Philippa Kaur

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Latitude is geographer Nicholas Crane’s account of the first international scientific expedition, in 1735, to discover the planet’s shape, a journey beset by egos, disease, mutiny and murder.
Anti-Body by Alexander Whiteley Dance Company, Photo by Sodium
Visit
Anti-Body on 8 October at DanceEast in Ipswich, UK, sees dancers reacting to motion-responsive visuals in Alexander Whitley’s latest experiment in performance and new media. A tour follows.Advertisement

Watch
Five Patterns That Explain the Universe are explored by Brian Clegg on 7 October at 18.00 BST. This New Scientist event unpacks the shapes, from Feynman diagrams to the DNA double helix, on which reality depends. More

Three decades spent working as a psychotherapist with the most violent offenders has convinced Gwen Adshead that they aren’t the monsters we portray them as

Humans

29 September 2021

By Rowan Hooper

Jennie Edwards
HOW do people come to commit violent and life-threatening acts? Some think such people are innately bad, calling them “monsters” or “evil”. It is a view that William Shakespeare encapsulated in The Tempest when Prospero says of Caliban that he is “a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick”. But Gwen Adshead doesn’t accept that view. She has spent her career working as a psychotherapist with offenders in prisons and secure psychiatric hospitals, including Broadmoor Hospital, where some of the UK’s most notorious criminals are detained. Rather than seeing violent offenders as being innately evil, she thinks of her patients as survivors … More

By Annalee Newitz

traveler111/iStockphoto
LAST year, High Country News published an online, interactive map that helped me understand 200 years of US history in about 10 minutes. At first glance, it looks like one of those airline maps that show flight paths: blue and red lines arc over the nation, linking east to west. But when the map is fully loaded, there are so many lines that they blur into a cocoon swaddling the skies over North America. This isn’t a map of connection after all, it is a chronicle of property theft, done in the name of education.
Anyone familiar with the … More

By Sam Wong

Shutterstock/bigacis
TO CREATE perfectly cooked food, you need precise control over its temperature. It is this thinking that led to the invention of the sous vide method, in which food is cooked in a water bath held at a steady temperature. If you like splashing out on gadgets, you can buy the equipment to do this at home, but DIY methods also exist.
Why bother? Suppose you are cooking a thick steak and you want it to be medium rare. How well cooked a steak is largely depends on the maximum temperature the meat reaches, rather than how long it … More

Food waste isn’t just morally objectionable; it also produces vast amounts of greenhouse gases. But this is one food fight we can win, with simple actions at home and new tech in industry

Humans

22 September 2021

By Marta Zaraska

Fabio Buonocore
I OFTEN feel guilty in the kitchen. The problem isn’t my cooking; I live in France and pride myself on my culinary skills. The cause of my guilt is the amount of food I keep throwing away. A pile of leftover pasta, the uneaten salmon from my daughter’s plate, some expired tofu discovered at the back of the fridge – in it all goes. It sits there in a heap on top of the plastic packaging in which most of the food came wrapped.
It might be a modest heap in my kitchen bin, but, worldwide, food waste is a problem of supersized proportions. About a third of all produce is lost or wasted, most of it thrown into landfill. As that food rots, it produces vast amounts of greenhouse gases. If food waste were a country, its carbon footprint would almost match that of the US. You might say that instead of cooking our food, we are cooking the planet. No wonder that scientists, campaigners – and plenty of ordinary folk like me – are deeply worried.
I decided to turn to science and ask what we really know about how to make sure less food is squandered. It was eye-opening, to say the least. I have changed the way I shop and eat. My preferences on the way food is packaged have been transformed. I also learned that the food industry is at the beginning of some sweeping technological shifts, which could see food waste become not a problem, but an opportunity.
For most of human history, sustenance has been hard won and not something we would have dreamed of … More

There’s a lot that can go slightly wrong with the human body and most of the time science can’t explain why. But even our unremarkable illnesses deserve closer inspection

