Science

The prison overcrowding crisis in the UK has shown the public what researchers and those working in criminal justice have known for years: prisons are unsafe for those serving time and working there.

With high rates of violence, drug abuse and self-harm, it is unsurprising that people in prison often suffer from poor mental and physical health. In the UK, 82% of women and 58% of men in prison report mental health issues. In turn, people are more likely to end up back in prison after release. This contradicts the whole point of prison: that punishment will deter people from crime.

One way to improve well-being in prison is through sport. As with those of us outside of prison, sport benefits body and mind, offers a distraction from harmful influences and connects us to others. Feeling that you “belong” has a huge impact on health, a mechanism commonly referred to in psychology and psychiatry as the “social cure”.

Prisons are environments where people are, by design, isolated from society and surrounded by strangers. Sports programs have the potential to improve lives by offering, among other things, positive social connection.

We have recently studied the effect of sport on improving well-being in prisons. We found that participating in an organized football program had positive, statistically significant effects on social connections for people in prison, with knock-on effects for their well-being.

The Twinning Project is a UK-founded football charity. It partners with over 70 prisons and professional football clubs to provide coaching, refereeing and stewarding qualifications to men and women in prison or serving community sentences.

In the UK, most participants complete a Football Association accredited qualification. As part of this training, they also play football and participate in other physical activity.

We surveyed 164 male participants to understand how the program influenced their well-being and sense of belonging. We measured their life satisfaction, optimism about the future and belief in themselves before and after the program. We also tracked the extent to which their psychological needs, such as feeling useful and close to other people, were satisfied.

The percentage of prisoners who thought they could achieve their goals rose from 29% before the program to 41% after. The rate of those who reported feeling satisfied with their life increased from 74% to 89%.

We also found evidence for the social cure mechanism of improving well-being. Tellingly, the share of participants who said they identified with, or felt a connection to the Twinning Project significantly increased from 76% to 86%.

Participants who identified more strongly with the program also showed increased satisfaction with critical psychological needs, which helped explain improvements in life satisfaction, personal efficacy and higher levels of optimism and happiness after the program. A stronger sense of connection was clearly linked to better well-being.

These results support our previous findings from interviews with participants completing community sentences. The interviews revealed that the camaraderie within cohorts and the mentoring from coaches helped to fill gaps in social support that many people experience in the criminal justice system. Participants told us: “My probation officer used to be on my case, she told me I should be in prison. Now she only calls me once a month because I’m doing so well since [the program started].

“It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. I’ll carry that with me for the rest of my life … Just because I’m 32, doesn’t mean my dreams all just disappear.”

Life after prison

The vicious reoffending cycle costs the UK alone £18 billion a year (more than the government spends on the environment or housing). Improving prisoner well-being is therefore not just about making prisons safer, it has benefits for society as a whole.

While the data to assess participants’ behavior after release won’t be available for this particular project until 2026, other research has shown that vocational programs are linked to lower reoffending rates, and that sports programs are effective at reducing crime and improving well-being.

The project currently focuses on prisoners within a year of release, helping them apply new skills, with recruitment favoring those on good behavior.

Football, the most popular sport on the planet, works well because of its accessibility and minimal equipment needs. But the core idea of this program—engaging prisoners in healthy, educational activities together that develop soft skills and boost confidence—can be applied to any organized sport. There are trials in the UK and US involving rugby and basketball.

While sport alone cannot address the prison overcrowding crisis, programs that provide a sense of belonging and purpose are crucial to improving the situation. The social benefits of these activities should be a key consideration when designing content for people in prison.

Ultimately, prisons should be places where people can participate in meaningful activities, fostering growth and rehabilitation rather than simply serving as places of confinement.

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

As BepiColombo sped past Mercury during its June 2023 flyby, it encountered a variety of features in the tiny planet’s magnetic field. These measurements provide a tantalizing taste of the mysteries that the mission is set to investigate when it arrives in orbit around the solar system’s innermost planet.

Like Earth, Mercury has a magnetic field, albeit 100 times weaker at the surface of the planet. Nonetheless, this magnetic field carves out a bubble in space, called a magnetosphere, which acts as a buffer to the continuous flow of particles blown out by the sun as the solar wind.

Because Mercury orbits so close to the sun, the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere and even the surface of the planet is a lot more intense than at Earth. Exploring the dynamics of this bubble and the properties of the particles contained within it is one of the main aims of BepiColombo’s mission.

