July 18, 2024: We're covering cooking in outer space, collective trauma and the misnamed hallucinations of ChatGPT. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | | Much like the 2011 shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump last Saturday likely has distressed many people who follow the news. Political polarization already is very stressful, reports Scientific American editor Tanya Lewis. In fact, political polarization is one of the most stressful experiences reported by participants in an ongoing study following several thousand people for the past four years, says Roxane Cohen Silver, professor of psychological science, medicine and public health at the University of California, Irvine. Participants also have been surveyed about the COVID pandemic, mass shootings, the police murder of George Floyd and climate disasters, says Silver, who is heading up the study.
What the experts say: "When these events happen, one of the things we have to do is take a breath and consider, 'What do I really know, and how does this fit into my understanding of the world around me,'" says Robin Gurwitch, a psychologist and professor at Duke University Medical Center, who works with people exposed to mass shootings and other traumatic events.
What to do: Limit your media consumption after politically violent events, experts recommend. Particularly, try to avoid exposure to graphic images. | | | Weirdly Shaped Kitchen Tools | A saucepan in the shape of a slice of cake, pointy-edge down, is among the innovations devised by food scientist Larissa Zhou and other researchers to make it easier for space travelers to boil water and escape a freeze-dried diet in microgravity. Down the line, she envisions modifying the cooking vessel, called H0TP0T, for a process like sous vide in space. Researchers also have adapted deep fryers, sauté stations and other cooking tools that function in microgravity, reports freelance science writer Andrew Chapman. To truly enable more appealing cuisine in space, researchers also must consider how cooking tools adapted for microgravity might fit into the larger system of agriculture and food processing in space, says a NASA contractor.
How it works: In space, low gravity alone won't keep water in a cooking pot. But capillary action and surface tension can play a larger role. Also, it helps that water molecules attract one another as well as any surface they touch. So water gets trapped in H0TP0T's narrow, wedge-shaped corner. Heating elements surround the pot to overcome the lack of convection that otherwise defeats boiling in low gravity.
What the experts say: "I don't want people to eat freeze-dried food in space forever. I actually want people to cook," says food scientist Larissa Zhou. | | | The prototype H0TP0T device, a small triangular object, sits within a transparent box.Larissa Zhou | | | • Successive disasters put Gulf states at risk of a "knock-out blow." | 3 min read | | | A view of the classic video game Space Invaders Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images | | | • "Hallucinations" is the trendy word that people tend to use nowadays to refer to the made-up facts that appear in prose spun by ChatGPT and similar generative AI programs. But that misleads people, write philosopher Joe Slater and colleagues. Call it "bullshitting," a term they don't use lightly, as they explain. | 5 min read | | | Most people have mixed feelings about cooking, be it Earth-bound or out of this world. Some days, I feel like author Fran Liebowitz, who said on a recent episode of the "Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon": "I wouldn't say I don't like to cook. I would say I hate to cook. I hate to prepare food in any way." Bringing a science and technology mindset to cooking can spice it up, as science journalist W. Wayt Gibbs and inventor and technology leader Nathan Myhrvold explain in this story and this podcast episode. These pieces were timed to coincide with the release of Myhrvold's six-volume Modernist Cuisine and the Modernist Cuisine at Home. For more on the science of food, you might also check out this special edition of Scientific American, edited by Gibbs. | —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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