Learn about how qualified immunity prevents police misconduct from being punished; why we’re due for “wandering star” Gliese 710 to visit our solar system soon; and what studying prairie voles can teach us about successful long-lasting relationships.
Learn about how qualified immunity prevents police misconduct from being punished; why we’re due for “wandering star” Gliese 710 to visit our solar system soon; and what studying prairie voles can teach us about successful long-lasting relationships.
Qualified immunity is why police misconduct is rarely punished by Kelsey Donk
Wandering stars "visit" our solar system every so often, and we're due for another by Grant Currin
Prairie vole study suggests longing is a key ingredient in long-lasting relationships by Grant Currin
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/qualified-immunity-in-police-misconduct-why-longing-is-important-in-relationships-and-wandering-stars-regularly-visit-our-solar-system
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about the policies that prevent police misconduct from being punished; why we’re due for a “wandering star” to visit our solar system soon; and what studying prairie voles can teach us about successful long-lasting relationships.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Here in the United States, it feels like police reform is on everyone’s minds. And even if you don’t live in the US, there’s a good chance you’ve seen pictures and videos online lately that are hard to explain. Things like police officers doing some seemingly questionable things, in both protest and non-protest situations. Curiosity Daily is a pretty apolitical podcast, and we’re stay as objective and scientific as we can. But there’s a policy called qualified immunity that we feel is important enough to take take a few minutes to explain. It’s a major reason why police officers in the US who violate someone’s constitutional rights are rarely held accountable by the courts. So here’s the story.
Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine, and it’s not something the average person hears about on a day to day basis. Basically, qualified immunity protects government officials, like police officers, from punishment for violating someone’s rights unless those rights are quote-unquote “clearly established.” Defenders of qualified immunity say that without this legal protection, police officers and other government officials simply wouldn’t take the job. It would be too risky.
But over time, the definition of what’s “clearly established” has gotten much more narrow, according to law experts. It’s come to mean that police officers can’t be charged in civil rights lawsuits unless other courts have found a similar act to be unconstitutional. As Justice Byron R. White wrote in a 1986 Supreme Court decision, quote, “As the qualified immunity defense has evolved, it provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” unquote.
There are three main arguments against qualified immunity. And I want to be clear up-front that there is bipartisan support for eliminating it in its current form — this is not just coming from the quote-unquote “left” or “right.”
Number one: it makes it harder for victims to seek justice. If they know that there’s no precedent for a case like theirs, they may not even file a lawsuit in the first place.
Number two: even if someone wants to sue, it may be too hard to find a lawyer that will represent them. If a case is dismissed on qualified immunity grounds, lawyers don’t get paid for their time, so they may not take the case.
The third problem, according to law scholars, is that qualified immunity freezes constitutional law. If every rights violation always has to be proven in some earlier case, nothing will ever be proven. If no one else has been charged for, say, seizing $275,000 on a search warrant and only reporting $50,000 of it, the court tends to say that the rights violation isn’t clearly established, and they dismiss the lawsuit. And the next time it happens? It won’t have been established then, either.
Politicians and experts on both sides of the aisle have suggested doing away with qualified immunity, and there are at least two bills in Congress proposed to do just that. They may have a long road ahead of them: last month, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case challenging qualified immunity. It just goes to show that change isn’t quick or simple. But it is possible.
Our solar system occasionally has visitors. No, not that kind of visitor. I’m talking about celestial objects like asteroids, comets, and even whole stars. Thanks to data from Earth-bound telescopes and an ambitious project to map the Milky Way, we’re pretty certain that a wandering star once passed right through our solar system — and there’s another that’s scheduled to do the same thing.
The ancient wandering star I’m talking about is called Scholz’s star, and it’s actually not just one star — it’s a binary system made up of two stars orbiting each other. Modern science didn’t learn about Scholz’s star until 2013, but the humans and Neanderthals that were around 70,000 years ago probably took note. It’s a relatively small red dwarf orbiting an even bigger brown dwarf, but the star system did get pretty close. Modern calculations suggest that Scholz’s star came within one light-year of the sun and passed right through the Oort Cloud, the haze of aspiring comets that hang out beyond Pluto’s orbit.
We don’t have any evidence about how the prehistoric fly-by affected the people who saw it, but it looks like Scholz’s star did leave a lasting impact on our solar system. There’s reason to think the star system drew a few new comets into the inner solar system from the Oort cloud. New evidence suggests it might have even drawn a few objects from outer space.
We aren’t expecting anything like Scholz’s star to pass by in our lifetimes, but new data from the space observatory Gaia suggests that a much larger star, called Gliese 710, is on course to pass through the outer solar system in the future. Cosmologists think the star could have a big effect on the Oort cloud. But don’t worry — Gliese 710 isn’t really our problem. It probably isn’t a threat to Earth, and according to data from Gaia, it’s slated to arrive in about 1.4 million years. We’ll be long gone before it gets anywhere close.
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What keeps relationships going strong? That feeling of longing when you’re apart may be just as important as how you feel when you’re together. That’s according to a team of neuroscientists, who scanned the brains of a particularly romantic rodent species as they dramatically reunited, rom-com style. And what the team learned tells us important things about the science of love.
Mammals are not a particularly monogamous class; only about 3 to 5 percent of mammal species tend to mate for life. The rodent poster-child for this lovey-dovey club is the prairie vole, an adorable, fuzzy, hamster-like animal that could fit in the palm of your hand. Prairie voles form pair bonds after they mate that usually last for life — all two to three years of it. When their offspring is born, the couple splits parenting duties, and when one mate dies, the other experiences grief. For those reasons, this little animal is a popular study subject for love research.
Still, this is the first time scientists have used them to understand what happens in the brain regarding a key aspect of monogamy: the longing to reunite with a partner after being separated. After all, in order to stay together for the long haul, you’ve got to want to be with your partner even when they’re away.
The researchers studied that motivation by staging a bit of relationship choreography and scanning the lovers’ brains at several points along the way. They were particularly interested in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. It’s associated with pleasure — whether from love or from hard drugs — and previous studies in humans have shown that it lights up when a subject is holding hands with a romantic partner, but not with a stranger.
The researchers in this study thought the voles’ nucleus accumbens would be more active when they cuddled up next to a partner than when they were next to a vole they’d never met. But surprise! That didn’t happen. The scans looked about the same.
But there was a situation when the nucleus accumbens went wild, and that was when voles that had been separated from their partner were running to meet them, like the final airport scene in Love Actually. During those moments of reunification, a cluster of neurons the researchers named the "partner approach ensemble" went wild. And here’s the cutest part: that cluster was bigger in pairs that had been together for longer.
So if you can’t be with your partner right now, lean into that longing. It just means your relationship is strong. [Also, if you’re looking for a cute pet name, I’m pretty sure “prairie vole” is up for grabs.]
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s stories were written by Kelsey Donk and Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Today’s episode was produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!