The Thwaites ice shelf is cracking, humans have learned to walk many times and covert consciousness can be detected in unresponsive patients
The Thwaites Ice Shelf is one of the most important geological features on the planet and it is in trouble. The 800 square kilometer ice sheet floats in front of Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier and holds it in place. In recent years, scientists have discovered new ways in which the ice shelf is melting, cracking and rocking. Science journalist Douglas Fox accompanied the researchers as they pulled sledges full of radar equipment across the ice to study its interior, finding surprises with each new observation. The consequences of a collapse of the Thwaites Ice Shelf would be catastrophic, flooding coastal cities across the world, and could begin to crumble within a decade.
The implications of Thwaites’ research are grim, but the article on it is a lot of fun. Details make history: Antarctic ice that breaks up like cornflakes, snow when scientists detonate explosives, and the possibility that, on a future mission, scientists unexpectedly wake up floating on an iceberg.
Scientific American editors encourage our authors to share the fun, weird, inspiring, and scary human side of science in their stories. Paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva really helped us out, with a memorable anecdote about researchers playing dodgeball with elephant dung before they discovered an important bed of fossilized footprints. I laughed out loud when I read your methodology for a research project involving apples (I won’t spoil it). The fascinating takeaway from all this Very Serious Research is that humans have learned to walk many times in our evolutionary history, with very different gaits and postures. When several hominid species lived in the same place, they might have been able to distinguish one from another at a distance based on how they walked.
New techniques to assess brain activity are revealing that some patients who appear to be in a coma or are unresponsive may understand a little of what is happening around them. Detecting “covert awareness” can help guide treatments and predict clinical outcomes. Neurologists Jan Claassen and Brian L. Edlow are working to improve methods for testing covert consciousness and explore what this means for our understanding of consciousness itself.
The subatomic particles appear to be breaking a rule called the “universality of lepton flavor”. Physicists are getting really excited about your strange behavior, and I hope you will be too, after reading the story of theoretical physicist Andreas Crivellin. The Standard Model has been extremely successful in helping us understand the subatomic world, but it doesn’t explain everything. Oddly behaving particles have the potential to reveal what is wrong or what is missing in our understanding of everything from neutrinos to dark matter.
Certain newly invented materials also behave strangely. Some of these “metamaterials” bend light in unusual ways, hiding an object to make it invisible. They’re engineered at the nanoscale, with an array of features that bend light and sound to your whim. Physicist and engineer Andrea Alù describes how metamaterials can withstand superconductivity and break symmetries.
Citizens’ assemblies are groups of people who work together to understand a problem, find solutions and build consensus, especially for controversial issues. They have been around since ancient Greece but are becoming more popular lately. These assemblies are much more inclusive and representative than representative democracy, but the process of choosing participants can still be complicated. Computer scientist Ariel Procaccia shares his work in creating and refining an algorithm for democracy.
This article originally appeared with the title “Our Human Side” in Scientific American 327, 5, 4 (November 2022)
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1122-4
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Laura Helmuth is Editor-in-Chief of Scientific American. Follow her on Twitter @laurahelmuth Credit: Nick Higgins