BepiColombo is set to arrive at Mercury in 2026 using flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury itself to adjust its speed and trajectory to allow it to be captured into orbit around the planet. The currently “stacked” spacecraft will separate and deploy two science orbiters—the ESA-led Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the JAXA-led Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO, or Mio)—into complementary orbits to enable the essential dual-spacecraft measurements needed to paint a complete picture of Mercury’s dynamic environment.

As the spacecraft speeds past Mercury during the flybys, many of its science instruments are able to sneak a preview of the exciting science to come. Moreover, the flybys provide unique insights from regions around the planet that won’t be directly accessible from orbit.

Lina Hadid, a former ESA Research Fellow now at the Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas at Paris Observatory, used the Mercury Plasma Particle Experiment (MPPE) suite of instruments active on Mio during the 19 June 2023 flyby, BepiColombo’s third of six Mercury gravity assists, to build up an impressive picture of the planet’s magnetic landscape in a very short period of time.

Hadid is the lead co-investigator of MPPE and lead of one of its instruments, the Mass Spectrum Analyser. She worked on the paper published in Communications Physics that presented the results with former instrument lead Dominique Delcourt.

“These flybys are fast; we crossed Mercury’s magnetosphere in about 30 minutes, moving from dusk to dawn and at a closest approach of just 235 km above the planet’s surface,” she says. “We sampled the type of particles, how hot they are, and how they move, enabling us to clearly plot the magnetic landscape during this brief period.”

Combining BepiColombo’s measurements with computer modeling to determine the origin of the detected particles based on their motion enabled Hadid and her colleagues to sketch out the various features encountered in the magnetosphere.

“We saw expected structures like the ‘shock’ boundary between the free-flowing solar wind and the magnetosphere, and we also passed through the ‘horns’ flanking the plasma sheet, a region of hotter, denser electrically charged gas that streams out like a tail in the direction away from the sun. But we also had some surprises.”

Delcourt states, “We detected a so-called low-latitude boundary layer defined by a region of turbulent plasma at the edge of the magnetosphere, and here we observed particles with a much wider range of energies than we’ve ever seen before at Mercury, in large thanks to the sensitivity of the Mass Spectrum Analyser designed especially for Mercury’s complex environment.”

“BepiColombo will be able to determine the ion composition of Mercury’s magnetosphere in greater detail than ever.”

“We also observed energetic hot ions near the equatorial plane and at low latitude trapped in the magnetosphere, and we think the only way to explain that is by a ring current, either a partial or complete ring, but this is an area that is much debated,” adds Hadid.

A ring current is an electric current carried by charged particles trapped in the magnetosphere. Earth has a well-understood ring current located tens of thousands of kilometers from its surface. At Mercury it is less clear how the particles can stay trapped within a few hundred kilometers of the planet, especially as the magnetosphere is squashed against the planet’s surface. This debate will likely be settled once MPO and Mio are collecting data full-time.

Hadid and her colleagues also observed the direct interaction of the spacecraft with the surrounding space plasma. When the spacecraft is heated by the sun it cannot detect the colder, heavy ions because the spacecraft itself gets electrically charged and repels them.

But as the spacecraft moves through the planet’s nightside shadow, the charging is different, and suddenly a sea of cold plasma ions becomes visible. For example, the spacecraft detected ions of oxygen, sodium and potassium, which were likely sent flying from the planet’s surface by micro-meteorite strikes or through interactions with the solar wind.

“It’s like we’re suddenly seeing the surface composition ‘exploded’ in 3D through the planet’s very thin atmosphere, known as its exosphere,” remarks Delcourt. “It’s really exciting to start seeing the link between the planet’s surface and the plasma environment.”

“In this rare dusk-to-dawn sweep through the large-scale structure of Mercury’s magnetosphere we’ve tasted the promise of future discoveries,” says Go Murakami, JAXA’s BepiColombo project scientist.

“The observations emphasize the need for the two orbiters and their complementary instruments to tell us the full story and build up a complete picture of how the magnetic and plasma environment changes over time and in space,” adds Geraint Jones, ESA BepiColombo project scientist.

“We can’t wait to see how BepiColombo will impact our broader understanding of planetary magnetospheres.”

