This data scientist and entrepreneur has spent much of her career in Japan, working in the field of video games. There she founded Yokozuna Data, a company devoted to predicting the behavior of individual gamers by means of machine learning algorithms. At the end of 2019, she returned to Spain to work as the Chief Analytics Officer at Inditex, where she led the data science research, development and implementation across the organization. However, despite being very interested in the project, she did not last long in that position. "I got a call with a proposal that was hard to turn down," she said with a big smile.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation approached us to enhance mobile health apps through our machine learning platform, which features recommendations, individual behavior predictions and experimentation systems

How did you feel when you got reached by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a proposal like this?

It was such a nice opportunity that I did not have to think about it at all. This foundation recruited us to make improvements in health apps through artificial intelligence (AI). Among other things, we will work on promoting positive reinforcement and nudging the behaviors of the users of these apps. Our mission is to take the most advanced machine learning algorithms for personalization, which are used in the apps of large technology companies, to the healthcare field in resource-poor countries.

To this end, we created benshi.ai, a nonprofit that is fully funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and that operates as one of its arms. Our headquarters are in Barcelona and we already have a budget: about 9 million dollars for the next two years. We are very happy and motivated.

What is benshi.ai working on now?

After registering our organization, we are developing a machine learning platform that will include different products, such as recommendation systems, individual predictions of the behavior of health app users, and an experimentation system.

Are you already using the platform for any specific issue?

Yes. While we continue improving the platform in the issues I mentioned before — predictions, experimentations and recommendations — we are already working with another nonprofit called Maternity Foundation [also funded by the Gates foundation] that has built an online learning app for midwives. They have been active for quite some time now and are present in most of Africa, in India and in many Southeast Asian countries. Their app is called the Safe Delivery App and is designed to train midwives in these countries to assist women during childbirth

Every day 800 women die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, so it is crucial to improve the training of midwives and the resources they can use

There are many organizations investing in midwives, as they are women who help other women. They are very much neglected by the institutions of these countries, where every day 800 women and 14,000 babies die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. This is why it is critical to improve the knowledge and resources they can use.

África Periañez during a moment of the interview / Álvaro Muñoz Guzmán / SINC

And what improvements are you making to the Safe Delivery App?

First, we are developing predictive models to help us determine how midwives use the application on their cell phones. For instance, we want to find out when they will connect again and which modules they will access. To that end, we use algorithms that combine autoregressive and deep learning models, such as DeepAR.

Once we know more about what they will do and how they will use the app, we can start creating incentives based on their behavioral data. We already did that in video games to motivate players. In health apps, you can also use this technology to shift behaviors.

In the Safe Delivery App, we are including predictive models to determine how midwives use the app on their cell phones. For instance we want to find out when they will connect again and which modules they will access, so that we can choose the best time to send them notifications

What incentives can be given to a midwife in these countries?

 To investigate this question, we developed a tool that we called XP Engine. This experimentation system allows us to test different approaches in order to decide, for example, what kind of incentive will work best: financial help, food, working material, etc. Such "prizes" can encourage midwives in these countries to access the app more often whenever we recommend the specific modules they are going to need, so that they can improve their training and practice at the time of delivery. It is a matter of sending the most appropriate incentive to each midwife. We also use reinforcement learning models to enhance their training.

How do these models help?

Reinforcement learning models are AI agents that automatically learn how each midwife reacts to the different interventions we have devised. In this way, we can optimize the notifications she receives on her cell phone by including the right content and sending them at the best time for her to assimilate and apply the information. For example, would it be better to send her the recommendations just as she is delivering a baby, or on the night before, so that certain materials are fresh in her mind? 

We take into account many factors. We need to know when the best time is to send these notifications. This is why we turn to behavioral scientists, who give us tips like: "Be careful if you want to send a recommendation at night in some African countries, because women usually do not look at their phones during these hours." There are many things we cannot see in the data, so we try to complement them with the knowledge of these experts. 

With the experimentation module, we test what incentive will work best, and we also take into account the recommendations of behavioral scientists to get information that are not in the data

In which countries, and in what other areas, are you working?

At the moment we are conducting projects with midwives in Ethiopia and India, and we are already gathering data from almost all countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

We are also starting to improve general diagnostic apps in other African countries, such as Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana. Plus, we are working with pharmacy apps, in order to ensure the correct use of drugs, encourage the monitoring of treatments, and perform the necessary tests to guarantee the control of diseases such as AIDS, malaria or COVID-19.

We will investigate what incentives can be given to change patients' habits, so that, for example, they start taking their medication or collecting the results of the tests they have undergone.

Interview with África Periáñez. / Álvaro Muñoz Guzmán / SINC

Do you collaborate with research institutions?

Yes, we are working with universities to turn research results into production systems on our platform. Currently, we collaborate with the Statistical Reinforcement Learning group at Harvard University. Also, with the University of California, we are developing personalized surveys for midwives; this will help us to further assess the impact these personalized recommendations and incentives have on them, beyond the analysis of the data they generate in the apps.

One of the main issues in connection with AI bias is that most data scientists are straight white males from rich countries. In the end, you are not aware of your own bias

AI algorithms have a very bad reputation for introducing all kinds of bias. How can this problem be mitigated?

One of the main issues in connection with AI bias is that most data scientists are straight white males from rich countries. In the end, you are not aware of your own bias.                                                            

To improve things, I think it is important to have diverse teams. This is something we are working very hard on. To that end, we are trying to attract talents from Africa and elsewhere. We also want to open offices in Zambia and Nigeria, and our staff include people from different continents, religions, genders — we have more women than men — and sexual orientations.

In addition, we are collaborating closely with behavioral scientists in the countries where we work, because, as I have said before, many times data alone is not enough.

To get the vaccine, we are working as we have done with SARS 2002 and MERS 2012. In fact, the one we are designing has already been applied to the MERS virus with a 100% protection. It is based on a fragment of DNA directly derived from the virus - from five genes of SARS-COV-2 - that has the capacity to amplify itself but cannot spread throughout the body, which makes it very safe. 

The time frame for obtaining the first prototype for the new vaccine lies within a range of about 4 months. However, after then, it will be necessary to ask for permission to give it to people, which may take an additional  8 to 12 months for sure.

Is the infection mechanism of SARS-VOC-2 known?

Yes, the receptor it uses to enter the cell is known. There are already publications with some details of this entry. Therefore it is already known what could be blocked to stop it from causing infection.

One study (not yet peer-reviewed)  mentions another entry point for the virus besides the ACE2 protein. How can these results have an impact?

I haven't read it in detail, but it's likely that - as it happens with other viruses – there is more than one receptor. In fact, traditionally there is a co-receptor and a receptor. The co-receptor helps viruses to attach to the cell, to bring them into the cell, and the receptor is what activates the entry mechanisms for the virus to invade the cell. But sometimes these co-receptors can also act as receptors.

Therefore, viruses using a possible second entrance door might be within the norm?

Yes. But the fact that the virus has more facilities to enter the cell is not good news because then, even if we can block one entrance door, the virus could use the other one. However, this wouldn’t be the first case: sometimes viruses use, in addition to perfectly defined proteins, carbohydrates from the cell surface. 

Some research says a weaker strain has come to Europe. Is that true?

Right now, the strain we have is not very attenuated. That is the news I have from those doctors directly involved with patients in Spanish hospitals. 

Anyway, I have always said that, among viruses of this kind, it is common for the more attenuated ones to evolve and be selected highly positively. The reason for this is simple. If a virus is very deadly, it kills the patient quickly and therefore removes itself from circulation before it can infect others in the population.  On the other hand, if a virus is less deadly and infects a patient but does not cause clinical symptoms, the patient goes on with their normal life and spreads the virus. This way it is easier for the virus to become widespread and this is what generally happens with successful viruses.

With warmer weather approaching, is it too optimistic to begin saying goodbye to the pandemic?

High temperatures are excellent because coronaviruses are very sensitive to heat: every day at more than 37 degrees, they lose their infectivity tenfold. Therefore, after three warm days their infection capacity would have been lowered a thousand times.

Good weather could also help because of the ultraviolet radiation in sunlight, to which viruses are very sensitive and are inactivated by. As well as this, with pleasant temperatures people are more likely to spend time outside and are less likely to spend time in confined spaces, meaning less contamination.

Obviously, with the state of alert these days, people must stay at home. But that does not mean that they cannot open the windows and air their homes to reduce the potential presence of the virus to much lower concentrations.

There is speculation about cases of reinfection in some patients. How could these cases be explained?

The truth is that they are not normal. If a patient has recovered from a virus and has become seropositive, meaning that they have developed immune defences which are found in their blood, they normally should not be able to become re-infected.

That being said, there are many potential explanations for this observation. The simplest is that those patients who tested negative received this result because although the body tissue sampled  no longer contained the virus, it did persist elsewhere in other tissues. Indeed it is known that within the family of coronaviruses, the virus can sometimes last up to three months.

Additionally, when the presence of the virus decreases, the immune response also decreases, and so a reservoir may be present in a certain tissue in which less blood and defence lymphocytes circulate, allowing the virus to reactivate later.

Another explanation is that the virus has evolved and successfully escaped from the immune system. Simply put, with virus 1, antibody 1 would be produced. Then all of the virus would be neutralised except for the mutated ones, which are variant 2. These would spread, escaping antibody 1 response, and so antibody 2 would be produced. Then, variant 3 of the virus would in turn  spread. What we call ‘escape of the virus from the immune system’ is due to the evolution of the virus’ surface antigens to evade detection by the immune system.

The CNB laboratory working on a vaccine against SARS-COV-2.

What do you think of the UK's strategy of confining people over 70 and letting the rest of the population get infected?

I don't see it as viable. It is better for older people to stay close to their close relatives and for them to be cared for, taking all the necessary precautions, constantly disinfecting the environment, etc. This can only be an idea of the ‘very clever’ Boris Johnson (irony).

They say that this would secure the economy...

Yes, of course, by letting the old people die and thus save on social security. We can't give this man any ideas. I see no advantages in this decision. There are fascist systems that may promote operations of a certain kind, such as eliminating the weakest and those who produce the least, but I don’t find this advisable.

Is the profile of those affected in Spain known?

The news that has been directly conveyed to me by Spanish doctors who are working on it is that it does indeed have a much more serious effect on those over 65 and, above all, those who have other associated medical problems, such as diabetes, kidney failure, heart problems or respiratory tract infections from other viruses, such as the flu.

Is it true that young people are being affected more and more?

We know that all coronaviruses that are deadly to humans are age-dependent, which means that they affect older people much more. Normally, it does not affect children under 15 much, and within the age range of 15 to 55, people do become infected, but normally these people manage to fight off the infection. Then there is the older group, which is more susceptible to suffering from a serious illness.

Why in Spain, unlike other countries, no information is given on the profiles of those that become infected and die?

I don’t think there is any obscurantism about this at all. The problem is that there is no time to make calculations at the moment.

Was it possible to foresee the current scenario?

I believe that everything that is happening is what epidemiologists had foreseen, as they  know how these epidemics usually evolve. Naturally this virus has a personality of its own and possesses the characteristic of proliferating in people without producing clinical symptoms. As a hidden virus, it spreads very easily. This means that we usually arrive a little late and that, at present, we don’t know which mammal has been the intermediate vector. It’s no more special than that.

Once this crisis is over, will the worst case scenario be that COVID-19 becomes a seasonal virus?

Yes, that’s what I foresee. The good news is that the virus with its transmission will fade away. Currently, we know of seven human coronaviruses and four of them are attenuated viruses, which are the ones that infect almost all of us. Active human coronaviruses are all already very much attenuated and hardly cause more than a common winter cold. I hope that it will be the same with this one. If the virus is attenuated, it spreads very easily and can then return each winter, as does the flu virus, which is seasonal. I think this is quite likely to happen.

But this would mean a significant cost to Spanish society, as is already the case with the flu...

Indeed, but the flu virus is much worse than this, for the time being. In the US alone, in the winter of 2017 and 2018, the seasonal flu virus infected 32 million people. Some 350,000 people needed hospitalisation, and 18,000 of them died. In Spain, the number of patients who died from the flu in recent winters has been 6,000. This means that both viruses are dangerous, but right now the flu virus would beat the other one for seriousness.

Speaking of time, how long do you think this crisis can last?

According to theoretical epidemiologists who base their predictions on previous experiences and the evolution of the virus (how the growth curves are going, the number of new cases per day, etc.), the prediction is that the peak of the wave we are in now will last from two to four weeks. It is likewise predicted that towards June, approximately, the virus could already be at very low levels. I think this is a reasonable forecast, we are all very alarmed now - especially because of the hyper-congestion in hospitals - but epidemics usually come and go, and this one will be no exception.

Before Galdikas settled in Borneo to study orangutans (as Goodall did with chimpanzees and Fossey with gorillas), humans had been speculating about the behaviour of these solitary primates from the most absolute ignorance.

What is your daily life like in Indonesia?

My daily work is very different from one day to the other. At first, and perhaps for the first twenty years, I would go into the forest almost every day and look for wild orangutans. When I found them, I followed them. Seeing that more and more orangutans were becoming orphans, we created a conservation program. Then we started building camps. At the beginning, almost 50 years ago, we only had two, very simple ones.

“50 years ago for the aborigines of Borneo it was not taboo to kill the orangutans and eat them"

How many people worked in these fields?