Humans

22 September 2021

By Graham Lawton

Adam Nickel
FOR a few months last year, I broke the habit of a lifetime and started keeping a diary. I hadn’t taken a sudden interest in recording my innermost thoughts, I was conducting a scientific-experiment-cum-book-project. I called it my “Mustn’t Grumble” diary; every evening, I noted down all of my minor health woes from that day.
Keeping a record confirmed what I had suspected – that I’m constantly slightly ill. Highlights included a cold, a twitchy eyelid that drove me nuts for three days and a terrifying loss of taste and smell. There was also the tedious matter of my chronically … More

By Gege Li

Volcanic activity destroyed Plymouth in Montserrat, but in space, it could be the key to lifeNatalie Starkey
Book
Fire and Ice
Natalie Starkey

SINCE the dawn of its formation, the surface of Earth has been moulded and reshaped by volcanoes. We know them as fiery, magma-filled peaks spewing lava and billowing clouds of ash. Yet beyond our own planet, volcanoes come in many shapes and sizes, not all of which are hot. Understanding their mysterious ways could provide key clues in the hunt for alien life.
Fire and Ice, by science … More

By Davide Abbatescianni

Inheriting mining rights on Arrakis is a poisoned chalice for Paul (right)Chiabella James/Warner Bros
FilmDuneIn UK cinemas from 22 October

ONE of the most anticipated flicks at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is the first chapter of a new two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel.
The story begins in AD 10,191 in a universe ruled by an interstellar empire in which noble houses fight to control planetary fiefs.Advertisement
The Atreides family, led by Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) is tasked with administering Arrakis, an inhospitable desert planet abundant in “spice”, a mind-altering substance that is crucial for interstellar travel. Neither the planet’s previous rulers, the Harkonnens, nor its hardy citizens, the Fremen, are pleased to see them – and mining spice is made treacherous by the presence of gigantic, territorial sandworms.
The first part of the film depicts the transition of power after the family’s arrival on Arrakis, and establishes the relationships that the Duke’s son Paul (Timothée Chalamet) has with his mother, the mystical Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and his two mentors, weapons master Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) and swordmaster Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa).
This set-up is effective: we learn that Paul fears his future as the next Duke, that he dedicates himself to intellectual and physical training and that he can count on his parents who, despite their institutional roles, are generally supportive.
As Dune progresses, however, the focus shifts from family drama towards politics and the turbulent relations with the Fremen. This transforms the remaining two-thirds of the film into a dull space opera, where the serious and the overly solemn tone starts to impinge on the excitement and mystery. Meanwhile, the story descends into cliché-filled dialogues about strength, courage and honour, the likes of which are all too common in the sci-fi and superhero genres.
Villeneuve takes spectacular visuals to the next level – the Harkonnens’ attack on Arrakis is a prime example, as is the scene in which Idaho manages to dispatch half a dozen enemies with relative ease despite a serious stab wound to the chest.
While the movie is packed with tension, majestic heroism and countless mortal dangers, it is sadly let down by the mediocre quality of the writing and the varying levels of performance among the cast.
Chalamet successfully embodies a young man hesitantly embracing the perils and the responsibilities of adulthood. Stellan Skarsgård brilliantly portrays Baron Vladimir Harkonnen’s greed and pure evil, and it is a shame that his character wasn’t more present throughout. Ferguson, however, fails to provide the complexity of her tripartite role of wife, mystic and mother. She opts for a strange neutrality of expression that struggles to prompt any particular sympathy or antipathy.
Chani, the Fremen warrior portrayed by Zendaya, is reduced to someone bathed by the setting sun, and who occasionally shows up in Paul’s visions. Later, she makes a short, clichéd “tough-girl” appearance, before taking part in one of the most banal endings in the history of sci-fi.
Overall, the adrenaline-filled scenes teamed with Hans Zimmer’s omnipresent, bombastic score make the 155-minute viewing time a rather tiring experience. Unfortunately, the visually astonishing cinematography by Greig Fraser, the star-studded cast and the industrial quantities of special effects don’t save the day.
Dune fails to deliver the ecological, anti-colonialist spirit of the original novel, nor does it provide an urgent, fresh take that would justify retelling its epic vicissitudes. In short: too much action, not nearly enough heart. More