Meanwhile, scientists are already digging into the data snatched during last month’s fourth close Mercury flyby, while flight controllers are readying for the final two back-to-back flybys slated for 1 December 2024 and 8 January 2025, respectively.

If you started watching a movie from the middle without knowing its plot, you’d likely be better at inferring what had happened earlier than predicting what will happen next, according to a new Dartmouth-led study published in Nature Communications.

Prior research has found that humans are usually equally good at guessing about the unknown past and future. However, those studies have relied on very simple sequences of numbers, images, or shapes, rather than on more realistic scenarios.

“Events in real life have complex associations relating to time that haven’t typically been captured in past work, so we wanted to explore how people make inferences in situations that are more reminiscent of everyday life,” says senior author Jeremy Manning, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and director of the Contextual Dynamics Lab at Dartmouth. “Real life experiences, unlike abstract sequences, often include other people.”

For the study, participants watched a series of scenes from two character-driven television dramas, “Why Women Kill” on CBS and “The Chair” on Netflix. They were asked to either guess what had happened before each scene, or what would happen next.

Participants were consistently better at guessing what had happened before a just-watched scene than they were at guessing what would happen next.

The researchers found that participants’ inferences were heavily influenced by references to specific past and future events in characters’ conversations. Like people in real life, characters in both shows often talked about their past experiences and future plans. Since the characters in those two shows tended to talk more about their pasts, participants had more clues to work from to make inferences about past rather than future events.

To determine if this pattern of talking more about the past extends to other conversations as well, the team analyzed millions of dialogues in novels, movies, television shows, and more. They found that fictional and real people alike tend to talk more about their pasts than their futures.

Even though we can make plans for the future, our memories only tell us about our past. Just as real people remember their prior experiences but not those in the future, so too do fictional characters, perhaps, in an effort by writers to help them appear realistic, according to the co-authors.

“Our results show that on average, people talk one-and-half-times more about the past than the future,” says Manning. “And this seems to be a general trend in human conversation.”

Prior research has referred to the phenomenon of remembering the past but not the future as the “psychological arrow of time.” “This phenomenon also reflects that one knows more about their past than their future,” explains lead author Xinming Xu, Guarini, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and member of the Contextual Dynamics Lab.

“Our study shows that a person’s asymmetric knowledge of their own life can be transmitted to others.”

Ziyan Zhu at Peking University and Xueyao Zheng at Beijing Normal University also contributed to the study.

In recent months, many Canadian employers in both the public and private sectors have implemented return-to-office mandates, requiring workers that transitioned to remote or hybrid work during the COVID-19 pandemic to work in-person again.

Employers are justifying these mandates by arguing they improve productivity, build more collaborative teams and improve mentorship for junior employees.

Employers are not the only group ecstatic about these mandates. Municipalities and business owners are also expressing hope that the presence of office workers will spin off into greater consumer spending at restaurants and other businesses near office buildings. The expectation is that office workers will once again start spending money on coffee, lunch or after-work beverages.

In 2022, the mayor of Ottawa partially blamed the downtown core’s economic struggles on the fact that federal public service workers were still largely working remotely. Federal workers have since been mandated to return to work in-person three days a week in late fall.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business similarly criticized the slow return to offices as a leading factor behind why small and medium-size businesses, especially restaurants and bars, are facing challenges in downtown areas.

Insight into restaurant success

During the pandemic, there were predictions that more than half of Canada’s independent restaurants would fail as part of their customer base—office workers—shifted to working from home.

Our recent study investigated which operational, demographic and land use factors affected restaurant survival during the first year of the pandemic in London, Ont.

We found no significant differences between restaurants that failed and restaurants that survived based on proximity to office uses. Instead, operational decisions made by restaurants individually were much more predictive of their survival than any geographic factor, including the presence of offices.

We found that restaurants located in areas receiving more CERB (Canadian Emergency Response Benefit) payments, and with a higher density of entertainment venues around them, were less likely to survive.

Restaurants that adapted by offering pickup and delivery options were more likely to survive, though only for those that did their own delivery in-house rather than relying on platforms like UberEats and SkipTheDishes. Restaurants that had drive-thrus, held liquor licenses, or had been established for more than five years were more likely to survive. These older, more established restaurants were likely more resilient because of financial stability and customer loyalty.