We had three assistants: the cook and two others who left to earn more money. Only one couple remained behind, with their eight children, but the children didn't count [laughs]. Then, over the years, the number of attendees grew because we needed people to climb trees to collect botanical samples. That's how we started hiring Dayaks, the Borneo Aboriginal people.

How did the local people behave towards orangutans?

There wasn't really much of a relationship with the people in our area. There may have been more with other Dayaks, but in our region they sometimes hunted and ate them. It wasn't taboo to kill orangutans, although it was to kill long-tailed macaques. But they didn't go to the forest to look for orangutans, but wild pigs. They hunted all day and if they saw an orangutan on a tree they could kill it. Even my husband, who is a Dayak, ate their meat as a child and a teenager, although he never killed one himself. In these native villages, people shared hunting with other villagers or members of their families and clan.

When it became a tourist destination, what consequences did that bring about?

When I first arrived, there were no tourists. The first one to visit us was a 14-year-old girl from Jakarta, who had a spirit of adventure. The second visitor wasn’t really a tourist but Barbara Harrison, the wife of the curator of the Sarawak State Museum. In 1960 Harrison wrote a book on the behaviour of orangutans, one of the few writings available at the time about the species. He had rehabilitated some orangutans and researched them in nature. He had a measure of arguably scientific experience with orangutans.

What was that meeting with Barbara Harris like?

I had met her before going to Borneo. I was teaching at Cornell University in Ithaca. I went to see her and stayed with her for almost a week. She gave me a lot of practical advice on what it was like to live in Borneo and what to observe. It was very helpful to me because when I travelled to Borneo in 1971, practically nothing had been written since 1860 or 1870. It was as if you were going to visit Arizona and all you could find was information about the Apache wars.

“if humans were not to cut down a single tree more, one third of the orangutan populations would disappear just because of climate change. ”

You arrived in Indonesia almost half a century ago. What did you see when you arrived in Borneo?

Everything I had read was about headhunters and I wasn't that far from that when I arrived. I went to villages where they had totems that had been erected to celebrate this tribal headhunt. I remember asking a village chief when one of those totems first appeared and it had been there since 1939.

Your team has set up fifteen camps, three of which can be visited. What is the profile of the tourists who go there?

It's interesting that you should ask that question because most of those who come to our camps in the national park are Spanish. They say it's an incredible experience they can't have anywhere else in the world.

You have devoted your whole life to the study of orangutans. Do we still have much to know about their biology and behaviour?

They will always continue to surprise us. It's the same with human research. Even we, who have been so intensely studied, still discover new things about our psyche or our biology. Orangutans have not been studied as much and will continue to surprise us.

In addition, they live in a different universe from ours, in tree-tops. Their life depends on their ability to discover and understand where the fruit is. That is why it is very difficult for humans to evaluate abilities of this kind. The same goes for dolphins, which are not particularly visual. Their brains are dedicated to hearing and they navigate the world using echolocation. It is very difficult to measure their intelligence.

Biruté Galdikas during his visit to Burgos / Anaís Pérez Martínez (SINC)

Orangutans offer the additional problem of being quite elusive...

They are solitary animals in nature when they are adults. It is a thoroughly self-reliant creature, which is why it develops a different type of intelligence from ours, as we are intensely social.

“Palm oil and logging states are responsible for orangutans being currently on the verge of extinction in the wild”

What future awaits orangutans with the climate crisis we are experiencing?

I read a report made by several experts and came to the conclusion that even if humans were not to cut down a single tree more, one third of the orangutan populations would disappear just because of climate change. The phenology of the rainforest is changing, fruiting patterns are altering and climate change will disturb them as much as it will disturb humans.

What do you think about considering them as “non-human persons”, as happened with Sandra, who was released from a zoo in Buenos Aires to be transferred to a sanctuary?

I'm all for it. I am Honorary President of the Great Apes Project. Her fame is one of the reasons why I agreed to come to Spain.

What do you think of zoos?

I think they are somewhat anachronistic. I’m against them. I'm also aware that in a realistic world you just can’t open the doors and have all rules about animals change, but I don't agree with the idea of keeping animals in captivity.

This year the fires have drawn attention to the deforestation of the Amazon, but in Indonesia it is also a drama.

It is a tragedy. We’ve been altering forests and nature for years. It’s not a political problem, it’s because of the way the world is built. Global industrialization has disconnected us from nature and the process has intensified with the passing centuries.

We have an industrial agriculture from which we all get our food and that is what is destroying nature. We use fossil fuels and have an economic system that connects us all. But what we are doing is destroying the Earth. The balance between people and nature is being destroyed. The fires in Indonesia, in the Amazon and in Siberia are symptoms of this.

And what about the palm oil plantations?

They are annihilating the forests. And who manages these plantations? International conglomerates. Obviously, Indonesian billionaires are also involved. I've been in contact with one of these companies; once you get to know the people who run them, they're just like you and me, but their only purpose is to make their companies profitable. The plantations started here, but now they are also in Papua New Guinea and even in Africa. This whole economic system is destroying the forests. They just want to make money.

How can you convince people to change these unsustainable economic expectations, to learn to be ‘poorer’?

It's not a matter of poverty. The palm oil workers on those plantations in Indonesia may be a little more economically secure, but they’re still poor. That is, they have bicycles, motorcycles and large satellite dishes, but are they happier? That’s the question to be raised.

Are there defenders of palm oil?

I have criticized palm oil and in social networks I respond to people who say that palm oil could be sustainable. My answer to this is: “How can something that is founded on the bones of orangutans and the ashes of forests be sustainable?” Palm oil and logging states are responsible for orangutans being currently on the verge of extinction in the wild.

“We can't change political systems, but we can do activism and vote, vote and vote”

What can we do to stop this?

We can't change political systems, that's the problem.

Could it be achieved through activism?

Activism and voting, voting and voting. In the U.S. Donald Trump was elected president, but there was a reaction and the Democratic Party came in and took over Congress. I'm not an American, but my foundation is based there and I also went to college in America. Prior to 2019, no president or candidate, no matter who it was, would talk about climate change. And what happened? Fires in the Amazon, in Indonesia, in Alaska and large floods in the Mississippi River.

Then suddenly the Democratic presidential candidates said it was because of global warming. Now, in this party's primary election debates, everyone is talking about climate change policies. This has happened in a year because of those floods in the Midwest.

So, it's a political and industrial problem.

It's like what that young Swedish activist says.

Greta Thunberg?

Yes, she says: how dare you do this to the next generations? There is an awakening, it’s something that has to happen.

Biruté Galdikas during his visit to Burgos / Anaís Pérez Martínez (SINC)

Superior shows the yin and yang of the study of human races. On the one hand, Saini speaks with prestigious researchers such as Svante Pääbo, David Reich, Robert Plomin and Jonathan Marks. On the other hand, she delves into the dark side of academia, where an inbred circle publishes ideas from the previous century in non-impact, suspiciously funded journals.

We met Saini in a cafeteria in central London, just a few metres from the British Museum, with which Superior begins. The journalist fears that race science is taking advantage of the resurgence of nationalism and the far right to return from the darkest corners of the twentieth century. Two days before the interview, the author had erased her profiles on social networks, frustrated by the racist harassment she had been suffering on Twitter. Precisely this week the writer tweeted again from her account, grateful for the reports of harassment of thousands of users.

“Racist and neo-Nazi pages spoke of my book. I complained to Twitter about the most atrocious insults, but in most cases they didn’t do anything.”

Have you suffered more harassment than when you published your former book, Inferior?

Yes, partly because I was less well known then. Also, in Superior I identify the names of neo-Nazis, who communicate with each other and were ready to attack. They have a very strong political vision. Sexism appears in all societies, but racism has a different political tone.

Why did you leave Twitter?

In recent weeks, weeks racist and neo-Nazi sites talked about my book. I reported the most outrageous insults to Twitter, but in most cases they did nothing. There were also sexist comments, both are always connected. I left because we’ve got to give these companies the message that if they’re going to sit down and allow harassment, we will leave them.

You mean Quillette? I say this because in addition to talking about your book, it has received recent criticism for pointing the finger at journalists and putting them in danger.

I'm talking about darker websites, although today it's all mixed up. It's very difficult to know where the boundaries are anymore, look who comments. They are the same people! People who talk about me on 4chan are the same people who talk about me on Quillette.

You speak of the “return of race science,” along the same lines as an article in The Guardian warning of its “resurrection”. Had racial science really gone?

Its popularity comes and goes, according to the politics of the moment. Now, with the rise of the far-right and nationalisms, these people have become powerful and are trying to protect their vision of the world. Some are very well educated and try to fit their racism with what they know. That means twisting and manipulating the facts.

Their intellectual arrogance makes them think they understand things that mainstream science misses. They try to present their arguments with science to reinforce the idea that we are different and that their rhetoric works. That's why it now has a popularity it may not have had before, although it’s true that it has never left.

There were people who misunderstood Inferior asserting that you denied the differences between men and women. Are you afraid something similar will happen to Superior?

It’s assumed that I’m some kind of race denier, that I say there’s no variation between humans. Of course there is! I’m not saying that at all, it’s a deliberate misinterpretation. What I’m proposing is that human variability doesn’t go well with our view of racial categories. This is not controversial, scientists say so every day. There are statistical variations between populations; not deep, but subtle and not very significant.

So, do races exist?

Race is a social construct, which means races exist. Just because something is cultural doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In fact, it has biological repercussions, as does gender, due to inequality. The life expectancy of African Americans is lower than average; it's not because of genetics, it’s because race has power in our society. That's why it’s being researched as a cultural entity. As a biological entity it has much less meaning than socioeconomic differences and diet.

I was surprised by the chapter on racial medicine. So it doesn’t work?

“To say that science is free of ideology is becoming increasingly less sustainable, the study of human behaviour was political from the beginning.”

It surprised me, too. There is a high rate of diabetes in India. It may be partly because of genetics, but mostly because wealthy people eat too much butter, salt and sugar, and associate living well with a sedentary life. So of course diabetes will appear! It’s fatalistic to think of these things in racial terms, but we do it because it’s easy.

There are already cases of people to whom science has said they do not belong to the race with which they have identified all their lives. Will we see more such cases as genetic tests become even more popular?

Yes, and as societies become more mixed. We already have problems placing ourselves in these ‘hard’ categories, which shows their arbitrariness. In America being black means something very different than in South Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom or India. They have a different meaning depending on where you are, they’ve always had it and always will. We have to accept that race is a social construct.

In Superior you link scientific racism with Trump and Brexit. Can science and ideology be separated?

To say that science is completely free of ideology is becoming less and less sustainable. This might apply to some disciplines like theoretical physics [laughs], but the study of human beings and their behaviour was political from the beginning. To suggest otherwise is to deny that we have biases. Anyone who studies human differences and says “I'm free from bias, I'm completely objective” is being self-deceitful. In fact, they do more harm, because unless they are aware of their prejudices, they will be unable to control them.

“Anyone who studies human differences and believes to be free from biases is being self-deceitful.”

What responsibility has science had for the survival of scientific racism?

Your view of the world depends on the lenses through which you look at it. Humans live in very different, changeable ways. Observing who we are only captures a snapshot of that moment and place, of that group of people and their culture. The study of human nature tries to see who we are if we remove all the layers. What I argue is that it is impossible to remove them all, because culture shapes us from the second we are born. You can’t separate one thing from the rest.

You say at the end of the book that, when it comes to races, “history is the thing that can provide the answers; science can’t help you here”. Can’t it?

We can’t assume that race has a biological meaning because we know it isn’t true. There’s no doubt about that, science is clear on this issue. One of the arguments I put forward in Superior is that scientists need to connect with the social sciences to get a fuller picture of who we are. We cannot study human beings in a vacuum. We can [do research on races] if we are humble, recognize our biases, and read social science research.

It is impossible to deal with this subject without talking about genes and intelligence. If there are population differences in issues such as lactose tolerance, why should intelligence be different?

The differences between groups are statistical; there are no ‘race genes’. Also, if we talk about altitude tolerance, it doesn’t mean that the rest of the characteristics of that group are also different. Finally, these variations have to do with survival, such as the ability to hold one’s breath. Intelligence depends on thousands of genes. Why would they be more concentrated in certain groups? There is no genetic or evolutionary evidence to suggest this. No matter what society you live in, being intelligent is beneficial.

“Whether for reasons of gender, race or class, when certain genetic arguments are used, it is always to defend power.”

There is a rather dark underworld outside the world of academia that argues, for example, that human beings are losing intelligence because of the poor and immigrants. Is it all connected?

For hundreds of years they have argued that deep down we are different. The interesting thing is that this debate has not always been with races, but with classes. At the beginning of the history of eugenics, it was feared that the poor were congenitally incapable and mentally weak. If they failed to improve over generations, it was because they passed on their weakness to their children. This applies to racial debates, with the idea that there are groups that don’t meet the genetic standards of the rest and should not enter the country and have kids.

That's why at the end of the book I come to the conclusion that this is all about power. It’s about a group of people who have power telling others that they don’t deserve it, that they should be controlled and that they have less of a right to live. Whether for reasons of gender, race or class, when these genetic arguments are used, it is always to defend power.

Power and also the need to create the myth of a nation. You relate colonialism to the origin of the modern concept of race. Do we still have this mentality in countries like the United Kingdom and Spain?

