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    Climate change drove the expansion of the Tupi people in South America

    By Krista Charles

    Alto Paraná Atlantic forests, BrazilLuiz Alves/EyeEm/Getty Images
    The Tupi people, who originated in what is now Brazil, probably spread out from this ancestral location following climatic change.
    The language they speak, also called Tupi, is one of the most widespread language families among the Indigenous peoples of South America, and emerged about 5000 years ago in the south-west Amazon.
    Jonas Gregorio de Souza at the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and his colleagues explored just how it came to be so widespread by simulating different scenarios for human expansion in South … More

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    Space rocks may have bounced off baby Earth, but slammed into Venus

    Squabbling sibling planets may have hurled space rocks when they were young.

    Simulations suggest that space rocks the size of baby planets struck both the newborn Earth and Venus, but many of the rocks that only grazed Earth went on to hit — and stick — to Venus. That difference in early impacts could help explain why Earth and Venus are such different worlds today, researchers report September 23 in the Planetary Science Journal.

    “The pronounced differences between Earth and Venus, in spite of their similar orbits and masses, has been one of the biggest puzzles in our solar system,” says planetary scientist Shigeru Ida of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the new work. This study introduces “a new point that has not been raised before.”

    Scientists have typically thought that there are two ways that collisions between baby planets can go. The objects could graze each other and each continue on its way, in a hit-and-run collision. Or two protoplanets could stick together, or accrete, making one larger planet. Planetary scientists often assume that every hit-and-run collision eventually leads to accretion. Objects that collide must have orbits that cross each other’s, so they’re bound to collide again and again, and eventually should stick.

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    But previous work from planetary scientist Erik Asphaug of the University of Arizona in Tucson and others suggests that isn’t so. It takes special conditions for two planets to merge, Asphaug says, like relatively slow impact speeds, so hit-and-runs were probably much more common in the young solar system.

    Asphaug and colleagues wondered what that might have meant for Earth and Venus, two apparently similar planets with vastly different climates. Both worlds are about the same size and mass, but Earth is wet and clement while Venus is a searing, acidic hellscape (SN: 2/13/18).

    “If they started out on similar pathways, somehow Venus took a wrong turn,” Asphaug says.

    The team ran about 4,000 computer simulations in which Mars-sized protoplanets crashed into a young Earth or Venus, assuming the two planets were at their current distances from the sun. The researchers found that about half of the time, incoming protoplanets grazed Earth without directly colliding. Of those, about half went on to collide with Venus.

    Unlike Earth, Venus ended up accreting most of the objects that hit it in the simulations. Hitting Earth first slowed incoming objects down enough to let them stick to Venus later, the study suggests. “You have this imbalance where things that hit the Earth, but don’t stick, tend to end up on Venus,” Asphaug says. “We have a fundamental explanation for why Venus ended up accreting differently from the Earth.”

    If that’s really what happened, it would have had a significant effect on the composition of the two worlds. Earth would have ended up with more of the outer mantle and crust material from the incoming protoplanets, while Venus would have gotten more of their iron-rich cores.

    The imbalance in impacts could even explain some major Venusian mysteries, like why the planet doesn’t have a moon, why it spins so slowly and why it lacks a magnetic field — though “these are hand-waving kind of conjectures,” Asphaug says.

    Ida says he hopes that future work will look into those questions more deeply. “I’m looking forward to follow-up studies to examine if the new result actually explains the Earth-Venus difference,” he says.

    The idea fits into a growing debate among planetary scientists about how the solar system grew up, says planetary scientist Seth Jacobson of Michigan State University in East Lansing. Was it built violently, with lots of giant collisions, or calmly, with planets growing smoothly via pebbles sticking together?

    “This paper falls on the end of lots of giant impacts,” Jacobson says.

    Each rocky planet in the solar system should have very different chemistry and structure depending on which scenario is true. But scientists know the chemistry and structure of only one planet with any confidence: Earth. And Earth’s early history has been overwritten by plate tectonics and other geologic activity. “Venus is the missing link,” Jacobson says. “Learning more about Venus’ chemistry and interior structure is going to tell us more about whether it had a giant impact or not.”

    Three missions to Venus are expected to launch in the late 2020s and 2030s (SN: 6/2/21). Those should help, but none are expected to take the kind of detailed composition measurements that could definitively solve the mystery. That would take a long-lived lander, or a sample return mission, both of which would be extremely difficult on hot, hostile Venus.

    “I wish there was an easier way to test it,” Jacobson says. “I think that’s where we should concentrate our energy as terrestrial planet formation scientists going forward.” More

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    People reached remote Atlantic islands 700 years earlier than thought

    By Michael Marshall

    The lake inside the collapsed caldera of Corvo Island in the AzoresSantiago Giralt
    One of history’s greatest journeys has been uncovered. People arrived on the islands of the Azores, in the central Atlantic, about 700 years earlier than thought.
    “We can clearly identify evidence of early human impact on the islands before the official colonisation by the Portuguese,” says Pedro Raposeiro at the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources in Ponta Delgada on São Miguel Island in the Azores.
    It isn’t certain who the first colonists were, but there is evidence that it was … More

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    Marie Antoinette's censored love letters have been read using X-rays

    By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

    A letter from Marie Antoinette to Axel von Fersen, dated 4 January 1792, that has been partially redactedCRC
    During the throes of the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette expressed her love for Swedish count Axel von Fersen through words that are finally readable 230 years later.
    Modern scanning technology has successfully distinguished the ill-fated French queen’s ink from that of von Fersen, who scribbled over her text in what was probably an effort to protect his close friend and probable lover, says Anne Michelin at Sorbonne University in Paris.
    She and her colleagues recently investigated 15 letters exchanged between Antoinette and von Fersen from 1791 to 1792 at the request of the French National Archives. While the majority of each letter was readable, certain words or sections had been hidden under heavily penned loops and random letters – Js, Ls, and Ts mostly – intended to censor the document. Forensic units of the French National Police made an unsuccessful attempt to uncover the hidden words in the 1990s, but the technology of the time was lacking, says Michelin.Advertisement
    This year, Michelin’s team used X-ray fluorescence scanning to hone in on the compositions of metallic elements like copper, iron and zinc in the letters’ ink. Because the various inks used in the letters contained different ratios of these elements, the researchers were able to customise their scanning techniques to decipher original words buried under the layers of looping ink – sometimes needing to adjust their methods even for a single word, which could take several hours to scan.