Table-service restaurants fared better than fast food outlets, likely because they could offer large patio dining spaces during the summer. Restaurants with liquor licenses substantially benefited, especially after a regulatory change by the Ontario government that allowed alcohol sales with takeout and delivery—a first for the province.

In short, restaurant success was driven more by individual business decisions rather than being in a specific location. People working remotely instead of in the office did not significantly affect restaurant survival during the first year of the pandemic.

Downtown struggles

As Canadian downtowns look to recover, many face ongoing challenges. Activity levels are down by about 20 percent from pre-pandemic levels in many places, lagging behind many similarly sized downtowns in the United States.

This downturn has been partially attributed to a combination of higher office building vacancies and fewer workers downtown. For the first time, downtown office vacancy rates have exceeded suburban rates in the Greater Toronto Area. There has also been tremendous housing growth within many downtown cores.

At the same time, downtowns have become a highly visible focal point of Canada’s growing addictions, mental health and housing crises. The pandemic fully revealed the deeper social, economic and health challenges happening in Canadian society.

While violent incidents are rare, the social incivilities and disorder on display—public urination and defecation, open drug use, visible tents and property crime—contributes to a perception that Canadian downtowns are unsafe. This perception, whether accurate or not, has an impact on the willingness of people to engage with their downtowns.

A way forward

The damage to the reputation of Canada’s downtowns has been done. Downtown London now has the highest office vacancy rate in the country. The Workplace Safety Insurance Board of Ontario, for instance, recently chose to consolidate its offices in the outskirts of London, rather than downtown.

Many people now elect to spend their time and money in areas that have embraced the “experience economy.” These are places that provide highly manicured entertainment and shopping destinations, with restaurants being the bedrock of enabling high quality experiences in these areas.

Foot traffic is at an all-time high in suburban shopping centers. The downtowns of cities that are widely known as global tourist destinations—Las Vegas, Miami and Nashville—have activity levels close to or higher than their pre-pandemic levels.

These are places that are developing highly attractive economies that provide people with the safe, fun and exciting experiences they are looking for locally and internationally. Instead of trying to force unwilling workers back to the office, Canadian cities should instead focus on developing downtowns that people genuinely want to visit and experience.

One potential way to do this is to provide wrap-around support services and direct pathways to stable housing across the entire community, as the City of London has done. By spreading care and outreach services across the entire city, rather than concentrating them exclusively in downtown areas, the negative effects from Canada’s homelessness crisis can be reduced on urban cores.

This type of strategy will direct those who need help away from downtowns, and may even permanently lift them out of poverty. In turn, Canadian downtowns can return to being places for everyone to shop, eat, relax, and work in comfort.

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

It’s about time city councils did more to make our cities accessible. I recently tried to buy tickets to two Sydney Fringe Festival events, only to be told by the box office that the venues were not wheelchair-accessible.

Sydney remains a place where people with disability feel like they don’t belong. The same is true of other Australian cities. But local councils don’t bear all the blame.

Event organizers are responsible for selecting venues. In the case of the Fringe Festival, they chose locations inaccessible to wheelchair users and others with mobility challenges. It’s a bitter irony that a fringe festival, which ostensibly empowers artists and creatives on the margins, would exclude people with disability.

If event organizers (and every one of us) decided never to hire inaccessible venues, then the market might solve the issue. But those of us with disability are realistic enough to know most people don’t care—or don’t give us a thought. The market hasn’t solved the problem, so it’s up to governments.

The problems go beyond arts venues

Inaccessible venues are only the tip of the iceberg. Countless restaurants, shops and offices are inaccessible, with steps on entry, inaccessible bathrooms and narrow and cluttered aisles.

“Spend the day in my wheelchair” programs are sometimes criticized for trivializing the challenge of disability. However, they do unmask how frustrating and alienating our cities and towns can be.

Google Maps now indicates whether premises are accessible. Those that bear the universal symbol of disability access—the stylized blue wheelchair. Even then, a person with a disability is just as likely as not to turn up and discover a lift has broken down, a doorway has been blocked off, a bathroom has been used for storage, or a venue is only partially accessible (it’s always the cool spaces that are out of reach).

The Commonwealth and states brought in disability discrimination laws in the 1990s. These have made some difference, but their many exemptions let businesses off the hook. (See the Disability Royal Commission’s recommendations to amend the Disability Discrimination Act 1992.)

More than 30 years down the track, our cities and towns remain bastions of exclusion.