The paternalistic rhetoric of the benevolent civilization that cares for a weaker civilization is still seen here with the Brexit, as a result of how badly the history of the British Empire has been taught. Do we assume that the end of history has already been written and there will be no other winners in the future? Of course there will be, we’re already seeing it with countries like China and India.

The world order is changing and that causes insecurity by losing a control that we feel is naturally owed to us. And we assume this because the ideas of superiority and inferiority have permeated the subconscious. There may someday be museums in Singapore with European artefacts, like the British Museum. Arrogance makes empire builders think that their empire will last forever.

“Being impartial with racism is the same as being impartial with climate change deniers and Flat-Earthers. Why feed the idea that there are two opposite and equivalent sides?”

In that sense, you also criticize the ancestor tests. Will nationalisms increase their popularity?

There are already people who undergo these to reinforce their idea of who they are. In Israel they are being used to determine whether someone is Jewish or not; just imagine if that technology had existed in the 1930s. It seems very dark to me that everyone, not just the far right, has bought this idea that inappropriately biologises race and reinforces in our minds that there must be racial genes. Actually, the tests show who you may be vaguely related to, but they don’t find ‘European genes’ or ‘Asian genes’ because they don’t exist.

In ‘Superior’ you point to Enlightenment, a period that many claim today is the origin of the problem of scientific racism. Why?

Enlightenment reinforced political ideas that were already there and hardened them with science. It was the same with colonialism and the genocides we saw in the 19th century. Would they have happened without Western science? Probably, but science gave strength to these ideas and legitimacy to these racial constructs, which made them appear more rigid than they were before.

I was amused to read that 70 years ago there was already talk of how censorship and political correctness were damaging science because of “irrational science denialists”. Are those who repeat that nowadays as novel as they think?

They like to present themselves as such. What fascinated me was to see how intelligent they had been in manipulating speech using euphemisms, speaking of freedom of speech, academic freedom and diversity of opinion, to find accommodation in mainstream discourse. Today, universities and media support them without realizing that they are the direct intellectual heirs of Nazi eugenics. They have changed the way they speak, but they say the same things. We let them in and now there are politicians who use the same rhetoric of 70 years ago.

“There’s no conspiracy: if race science has trouble getting its work published, that’s because it’s not very good.”

It reminds me of the ‘debates’ between evolutionists and creationists, or between physicians and homeopaths. There is no middle ground between being and not being a racist!

I just did an interview on the BBC and, after telling about the racism I've experienced online, the interviewer said, “I'm going to put my impartiality aside and say that this is terrible.” I thought: “How can you be impartial with racism?” It's the same as with the climate change deniers and the Flat-Earthers. Why do we keep feeding this idea that there are two opposing sides and equivalents? They were never any. There are only facts that are under scrutiny and should always be. The power we are fighting here is extreme right-wing ideology, not science. If we cannot recognize that, then we are making it easy for them.

Is it that worrying? I have the impression that it’s an inbred circle, that it publishes in its journals without any real impact and get no respect from the rest of the academic world.

There is a rigid circle, but there are university professors and politicians on its edges. The veil is being lifted from them, many people have done research and they’re finding it harder to keep up appearances. It’s shocking that there are serious magazines that allow those people to be on their editorial committees. For instance, Gerhard Meisenberg and Richard Lynn were on the editorial board of Intelligence and I contacted the editor of the magazine, who defended him on grounds of academic freedom. After I wrote an article in The Guardian, Meisenberg had been removed by the end of 2018. But the problem has not been solved, others have done nothing.

Is it true that, as one of the researchers states in Superior, “we look to science as a rationalisation of political ideas”?

Science has a power in society that nothing else has. It is viewed as objective, rational and legitimate. If it looks like a scientific fact, then it cannot be racist. This is what racists say on the Internet: “facts don't care about your feelings”, ignoring that facts are not on their side. They sell it as if they were being repressed by a conspiracy that tries to silence them, while they defend good science and are like Galileo or Copernicus.

“Cultural stereotypes have given meaning to labels and once we've put one on someone, we feel like we already know something about that person.”

It’s puzzling that someone buys this argument and what most impresses me is that many people do. I don’t have a problem with white men; I have a problem with those who say that science is on their side, when it isn’t. There’s no conspiracy: if race science has problems getting its work published, that’s because it's not very good.

In the end, as they say, “facts don't care about your feelings.”

No, but we can’t use that on them, can we? [laughs].

It seems that human beings need to think in categories like races or nations. What can we do?

I try to treat each person as an individual, because more than 95% of the differences between people are individual. It's difficult, I also have many biases and stereotypes, but I can’t think of any other way to act. Cultural stereotypes have given meaning to labels: once we have put one on somebody, we feel that we already know something about that person. Instead of seeing each person as you think they are, we must give them a chance to show who they really are.

We meet at the entrance to the hotel where she is staying, two hundred metres from La Pedrera, very close to Barcelona's Paseo de Gracia. She comes down from her room in an elevator, chewing gum. We sat down on the hotel´s inner and talked about physics, the relationship between science and art, the future on Earth and the role of women. Despite being elusive about gender issues, Randall is a pioneer in her field. She was the first woman to hold the chair of Theoretical Physics at Harvard and Princeton Universities and the first full female professor of Physics at MIT.

“It will take many years before a high energy particle collider is built, if it ever comes into existence”

Physics is experiencing a good time. In recent years there have been great discoveries, such as the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Do you feel fortunate to live in this era?

It's funny, because despite all these discoveries we're always interested in what’s to come next. The Higgs boson was predicted 50 years ago. We're interested in what’s beyond the standard particle model. This does not mean that the current experiments are not good enough, but it seems that we will need much higher energies to know even more. We don’t know what we will learn from future experiments. It will be many years before a high energy particle collider is built, if it ever comes into existence. On the other hand, gravitational waves are going through an exciting time. We’re right at the beginning, it’s exciting.

What would be the impact of a high energy collider like the one China wants to build?

We’ll be very lucky if it’s ever built. There are proposals from China and CERN, which has proposed the construction of a future circular collider (FCC). This does not mean that the current LHC will expire, as it will be many years before CERN carries out this project. The next step will not be high energies, but the high luminosity stage of the LHC. This will allow for very good physics, but I don’t think there’s anything that can replace high energies.

In spite of the current knowledge of the universe, there are still people who believe that the Earth is flat.

Yeah, it’s funny. In addition, we are dealing with the current political situation in the United States... Somehow, we live in the smartest and, at the same time, the dumbest era. I don’t know why this is happening, maybe they’re scared or don’t trust science. One of the questions I ask myself when writing popular books is why people are so reticent about certain ideas. Of course, most people who read my books do not believe that the Earth is flat, but my intention is to make my ideas well understood. If you don’t do science, you don’t have to have certain knowledge. There must be something else to explain why people distrust science, I don’t know what it is. It’s something we need to address.

Lisa Randall / Guillermo Castellví

Another issue that mankind should address is climate change. Are you concerned about the future of the Earth?

I’m not worried about Earth, I'm worried about life on Earth [laughs]. Our planet will survive. I think we’re bringing about very rapid changes, more than we can control. It’s very difficult to maintain the current lifestyle, even if we find other sources of energy. There are a lot of people who don’t see nature in their daily lives. I grew up in Queens and I didn’t go out to the countryside, it’s something I didn't do and which now makes me very happy. I think we are disconnected from nature. We don’t think about the massive consequences of all this. There are species that may no longer have anywhere to go. If we destroy their habitats they won’t survive.

“I’m concerned about life on Earth. I think we’re bringing about very rapid change, more than we can control”

You’re a theoretical physicist, not an experimental one. Your work tools are blackboard and chalk. What is your routine?

I wish I had a routine. We work on ideas. I spend a lot of my time with people and talking to my postdoctoral students. I read scientific articles, I think about whether what they say makes sense, whether it is interesting, whether there’s something I failed to grasp... When we have an idea, we have to work on it. Here my students are very useful. I mean that they are useful at all stages of the process, but they play a major role in solving details or doing numbers. Sometimes I work more on cosmology and sometimes more on particle physics. It really is a combination of reading, having ideas, solving problems and going into detail.

The work of a theoretical physicist is to think a lot. But do you also procrastinate?

Oh, yes, of course. I do procrastinate. The other day I was joking about it on Twitter: “I particularly procrastinate when I'm preparing talks. When I prepare lectures, I procrastinate a lot. It’s easy, especially when you get stuck. I look at my incoming e-mails... It’s good to escape, but then you have to go back to work and focus again.

Is there anything that helps you think and contributes to your creativity?

I like to get away and do climbing, for example. Sometimes it helps me to clear my mind. If I’m worried about something or distracted, climbing helps me not to think about it. In fact, last Saturday I went climbing in Montserrat, it was fantastic. I was very lucky, because it didn’t fit into my plans. But someone contacted me, seeing that I was around, and suggested it to me. It was wonderful. Not that we did anything exceptional, but it was a really nice day. Montserrat has different levels, you can choose which one to climb. But the greatest advantage is that it’s close [to Barcelona].

“I like to get away and do climbing. Sometimes, it helps me clear my mind”

At the Kosmopolis Literature Festival you talked about the cooperation between art and science. Is this blend a good idea?

Not always. Many things have been done badly. Sometimes scientists think that all the beautiful pictures they take are art and they are usually not. For their part, artists think they’re doing something scientific, although they actually aren’t. Many mistakes are made. What art does is translate things that we can think about and it addresses questions and concerns about how human beings situate themselves in these advances. At other times, it simply makes you aware of it all; art is a different way of becoming aware. Science is the protagonist of many of the changes in today’s world, and artistic efforts to tell about them work quite well.

You seem to be highly sensitive to art. In Barcelona you were already involved in the creation of an opera with the Catalan composer Hèctor Parra.

It's funny, because I didn’t realize how much I appreciate art. I go back to the museums I had visited as a child, like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and I remember many of its paintings. I think this is something that affects you. I remember once I saw a Guernica in Madrid and I said to myself, wait, I've seen this before [laughs], as if I had registered it. I was really young when I first saw it. You don’t notice the influence art has on you, but it does.

One of your books is named after a song by Guns'N'Roses (Knocking on Heaven's door), yesterday you mentioned another one by Suzanne Vega... Do you also like music?

Music is very catchy. Sometimes I get hooked on a song, whether I like it or not. I usually like it. I would say that there are people who are much greater music fans than I am. But I really like song lyrics, I think it's a form of poetry, it's fun. I love to play with words and music is a good way to play with them. Especially in a context that is familiar to people, rather than a quote from an ancient Greek philosopher.

You once did a cameo appearance in the Big Bang Theory series. You were told to go unnoticed, sitting at a table behind Sheldon. Very few people really saw you.

The funny thing was that, even though I was sitting in the background and you could see me quite well, very few people noticed. Many of those who watched the series and knew me didn’t actually see me. That’s because they didn’t expect me to be there. We think we’re very observant and have a lot of tools, but there’s so much information everywhere that it really helps to know what you’re looking for, as in particle physics.

“If Hillary Clinton had said half the things Trump has said, people would have laughed at her out loud. A woman would never be allowed”

Are you comfortable with the image given of physicists in the series?

I have mixed feelings. Do we want physicists to be normal or not? The reason the series is popular isn’t just because its physicists are weird, I think it deals with some issues that are universal and affect us all, but it makes fun of physicists. How do you act in a world where you always feel like someone different? I think it was great that they also included a female physicist, who was as strange as the guy. Is this the only image we want people to have of us? Not necessarily, but it’s crazy that a series about physicists has been the most popular on television. It’s great!

I know you’re reluctant to talk about gender issues, but I have to bring it up.

I am reluctant when, in a five-minute interview, half the conversation is just about this issue.

For instance, there are only three women who have won a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Yes, there is a problem.

What’s your opinion? You’re a benchmark for many people.

Thank you very much, I like to think so. I must say it’s hard for me too. People don’t believe it because I’m successful, but sometimes it’s hard. You just have to really worry about what you're doing and focus on it. I don't think there’s a single answer to the problem and I don’t think it’s limited only to the presence of women in science. This is a much broader issue. Look at the political situation or remember the last American elections. If Hillary [Clinton] had said half the things, or any of the things, that Trump said, people would have laughed at her out loud. A woman would never be allowed to do that. That’s how we’ve been educated. Then they wonder why we’re so prudent. We’re not allowed to be careless [she laughs]. It’s very frustrating, really.

It was not the first big prize awarded to Geim. He had received an Ig Nobel prize in 2000, a parody of the prestigious Swedish prize given out every autumn to the most unusual scientific achievements. Geim was awarded this honour for using the magnetic properties of water to make a frog levitate. To date, he is he first an only person to win both awards.

Now Geim works at the University of Manchester. SINC spoke to him during a visit to Spain organised by the Graphene Flagship, a long-term European project that brings together more than 150 partners and counts on a 1-billion-euro budget to bring graphene from the laboratory to the market.

Graphene was known already, but people weren’t paying to much attention to it. Why did you start working on this field?

People knew that graphite was made up of several ‘graphene layers’, but their properties and behaviour were unknown. Graphene had never been isolated, nor investigated. It was not understood at all. Indeed, this is something quite common in science: we knew the planets existed for almost three thousand years, but we had to wait until Copernicus’ time to fully understand them. Furthermore, most people believed that graphene would not even exist if isolated.

Did you expect this huge outcome?

