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Police officers at a Black Lives Matter rally in Los Angeles, California, in May.Credit: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty
Mathematicians call for boycott of police work
More than 1,400 researchers have signed a letter urging their colleagues to stop collaborating with police because of the widely documented disparities in how US law-enforcement agencies treat people of different races and ethnicities. They concentrate their criticism on predictive policing, a maths-based technique aimed at stopping crime before it occurs. Critics say that the data used to feed such algorithms contain racial biases, and that the ‘control conditions’ for predictive policing — ordinary policing — are racially skewed. “It is simply too easy to create a ‘scientific’ veneer for racism,” the mathematicians write.
Circle of huge shafts found near Stonehenge
Archaeologists have discovered a 2-kilometre ring of prehistoric shafts about 3 kilometres from Stonehenge. There are at least 20 of the 4,500-year-old shafts, each more than 5 metres deep and 10 metres in diameter. The startling discovery, in one of the world’s most studied archeological landscapes, comes thanks to modern techniques including ground-penetrating radar. They show “the capacity and desire of Neolithic communities to record their cosmological belief systems in ways, and at a scale, that we had never previously anticipated,” says archaeologist Vincent Gaffney.
Reference: Internet Archaeology paper
The evidence-backed path to fairer policing
Some disturbing findings are coming in from long-running studies that were spurred by protests in 2014 after the deadly shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the death of Eric Garner by chokehold in New York City. About 1,000 civilians are killed each year by law-enforcement officers in the United States. By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime. In another study, of those who were fatally shot by police, Black people were more than twice as likely to have been unarmed than white people. “We have enough evidence that tells us that action needs to be taken,” says criminologist Justin Nix. “One thousand deaths a year does not have to be normal.”
Source: Ref. 4
38 ℃ (100.4 ℉)
The temperature last Saturday in Verkhoyansk, Siberia. If verified, it breaks the record for the highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. (The Washington Post | 5 min read)
COVID-19 coronavirus update
Carl Court/Getty Images
The science of lockdown silence
From the delights of birdsong to the eerily quiet streets, lockdown has revealed what the world sounds like without us. Seismologists, marine biologists and atmospheric scientists are among the many researchers scrambling to take measurements and set benchmarks while the world has been forced to press pause. In the United Kingdom, The Quiet Project aims to gather acoustic measurements and survey data on how the changes affect people's wellbeing. The outcome could offer a chance to put a value on the cost of investing in a quieter world.
Some in Sweden second-guess its strategy
Sweden’s light-touch lockdown, which has seen schools, bars, restaurants and gyms left open, is under debate in the country. The country has a higher death toll per capita than its Nordic neighbours, which are opening their borders to each other — but not to Sweden. But the approach has advantages for the economy and to aspects of public health, such as mental wellbeing. It looks likely to be some time before we see clearly how Sweden’s ‘third way’ will pan out. “All of us who work with this, every day and night, we think, ‘Was this right or wrong?’” says communicable-disease control officer Leif Dotevall. “Some days we think we were right and other days not at all. Finally, we may be surprised to see the whole picture.”
The Financial Times | 11 min read
Coronapod: The promise of dexamethasone
Dexamethasone, a cheap, readily-available steroid, is the first drug shown to reduce deaths among people seriously ill with COVID-19. The Nature news team explores what the results — which have not yet been peer reviewed — might mean for the pandemic.
Nature Coronapod | 38 min listen
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How to fight coronavirus misinformation
If you feel ready to roll up your sleeves and start tackling the tsunami of bogus remedies, myths and fake news about COVID-19, Nature has some tips. We look at how to spot the bad stuff, the evidence-based techniques that you can use to counter it and when it might be better to just let it lie.
Features & opinion
How to sell your public outreach ideas to funders
Funding agencies and societies love new approaches to science communication. The Working Scientist podcast from Nature Careers offers expert advice on how to grab their attention for your public-outreach ideas.
Nature Careers Working Scientist podcast | 30 min listen
Do we need another accelerator?
CERN wants to build a collider four times larger than its Large Hadron Collider, currently the world’s biggest. A plan the CERN Council approved last week aims to build a ‘Higgs factory’ by mid-century, to study those particles’ properties in more detail. This would have undoubted scientific value, but it is not worth the tens of billions it would cost, argues theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. And the second stage in CERN’s plan — to later replace that collider with one that would reach record energies — is not guaranteed to discover any new particles. “Building larger particle colliders has run its course,” Hossenfelder writes. “It has today little scientific return on investment, and at the same time almost no societal relevance.” Better ways to invest money could be an international centre for climate predictions, or one for modelling epidemics.
Scientific American | 6 min read
Read more: CERN makes bold push to build €21-billion super-collider (Nature | 5 min read)
News & views
Fast radio burst repeats every 16 days
Astronomers have seen dozens of mysterious ‘fast radio bursts’ (FRBs) — flashes of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation — so far, some of them coming repeatedly from the same source. Now one source has been found to produce FRBs at regular intervals. The CHIME radio observatory in Canada saw FRB 180916.J0158+65 return 38 times between September 2018 and February 2020, with an intermittency of 16.35 days. It is still unclear what powers FRBs; some 51 theories have been proposed so far, and they could all be wrong, writes theoretical astrophysicist Bing Zhang. Perhaps periodicity is the key to understanding the mechanism underlying them, and if so, “it would mean that these natural phenomena are defeating the ability of the human imagination to explain it”.
Nature News & Views | 7 min read
Figure 1 | Two possible scenarios to explain the observed periodicity of a fast radio burst (FRB). The CHIME/FRB Collaboration4 reports that FRBs from a source called FRB 180916.J0158+65 repeat with a period of about 16 days. a, The source might be a neutron star in a binary system with a massive companion star. The companion produces a strong ‘wind’ of particles that could obscure radio waves from the neutron star. But if the neutron star has its own stellar wind, this could deflect the companion star’s particle flow, opening up a window behind the neutron star from which FRBs can escape. These FRBs could be observed when the window orbits through Earth’s field of view. b, Another scenario is that the FRBs are emitted in focused ‘beams’ from the magnetosphere of a highly magnetized neutron star, or from regions far beyond the magnetosphere (the exact region of FRB emission is not shown here, for simplicity). These beams precess like a gyroscope, periodically entering Earth’s field of view.