Better access benefits everyone

Landowners and businesses typically complain providing access for the few affected people is too costly. In reality, making our public spaces accessible often requires little more than determined creative design. The costs are a mere fraction of what we spend on other things we judge as more important.

We also underestimate the value added by accessible design.

The Curb-Cut Effect, for example, describes how designing for people with disability often benefits everyone. The term refers to the impact of activist action in California in the 1970s. Disability advocates in the city of Berkeley poured concrete onto road curbs to create ramps giving wheelchair users access to footpaths.

These ramps also proved valuable to parents pushing children in strollers, older people and cyclists. Refined into curb cuts, they spread rapidly around the world.

There are many other examples. Television captioning, developed for people who are deaf and hard of hearing, is now widely used by non-disabled people. Audiobooks, developed for people who are blind, are now a common way that many other people enjoy books.

Accessible venues will not just benefit wheelchair users. Older people, those with impaired mobility and people who push prams and tow suitcases all benefit. Indeed, if we make venues accessible to those on the margins, no one is excluded.

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities highlights the importance of universal design. The convention insists on “the design of products, environments, programs and services to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.”

Why use steps that exclude some people when everyone can use a ramp or a lift?

Why councils must lead the way

Accessibility in cities is about more than just wheelchairs; it requires a comprehensive approach to urban planning to meet the varied needs of all citizens. This includes providing sensory aids like audio signals, braille signage and visual measures for people who are blind, deaf or hard of hearing. It’s also crucial that information on public services and events is easily available to everyone in formats they can access and understand.

My focus has been on access to public spaces, but we also need to turn our attention to private homes. Wheelchair users and people with other mobility impairments can’t access most private houses in Australia. There is a drastic lack of accessible housing for people with disability and the cost of retrofitting access is exorbitant.

New South Wales is yet to follow the lead of other states and territories by signing up to the Silver Liveable Housing Design Standards. These standards are part of the revised National Construction Code. They require new housing developments to offer basic accessibility for all people.

We can and must do better. Every level of government can contribute to change.

However, new builds and renovations are often decided upon at the regional level. This means local councils should bear much of the responsibility.

A determined effort by our mayors and councilors to insist premises are accessible will be better for everyone. From a selfish perspective, it might mean I could go out to dinner or a festival without worrying if I can get in the door.

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

When Amazon told staffers last month to come back to the office five days a week, many observers reacted as if an earthquake struck the post-pandemic world of work. To Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, the news barely registered.

“I doubt it will change anything,” he says, dismissing the notion that Amazon’s mandate means many companies will rescind their work-from-home policies.

By now—more than four years after COVID-19 triggered one of the country’s largest labor shocks since World War II—Bloom and his longtime collaborator Steven Davis of Stanford have gotten used to the frequent headlines questioning the staying power of working from home.

The pair, both senior fellows at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), have been on the forefront of remote work research from the onset of the pandemic. And the skeptics, they say, are wrong.

Their research finds that, despite the headline-grabbing pullbacks, work-from-home rates are holding steady—with about one-third of the U.S. workforce (quadruple pre-pandemic levels) logging in remotely at least two days a week.

Employees, especially those with children, are willing to take a pay cut and stay in their jobs when given the perk of staying home two or three days a week. And through their studies, they have dispelled as a myth the belief that “the bed, the fridge, and the television” are the enemies of working from home. When managed well, employees on a hybrid schedule are just as productive as they are when in the office.

“The pandemic removed the stigma of working from home and accelerated by a few decades where we would have ended up eventually,” says Davis, the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Senior Fellow and director of research at the Hoover Institution.

Remote work’s implications go far beyond workers and their employers. Major cities like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are grappling with how to respond to declining revenues given the drop in commuters and takeout lunches. Commercial and home real estate markets are shifting. Companies big and small are developing tools and services to improve remote work for employees and businesses.

Research has indicated, too, that there are potential consequences for exacerbating inequality when it’s mostly college-educated workers in higher-paying jobs who get the opportunity to work from home.

“Even burglars have been affected,” says Bloom, the William Eberle Professor of Economics in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences, citing a study of daytime crime rates. “You can’t break into homes when owners are sitting at the coffee table with their laptops.”

Research has and will continue to play a pivotal role in understanding how working remotely is impacting society and the economy, Davis and Bloom say.