That is not our goal as scientists. We were trying to figure out what happened to graphite if we kept making it thinner. We didn’t expect to get it down to a single layer, and the most important thing wasn’t that it is just 1 nanometre thick, but the fact that it showed unique properties that nobody could expect. Had it just been a single carbon atom layer, people would have said ‘oh that is cute,’ end of story. Isolating graphene kicked off the discovery of a myriad of electronic and mechanical properties that attracted the attention of the community.

In your opinion, which of its many properties is most interesting?

We got the Nobel prize for its electronic properties. I believe that the most interesting thing is that day to day physical laws, used to describe copper or iron, don’t apply to graphene. You enter the world of quantum relativistic physics. Suddenly, we can sit at a table and study phenomena that should only occur at light speed, or in CERN experiments. Nobody thought that would be possible.

“Graphene expanded our toolbox as a species to a whole new dimension”

Also, looking from a wider angle, we had the Stone Age, Bronze, Iron, now silicon and plastics. All these materials are three-dimensional. There were no 2D materials, where thickness just does not exist. We expanded our toolbox as a species to a whole new dimension, and we are still trying to understand how to use it.

There is no consensus about graphene ever replacing silicon, what’s your opinion on this?

That will not happen, in my opinion. A decade ago, there was a lot of hype over the idea that graphene would replace silicon, but developing its applications in electronics will take two or three decades, and now we have dozens of new 2D materials. Graphene will be used to make faster electronics – at some point one of these materials will replace, or be a great asset to silicon. For instance, some of our partners in Spain already integrate graphene in silicon circuits.

Did hype hurt graphene?

There is still too much hype around graphene. We are human, and our great expectations usually go beyond reality. But we need to understand that basic research, carried out at universities, may see the light in ten, twenty years if ever. Now, people have discovered that you don’t need pristine graphene for some applications that, instead of revolutionary are just ‘evolutionary.’ I like to call it ‘diffusion’ – these materials diffuse into the market, even if properties are just enhanced by 50% and revolutions are yet far to come.

Both academics and journalists should understand how real life works. Everything changes gradually. Moving from basic research to a consumer product requires, at least, one generation. Graphene did not start the race in 2004, but several years later, when we started producing it in large quantities. Now we have new companies, real-life products, and new enhancements.

“Moving from basic research to a consumer product requires, at least, one generation”

Should we change our perspective and understand that scientific revolutions do not exist?

We cannot change that. We have been raised in a world full of the immediacy of software, apps, and the internet. Everyone expects the same, quick developments in graphene – which is a new material. People believe Bill Gates invented computing and Mark Zuckerberg created social media, but in reality, it took almost a whole century to kick off the silicon revolution and develop the first computer. We need to lower our expectations.

What is the greatest challenge for graphene now?

Graphene is mass produced in high quantities, but not with quality yet. It is broadly used, but the quality is insufficient for high-tech applications. It needs time – time to find applications, time for us to learn to make it better, and cheaper. Just wait for it. It happened the same with silicon.

You have few patents, and graphene is not amongst them. Why not?

I have always been sceptical about what to patent, it’s hard to protect all with a single filing. Plus, they are expensive – you need hundreds, thousands of euros, and then you must keep supporting them for twenty years. Had we patented graphene back in 2004, the patent would be close to its expiration date without having many products around.

In fact, I am quite sceptical about patents in general. I have about ten of them, and none has yielded money – some might in five years or so. It all involves a very complex mechanism – you need to establish which area needs protecting, you need to communicate with industry to meet their needs, find new application areas and protect them too. People believe you patent ‘an idea’ and you go lay down for a while, smoking a cigar while you wait for the money to come. That is rarely the case. You can use patents to protect products, but until you get one, you have nothing.

You claim that we face a “knowledge crisis” and that our rate of discoveries is now slower than ever. But we tend to think that there are more inventions every day, and they come quickly. Could you explain why you say that?

“We are like athletes running so fast that they don’t notice they are going to die, exhausted. In our case, death will come from the lack of basic knowledge that feeds applications”

We live on knowledge generated long ago; discoveries made during the last century. We are like athletes running so fast that they don’t notice they are going to die, exhausted. In our case, death will come from the lack of basic knowledge that feeds applications. You blink your eyes and there’s a new technology, a new app that makes them millionaires. Bitcoin appears, and everyone’s suddenly rich. But as far as I know, Bitcoin has just contributed massively to global warming because of all the electricity it requires.

People often forget the ties between basic science and prosperity. We wondered what would happen if we made graphene thinner and thinner. Someone could have said: ‘Who cares? Why is that useful?’. But discoveries are divided between those which have been applied, and those which haven’t yet. There is nothing purely basic – everything can eventually be applied. Look at Einstein’s theory of relativity: ‘It’s all lunatic academics that look for something irrelevant.’ Half a century after that, we got GPS.

These thoughts remind me of something Buzz Aldrin said: ‘You promised me colonies in Mars. Instead, I have Facebook.’

You need both. I don’t like Facebook, or social media – or Bitcoin for that matter, although I have been quite lucky with that. But I see the whole picture: these advances create quicker, more efficient interactions amongst people. It’s like Google, but nobody blames them. Facebook, Twitter make our communications more efficient, and that is key to our species.

Quside quantum chips can be installed on any connected computer for unbreakable encryption

The field in which Abellán is innovating is that of computer security and communications. Not only regarding current equipment, but also setting his sights on future quantum computers, an area to which large corporations like IBM are strongly committed.

“Current encryption systems are very limited in a world with all kinds of connected devices and with an increasing amount of information stored in the cloud,” the executive comments to Sinc.

“Quside uses the latest photonic integration technologies to design and produce components that generate random numbers capable of producing billions of bits per second,” as Abellán explains. “These devices can be installed on any computer that is connected to the internet to protect its data and communications.”

Secure encryption for today and tomorrow

“The greatest advantage of using a quantum component as the one we offer is that we guarantee that the generated numbers, which are then used to encrypt the information and the transmission, are truly random and therefore unpredictable to any hacker. This ensures that the protection will be secure not only today but also in the future,” he points out.

The devices can be integrated in servers, mobiles, tablets, autonomous cars, intelligent houses, drones... "The business potential is enormous"

The technology is available in the market in the form of a card called Qucard that can be installed in the equipment. The company has also developed a photonic chip, using light instead of electrons, which they have named Qupic and is in prototype phase.

Both devices can be integrated into servers, mobile phones, tablets, autonomous cars, intelligent homes and offices, drones, etc. In general, any equipment connected to the Internet. “The business potential is enormous,” emphasizes the manager.

The company’s customers include manufacturers of devices for data centres and telecommunications companies that use its technology to generate billions of random bits per second to improve the encryption systems in their products.

Carlos Abellán, founder and CEO of Quside / Domenico Tulli

The challenge of quantum computing

Another challenge facing the information and communications security sector is quantum computing.

“Today's cybersecurity algorithms are considered secure because they are too complicated to decipher for a conventional computer. But the enormous power of quantum computers could easily solve them,” notes Abellán.

If today there were a quantum computer with enough qubits, all communications on the Internet would be unprotected. "Our technology would guarantee the security"

If there were now a quantum computer with enough qubits, all communications on the internet would be unprotected. It would therefore be “necessary to integrate and deploy solutions based on products such as ours before the security of our communications collapses to guarantee long-term online security,” he says.

The field in which Quside works is still very much an emerging one and therefore has still few rivals. “There are several offers in the research field. The biggest competitor in the industry is the Swiss company ID Quantique, which has recently signed an agreement with the Korean telecommunications company SK Telekom”, Abellán tresses.

The goal that the company –which currently employs eight people– has set itself is to scale up the technology over the next few years so that its chips can be integrated into all types of devices at an affordable cost.

European Research

Quside was created in early 2017 to market the technology developed at ICFO, a leading research centre in the field of photonics. The company continues to collaborate with this institution “to continue investing in basic research as a tool for innovation and the generation of new products,” says the entrepreneur.

Quside is also part of two consortiums within the European Commission's FET Quantum Flagship, a programme with a €1-billion grant for the next ten years that aims to place Europe among the world leaders in quantum technology.

More specifically, the Spanish company is part of the QRANGE project, which focuses on the industrialization of quantum random number generators as a basic element of encryption systems. The company is also working on the CiViQ initiative, which focuses on the development of quantum key distribution systems and is based on a technology known as continuous variables, which is compatible with current telecommunications networks.

“I'm very hairy,” she said, vainly, while fanning herself during a very hot evening in July 2018, in the City of Space in Toulouse (France).

The atomic structure of graphene, the material of the future due to its promising properties, enveloped her hair and neck. She did not go unnoticed among the scientists and journalists who were eating and drinking champagne at the reception of the biennial Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) congress.

She is Sassy Science, the world´s first drag queen science populariser. “I've never seen anything like her. Maybe there are others... but I'm afraid not,” says Javier Armentia, the creator of the CienciaLGTBIQ website, who declares himself a “superfan” of the character.

Sassy Science wears graphene around her neck and, when not in drag, she does research on nanomaterials. / SINC

Sassy Science is the alter ego of Mario Peláez (Langreo, Spain, 1992), a doctoral student at the Aragon Institute of Nanoscience who is in love with graphene. His drag queen outreach project emerged from the communication workshop he received at Enabling Excellence, an international training network of 13 PhD students in nanosciences and nanotechnology, funded by the European Union.

“I'm Dr. Sass, an openly bisexual LGBT activist, amateur drag queen and a PhD student in Physics,” as he introduced himself in perfect English in the first video

“Mario's project amazed me,” comments Chris Ewels, coordinator of the European project, who stresses: “I've been involved in many outreach projects, but never in my career have I seen anything like Sassy Science.” Ewels explains that at first he did not quite understand Mario's idea and remembers watching the drag queen videos he sent him with scepticism. Now he cannot help feeling like “a proud father.”

Peláez has always been clear, though: “Communication is a cornerstone for doing science, whether it be writing a good article, giving a good talk or presenting a good poster.”

In Toulouse, her poster was the only one with a tablet showing her YouTube videos: “I'm Dr. Sass, an openly bisexual LGBT activist, amateur drag queen and a PhD student in Physics” she presented herself in perfect English in the first video she posted last July.

“Communication is a cornerstone for doing science, whether it be writing a good article, giving a good talk or presenting a good poster,” says Sassy Science. / SINC

Millennial popularisation

Like any good millennial, Mario Peláez relies on social media to disseminate science and denounce the discrimination among researchers against young women, POC and the LGTB+ community in the STEM disciplines, which include science, technology, engineering and math. “I think drag is a good tool to empower these groups,” he states. He then reveals his plan B to change the situation: glitter!

So far, he has profiles in Instagram and Twitter, and YouTube channel, where he has already started to upload some videos about “queens”, as he refers to current and historical researchers, who are and were invisibilised. “Mario uses the media his community uses to reach his desired audience,” Ewels points out.

On Instagram and YouTube, he has already started to post videos about “queens”, as he refers to current and historical researchers

On his YouTube channel you can already find videos about the chemist Rosalind Frankin and the physicist Lise Metiner. He says he also wants to record more about Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie, although he jokingly admits that the Polish scientist “would need a whole special”. Aware of his privileges, he claims: “I want to look for a woman of colour (WOC) because this is starting to look a lot like white feminism.”

So far, the reactions to his persona have been positive. Mario says he feels “very welcomed” by the European project that saw the persona’s birth and the laboratory where he works. For his part, Ewels acknowledges the young man's effort: “Mario is passionate about what he does and Sassy Science has taken him out of his comfort zone. There is a great deal of merit in attending a congress [ESOF] with thousands of participants while doing drag.”

The resurgence of drag

There is not a single definition of what constitutes a drag queen. Many agree that the concept refers to a man who dresses as a woman and acts in accordance with the stereotypes socially attributed to one. Their expression is exaggerated and they usually confine their appearances to bars and shows.

Mario Peláez next to the sign that indicates the different departments of his university. / SINC

But there are others who have a broader view. “We are all born naked and the rest is drag,” sings the American drag queen RuPaul in one of her songs. The artist has just released the fourth and final season of the reality show RuPaul's Drag All Stars Race on the Netflix platform, in which different drag queens compete for a prize of 100,000 US dollars and a place in the hall of fame.

For Mario Peláez, drag is an art with which he came into contact a couple of years ago through the Somos LGTB+ association in the region of Aragón, where he was already doing activism and there is a lot of drag culture. “The creation of the drag identity rarely takes place on an individual basis. Drag families are a great community to turn to for creative and emotional support,” states Steven J. Hopkins of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Radford University.

He uses drag to popularise science without complexes: “I do this from an enormous respect for the drag culture, which has always been a driving force for activism and the fight for LGTB+ rights”

Now, Peláez uses drag as a means to popularise science without complexes. “I do this from an enormous respect for the drag culture, which has always been a driving force for activism and the fight for LGTB+ rights” he remembers. “Drag has made me think a lot about gender issues and my privileges as a cis white man. There are small micro-sexisms that people don't take into account,” he stresses.

Mario is not afraid that his persona will eclipse science itself: “Scientific communication is for people to acquire an interest in it, not to get a master's degree in Physics. And above all, it's for making them understand that science is important and that everyone can do it.”

Next July, Mario will present his doctoral thesis. “For me, science is the greatest thing. Although it requires a lot of sacrifice and I'm not going to see it through rose-tinted lenses, I can't imagine my life without doing science.” His research focuses on the electron microscopy of two-dimensional nanomaterials, such as graphene, which is what surrounds his neck whenever he is in drag.

