All posts tagged: invisible

Babies – the new drama exploring the invisible grief and multiplying longing of pregnancy loss

Babies – the new drama exploring the invisible grief and multiplying longing of pregnancy loss

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter As is customary for actors auditioning to play people in love, Paapa Essiedu and Siobhán Cullen underwent a chemistry test. But the scene was not a flirty meet-cute or a moment of intimate tenderness. Instead, says Essiedu, “It was this big and long, quite horrible argument – and that’s how they wanted to see how well we got on.” Seeing the two of them fight would serve as an apt litmus test for Babies, the new BBC drama in which Essiedu, 35, and Cullen, 36, play a couple whose relationship is rocked by a series of crushing miscarriages. “It’s a good scene because not only are they arguing but they’re doing a whole lot of work to try not to hurt each other,” says Cullen. “That’s how couples argue, right? You land the punches, but there’s also a way of couching …

Scientists discover the invisible scent language of plants

Scientists discover the invisible scent language of plants

Published by Jenni Sidey

A quiet grassland can feel still, but it is never silent. Every leaf, flower, and root releases tiny scent molecules that drift through the air. Those odors help plants deal with threats, recruit helpful insects, and send cues to nearby life. New research from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology and the University of Kiel shows that when plant diversity drops, this scent language changes across whole communities, and even inside individual plants. The study offers rare experimental proof that biodiversity shapes chemical communication. The researchers found that species-rich grasslands release a broader, more layered mix of odor signals. As diversity declines, those signals shift, which can change how organisms interact across the ecosystem. “Understanding how a plant’s chemical signals change with plant diversity in its environment helps us to see the loss of biodiversity as more than just a loss of species. It also changes the chemical communication of an entire ecosystem,” said Sybille Unsicker, who led the Plant-Environment Interactions project group at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology and is now …

Invisible Disabilities in Graduate School

Invisible Disabilities in Graduate School

Published by Jenni Sidey

The APA and other academic institutions have made efforts to gather and report demographic information about persons in philosophy. One motivation for doing so is to ensure that various voices and perspectives are not being shut out, and to invite perspectives to participate in doing “philosophy.” I wish to call your attention to a group often not recognized as worth recording data about: philosophers, particularly graduate students, with invisible disabilities. According to the National Institutes of Health, an invisible disability is “a physical, mental, or neurological impairment that is not obvious to others, but may impact upon a person’s movements, senses, activities, and day-to-day life.” The adjective “invisible” in referring to disabilities is juxtaposed with those disabilities that include physical manifestations or markers; a wheelchair or someone missing a limb are such examples of “visible” disabilities. Navigating the world with any disability comes with its unique set of experiences and challenges; my goal here in emphasizing invisible disabilities is not to compare, but to bring attention to this group. I want to highlight some of …

Researchers create an invisibility cloak by bending magnetic fields around real-world objects

Researchers create an invisibility cloak by bending magnetic fields around real-world objects

Published by Jenni Sidey

Magnetic invisibility sounds simple in theory. Place the right materials around an object and magnetic fields flow around it as if nothing were there. Reality has been far messier. For nearly two decades, physicists have tried to cloak objects from magnetic fields using carefully arranged materials. Early designs relied on idealized shapes such as perfect cylinders or spheres. Those forms behave predictably in equations and laboratory tests. Real devices rarely cooperate. Power cables twist through irregular housings. Electronic components form sharp corners. Industrial systems contain uneven edges and layered geometries. Once these shapes enter the picture, magnetic cloaking designs often fail, leaving obvious distortions in the surrounding field. Magnetic cloaking achieved using bilayer SC-SFM metastructures with different geometries. (CREDIT: Science Advances) Researchers at the University of Leicester now report a way around that problem. Their new framework, described in Science Advances, allows magnetic cloaks to be designed for objects with complex shapes using materials that already exist. Two Materials Working Together Magnetic cloaking typically relies on a pairing of two materials. The inner layer is …

Nearly invisible galaxy may be built mostly of dark matter, Hubble finds

Nearly invisible galaxy may be built mostly of dark matter, Hubble finds

Published by Jenni Sidey

A tight clump of four star clusters sits in the Perseus galaxy cluster, and at first glance it looks like nothing special. No bright spiral arms. No obvious central bulge. Not even the soft smudge you would expect from a faint dwarf galaxy. That emptiness is the point. Astronomers say those four globular clusters, plus an almost ghostly halo of starlight around them, mark the location of an “almost dark” galaxy, one that carries a huge load of dark matter while forming very few stars. The object is called Candidate Dark Galaxy-2, or CDG-2, and it may be among the most extreme examples yet of a galaxy where the usual luminous stuff barely registers. Finding a galaxy by its leftovers CDG-2 did not announce itself through a patch of diffuse light, the way many ultradiffuse galaxies were first found in the last decade. Instead, it appeared as a statistical signal, a suspiciously tight overdensity of globular clusters that did not seem attached to any normal, bright galaxy. The low-surface-brightness galaxy CDG-2, shown in this image …

How This Skyscraper Ruined Paris, and Why They’re Now Trying to Make It Invisible