In 2022, they organized the first Remote Work Conference at Stanford to examine the latest research and explore unanswered questions. The third annual conference, sponsored by Hoover and SIEPR, is set for Oct. 9–11.

Davis and Bloom’s closest collaborator on work-from-home research is Jose Maria Barrero, a former advisee of Bloom and now an assistant professor of finance at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

“We are only at the end of the beginning of the remote work revolution,” Bloom says, “and the research needed to understand its full effects.”

Remote work’s research desert

Much of the credit for what we know today about working from home dates to 2011—when Davis and Bloom first forged a connection at a National Bureau of Economic Research meeting in Boston. At that time, Bloom was doing some work on perceptions of economic uncertainty, which can slow GDP growth.

Davis, then a professor at the University of Chicago, and Bloom got to talking over beer at the Royal Sonesta hotel about how they might work together to shed light on the hard-to-measure phenomenon of uncertainty.

Five years later, some of the ideas they sketched out that day were published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. The “Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty” study, co-authored with Scott Baker of Northwestern University, remains one of the most cited papers in the social sciences of the last 10 years. The three academics have since tracked levels of uncertainty globally and within 30 individual countries.

When COVID lockdowns began in 2020, research into remote work—or telecommuting, as it was long known—was scant. Bloom was one of the few scholars to have published a large-scale study. It centered on a remote-work experiment at a China-based online travel company, Ctrip, that was looking to cut back on office real estate costs.

Released in 2013, and later published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the conclusions were mostly positive: Remote employees were more productive, satisfied with their jobs, and less likely to quit. The one downside was that they weren’t promoted as often.

“My thought at the time was, “Okay, this works quite well for some, but probably not for most,'” recalls Bloom. “Even I wasn’t convinced that hybrid work made sense.”

When the CEOs came calling

But the research took on new life when the pandemic hit. With millions of office workers sheltering in place at home, journalists uncovered Bloom’s Ctrip paper and clamored for his insights into what the tectonic labor shift meant.

Bloom and Davis, by now not just research collaborators but also good friends, pivoted. For six years, in addition to their ongoing work in economic uncertainty, they had been examining expectations and managerial practices through a monthly survey of business executives with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

In short order, they added questions about how these executives saw the work-from-home experiences at their own firms and their expectations for how it might play out into the future.

Wanting, too, to hear from workers, they recruited Barrero to help design and run the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, beginning in May 2020.

Roughly 8,000 U.S. workers complete the survey each month. Along with a separate global version, it is now one of the most closely watched measures of changing attitudes and policies around remote work and the basis for multiple papers authored by Bloom, Davis, and Barrero to date.

It didn’t take long for their research to make a big impact. In the fall of 2020—not long after the trio predicted that one-third of U.S. employees would work remotely at least two or three days a week—Fortune 500 CEOs and company directors started reaching out, one by one. They had questions, lots of them, for Bloom and Davis.

The head of one of the country’s largest banks wanted to know whether working from home was just a passing fad or a permanent change. A Big Tech chief executive wondered if he should close company retail stores located near now-vacant financial districts. And the board of a well-known restaurant chain wanted guidance on what to do because nobody was ordering catered office lunches on Mondays and Fridays anymore; they all wanted meals delivered Tuesday through Thursday.

“There was a real tension between what senior managers wanted to have happen and what they were forced to acquiesce to given the new market realities,” says Davis, who joined Stanford in 2023 after more than 35 years at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

“At one point,” he continues, “we asked workers, ‘How many times has your employer implemented a return-to-office mandate? Is it 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5?'”

Their research, individual and collectively, consistently reaffirms that hybrid work is good business for many companies. In a larger follow-on study of Ctrip, the online Chinese travel agency, that was published in Nature in June, Bloom confirmed his earlier findings, with one notable exception: Hybrid employees’ chances of getting promoted were not affected by remote work.

“The pandemic forced us to experiment with a very different way of working, for weeks and months on end,” Davis says. “And we’ve discovered, contrary to what many economists predicted, that not only does it work well in many settings, but also that we’re getting better at it.”

Artificial intelligence is already disrupting industries from banking and finance to film and journalism, and scientists are investigating how AI might revolutionize their field—or even win a Nobel Prize.

In 2021, Japanese scientist Hiroaki Kitano proposed what he dubbed the “Nobel Turing Challenge”, inviting researchers to create an “AI scientist” capable of autonomously carrying out research worthy of a Nobel Prize by 2050.