Updated 23 January 2019. Apart from Sassy Science, Lana Vuli is another drag queen who also popularizes science. In 2017 she presented the cabaret 'Seafood Tango' and, as she informed SINC, she will soon also start with a YouTube channel. She is the alter ego of the doctor in Environmental Chemistry Òscar Aznar.

The Human Brain Project (HBP) is a major European initiative that began in 2013 and in which more than one hundred research centres are working. With an estimated global funding of about one billion Euros, the challenge is that of making progress in the study of the brain from multiple different approaches. It has recently held its first international conference, with 250 scientists gathered in Barcelona to deal precisely with the study of consciousness. We have spoken with Mavi Sánchez Vives, director of the Systems Neuroscience group at IDIBAPS (Barcelona), a member of the project, coordinator of SloW-Dyn (a partnering project of the HBP) and the local organizer of the meeting.

“We are trying to standardize measures that tell us of a patient’s state of consciousness”

What role does the study of consciousness play within the Human Brain Project?

There are many groups in the project that coincided on dealing with the issue of consciousness, whether on the basis of basic, clinical research and even of philosophy. This has made it become a main axis and that this theme has been chosen for the first major international conference of the Human Brain Project.

At what stage are we in the study of consciousness? How much do we really know?

Well, if we compare it, for example, with the great theories of physics, we must admit that we’re just starting. It was a topic that science was almost unwilling to deal with in the twentieth century; it was much disregarded among scientists because it was seen as unscientific, more typical of the religious field. But we must also bear in mind that problems of the alteration of consciousness such as those suffered by patients in a coma are a matter that some clinicians face daily, and in that sense there are advances: we are trying to standardize measures that tell us of a patient’s state of consciousness or even allow us to communicate with them through brain-computer interfaces.

Right now there are two great models that try to explain consciousness. What do they consist of?

[Sánchez Vives shares the question with Johan Storm, professor at the University of Oslo and organizer of the meeting]. "There are many models, but it is true that two of them are the most famous," explains Storm. “One is that of the Global Neural Network, which studies the neural networks and the areas of the brain needed for consciousness to emerge. The second is the so-called Integrated Information Theory, which is more ambitious and tries to explain consciousness in its entirety through mathematical models. There’s a lot of debate about which one is better: I think the answer will lie somewhere in between”.

[Returning to Sánchez Vives]. The latter model seems to have been the basis for one of the tools that have been developed to measure the level of consciousness, including patients in coma, the so-called 'disturbance complexity index,' which in a way quantifies the echo that a magnetic stimulation produces in the brain. What does it consist of?

Yes, you have to think of the brain cortex as a network. If the network is very segregated, if everything acts very locally, there is no awareness. But if it’s too integrated, if everything connects with everything else, the response is very stereotyped and there is no awareness either. Consciousness occurs when there is a balance between integration and segregation -according to the Integrated Information Theory model-. What we do is disrupt the network with an electrical or magnetic stimulus: if the network is segregated, the response to the stimulus (the echo) is very short, not very complex; if it’s very integrated, there will be a general response that disappears very soon. But if that balance occurs, relationships are established between the nodes of the network that produce a much more complex response. This index has been validated in studies in people who are awake, asleep, under anaesthesia, in patients with different levels of coma ... The good thing for the doctor is that this index is an objective number that correlates quite well with the level of consciousness. This is particularly valuable in situations in which the patient doesn’t respond but may be conscious, which is why it’s necessary to identify objective measures of consciousness…

And could this index be applied to determine the degree of consciousness in animals? Is there any recognized tool to study this?

No, the problem is that we cannot use it as an absolute value to compare the brains of different species. What is certainly being studied in animals and within the project are the mechanisms that intervene in these responses and that vary, for example, with the level of anaesthesia. As regards the tools for studying whether there is consciousness in animals, there are useful tests like the mirror test, which tells you that, if an animal recognizes itself, it has some awareness of itself. But there is still confusion in this highly interdisciplinary field. To a large extent, definitions must be unified. But the most important problem is that we need a great theory of what consciousness is and we still don’t have that. Now, I do believe that it can be found. It may be a specific neural network, a certain pattern of brain activity, we still don’t know.

“A new, much more collaborative way of working in neuroscience has been begin, copying the model of physics”

Regarding the role of machines, what can their use and study contribute to an understanding of consciousness?

Within the Human Brain Project, many mathematical models are being created to try to explain consciousness from a theoretical point of view. Simulations are also being made in chips, emulations of neuronal circuits of millions of neurons that reproduce brain functions and that could at some point be integrated with the nervous system. By 'copying' the biology of the brain, which is so optimized by evolution, useful computational strategies can be generated.

You are part of the project as a central partner but also with a the partnering project called Slow Dyn, in which you research the slow waves of the brain that occur, for example, during sleep. What is known about them and why are they so important?

This is interesting because, in the early 1990s, one of the great open questions of neuroscience was the function of sleep, and a fundamental way of studying consciousness is to know how this disconnection occurs. However, in the last 25 years, a lot of evidence has accumulated of the role of sleep in cleaning mechanisms, in rebalancing and resetting the connection of synapses (synaptic homeostasis), metabolic balance (or homeostasis) or in how slow waves occurring during deep sleep improve cognition and memory consolidation. In fact, a commercial partner of Slow Dyn’s has developed a band-like device that is placed around the head, registers the brain´s activity and can induce this type of slow waves of sleep by means of auditory stimuli with the purpose of improving sleep.

It has already been published within the project that waves of this type were altered in mice, this being a model of early aging, and possibly also in diseases such as Alzheimer's. Is this a consequence of these processes?

Yes, we saw that the wave pattern was altered with aging and possibly with Alzheimer's, although work on Alzheimer's specifically will be published shortly. It seems clear that the alteration of sleep is a consequence of aging, but it is also true that alterations in sleep can facilitate the advance of cognitive deterioration associated with aging and associated neurological pathologies. In any case, the latter is still somewhat speculative.

The possibility of modifying, of restoring "young sleep in already elderly individuals" was also announced. Is this real?

Yes, a good example would be the device we talked about earlier. In principle, the idea was to collect information about the sleep of thousands of people of different ages, to have a sleep sample of a large population including different ages, which information does not yet exist. But there’s also the possibility of modifying it, because it’s been shown that a certain induction of the slow wave can be made, increasing the duration of these periods that older people have shortened. This has been proven by magnetic stimulation and also with auditory stimuli. If this is achieved systematically, a "youthful" sleep could be simulated, ideally with the corresponding cognitive benefit.

Going back to the project as a whole, what main contributions has it made so far? After some initial criticisms of its organization and conception, and after some changes, how’s it working out?

In my opinion, the Human Brain Project is now doing very well. The number of annual publications being generated is very large, but it’s not so much a matter of highlighting a particular discovery as the fact that a new, much more collaborative way of working in neuroscience has been begin, copying the model of physics. Individual and independent initiatives are also very important, but now infrastructures and platforms are being created to share data on a large scale that didn’t exist before. There is no doubt that many advances will be made, but for the moment we must focus above all on improving the necessary structures: the discoveries will be a consequence of all this.

SINC produces scientific news for the European SCOPE project, coordinated by FECYT and funded by the European Union through Horizon 2020, its funding program. The SCOPE mission is to communicate visionary research results of partnering projects in the framework of the Graphene Flagship and the Human Brain Project, as well as to enhance the FET Flagships partnering environment in the European Union.

"It is the second cause of environmental complaint in the world, after noise but it doesn’t receive the attention it deserves from the authorities or the industry”

This chemical engineer has been working on odour-related problems since 2004 and trying to break into an area in which "everything is still to be done". Arias has been employed in two of the main consultancies dealing with the subject in Spain, but she eventually decided to act on her own, since these companies -she says- "have no interest in innovating".

A couple of years ago, she developed an app called OdourCollect, "that uses citizen science, the smartphones we always carry with us, and our nose, which is the best smell sensor that exists." Humans can distinguish around one billion different odours.

As a sense of defence that alerts us of dangers, it is highly developed. "For example, hydrogen sulphide, the main gas that causes the odour of rotten eggs in sewage treatment plants, is a lethal gas and our nose detects it at very low concentrations of less than 10 parts per billion (ppb), which is below the detection limit of many measuring devices”.

"The app," she explains, "is very simple. What it does is geolocate the user in space and time using the mobile phone, which means you can register a new smell in real time wherever you are. You also have the possibility to access the observations included by other people and even communicate with them to make a collaborative map of odours."

A European project to fight odour pollution

The researcher points out that "the largest number of odour complaints in Spain is due to waste treatment activities and sewage treatment plants because they are very close to the population."

"I wanted to give citizens a tool to show that there is an odour problem in their community and to demand action from those involved"

She comments that "there are very few cases in which the industries or the municipalities involved carry out technical studies to confront the problem and, if there are any, they are closed and less than transparent. Citizens have no access to this environmental information, which is affecting them every day."

This was the reason that led her to develop the application. "I wanted to give citizens a tool that could empower them to not only access the data, but also generate them; to prove that there is a odour problem in their community and to demand action from those involved."

Her determination to bring this environmental problem to the foreground has made the EU award her with the leadership of the European D-Noses Project, along with the Ibercivis foundation of citizen science in Aragón. The goal, she says, "is to create a world map of smells with the help of data sent by people via OdourCollect."

The Odour Collect app allows citizens to register smells using smart phones. / Ibercivis

The project, which started last April, has a budget of 3.1 million Euros for a period of three years and "is the most ambitious odour pollution initiative in Europe and in the world," she stresses.

D-Noses is participated by fifteen partners, including experts in odour pollution from universities, civic associations and small companies from the environmental sector.

A total of nine countries will participate: Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria, Italy and Chile. Arias indicates that "there will be case studies of communities that are severely affected by this problem in these countries as well as in other countries in Africa and in different parts of the world."

"We are going to develop a world map of smells with the help of data sent by people via our app"

As she explains, "to begin with, the OdourCollect tool will collect the data that citizens generate in real time; the odour experts will be responsible for validating the different insights and will incorporate meteorological data and mathematical back-trajectory models to verify the origins of the smell".

Then, in collaboration with the environmental authorities and the emitting industries, we will study what was happening at the time of each validated observation, in order to find ways to reduce the nuisance; for example, applying good practices in the emitting industry or modifying the different operations in order to emit the odour in favourable dispersion conditions.

In addition, "the analysis of the information we obtain will help us to make recommendations, guides, the green book of odour pollution and the action plan for the next five to eight years", she adds. “The idea is to influence the environmental policies of the different countries and put odour pollution on the map. We also want the citizens to be protected, as we haven’t been so far”.

Arias wants to influence the environmental policies of the different countries. / David Fernández / SINC

International Observatory

The International Odour Observatory will be ready by the end of the year. It will act as a repository of information and, as Arias explains, "it will map emitting industries, communities with problems and areas with environmental regulations, allowing open access to information for the first time as regards odour pollution."

"Odour pollution is a warning sign of more serious environmental problems and can be harmful to one’s health"

"What we want to show," she says, "is that odour pollution is a warning sign of more serious environmental problems. It can be harmful to one’s health and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change."

For example, "one of the most pestilent odours is that of methane, one of the main gases that cause the greenhouse effect, more so than CO2, and mainly generated in landfills and livestock farms."

"With the right facilities, these gases could be collected through pipes and suction systems and then sent to a cogeneration engine to produce energy. In this way, both stenches and greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced, "she clarifies.

The researcher believes that the European initiative will help to further pressure the emitters of these smells into taking corrective measures. It will also serve "to design new strategies in response to this problem with the help of citizen participation".

A 'start-up' to exploit citizen science data

In parallel to her participation in D-Noses, Rosa Arias’s upcoming plans include the launching of a start-up to be called Science for Change, which is now in the constitution phase.

"The idea behind this company is that of making use of the data on odour pollution that we are going to collect thanks to the European project with the Odour Collect tool," she points out.

The business model "will be based on the identification of populations with stench problems and with an interest in applying our new, citizen science-based methodology to solve the problem from a bottom-up perspective".

According to the chemical engineer, "the odour experts at Science for Change will be responsible, on the one hand, for creating the community of citizens involved in registering odours in real time, training them and educating them to obtain valid observations, and, on the other hand, for validating each one of those observations, verifying the origin of the odour with mathematical models and making detailed analyses of what is causing that annoyance in order to reduce it”.

"The emitting industries will have a very powerful monitoring tool that will be more affordable than traditional odour studies - since citizens' observations are free of charge – in order to improve their processes and reduce odour pollution. At the same time, it will be possible for them to check whether the corrective or good practice measures they are implementing actually work."

In addition,"it will be possible to extrapolate the model to address other environmental issues, study climate change or improve urban transport, and generate data in real time through citizen science tools.The possibilities are endless,” she concludes.

The company continues to receive awards and recognitions for their work in developing technology and helping to understand the links between the brain and disease. The British Magazine Wired declared it the Best Start-up in health in 2015 and last year the El Periódico journal chose it as the best innovative company in Catalonia. Even the Financial Times has highlighted this businesswoman’s entrepreneurial talent within the field of Neuroscience.

The headgear of success

Neuroelectrics started operating in 2011 in Europe from its headquarters in Barcelona, and in 2014 it opened offices in Boston to reach the US market. "The staff consists of thirty employees, mostly engineers, physicists, mathematicians and neuroscientists," says Maiques to Sinc.

