest ones,” said Brian Powell, a co-author and data scientist at Goddard. “Roman’s high-resolution view will help us measure light from stars that usually blur together, providing the best look yet at the nature of star systems in our galaxy.”

And since Roman will monitor light from hundreds of millions of stars as part of one of its main surveys, it will help astronomers find more triple star systems in which all the stars eclipse each other.

“We’re curious why we haven’t found star systems like these with even shorter outer orbital periods,” said Powell. “Roman should help us find them and bring us closer to figuring out what their limits might be.”

Roman could also find eclipsing stars bound together in even larger groups—half a dozen, or perhaps even more all orbiting each other like bees buzzing around a hive.

“Before scientists discovered triply eclipsing triple star systems, we didn’t expect them to be out there,” said co-author Tamás Borkovits, a senior research fellow at the Baja Observatory of The University of Szeged in Hungary. “But once we found them, we thought, well why not? Roman, too, may reveal never-before-seen categories of systems and objects that will surprise astronomers.”

Does the thought of putting on a fake smile and making idle small talk with strangers in order to advance your career send shivers down your spine? Do you avoid networking as a result? If so, you’re not alone.

People shun networking for a variety of reasons, such as shyness, a lack of confidence, feeling uncomfortable asking for help or because they want to be authentic and avoid “putting on an act.”

However, avoiding networking can be a bad career move. Networking provides valuable benefits, including assistance with work, social and career support, and a way to gain new ideas and business opportunities.

Because of this, it may not come as a surprise to learn that networking has been shown to be associated with career success in the form of salary growth over time, and career satisfaction. In the end, avoiding networking may hurt your career.

Fortunately, there is no need to feel exploitative or awkward about networking—it can be as simple as making new friends. In fact, this is one of the main reasons people engage in networking in the first place.

Dispelling networking myths

Research suggests there are four myths about effective networking. First, some people believe effective networkers are born, not made. This is not true; effective networkers work hard at honing their networking abilities.

Second is the belief that effective networkers exploit other people. On the contrary, the most effective networkers are co-operative and consider building relationships to be an opportunity to give to others, instead of taking.

Third, some think effective networkers shield their networks from others. This is also inaccurate. People who are effective at networking are interested in helping others build their networks too, so they share their contacts with other people. This, in turn, can extend their networks even further.

Fourth, people assume effective networkers stay in constant contact with everyone they know. That would be exhausting. Instead, most networkers prioritize staying in touch with the people who are most important to them at any given time.

Take advantage of opportunities

Based on academic research, books on interpersonal skills and training that targets them, there are three tactics you can implement to get better at networking and reap the associated benefits.

The first is creating and taking advantage of networking opportunities. Join social clubs, sports teams, professional associations, and attend as many work-related events as you can manage.

Prepare yourself for networking events by developing an elevator script to introduce yourself that serves as an ice-breaker. Include something unique and interesting about yourself that will capture people’s interest and remember you, and practice your script so it flows naturally.

If possible, review the participant list before events and make a note of the people you’d like to meet. Research them and their organization online and on social media sites like LinkedIn to learn more about them.

Indeed, you can use social media to your advantage. Research has shown that work-related social media sites can help people develop networks and promote career success. It is the frequency of use, not the number of contacts, that is associated with positive career outcomes.

Build connections

During networking opportunities, aim to meet as many people as possible. One of the most important networking skills is making a good first impression, so, make sure to smile and speak calmly and confidently. Give people your full attention and don’t look around the room like you’re seeking out your next conversation target.

Based either on the research you have done or things you learn while chatting, ask open-ended questions that can stimulate rich conversation and uncover mutual interests.

When networking, it’s OK to ask about personal matters like hobbies and leisure activities—as long as you don’t pry and respect the signals you receive about whether or not people are comfortable discussing these things. Similarly, be willing to appropriately share your own personal interests.

Remember, being professional doesn’t necessarily require being formal. Consider asking someone you know to introduce you to someone you don’t. Always be thinking of how you can help others through your knowledge, skills or existing contacts, but don’t force it. Try to find common ground.