Some scientists are already hard at work seeking to create an AI colleague worthy of a Nobel, with this year’s laureates to be announced between October 7 and 14.

And in fact, there are around 100 “robot scientists” already, according to Ross King, a professor of machine intelligence at Chalmers University in Sweden.

In 2009, King published a paper in which he and a group of colleagues presented “Robot Scientist Adam”—the first machine to make scientific discoveries independently.

“We built a robot which discovered new science on its own, generated novel scientific ideas and tested them and confirmed that they were correct,” King told AFP.

The robot was set up to form hypotheses autonomously, and then design experiments to test these out.

It would even program laboratory robots to carry out those experiments, before learning from the process and repeating.

‘Not trivial’

“Adam” was tasked with exploring the inner workings of yeast and discovered “functions of genes” that were previously unknown in the organism.

In the paper, the robot scientist’s creators noted that while the discoveries were “modest” they were “not trivial” either.

Later, a second robot scientist—named “Eve”—was set up to study drug candidates for malaria and other tropical diseases.

According to King, robot scientists already have several advantages over your average human scientist.

“It costs less money to do the science, they work 24/7,” he explained, adding that they are also more diligent at recording every detail of the process.

At the same time, King conceded that AI is far from being anywhere close to a Nobel-worthy scientist.

For that, they would need to be “much more intelligent” and able to “understand the bigger picture”.

‘Nowhere near’

Inga Strumke, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said that for the time being the scientific profession is safe.

“The scientific tradition is nowhere near being taken over by machines anytime soon,” she told AFP.

However, Strumke added that “doesn’t mean that it’s impossible”, adding that it’s “definitely” clear that AI is having and will have an impact on how science is conducted.

One example of how it is already in use is AlphaFold—an AI model developed by Google DeepMind—which is used to predict the three-dimensional structure of proteins based on their amino acid.

“We knew that there was some relation between the amino acids and the final three-dimensional shape of the proteins… and then we could use machine learning to find it,” Strumke said.

She explained that the complexity of such calculations was too daunting for humans.

“We kind of have a machine that did something that no humans could do,” she said.

At the same time, for Strumke, the case of AlphaFold also demonstrates one of the weaknesses of current AI models such as so-called neural networks.

They are very adept at crunching massive amounts of information and coming up with an answer, but not very good at explaining why that answer is correct.

So while the over 200 million protein structures predicted by AlphaFold are “extremely useful”, they “don’t teach us anything about microbiology”, Strumke said.

Aided by AI

For her, science seeks to understand the universe and is not merely about “making the correct guess”.

Still, the groundbreaking work done by AlphaFold has led to pundits putting the minds behind it as front-runners for a Nobel Prize.

Google DeepMind’s director John Jumper and CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis were already honored with the prestigious Lasker Award in 2023.

Analytics group Clarivate, which keeps an eye on potential Nobel science laureates, places the pair among the top picks for the 2024 candidates for the Prize in Chemistry, announced on October 9.

David Pendlebury, head of the research group, admits that while a 2021 paper by Jumper and Hassabis has been cited thousands of times, it would be out of character for the Nobel jury to award work so quickly after publication—as most discoveries that are honored date back decades.

At the same time, he feels confident that it won’t be too long before research aided by AI will win the most coveted of science prizes.

“I’m sure that within the next decade there will be Nobel Prizes that are somehow assisted by computation and computation these days is more and more AI,” Pendlebury told AFP.

© 2024 AFP

Next week’s Nobel Prize announcements will crown achievements that made the world a better place, a glimmer of optimism amid a spiraling Middle East conflict, war in Ukraine, famine in Sudan and a collapsing climate.

The prize winners will be announced between October 7 and 14.

For the Peace Prize, the most prestigious of the six Nobels, experts say it is harder than ever to predict the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s pick, to be revealed on October 11.

Swedish philanthropist Alfred Nobel created the prizes in his 1895 will, stipulating that they go to those who have “conferred the greatest benefit on humankind”.

But given the bleak state of world affairs, perhaps no one should get the Peace Prize this year, suggested Dan Smith, the head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

“Maybe this is the time to say, ‘Yes, many people are working very hard, but it’s not getting there and we need more people and world leaders to wake up and realize that we are in an extremely dangerous situation,'” he said.