The star product is Starstim, "the first device on the market that can simultaneously record electrical brain signal and apply transcranial current stimulation into the brain. The technology is based on mathematical models, data analysis and artificial intelligence".

"Patients can take the device home to apply the stimulation sessions on themselves with medical supervision"

As she explains, the device does two things: "It records brain activity and stimulates it by administering small currents to the brain." In addition, "our scientists have developed a series of brain models and algorithms that make it possible to customize the treatment according to the characteristics of each patient and their pathology."

"The system allows us to collect brain activity, upload it to our Cloud storage and then compute a customized solution. We can decide the number of electrical channels and the type of currents for exciting or inhibiting a specific area or different areas of the brain”.

In her opinion, "it is a very sophisticated technology that for the very first time, allows one to address or non-invasively focus on different areas requiring treatment, which are different for each patient, depending on the disease or where the source of their injury lies". Another benefit of this technology is that "patients can take it home, under the supervision of a medical personnel, to apply stimulation sessions themselves."

Clinical trial with epilepsy

The most important project which Neuroelectrics is implementing now is the use of Starstim for the treatment of epilepsy. "We are testing it in a clinical study at the Boston Children’s Hospital with about a hundred patients," she comments. The idea is to reduce epileptic seizures in children who do not respond to medication by non-invasive electro-stimulation. A sample of adults has also been included."

Ana Maiques, co-founder of Neuroelectrics and Starlab. / Daniel Loewe Pujol-xicoy

If the company accomplishes positive results in the next two years, the hopes are that the US Food and Drug Administration will give the approval so that Starstim can be used on patients.

She believes that this device can help people with various neurodegenerative diseases. "We are working on a pilot study with Harvard University to stimulate the memory and motor skills of 40 patients with dementia and cognitive impairment, which is an early stage of Alzheimer's."

In addition, the company has received help from the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which is dedicated to supporting research on Parkinson's, "to see if, with brain monitoring, one could develop early biomarkers of the disease," she says.

Starstim is being tested in children with epilepsy and in trials with patients with dementia and Parkinson's

Another possible application under study is that of rehabilitation after a stroke. Neuroelectrics is working with several centres in Spain, such as the Hospital Vall d'Hebron and Sant Joan de Deu, which perform research in this field.

Neuroelectrics is also exploring the use of Starstim in psychiatric ailments such as depression and anxiety. "We will have to go pathology by pathology, proving effectiveness, but we believe that our devices could be applied in these cases."

Apart from participating in clinical trials of its technology, Neurolectrics sells its devices for research purposes to scientific centres, hospitals and universities around the world. "This is our main source of income," she points out.

"Last year’s revenue reached over three million Euros with the marketing of Starstim to institutions in 40 countries, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre and veterans’ hospitals in USA ". In the latter, she comments that "they are using Starstim in neuro-rehabilitation sessions and for treating post-traumatic stress syndrome."

Good times for neuro-technology

For its part, NASA is applying the Neuroelectrics device to monitor brain activity and study the fatigue of pilots during space flights.

“There will be more and more technologies improving the quality of life of patients with neurodegenerative diseases”

Apart from the sales obtained with Starstim, the firm is immersed in its first round of financing, trying to secure 15 million dollars (about 12 million Euros) while searching for industrial partners.

The board believes that this is a good time for research and development in neuro-science and neuro-technology. "The population is aging, so neuro-degenerative diseases are increasingly affecting more people and there are only a few drugs on the market that help improve a patients’ quality of life. We’re going to see more and more innovative technologies that try to provide a solution to this epidemic of pathologies," she concludes.

Can consciousness be measured?

The scientific 'muscle' of Neuroelectrics is Starlab. It is the Barcelona-based Spanish corporation parent company, which is also in charge of longer-term research.

Starlab is currently participating in the Luminous Project of the European Commission, which uses Starstim to measure the level of consciousness in patients in a vegetative state and investigate whether this can be modified with electro-stimulation.

Stiped, another European project, uses the digital brain technology to collect brain data from children with hyperactivity and Autism, and check if they improve with stimulation.

It has a global revenue of 4.5 million Euros (including the three million contributed by Neuroelectrics) and allocates 700,000 euros a year to R & D. Maiques and her husband founded it in 2000 from the remains of a Belgian company that went bankrupt during the 'dotcom' crisis. "We recovered it to work in the Aerospace and Neuroscience sectors," comments Maiques.

"Starlab continues to do cutting-edge R&D in these two areas, but the partners’ intention were always to go from research to market. Therefore, we decided to create the spin off, focusing on marketing devices to the medical sector. This led to the creation of Neuroelectrics, which is 100% owned by the parent company," she says.

Elected Inventor of the Year in 2001 for his work on statistical learning and visual perception models, in 2012 the European Research Council awarded him an Advanced Grant to study how the brain processes information. With more than fifty patents awarded to him, Deco manages Brain and Cognition Center at the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) and is a researcher at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA).

The scientist is part of the Human Brain Project (HBP), the macro-project of the European Union that wants to unveil the mysteries of the human brain. The HBP partnering project CHAMPMouse, run by the Neuroscience Institute of The Netherlands, aims to find out which brain areas communicate with each other during visual perception.

After almost one century of neurophysiology we now know that there are related areas, such as the visual ones

With CHAMPMouse you are studying how visual perceptions occur in the brains of mice. Is that the main goal of the research?

The question is to know how a particular cognitive function involves more than one brain area, perhaps a large part of the brain. We focus on a classic problem, which is the segregation of objects in a complex image. That is, how we identify an object and segregate it from the rest of the image. We want to see how, in performing this task, many different areas of the brain communicate with each other.

When you talk about segregating, does it mean that the brain separates the object from the general image?

Segregating is separating it, yes. For example, if you have a white box on a white wall, you may not see it. On the other hand, if it was, it would be obvious. We call the fact that there is a kind of pop-up (emerging element) with respect to the general image segregation.

What brain areas do you think are involved in this process?

After almost one century of neurophysiology we now know that there are related areas, such as the visual ones. But the beauty aspect of the project is that we think that many regions in different parts of the brain, will be involved in this task, including the subcortical areas such as the thalamus or different areas of the parietal cortex.

Your team has published an article in bioRxiv in which you describe a method to study how the networks responsible for this process are configured. What does it consist of?

We have designed global reach models, which model the activity not of a neuron or a group in a localized region, but of the entire brain

When one has a measure of brain activity covering several regions, calcium imaging techniques are used. This way you can visualize activity in large areas of the brain. With an analysis of connectivity, we want to distinguish different phases in the processing of the visual segregation task. We have tested the method with humans to distinguish when they were not doing anything from when they were watching a movie. Since the model has differentiated well the two conditions, we now hope to be able to see which areas communicate with each other with mice and with different measures of object segregation.

Is the perception process similar in the human brain and in the brain of mice?

With some anatomical and behavioral differences, the basic principle is the same. If we see that the mouse uses the subcortical system, the thalamus, it is a good clue to take these areas into account in humans.

CHAMPMouse is coordinated by the Neuroscience Institute of The Netherlands with the participation of the University of Leuven (Belgium). What are your team's tasks?

To develop statistical and modeling methods to analyze the data they measure. From these data, information is extracted that could not be obtained without explicit modeling.

The project started in January 2016 and will last three years. At what point is it today?

We have already started receiving data from awakened mice that are non-specialized in anything. This is already interesting to see which areas are communicated when one does not do anything. By the middle of the year we will receive the final data with the mouse performing the task. Applying the method, we will analyze and interpret the final result, to know which regions communicate with each other.

What new lines of research will be opened once you have completed your work?

Until now, neuroscience has been 'localizationist', that is, it tried to associate a task, a computation, a particular function to a neuron or a region. Today, the approach is holistic: we think that even the simplest tasks require a great integration of all the information that is distributed throughout the brain. The main goal of the project is to proof that this approach works well and to develop the techniques to perform these measurements on large scale animals. Within our group we have designed global reach models, which model the activity not of a neuron or a group in a localized region, but of the entire brain.

Neuroscience is in its infancy, although it has centuries of experimental tradition

What does the Human Brain Project mean for today´s neuroscience?

For the first time in Europe, it has been possible to synchronize the different research groups in the area of neuroscience. Until now, cooperation was implemented through European or national projects in small groups. To understand how the brain works, a massive and global effort is needed. Neuroscience is multidisciplinary; there is no person, no group or no university that can solve all the problems. A global, experimental, technological, computer and theoretical cooperation is needed, and the Human Brain Project tries to implement this philosophy.

Do we not know much more about the brain than we know?

Yes. Basically we do not know anything [he laughs]. Neuroscience is in its infancy, although it has centuries of experimental tradition. The need to cooperate between experimentalists and theoreticians, evident in other disciplines, such as physics, has not been assumed in neuroscience until now. Although we have a lot of data, there are practically no theories to understand the brain. We have very vague, scattered and disordered knowledge. Everything is still to be done.

In percentage terms, how much would yoy say we know?

Since I am have a physical-mathematical background, I refuse to give numbers when I do not know them [he laughs]. We do not know how much we can get to know. The limit is not clear.

SINC produces scientific news for the European SCOPE project, coordinated by FECYT and funded by the European Union through Horizon 2020, its funding program. The SCOPE mission is to communicate visionary research results of partnering projects in the framework of the Graphene Flagship and the Human Brain Project, as well as to enhance the FET Flagships partnering environment in the European Union.

Under the European Graphene Flagship initiative, three research groups from Spain, France and Germany have begun to demonstrate experimentally that graphene can be magnetized through the adsorption of individual hydrogen (H) atoms.

The project, called HiMagGraphene, is coordinated by Iván Brihuega (Madrid, 1975) from the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM).

What happens when graphene and hydrogen bond?

The results obtained to date in our project reveal that if a hydrogen atom touches a layer of graphene, it transfers its magnetic moment. Unlike more common magnetic materials –such as iron, nickel and cobalt– where the magnetic moment generated by each atom is located on a few tenths of a nanometre, the magnetic moment produced in graphene by each hydrogen atom extends several nanometres, which we can modulate on an atomic scale.

Exactly what happens during the process?

The magnetic moments produced interact strongly across large distances (in comparison with the atomic scale) following, moreover, a special rule: these moments build up or are neutralised depending on the relative position of the hydrogen atoms on the material. The structure of graphene, made up of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal shape, can be considered two triangular subnets, and if the hydrogen atoms are positioned on only one of these, magnetic moments build up. However, they are cancelled out when one hydrogen atom is positioned on each subnet.

How do you move the hydrogen atoms?

Using a powerful scanning tunneling microscope, which we use to individually visualise and manipulate these atoms. In this way, we establish the magnetic properties of selected regions of the graphene. We carried out the experiments in the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics (IFIMAC) of UAM, and the results have been complemented with sophisticated theoretical calculations. We presented the details last year in the journal “Science”.

Have you published more papers related to the project?

In 2016, together with co-workers from the Basque Country, we published another study in ”ACS Nano” in which we demonstrated how some properties of graphene vary when a metallic substrate is positioned beneath it. To be specific, the possibility of producing magnetic moments no longer exists. And in 2017, we published a study in ”The Journal of Physical Chemistry B” on the selective adsorption of hydrogen in rotated bilayers of graphene.

Which other groups are taking part in HiMagGraphene alongside you?

Two other groups. One is the Institut Néel in Grenoble (CNRS, France), which provides various types of graphene samples grown on silicon carbide. And the other is the German group from the Max-Planck-Institute (MPI) in Stuttgart, which has a unique infrastructure in scanning tunneling microscopy. We collaborate with them taking measurements at a very low temperature (lower than 1 Kelvin) and with high magnetic fields (up to 14 teslas).

Which phase of the project are you currently in?

HiMagGraphene is a three-year project which ends in November 2018. We are currently studying how to manipulate H atoms on the surface of graphene on a very large scale and with atomic precision in order to selectively modify their properties. We are also investigating the evolution of the magnetic moment produced in this material by H atoms –which we call spin polarised state– is currently being investigated depending of two factors: the magnetic field applied and the temperature of the sample.

Is spintronics a potential application of magnetic graphene?

A priori, it is an ideal material for use in spintronics, a promising technology which aims to substitute traditional electronic technology transmitting simultaneously magnetic (through spin) and electronic information. This could give way to a radically new generation of computers. The results of our project, which prove the possibility of generating magnetic moments which can communicate across large distances in graphene, anticipate a brilliant future for this material, both in the emerging field of spintronics and for its use in flexible and biocompatible magnetic devices. Furthermore, the ability to manufacture magnetic graphene would give us plastics and even magnetic textiles and nanoparticles for treating cancer.

Magnetic moments are generated when hydrogen atoms bond with carbon atoms on the graphene lattice, comprising two subnets. The moments align ferromagnetically (blue) when they are on the same subnet, and antiferromagnetically (orange) when on opposite subnets. / C. Bickel/Science

SINC produces scientific news for the European project SCOPE, coordinated by FECYT and funded by the European Union through Horizon 2020, its funding program. The SCOPE mission is to communicate visionary research results of partnering projects in the framework of the Graphene Flagship and the Human Brain Project, as well as to enhance the FET Flagships partnering environment in the European Union.

Within the large European initiative Graphene Flagship, this group coordinates a project which, however, does not focus on graphene, but on other 2D materials of growing interest with a name that is difficult to pronounce: transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). Dr. Covaci details the characteristics and applications of these novel materials.

