SPONSORED BY  | | | | February 9, 2023: The female physicist who launched the field of radio astronomy, an atlas of climate disasters and how to make urban gardens better for the climate. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | This is the little-known story of Ruby Payne-Scott. An engineer, physicist and math whiz, during the second World War she worked in Australia on radar equipment to detect enemy aircraft. After the war, Payne-Scott went to the cliffs at Dover Heights in Sidney before dawn on a February morning in 1946. At sunrise she aimed her radar detector at the sun and registered "fringes"--the sign of two overlapping radio waves, one from the sun, one from the radio wave bouncing off the ocean. How this matters: Using mathematical calculations to separate the overlapping radio waves, Payne-Scott successfully triangulated their precise point of origin: a sunspot on the sun's surface. This method is called interferometry and is still used today by radio telescopes that look out into the universe. Radio astronomers have captured the light of the early universe, jets of radiation spewing off supermassive black holes, nebulas where stars are born, and dead stars that flash in radio light. It was the dawn of radio astronomy. Payne-Scott left research after only six years to raise children (Australian policy at the time did not encourage married women or mothers to work).
What the experts say: Radio astronomy provided a new window on the universe, says Miller Goss, a radio astronomer. "It turned out that the universe looked a lot different in the radio than the optical astronomers had known ever since Galileo in the 17th century." | | | Most of the U.S. is already feeling the impact of a rapidly changing global climate—90 percent of American counties experienced a climate-related disaster (hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, etc.) in the decade from 2011 to 2021. A new project, called the Atlas of Disaster, makes a state-by-state accounting to date of disaster occurrences, federal assistance, and vulnerability to disasters by county.
Key takeaways: Every U.S. state carries significant costs and risks associated with climate-related weather events. All states also have regions of compounding risks, as the report authors call them, that include an intersection of both physical (compromised sea walls, for example) and social vulnerability (areas of poverty, where people fare the worst after disasters). These are the places where investment in better infrastructure or resources would have the biggest impact.
Surprising effects: Climate disasters have complex and intertwined effects. Storm surge from hurricanes, for instance, can increase rates of gastrointestinal illness, respiratory infections and allergies. While particulate air pollution from factories or carried in wildfire smoke can contribute to poor mental health. | | | Enjoying Today in Science? Dive deeper and try out a 90-day subscription to Scientific American for just $1. | | | • When asked, ChatGPT declared that its training material—the language humans fed to it—was to blame for potential racial bias in stories it generated. | 9 min read | | | • Some of the first galactic images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope seemed to turn astrophysics inside out. But there's probably a good explanation for the baffling data, new studies suggest. | 7 min read | | | Credit: Siegfried Layda/Getty Images | | | • Western individualism may promote a "better than you actually are" mindset, whereas people in Asian cultures do not show this so-called positive illusion, writes Shinobu Kitayama, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. "We think the cultural variation in positive illusions is one example of a broader cultural difference in how the self is construed," he says. | 6 min read | | | SPONSORED CONTENT BY BAYER | Easing Menopause Symptoms | Menopause symptoms can cause problems at home and at work, and women have had limited options to ease them. New research on the underlying biology is pointing the way toward better therapies for hot flashes, sleep disturbances and more. Learn more. | | | MOST-READ STORIES OF THE WEEK | | | Rampant COVID Poses New Challenges in the Fifth Year of the Pandemic | 6 min read | How String Theory Solved Math's Monstrous Moonshine Problem | 8 min read | The Government's Former UFO Hunter Found Something More Concerning than Aliens | 15 min listen | | | If you haven't given it a listen yet, the podcast series Lost Women of Science unravels the remarkable stories of women whose contributions to science have not earned the recognition they deserve. This includes Ruby Payne-Smith who I introduced above. One detail I should add to her story: Physicists who made advancements in radio astronomy earned the Nobel prize in 1974. Payne-Smith was not among them. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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