“We have now over 50 armed conflicts around the world. The lethality of those armed conflicts has increased dramatically in the past two decades,” he said.

‘A worthy candidate’

Not awarding a Peace Prize would be viewed as an acknowledgement of failure by the award committee, and is therefore deemed unlikely.

“I’m confident there will be a worthy candidate for the Peace Prize this year as well,” the secretary of the committee, Olav Njolstad, told AFP.

Last year, the award went to jailed Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran.

A total of 286 nominations are known to have been submitted for the Peace Prize this year, though the committee keeps the names sealed for 50 years.

Those entitled to nominate are however allowed to reveal their picks.

Among those known to be on the list are some actors involved in the Middle East, such as the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA; Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq; its Israeli counterpart B’Tselem and the International Court of Justice.

Given the existential risks to humanity posed by weapons systems that can operate autonomously without human control, several Nobel-watchers have cited the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots as a possible laureate.

The Nobel Prize in Literature, to be announced on October 10, likewise generates frenzied speculation every year.

Several pundits believe Chinese author Can Xue will be the Swedish Academy’s choice this year—and she has the lowest odds on several betting sites.

An avant-garde fiction writer often likened to Kafka, her experimental style flips between utopia and dystopia and transforms the mundane into the surreal.

“I think it will be a woman from a language zone outside Europe,” Bjorn Wiman, culture editor at Sweden’s newspaper of record Dagens Nyheter, told AFP.

The last Chinese author to win was Mo Yan in 2012.

Surprise name for literature?

With no public shortlist, it is always difficult to predict which way the 18-member Swedish Academy is leaning.

Names making the rounds in Stockholm’s literary circles include Australian novelist Gerald Murnane, Britain’s Salman Rushdie, Antiguan-American writer Jamaica Kincaid, Canadian poet Anne Carson, Hungary’s Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Mircea Cartarescu of Romania, Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Japan’s Haruki Murakami.

Last year, Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse took home the honor.

The Academy often shines a spotlight on relatively unknown writers.

“I think they’ve gone to great pains to find some writer that will catch the culture commentariat with their pants down,” Wiman said.

The Nobel season kicks off on Monday with the Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Analytics group Clarivate, which monitors potential science laureates, speculated that award could go to research on the genetics of lipid metabolism, which has led to new drugs to treat cardiovascular diseases.

Another candidate could be studies of the basal ganglia, which are parts of the brain associated with motor control and emotions.

Or the prize could go to the discovery of genomic imprinting, which has increased our understanding of epigenetics and mammalian development.

Last year, the Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to researchers Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman for their work on messenger RNA technology that paved the way for groundbreaking COVID-19 vaccines.

The Prize in Physics follows on Tuesday ahead of Wednesday’s Prize in Chemistry. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences then wraps up the 2024 Nobel season on Monday, October 14.

This year’s laureates will take home the prized sum of 11 million kronor ($1 million) per discipline, to be shared if there is more than one winner.

© 2024 AFP

At the heart of most large galaxies lies a supermassive black hole that plays a crucial role in cosmic dynamics. When black holes consume significant amounts of energy and matter, they unleash powerful jets of plasma that travel at nearly the speed of light. For instance, the supermassive black hole in Messier 87, located approximately 54 million light-years from Earth, generates jets that extend over 3,000 light-years.

The Role of Jets in Nova Activity

Recent observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have unveiled a fascinating phenomenon: double-star systems situated near these black hole jets experience an increase in nova explosions. These systems typically consist of a normal star and a white dwarf. When the normal star expands, it can shed material that is attracted to the dense white dwarf, eventually leading to a catastrophic explosion known as a nova. Research indicates that the proximity to the black hole jets may enhance this process, although the exact mechanism remains unclear.

Research Findings and Future Implications

Alec Lessing, an astronomer from Stanford University and lead author of the study, expressed excitement about the findings, noting, “This means there’s something missing from our understanding of how black hole jets interact with their surroundings.” The data was collected over nine months, revealing a statistically significant correlation between the jets and increased nova activity in the area.

Conclusion: A New Understanding of Cosmic Interactions

The study sheds light on the complex relationship between supermassive black holes and the surrounding stellar environment. As researchers continue to explore these interactions, the implications for our understanding of cosmic evolution and the behaviour of galaxies will undoubtedly deepen, paving the way for future discoveries.

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