The Top Science News

The social costs of taking nuanced (but realistic) moral stances; widespread homosexual behavior in monkeys; and more. Plus: when sowing fear is a public service. [View in browser]( | [Subscribe to Nautilus magazine]( July 11, 2023   Did a friend forward this? [Register here](. This Tuesday, your FREE member newsletter includes the week’s top science news plus one full story, below, from The Porthole. Enjoy!   DISCOVERIES The Top Science News This Week   [On Being Honest about Dishonesty: The Social Costs of Taking Nuanced (But Realistic) Moral Stances]( People who live by flexible principles leave so much wiggle room that it's not clear what it means to fail to live up to them. [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology→](   [Same-Sex Sociosexual Behavior Is Widespread and Heritable in Male Rhesus Macaques]( The behavior gets monkeys into the good graces of other companions, boosting mating opportunities. [Nature Ecology & Evolution→](   [Mathematics Meets the Fashion Industry on Path to Product Innovation and Sustainability]( The surprising ways math catalyzes creativity in fashion. [Proceedings of the Royal Society A→](   [Artificial Intelligence, Superefficiency, and the End of Work: A Humanistic Perspective on Meaning in Life]( “Life without wage work loses specific sources of meaning, but can still be sufficiently meaningful in certain other ways.” [AI Ethics→](   [Long Ties, Disruptive Life Events, and Economic Prosperity]( Experiencing major life disruptions—interstate migration, transferring high schools, and attending an out-of-state college—is connected to forming long friendship ties and financial success. [PNAS→](   [Seeing Color Following Gene Augmentation Therapy in Achromatopsia]( People who were completely colorblind became able to see a slightly muted shade of red. [Cell Press→](   [The Perception of Silence]( It turns out Simon and Garfunkel were right. [PNAS→](   [New AI Translates 5,000-Year-Old Cuneiform Tablets Instantly]( The past is becoming an open book. [Big Think→]( Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [SUBSCRIBE TODAY](   From The Porthole   COMMUNICATION When Sowing Fear Is a Public Service Nuclear winter is scary as hell. Spread the word. BY BRIAN GALLAGHER   Over time, dust collects on the camera’s lens, obscuring the view outside the silo. Only when someone “goes out to clean” is the view of the desiccated landscape—a lone tree leafless on a dead hill—clear again. In Apple TV+’s new sci-fi series Silo, set after an apparent nuclear apocalypse, the people of the silo—a monumentally tall underground shelter—cheer after someone wipes the lens clean. But “going out to clean” is no honor: It’s a death sentence. Cleaners ceremoniously don a hazard suit that keeps them conscious long enough above ground to dust off the camera. Once cleaners start climbing that dead hill—they’re consistently curious to see what lies beyond—they collapse out of breath, apparently suffocating. The people inside watch the live feed, piped onto window-like screens, even when there’s no one out to “clean,” to remind themselves that nothing survives beyond the silo. In the season finale, which aired last week, you discover whether post-nuclear Earth actually is as desolate as it appears (the dead hill, the leafless tree). The riveting story follows a character, Juliette Nichols, who resolves to uncover why the silo’s police determined her lover’s death a suicide, which ultimately leads her to expose the dystopian nature of silo society. I found the show equally thrilling and sobering. It reminded me that we live in our own quasi-dystopia: Russia’s invasion in Ukraine makes for an “exceedingly dangerous nuclear situation,” [according]( to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. This means that more or less any day could be the day when civilization goes up in smoke. And that would be just the start of the trouble. That smoke, heated by the sun, would loft high into our atmosphere, above the rain, and block out the sun, possibly for years, causing temperatures to [plummet]( in what’s now famously called a “nuclear winter.” A short new video from the Future of Life Institute, dreamed up and scripted by its president, the MIT physicist Max Tegmark, a Nautilus contributor, shows how an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia might play out. It relies on up-to-date climate, crop, and fishery models, published in a 2022 Nature Food [paper](—along with other research and non-classified military information—to simulate, as accurately as possible, how bad the environmental fallout could be. [[ratio]  ]( Credit: Future of Life Institute / YouTube [Like the story? Subscribe to Nautilus magazine]( “Earth gets freezing cold, even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees Celsius, or 40 degrees Fahrenheit,” the narrator says. Over 5 billion people would starve to death. Virtually all North Americans, Europeans, Chinese, and Russians would perish. That’s scary to envisage, and that’s the point, argues climatologist Alan Robock, and his colleagues, in a new [paper]( published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Fear of nuclear winter has “helped save the world, so far,” they write. “Nuclear winter theory helped to end the nuclear arms race in the 1980s and helped to produce the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017, for which the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Because awareness of nuclear winter is now widespread, nuclear nations have so far not used nuclear weapons.” But the mere existence of nuclear weapons is always a threat. Even a “limited” nuclear attack, accidental or intentional, could [escalate](, leading to global annihilation. The way to avoid this, according to Robock and Tegmark, is to keep the fear of nuclear winter alive in our minds until we reduce stockpiles of nuclear bombs. (As of early 2023, nine countries possessed roughly 12,500 warheads, [according]( to the Federation of American Scientists, with Russia and the U.S. holding 89 percent.) The reality Silo imagines, where at least 10,000 humans survive a nuclear winter, is terrifying. Possessing centuries-old “relics” from before the nuclear war—things like hard drives and tourist brochures—is strictly forbidden to keep people in the dark about life before the silo, ostensibly to content the masses with life underground. The show illustrates the challenges of humanely running a society in such a cloistered condition—a scenario to avoid at all costs. To my mind, Silo’s as much of a public service announcement as the latest scientific simulation of nuclear winter. Consider watching it in that light. [[ratio]  ]( Credit: Apple TV / YouTube Lead image: LeoEdition / Shutterstock More from The Porthole: • [How to drive a car through a wall]( • [Why electric cars are taking off](   P.S. Scientists recently [created]( a biological camera that captures and stores images directly into DNA. It’s just one of the latest advances in efforts to store digital information in biological molecules. Virat Markandeya wrote about “artist-scientist” Joe Davis’ bold project of coding human data into microbes that will survive for millions of years—[one way of preserving a sense of wonder in DNA](.   Today’s newsletter was written by Brian Gallagher   BECOME A MEMBER [The Dark Side of Storytelling]( [Issue 49 of Nautilus]( features “The Comet Year,” in which emergency physician Clayton Dalton meditates on the nature of the divergent storytelling around the causes of COVID-19—and what our fractured standards for truth could mean for the future. [GET NAUTILUS IN PRINT]( Thanks for reading. [Tell us](mailto:brian.gallagher@nautil.us) your thoughts on today’s note. Plus, [browse our archive]( of past print issues, and inspire a friend to sign up for [the Nautilus newsletter](. [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( Copyright © 2023 NautilusNext, All rights reserved. You were subscribed to the newsletter from nautil.us. 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