What exactly are the TMDs?

They are a family of two-dimensional semiconductor materials with the formula MX2, where M represents a transition metal –elements of the central part of the periodic table, such as molybdenum (Mo) or tungsten (W)– and X is a chalcogen –they are located in the column of the oxygen, such as sulfur (S), selenium (S) or tellurium (Te). Inserting a layer of atoms type M between two of type X we obtain the very thin, yet stable, monolayer of TMD. They have been known for half a century in its 3D version, but the graphene advances of the last decade have also triggered interest in these two-dimensional materials and their properties.

There are many benefits of the TMDs when compared to graphene, especially in electronics applications like field effect transistors

What are the advantages of TMDs with regard to graphene?

There are many benefits of the TMDs, and other two-dimensional materials like silicene, phosphorene or germanene, when compared to graphene, especially in electronics applications like field effect transistors. Within what is called bandgap energy, graphene is a zero-gap semiconductor, i.e. a semi-metal, and it can only be used as contact or gate. One requires a tunable gap in order to develop a transistor, and most TMDs are semiconductors with sizable bandgaps.

Are there any other differences?

Another shortcoming of graphene is the fact that spin-orbit interactions are very weak, and therefore a lot of interesting physics related to spintronics is missing. This is not the case in most of the other 2D materials, where the spin-orbit coupling is large, resulting in spin-split bands and the possibility of manipulating the spins of the electrons through electrical means. Nowadays ,there is a strong push towards combining TMDs with graphene, and this way inducing by proximity desired properties, like spin-orbit coupling.

And what is the European project you are working now?

It is called Trans2DTMD, a three-year project that began in 2016. This is a theoretical investigation of electronic transport in two-dimensional and 'functionalised' TMDs, a term that refers to that they are not pure, but have some element which changes their properties. The most interesting thing is that you can dope these materials by adding impurities (like introducing or varying some atom types) or changing its topology (at edges of nanoribbons and grain boundaries) to induce, for example, a metallic phase or magnetism.

An example of TMD: molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), which can be semiconducting (left) or metallic (right) depending on the arrangement of the atoms. / Trans2DTMD

And what are the main aims of Trans2DTMD?

On one hand, we develop novel numerical methods for electronic transport calculations in 2D materials. We use both commercial numerical codes and proprietary tools developed by us to investigate its structural, optical and electronic characteristics. On the other hand, we study the effects of defects and strains on the properties of metallic TMDs, as well as predict novel 2D materials with interesting properties.

What properties and applications have these TMDs?

Their topological properties are of utmost importance in electronic applications, for example, field effect transistors, photovoltaic devices and bio-sensors. TMDs are also relevant in spintronics, an emerging technology that exploits both the charge and spin of electrons, as well as in an even more novel one: the valleytronics, where energy "valleys" in the conduction band can trap and channel the electrons and act as a new degree of freedom.

You can dope these materials by adding impurities or changing its topology to induce a metallic phase or magnetism

What progress have you made so far?

To study these materials we are developing software based on the Pybinding code created at the University of Antwerp, which will also be an open source available to the entire scientific community. We have so far implemented efficient codes that can take advantage of state-of-the-art computational resources: computer clusters and video cards. This will allow for the investigation of generic systems where disorder effects on the electrical and optical conductivity of 2D materials.

What is this software for?

It will allow the simulation of very large systems (with billions of atoms) in order to capture effects that can then be observed in experimental samples. This is important since many of the theoretical tools fail to accurately study adatoms (individual atoms attached to a crystal) and defects that disperse the electricity. With this software, it will be possible to realize accurate spintronic and valleytronics simulations.

How many groups are involved in this project?

The Trans2DTMD project is coordinated by the Condensed Matter Theory group led by Prof. François Peeters at the University of Antwerp, with extensive experience in computational and theoretical tools to study TMDs. The second member of the consortium is the Theoretical Chemistry group led by Prof. Thomas Heine at the University of Leipzig (Germany). Coordination with Graphene Flagship and aspects related to graphene is done through the Technical University of Dresden (Germany). In addition, as associated partners, the University of Twente (Netherlands) specializes in spintronics; and the University of the Basque Country, provides calculations to analyze electron-electron interactions, an important aspect in 2D materials.

Have Trans2DTMD members already published any paper?

Together with other Graphene Flagship partners, the Leipzig University group has published in Nano Letters a paper about optical quality improvements in molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2). They have also presented in 2D Materials calculations on potential and exotic properties of tantalum selenide (Ta2Se3), showing two Dirac points, rather than one as is the case of graphene. Within the effort to describe transport properties of two-dimensional materials, the University of Antwerp group has also submitted a study on the conductivity of twisted bilayer graphene for a wide range of angles of torsion and electric fields.

SINC produces scientific news for the European project SCOPE, coordinated by FECYT and funded by the European Union through Horizon 2020, its funding program. The SCOPE mission is to communicate visionary research results of partnering projects in the framework of the Graphene Flagship and the Human Brain Project, as well as to enhance the FET Flagships partnering environment in the European Union.

One of the speakers at the event, named Women in Graphene, was the researcher Cinzia Casiraghi (Milan-Italy, 1975), who leads the Nanoscience and Spectroscopy Lab at the University of Manchester. Her lecture was entitled Adventures of a female scientist in Flatland.

What have been your professional adventures?

The research career is like an iceberg: people see the successes from the top, but not all the hard work, the sacrifices, the failures and the disappointments that lie beneath. In my case, although focused on the field of materials with carbon, I have a fairly interdisciplinary background, and that is not always appreciated in some environments. I obtained my degree as Nuclear Engineering in Italy in 2001, then I obtained my PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cambridge, followed by a position as junior group (related to Physics) at the Free University in Berlin. And I am now full professor at the School of Chemistry at the University of Manchester. Throughout this time there were difficult decisions, like leaving Cambridge, for example, or deciding between important options.

"Inks made of 2D materials like the graphene can be injected together to create arrays of light detectors and logic memories"

What do you mean?

As a researcher I had two options: to stay in the same department and group, or to establish my own group somewhere else. In the first case it meant to stay in an established laboratory, with nice equipment, in a famous university, where you know everybody, every facility and so on; but it is going to be difficult to gain independence and recognition. On the contrary, creating a new group meant starting from scratch, from an empty laboratory, to look for facilities, with limited money; though with independence and complete freedom. I chose this option at the end, but it was the most difficult moment of my career. Although earning respect as an independent researcher within the community still is one of the most challenging tasks, even with an independent lab.

And what is the most rewarding moment in your professional life?

It is when people recognize your work. The most rewarding is to receive messages of support and gratitude from colleagues and students. For example, recently I received a message from an undergraduate student to thank for my lectures on graphene, stating: "I have never been so interested in lectures since many years - well done!". Or when a colleague wrote me, "Cinzia, you fully deserve the ERC grant for your hard work, and I am very happy for you, you are a great model for all of us."

This prestigious European grant, with almost 2 million euros, is for your project Nucleation of Organic Crystals onto 2D materials (NOC2D). What are its objectives?

It is a ‘blue sky project’ (with applications that are not apparent), where I would like to use graphene as template in order to understand, and therefore control, the nucleation of organic crystals in liquids. Despite several studies, it is still unclear yet how molecules in solution start interacting to form a crystal. This process is however of fundamental importance in several fields, such as in the food and pharmaceutical industries. My project will mostly focus on graphene, but other 2D materials are currently very interesting (such as dichalcogenides) because they could be used in applications where graphene is not suitable. Indeed, in nature there are hundreds of layered materials that can be exfoliated to the single-layer level, giving rise to a 2-Dimensional material.

Is this your line of research?

Currently I have three research lines. One is dedicated to the characterization of 2D materials by Raman spectroscopy –a technique used to characterize nanostructures– in particular with the aim of helping the industry to improve the standardization of graphene-based materials. The second one is related to the development of inkjet printable inks made of water-based 2D materials (not toxic) which, as the parts of a LEGO, can be injected together to create a wide range of flexible devices, such as arrays of light detectors printed on silicon and plastic, as well as logic memories (devices used to store information in form of binary code). This breakthrough was published in February on the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Photodetectors printed in a plastic material and logical memories (with binary code of zeros and ones) created with 2D materials like the graphene. / Casiraghi Group / Univ. Manchester

Finally, I have just started the NOC2D project, where I aim at combining the knowledge and skills gained in the first two projects to investigate the nucleation of organic crystals in solution.

It is one of the projects of excellence of the Graphene Flagship, the largest European research initiative. What would you highlight about it?

Usually, it takes many years for a new material to be optimized and implemented into real products. The Graphene Flagship initiative is helping at accelerating the use of graphene in commercial products by coordinating all the major European scientists working in the graphene field and by promoting collaborations with companies.

"There is rather limited visibility for women working in the field of new materials"

When will we see the first applications of graphene?

Some are already here. For example in various composites, sensors and RF tags (radio frequency emitters). I also know that in China you can buy a graphene-mobile phone. As mentioned already, we should take into account that it is normal for a new material to take several years to be optimized and integrated into a specific application. Probably the main challenge is to develop mass-production techniques suitable for electronics, which requires high quality materials.

What is the situation of women in this field?

I have seen an increase in the number of women working on graphene at the student and postdoctoral level in the last 10 years; however, this increase is not reflected in the number of female group leaders and professors - indeed, the number of female speakers who get invited in major graphene conferences is very low, typically below 30%. Clearly there is still a lot to do to support and promote the career of women, in particularly in the University. In general, I think there is rather limited visibility for women working in the field of new materials for disruptive technologies.

How can Brexit affect European projects in the UK, and your life in particular?

It is difficult to say at the moment. We still do not know whether the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union will affect British universities and how the process will be, or how it will impact on access to EU funding. Certainly, it is not ideal to work with such uncertainty, in particular if one has family in England, as is my case. Some years ago an inspirational woman, who has been the first female Institute Professor at MIT, Prof Millie Dresselhaus, told me: “Family is very important because it will be always there to support you, even in difficult times”. Having the support of your partner, your kids, close friends, etc – people who really care about you - is superimportant to move forward, also in your professional career.

Playing LEGO with graphene and other 2D materials

Scientists layer graphene and other 2D crystal inks (tungsten disulfide or WS2, and hexagonal-boron nitride or hBN) with their deposition techniques in a similar way to stack bricks of Lego. The result is a ‘heterostructure’ that you can use to create devices with a specific purpose. / Credit: Casiraghi Group/Univ. Manchester

SINC produces scientific news for the European project SCOPE, coordinated by FECYT and funded by the European Union through Horizon 2020, its funding program. The SCOPE mission is to communicate visionary research results of partnering projects in the framework of the Graphene Flagship and the Human Brain Project, as well as to enhance the FET Flagships partnering environment in the European Union.

The mobile phone that we carry in our pocket has become a very interesting, ubiquitous sensor for finding out how people behave and, in addition, how our society behaves: it gathers data about how, when and with whom we communicate, where we are and how we move. This makes it possible to study human behavior and society’s behavior on a spatial, temporal and social level that is unprecedented. This can lead to understanding how information and epidemics are propagated in our society, how transport can be improved in big cities or how the authorities can be helped in emergency situations.

Which of the sensors on a Smartphone are the most interesting when it comes to gathering data?

Of course, the most important, “sensor” is the one that comes from the calls. That is, the telephone tells us where the call is being made from (which tower or station) and where it is being received. This tells us how, where and with whom we communicate. But the other sensors also give us a lot of information. For example, the GPS to locate our messages in applications. Other examples are the accelerometer on Smartphone’s that, in addition to improving the user’s experience, are being used to detect diseases such as Parkinson’s.

Will the new intelligent phones be able to incorporate more sensors of other kinds?

Yes, in the future they will, but what seems to be the trend right now is that intelligent phones manage the data from other devices (wearables). We are seeing this now in health applications.

Is analyzing this type of data a problem due to the issue of personal privacy?

In most applications, the user is informed that these data are going to be used, like what happens with social networking applications like Facebook or Twitter. Normally, access to these data has a trade-off for the user (recommendations of places, information searches, etc), so the user agrees to make their data accessible. In other contexts, the data are added at spatial and temporal levels that do not allow the user to be individually “de-anonymized”, as data protection laws require. Nevertheless, it is important that the user knows who uses this data and when it is used. At the NetMob conference there are a lot of groups participating that work in the are of “privacy”, that is, how to allow users to preserve their privacy at the same time that companies and administrations use their data for important applications such as managing epidemics, emergency situations, fraud, etc.

What social problems can be dealt with through the analysis of this type of data?

Access to large telephone databases (especially mobile phone) has changed the way we observe society. For example, we can now study the movements or social interactions of millions of people or of an entire city. This allows us to collect data, practically in real time, regarding how people are moving, how many of them are sharing public transport or how they are communicating. The main problems that are studied are related to social questions (segregation in cities, improving public transport in cities, recommending places to visit, detecting events), economic issues (detecting economic indicators, poverty, unemployment, underground economy, geomarketing), safety problems (crime, prevention or management of emergency situations) or issues related to health.

In this congress how to use these data for development will also be discussed. Can you tell us about this initiative?