When you leave a conversation, thank the person for their time, ask for their business card or contact information and express your interest in staying in touch.

Maintain connections

After networking opportunities, make notes to remember details about the people you’ve met, including important dates like birthdays and anniversaries. Also, pay attention to important events in your contacts lives such as promotions, and contact them to stay in touch. Don’t use social media for this—it’s too impersonal.

On occasion, send people emails with details you think they’ll find valuable or call them up and go for a coffee or lunch without the sole intention of discussing business. Be friendly, and always convey that you have time for people.

If all this sounds intimidating, take comfort in knowing that one study found that only 2% of managers were effective at all of the networking skills the researchers identified. In other words, most people are still learning and improving.

Nobody is perfect at networking, but we can all improve with practice. With a little effort, you can network like a pro. If you do it right, it won’t feel exploitative because you won’t be manipulating anyone. It won’t feel awkward either, because you’ll simply be allowing your strengths and personality to shine. You may even find that networking is fun and enriches not only your career, but your life.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the 1990s, NASA satellites built to spot high-energy particles coming from supernovas and other celestial-sized objects discovered a surprise—high energy gamma radiation bursts coming from right here on Earth.

While it didn’t take long for researchers to figure out that these radioactive supercharged particles were coming from thunderstorms, how commonly the phenomenon happened remained a mystery. Satellites weren’t built to find gamma radiation coming from Earth, and they had to be in just the right place at just the right time to do so.

After years of making do with platforms not ideal for the task, a group of scientists secured an opportunity to fly a retrofitted U2 spy plane owned by NASA over storms to take a proper look. In two new papers published in Nature, the team discovered that gamma radiation produced in thunderstorms is far more common than anyone thought and that the dynamics creating the radiation hold a treasure trove of mysteries yet to be solved.

“There is way more going on in thunderstorms than we ever imagined,” said Steve Cummer, the William H. Younger Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Duke University, who was a co-author on both papers. “As it turns out, essentially all big thunderstorms generate gamma rays all day long in many different forms.”

The general physics behind how thunderstorms create high-energy flashes of gamma radiation is not a mystery. As thunderstorms develop, swirling drafts drive water droplets, hail and ice into a mixture that creates an electric charge much like rubbing a balloon on your shirt.

Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end.

When other charged particles—such as electrons—find themselves in such a strong field, they accelerate. If they accelerate to high enough speeds and happen to strike an air molecule, they knock off more high-energy electrons. The process cascades until the collisions have enough energy to create nuclear reactions, producing extremely strong and extremely fast flashes of gamma rays, antimatter and other forms of radiation.

But that’s not the end of the thunderstorm gamma radiation story. Aircraft flying close to thunderstorms have also seen a faint glow of gamma radiation coming from clouds. These storms seem to have enough energy to produce a low-level simmering of gamma radiation, but something prevents it from creating an explosive burst like a popping corn kernel.

“A few aircraft campaigns tried to figure out if these phenomena were common or not, but there were mixed results, and several campaigns over the United States didn’t find any gamma radiation at all,” Cummer said. “This project was designed to address these questions once and for all.”

The research group secured the use of a NASA ER-2 High-Altitude Airborne Science Aircraft. A retrofitted U2 spy plane left over from the Cold War, it flies over twice as high as commercial aircraft and about three miles above most thunderstorms. It’s also extremely fast, giving the team the opportunity to pick the exact thunderstorms they thought were most likely to produce results.

“The ER-2 aircraft would be the ultimate observing platform for gamma-rays from thunderclouds,” said Nikolai Østgaard, professor of space physics at the University of Bergen in Norway and lead investigator of the project. “Flying at 20 km [12.4 miles], we can fly directly over the cloud top, as close as possible to the gamma-ray source.”

Because the ER-2 was the perfect solution and the team was going to fly over the right storms, the researchers figured that if these phenomena were rare, then they’d barely see any at all. But if they were common, then they’d see a lot.

And they saw a lot.

Over the course of a month, the ER-2 flew 10 flights over large storms in the tropics south of Florida, and nine of them yielded observations of this summer of gamma radiation, which was also more dynamic than expected.