How This Skyscraper Ruined Paris, and Why They’re Now Trying to Make It Invisible

Published by José Betancourt

The play­wright Tris­tan Bernard is said to have eat­en lunch at the Eif­fel Tow­er every day, but not because he liked the menu in its café: rather, because it was the only place in Paris with no view of the Eif­fel Tow­er. His view wasn’t whol­ly eccen­tric in the decades after its con­struc­tion, in the late eigh­teen-eight­ies, when the struc­ture had yet to become the most beloved in France, and per­haps in the world. Yet not far behind the Eif­fel Tow­er as a must-vis­it tourist attrac­tion in a town full of them is Paris’ least beloved build­ing: the Tour Mont­par­nasse, which since its com­ple­tion in 1973 has stood in infamy as the only sky­scraper in the cen­ter of the city. Unlike the Eif­fel Tow­er, which was com­mis­sioned in part to cel­e­brate the cen­ten­ni­al of the French Rev­o­lu­tion, the Tour Mont­par­nasse projects no polit­i­cal sym­bol­ism; unlike Notre-Dame de Paris, or Sacré-Cœur de Mont­martre, it has no reli­gious sig­nif­i­cance. Its pur­pose is whol­ly com­mer­cial, befit­ting a large office build­ing with a shop­ping mall — or now, the …

Invisible Pain Is No Less Real

Invisible Pain Is No Less Real

Published by Jenni Sidey

There is nothing funny about a broken rib. In fact, laughing hurts, so humor is better left out of the equation. There is irony in a former college hockey player slipping on the ice and breaking a rib. This happened after I escaped most of my career without a major injury. Still, here I am, and I am determined to learn from the situation. One week in, here are some takeaways that I would like to share. Not all injuries are visible. As a psychologist, I know this all too well. It is discouraging to be in intense pain, as with a broken rib, or chronic pain, without anyone being able to see it from the outside. This is also the case with depression, grief, and other forms of mental and physical illness. This feeling is isolating. No need to keep the secret. I have found that sharing that I am in pain is the best policy. This way, others can lend a hand without judging me for not pulling my weight. I have experienced …

Max Richter: the composer who crosses the invisible divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ music | Music

Max Richter: the composer who crosses the invisible divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ music | Music

Published by Sam Flores

The German-born British composer Max Richter had never been nominated for an Oscar until this year, though he may – unintentionally – have once scuppered someone else’s chance of winning one. In 2016, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disqualified Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score for the film Arrival on the grounds that viewers would find it impossible to distinguish the late Icelandic composer’s soundtrack from the bought-in piece of music that book-ended Denis Villeneuve’s alien invasion psychodrama: Richter’s soaring, maximalist-minimalist On the Nature of Daylight. A decade later, Richter is up for this year’s best original score for his work on the Shakespeare drama Hamnet. If he wins, it would be the crowning glory of an already superlative 12 months for the musician, who turns 60 a week after the Oscars ceremony in LA. Last year, his 2015 album Sleep surpassed 2bn streams across all platforms, becoming the first classical record to do so. Awarded a CBE in the new year honours list, his work will be celebrated with the Berlinale Camera award at …

The Invisible Type of Emotionally Neglectful Parent

The Invisible Type of Emotionally Neglectful Parent

Published by Jenni Sidey

The most common type of emotionally neglectful parents is also the most difficult kind to identify. They lurk in fine neighborhoods, fine jobs, and fine houses. They create fine families, and if you are friends with them, they appear to be absolutely fine. They may drive their children from one sports activity to another, stay on top of schedules, take family vacations, and help their kids with homework. They may even love their children and strive to do their best to raise them. Yet they make one crucial mistake that, even though it’s not their fault, leaves a lasting mark on their child. Many are mostly kind and welcoming when their adult child comes to visit. But despite all this, there are telltale signs. There are ways to know if your parents are of this ilk. We will get to that later. First, we must talk a little bit more about how emotionally neglectful parents are made, where they come from, and how they parent. The Well-Meaning-But-Neglected-Themselves (WMBNT) Parent The key to the most common …

A moment that changed me: I shaved off my hair – and immediately became an invisible woman | Parents and parenting

A moment that changed me: I shaved off my hair – and immediately became an invisible woman | Parents and parenting

Published by Sam Flores

In November 2000, two weeks after giving birth to my first and only child, I found myself collapsed in bed, breastfeeding in front of Top of the Pops, hair matted, sheets dirty, surrounded by sick-soaked muslin rags. I liked it. Or at least, it felt like a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing, until Madonna – who had given birth to Rocco Ritchie only three months earlier – appeared on the screen in a cropped leather jacket, belly bared, sexy-dancing to Don’t Tell Me. Did I feel inspired? Resentful? Brimming with pity for this attention-seeker? For sure, it was all three. As the weeks wore on, I began to see how it might be possible to shower, put on actual clothes and maybe even pop to the corner shop. Occasional visits to cafes, museums and other warm, baby-friendly spaces soon followed and stopped me from feeling as if I had fallen into a well of loneliness. But I knew that, if I was to fully return to functional human-ing, I urgently needed to sift through …