Whereas in developed countries mobile phone data complement the data that agencies or governments have with regard to the census, to how we move… in developing countries these data do not exist or are difficult to obtain. For example, in some African countries, there is not a precise census of the population, although the rate of mobile telephone use is very high. Therefore, the use of mobile phone data can be of help in obtaining a census of the population, or the people’s patterns of movement to study how epidemics are propagated or to estimate levels of unemployment based on levels of activity in different zones of a country. In the congress, there is an important part in which Orange and agencies like the World Bank and the United Nations have released data on calls in Senegal so that researchers can propose new ideas for their study and application to problems of transport, energy and health.

Can having intelligent phones help to create a more intelligent city?

As I said before, telephone data can give us access to information on the mobility and social interactions of people, practically in real time. This allows us to have a better idea of how the inhabitants of a city interact with their surroundings and, thus, it gives us a better idea of how areas of a city are used, what responses there are to changes that occur in transportation, what events are occurring and what is their impact, etc. All of this, evidently, is currently being used in many cities to improve organization and management.

During this congress, applications in the area of the economy are also discussed. Which of these really stand out?

Telephone calls allow us to know about a person’s behavior, which is limited by their socio-economic situation. For example, a person who works makes two very predictable movements during the day: from home to work and from work to home. For this reason, many researchers are trying to discover a person’s socio-economic status based on their telephone calls. This has two applications that stand out: for example, several groups are trying to predict the probability of a loan going unpaid based on a person’s telephone calls. Other groups are trying to guess whether or not a person is unemployed based on their mobile phone data and also to say something about the unemployment rate in neighborhoods or cities.

We live in a world with an ever-increasing amount of data. Do we have sufficient calculating capability to analyze these enormous volumes of information?

The volume of data limits the type of analysis that can be carried out on those large databases. But this is becoming less and less so, because many of the algorithms that are being used are being adapted to this large volume (or speed of appearance) of data.

What are the main trends or future developments, in the short- and mid- term, in this area of research?

Of course, a very important area for researchers, governments and companies is privacy. It is an interesting problem: how to make it so that a user cannot be “de-anonymized” (cannot lose their anonymity) in a large database, while at the same time maintaining the potential of their data.

What does organizing a congress like this entail?

For me, a lot of work and, of course, an honor. We have participants from five continents at this congress. They come from different branches of study, from private companies like Telefónica, Orange, Google, from agencies like the World Bank, UNICEF, the United Nations and universities like MIT itself, Harvard, Oxford, etc.

What is the MIT Media Lab on the inside?

The MIT Media Lab is a different type of research center. Here the main thing is to try to carry out interdisciplinary research where there is a convergence of branches of study as divergent as physics, math, sociology, or the arts like architecture, visual arts, etc. Thus, it is a unique place, where the most immediate applications converge in the search for “the next big thing”.

R. Well, I’m afraid that that title of the book may discourage more than one reader, but it shouldn’t. The intelligence I am referring to is an attitude, not an IQ number. What I mean is being curious, wanting to understand the world around us, and having a taste for thinking and wondering. Science is for people who have that thirst for knowledge, and I think that is something we all have as children, when everything is new for us and we see it all as a mystery. It’s just that then we are too small to have the criteria and ability to reason that science requires. And when we are old enough to have them, many times what we have lost is our curiosity…

You advocate un-learning the science that we know. Why?

In school they teach us a lot of things, but we learn them without really understanding them. For example, that the Earth is round or that it moves around the Sun. When we are older, we take these things for granted, as if they were obvious, but they are not at all obvious and the majority of us really have no idea how to explain why they are that way. If we had to convince a skeptic, we wouldn’t be able to. The fact is that many times what kills scientific curiosity is education itself: they give us a bunch of answers before we have even asked the questions, which takes away all the fun. That’s why I begin my book by inviting the reader to un-learn, to look at the world with the eyes of a Greek from the sixth century BC, who knows nothing of what we are taught at school about the Earth, the Sun or the stars, but who has his/her eyes wide open, observes what is around him/her and tries to understand it. That Greek is going to “do” science and the reader can identify with him/her and “do” science too, thinking for him/herself and discovering things even before I tell them about them.

With the eyes of a Greek who, more than knowing science, understands it, right?

Yes, it is one thing to know the content of science and another to understand it. In the university, for example, we have students who have studied a lot of material, entire syllabi of Physics and Chemistry, but who have a very weak and often mistaken idea of what science is.

So then, what is science?

Above all, it is a way of looking at the world and thinking about it. It is common to identify science with its results, with the entire enormous repertoire of knowledge that we have been given. That is the idea that students usually have, because they have spent years studying the results. This happens with a lot of people, who say that this thing or that is “a scientific fact” or that something is “scientifically proven”, as a synonym for “this is a truth that leaves no room for doubt”. But I believe that looking at science this way is a mistake. For one thing, it tends to mythologize it too much, to identify science as the only truth, as if there were no other valid ways to approach reality; and at the same time, this weakens science, because it leaves out all of its dynamics, all of its humanity, everything that makes it something that is alive. Science is a human activity, not a catalogue of results, or dead dogmas.

When was science born?

It is really like what happens with humans: they have a date of birth, but it takes a few years before their personality is defined and they reach adulthood. The birth certificate for science comes from ancient Greece, but it didn’t become an adult until Newton. Thus, the title of the book, which attempts to tell about those formative years that defined science’s personality.

Was it dangerous to “do” science in that era?

There is a certain tendency to present the great scientists of the past as heroes or martyrs, as champions in the struggle of the light against the darkness. Carl Sagan wrote many pages with this argument, pages that were very emotional, but also very deceptive. It makes no sense to present the history of science as a fight between the good guys and the bad guys. Historically it has almost always been dangerous to fly in the face of the dominant beliefs, but science is about how the natural world is, and ideas about Nature have never been as controversial as ideas about politics or religion. Cases like Galileo’s have been more the exception than the rule; in most cases the main danger to scientists has been that they were not understood or were marginalized by their peers. And even then, the ideas that have triumphed have almost always been the ones that deserved to triumph.

These great scientists also made some mistakes, of some importance…

Of course they did, but many times what we see as like mistakes were really good ideas in their time, and vice versa. The greatest astronomers from ancient times, like Hipparchus or Ptolemy, were opposed to Aristarchus, who, in the third century BC, defended the idea that Earth is not immobile but rather rotates around the Sun. Were they wrong? Today we know that they were indeed wrong, but in reality they were doing the best science that could be done at that time. In light of the physics and evidence that were available to them, Aristarchus’s theory was implausible and it was more rational to believe that the Earth was motionless in the center of the universe. Furthermore, we have cases like that of Kepler, who came up with his famous laws regarding the orbits of the planets using reasoning that was erroneous in almost all of its steps. Or that of Galileo, who made extraordinary contributions to Physics and Astronomy, but scorned Kepler’s laws and insisted that the tides proved that the Earth moved, an error that complicated his situation in the face of the Inquisition even more. These kinds of missteps are almost never mentioned, but to me they are fascinating because I think they teach us a great deal more about science than conventional history, which only tells us about the successes, as if we should be ashamed that scientists are human…

How do students react when you tell them these kinds of things?

One of the things that really grabs their attention is the number of myths and urban legends there are related to science. For example, almost all of them believe that Columbus thought the Earth was flat, and that this was the reason that he couldn’t get sponsors. It was hard for them to believe that what they had been taught in school was just a legend.

Is the history or philosophy of science part of the curriculum for engineering or pure science degrees?

They are not part of those curricula, and I find that a regrettable lack. Science and technology are part of culture and we are cutting off that aspect, depriving our students of it. I am fortunate to be able to teach a course on these subjects at my university, but it’s a Humanities course, which some students choose as an elective. I feel that in the sciences and in engineering we should be doing what they do in Medicine, where the history of the discipline has been a required subject for many years.

Can science popularization resolve this deficiency?

In recent years there has been an authentic boom in popular science in Spain, but I’m not so sure that this change can be translated into more scientific vocations or in greater science culture in society at large, because I think it is often headed in the wrong direction. For example, it has become a slogan to say, “science is fun”, but I don’t think it is especially fun, nor that presenting it in this way is really a very good strategy.

Why?

Science is not about explosions or machines that make your hair stand on end. I think that this kind of popular science is actually looking down on its audience, because it implies that they are incapable of appreciating the intellectual effort required to understand things, which is where the real beauty of science lies. And there is another variant of popular science which attempts to attract the public with abracadabra results: light that travels faster than light, black holes that evaporate or quantum particles that are tele-transported… these are questions that are so difficult that the general public really cannot understand anything and they have to be guided by metaphors and accept what the experts say as articles of faith. But using that authority’s argument is the absolute opposite of the spirit of science! And in using that type of popular science, we promote an attitude of credulity, which is not very rigorous and is definitely anti-scientific.

So how would be improve the popularization of science, in your opinion?

I think the key is that the objective should not be so much to transmit scientific knowledge, but rather to spread a scientific attitude and to understand what it can give us, its reach and how it works. The best popular science would be one that teaches us that way of looking at the world and that disciplined thinking that we talked about before; specifically, the one that would teach us to think like scientists. I think it’s possible, if we make that first effort to un-learn so that we can think for ourselves. This is what I have tried to do in my book.

Further information:

"Un magnífico libro sobre la esencia del periodismo científico". Reseña de Carlos Elías del libro: De Tales a Newton (“A magnificent book on the essence of scientific journalism”. Review by Carlos Elías for the book: De Tales a Newton)

De Tales a Newton: ciencia para personas inteligentes (blog de Juan Meléndez) (From Thales to Newton: science for intelligent people – blog by Juan Meléndez)

The middle classes are the backbone of the welfare state, the main consumers and also the principal taxpayers that ensure the viability of our system. In the midst of the current economic crisis, they are being hard hit by unemployment, job precariousness and the ensuing social decline.

And what about the expectations of a better future?

The principle underlying the behavior of the middle classes is the so-called “delayed gratification”. That is, strive today to have a better life tomorrow. However, because our prospects of having a standard of living at least like that of our parents are dim, this notion is being challenged and is having a devastating effect on society as a whole. Expectations to live or reproduce the lifestyle of the middle or upper-middle classes is one of the driving forces of our societies.

The results of your research have revealed that there is a new family conflict in Spain: the work-family issue. Did it not exist before?

It has always existed, but the problem has exacerbated in today’s society, in which citizens demand goods and services 24 hours a day, and men and women work very long hours in shifts or at night. Until recently, middle class families traditionally had resources to cushion this conflict: either by working in middle or senior level positions that allowed them to negotiate their terms of employment with their employers or to pay for help at home to meet the demands of the job.

Negotiating within companies has now become much more difficult because of this demand for around-the-clock services

What is happening now?

Negotiating within companies has now become much more difficult because of this demand for around-the-clock services. Also, paying for help at home has become substantially more costly. That is, middle class families face a work-family conflict that is exacerbated by the crisis and market conditions, and no longer have access to the means they traditionally used to get by.

Why did you choose families of working married couples with an intermediate to high level of education for your study?

Because this is a group that has not been widely studied and represents both the middle and upper-middle class in Spain, where many couples have an intermediate or higher education. It is a group that is undergoing a process of gradual degradation, which in some cases becomes users of social services as a consequence of the current economic crisis.

What were the main variables of your study?

The work-family conflict, the influence of support in caring for the family, and how the presence or absence of this support can buffer or intensify the feeling of being “burned out” in both men and women.

The work conflict interferes in men’s family life, while the family conflict creates more problems at work for women

What differences did you find in terms of gender?

The work conflict interferes in men’s family life, while the family conflict creates more problems at work for women. We are lacking work/family reconciliation policies and the sharing of roles and family responsibilities still carries little weight within Spanish families.

Is there any way to overcome these differences?

Social support for family care at all levels – from the micro level (household help) to the macro level (reconciliation policies) – is key: when the family has this support, stress and feelings of inefficiency lessen in both women and men. Moreover, when there is little time to take care of family obligations, women suffer more than men, suggesting that the traditional division of roles is still prevalent in family care.

How do these families manage their family obligations?

Family obligations are not optional, that is, parents cannot put their family’s needs on the back burner. Therefore, families as a group and its individual members are forced to meet the demands of a job that allows them to at least subsist economically, but which does not leave much room for personal and emotional well-being. Family members become exhausted in their efforts to meet the demands of both spheres of their lives, without satisfactory results. Spanish families deprived of their middle class status are forced to choose between work and family.

How do you expect this problem to evolve?

Because working hours are becoming increasingly long in our society, we need to design better reconciliation policies. If we fail to do so, the conflict will only increase in intensity. Since the number of middle class families in Spain has increased, as well as their social vulnerability, social work practitioners need to design better support programs that promote the reconciliation of work and family life for a group that traditionally has not made use of these social services.

Do these families pose a current challenge for social work in Spain?

In the current economic crisis, many middle class families find themselves caught up in a context of social exclusion, where not even their economic survival is guaranteed. The impacts of the crisis are heightened as those accustomed to the comfort social inclusion provides are further fragmented due to the lack of such comfort. It is not only a question of reproducing a lifestyle that has been inherited or corresponds to what we understand as the “middle class”. In this work-family debate, it is a question of not losing this lifestyle completely. Indeed, yes, these families represent a new challenge for social work in our country.

References:

Sagrario Segado Sánchez-Cabezudo, Antonio López Peláez. “Social work with middle-class Spanish families: The challenge of the work-family conflict”, International Journal of Social Welfare, 2014, nº 23, pp. 100-111. DOI: 10.1111/ijsw.12012.