    Their analyses also resolved the mystery of who had censored the letters. By comparing the compositions of the ink used for scribbling out words and that used for von Forsen’s own writing, the researchers confirmed that von Fersen himself had done the redacting.
    “There were probably political reasons for keeping the letters,” says Michelin, adding that they might have been intended to present a more favourable public image of the queen, who was ultimately beheaded by guillotine in 1793. “But von Fersen could have just been very attached to these letters, as well.”
    Marie Antoinette wrote to von Fersen at lengths about political concerns of the time, including how the royal family was coping with the revolution, says Michelin. Her censored writing, however, featured more romantic vocabulary – terms like “beloved” and “adore” and intimate phrases like “No, not without you” and “you, whom I love and will continue to love until my…”.
    Extramarital relationships were commonplace throughout the history of French royalty, so a romance between Marie Antoinette and von Fersen wouldn’t be surprising, says Michelin. Even so, the newly discovered words don’t confirm that they were lovers.
    “Correspondence is always just one part of the whole story,” she says. “We write, but we don’t necessarily write what we think. And what we write can be exacerbated by dramatic situations, like a revolution. The queen was no longer free to move around, so of course that would exacerbate her emotions. You can really feel that in her writing.”
    Unfortunately, the researchers’ scanning techniques still weren’t advanced enough to discriminate the buried words in seven of the letters, which remain a mystery, says Michelin.
    Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg4266

    More on these topics: More

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    Gwen Adshead interview: Why ordinary people commit heinous crimes

    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

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    The great land heist that helped form many US universities

    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

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    Don't Miss: A live event on patterns that explain the universe

    Read
    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

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    Psychonauts 2 review: A fun yet sensitive take on mental health

    By Jacob Aron

    The darkest corners of the mind are no match for the PsychonautsDouble Fine Productions/IGDB

    Game
    Psychonauts 2Advertisement
    Double Fine

    THESE days, film and TV are full of revivals: continuations of a much-loved story decades later that are a chance to revisit favourite characters when they are older and perhaps wiser. In recent years, I have enjoyed returning to the worlds of Jurassic Park, Twin Peaks and Veronica Mars to name just a few. Of course, there is always the chance that revivals go wrong – the most recent season of The X-Files probably should have remained buried in an FBI vault somewhere.
    It’s this risk that had me holding my breath before beginning Psychonauts 2, a sequel to one of my favourite video games of all time. The original Psychonauts, a cult classic, came out more than 15 years ago, a gap almost unheard of in an industry that tends to release yearly sequels. Barring a brief virtual-reality spin-off in 2017, I wasn’t expecting to see another instalment.
    Thankfully, I needn’t have worried about this revival. The new game’s story picks up just three days after the end of the first one, which saw a young boy called Raz attend a summer camp for individuals with psychic abilities run by the Psychonauts, a kind of psychic spy agency. Here, he learned to dive into people’s minds and help them come to terms with their deepest fears.
    In Psychonauts 2, Raz becomes an intern for the organisation. The structure of the game is much the same – exploring weird and wonderful mindscapes – but its approach to mental health has grown in sophistication. “We’re not here to change people’s minds, not here to fix people,” one of the Psychonauts tells Raz early in the game. “We’re here to help people fight their own demons.”
    “The entire game sparkles with wit and creativity, withoutshying away from serious issues”
    The entire game sparkles with wit and creativity, without shying away from serious issues. For example, one level involves Raz helping someone with a fear of judgement. This manifests in his mind as a bizarre version of The Great British Bake Off, in which Raz has to prepare a variety of anthropomorphic ingredients (which are all very cute and extremely enthusiastic about being cooked) before presenting the results to a panel of judges.
    Other mindscapes that Raz visits include a mash-up between a hospital and a casino, a city built from bowling lanes and a gigantic mailroom. But my favourite has to be the mind of a brain in a jar, played superbly by Jack Black, who has completely lost his sense of self. You help him rediscover it by reuniting his five senses, represented as band members who are scattered across a Yellow Submarine-esque psychedelic land.
    The enemies you encounter within these minds all derive from mental health concepts. These include Regrets, which fly about and attempt to weigh you down; Bad Moods, which you have to study to find their source; and Panic Attacks, which frantically scrabble at you in a way that can be overwhelming. It’s all thematically fitting and very well thought out.
    As a whole, Psychonauts 2 walks a fine line between exploring trauma and making light of it. The game opens with a thoughtfully worded mental health advisory, warning players that it tackles serious conditions, but usually in a comic manner. It could be a recipe for disaster, but the team succeeds in this balancing act even when events take a much darker turn in the latter half of the game. Even if you haven’t played the first instalment, I highly recommend it, as it is one of the best games so far this year.
    Jacob also recommends…
    Games
    Persona 5
    Atlus
    PlayStation 3 and 4
    More travels in other mindscapes. An enjoyable yet lengthy story.
    Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
    Ninja Theory
    PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
    A woman with psychosis battles her way through Norse mythology. Her experience bursts through via incredible audio effects. More