“The dynamics of gamma-glowing thunderclouds starkly contradicts the former quasi-stationary picture of glows, and rather resembles that of a huge gamma-glowing boiling pot both in pattern and behavior,” said Martino Marisaldi, professor of physics and technology at the University of Bergen.

Given the size of a typical thunderstorm in the tropics, which is much larger than storms at other latitudes, this suggests that more than half of all thunderstorms in the tropics are radioactive. The researchers postulate that this low-level production of gamma radiation acts like steam boiling off a pot of water and limits how much energy can be built up inside.

The researchers were equally excited to see numerous examples of short duration and intense gamma radiation bursts coming from the same thunderstorms. Some of these were precisely like those that were originally detected by NASA satellites. These almost always occurred in conjunction with an active lightning discharge.

This suggests that the large electric field created by lightning is likely supercharging the already high-energy electrons, enabling them to create high-energy nuclear reactions.

But there were also at least two other types of short gamma radiation bursts that had never been seen before. One type is incredibly short, less than a thousandth of a second, while the other is a sequence of about 10 individual bursts that repeat over the course of about a tenth of a second.

“Those two new forms of gamma radiation are what I find most interesting,” Cummer said. “They don’t seem to be associated with developing lightning flashes. They emerge spontaneously somehow. There are hints in the data that they may actually be linked to the processes that initiate lightning flashes, which are still a mystery to scientists.”

If there is anybody out there worried about getting turned into the Hulk by all of this gamma radiation, Cummer added, they shouldn’t be. The amount of radiation being produced would only be dangerous if a person or object were quite close to the origination source.

“The radiation would be the least of your problems if you found yourself there. Airplanes avoid flying in active thunderstorm cores due to the extreme turbulence and winds,” Cummer said. “Even knowing what we now know, I don’t worry about flying any more than I used to.”

An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new super-Neptune exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star. The newly detected alien world, which received the designation TOI-5005 b, is about six times larger and more than 30 times more massive than Earth. The finding was detailed in a paper published September 26 on the pre-print server arXiv.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite (TESS) is conducting a survey of about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun with the aim of searching for transiting exoplanets. So far, it has identified over 7,200 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 557 have been confirmed so far.

Recently, a group of astronomers led by Amadeo Castro-González of the Astrobiology Center in Madrid, Spain, confirmed another TOI monitored by TESS. They found a transit signal on the light curve of TOI-5005—a moderately bright solar-type star of spectral type G2V, located some 685 light years away. The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by follow-up observations using ground-based facilities.

“In this work, we used TESS, HARPS, PEST, and TRAPPIST-South data to confirm the planetary nature of TOI-5005 b and characterize its orbital and physical properties,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

The newfound planet has a radius of 6.25 Earth radii and a mass of 32.7 Earth masses, which yields a density at a level of 0.74 g/cm³. It orbits its host every 6.31 days, at a distance of approximately 0.066 AU from it. The planet’s equilibrium temperature was derived to be 1,040 K.

Investigating the internal structure of TOI-5005 b, the astronomers estimated that its core mass fraction and envelope metal mass fraction are about 0.74 and 0.08, respectively. All in all, the overall metal mass fraction of this exoplanet was calculated to be 0.76, therefore slightly lower than that of Uranus and Neptune. These results suggest that TOI-5005 b was formed via core accretion.

Based on the obtained data, the authors of the paper classified TOI-5005 b as a super-Neptune near the ridge of the “Neptunian savanna.” The so-called Neptunian desert and savanna mark the dearth of Neptune-like exoplanets on the shortest-period orbits and their modest occurrence at larger orbital distances. They are separated by a recently identified overdensity (ridge) of Neptunes in the 3–5 day orbital period range.

The researchers noted that TOI-5005 b has become a new member of a generally rare population of low-density Neptunes in the Neptunian savanna, in contrast to the planets in the ridge, which typically show higher densities—above 1.0 g/cm³.

In concluding remarks, the scientists added that the brightness of TOI-5005 makes the newly detected planetary system a key target for atmospheric and orbital architecture observations.

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