Philippa Kaur

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The Spirit of Green is Nobel prize-winning economist William D. Nordhaus’s account of how green thinking can help overcome today’s challenges, from climate change to corporate wrongdoing, without sacrificing prosperity.
Claudia Marcelloni, CERN
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Halo, at Brighton Festival in the UK, is an intricate multisensory installation that lets you experience conditions shortly after the big bang. Created by artist duo Semiconductor, it is driven by data collected at the CERN particle physics lab. From 19 May to 4 June.
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Princeton University Press Ideas Podcast interviews Lucas Bessire in an episode called “The water crisis on the High Plains”. Bessire talks about his new book, Running Out, and the imminent depletion of a vital aquifer. More

By Karina Shah

Bales of rubber like this one washed up on Brazilian shores during 2018Carlos Teixeira at Federal University of Ceará
Unidentified packages that appeared along the Brazilian coast in 2018 have been confirmed as bales of natural rubber coming from a German shipwreck from the second world war.
Throughout 2018, around 200 square packages washed up along 1600 kilometres of the Brazilian coastline from the states of Maranhão to Sergipe. Each weighed up to 200 kilograms and they ranged in size from 0.06 to 3.4 cubic metres. They caused considerable public concern as people were unsure what they were made … More

By Michael Marshall

The Cerne Abbas GiantNational Trust Images/Mike Calnan/James Dobson
A mysterious chalk carving of a huge, naked man on an English hillside was made in the 10th century, according to the first attempt to archaeologically date the giant. The finding is unexpected because the earliest mentions of the Cerne Abbas Giant are from just over 300 years ago, suggesting it was forgotten for centuries.
Historians and archaeologists had many ideas about when the giant was constructed, says team member Mike Allen, an independent geoarchaeologist at Allen Environmental Archaeology in Codford, UK. “Everyone was wrong.”

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The giant is carved into a hillside overlooking the village of Cerne Abbas in southern England. It is a figure of a man with a large, erect penis, holding a club. It was made by digging trenches into the hillside, then filling them with white chalk.
The earliest known reference to the giant is from 1694, from the records of the church in Cerne Abbas. The giant is absent from earlier records, notably a 1617 survey of the area by John Norden, who was famously thorough.
Historians have argued for decades over when the giant was created and what it represents. Some believe it was made in the 1600s, in line with the historical records, while others think it dates to Roman times.

Allen is part of a team that carried out excavations on the giant in 2020, with the support of its owner, the National Trust. The researchers dug in the soles of both its feet and the crooks of its elbows.
The team looked for grains of quartz in the chalk and in the soil next to the trenches. A method called optically stimulated luminescence dating could then be used to determine when the quartz was last exposed to sunlight.
Using the technique, the researchers dated the oldest chalk to between AD 650 and 1310. The giant was probably created sometime between these dates, with the year AD 980 falling in the middle of that window. In theory, the giant might be older, because the chalking has been replaced several times. But the soil data suggests not. The oldest date for the soil is AD 700 to 1100. “[The giant] cannot be older than that,” says Allen.
Intriguingly, a Benedictine monastery was founded in Cerne Abbas in the late 10th century. Allen speculates that the giant might represent a response to that.
“It would almost seem to be an act of resistance by local people to create this fantastically rude pagan image on the hillside,” says Alison Sheridan, a freelance archaeological consultant based in Edinburgh, UK. “It’s like a big two fingers to the abbey.”
It isn’t clear why there are no mentions of the giant for centuries. Allen says other findings from the excavation hint there was a time when the site was covered with long grass, suggesting the giant became overgrown and invisible.
However, Timothy Darvill at Bournemouth University, UK, says prehistoric monuments were often ignored. “Even sites like Stonehenge don’t get that much mention,” he says.
The giant is one of only three surviving “ancient” hill figures in England. The others are the Long Man at Wilmington and the Uffington White Horse. Only the horse can safely be said to be prehistoric, however.
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By Alexander McNamara
and Matt Hambly

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Forget feeling the music, some of us can actually taste it. Around one in 20 of us have synaesthesia, a condition that creates a strange connection between our senses. For these people, words may take on certain colours and music may have a particular taste or texture.
Although we aren’t certain of the causes of this unusual condition, studies have given us some idea of what is happening. As infants, our brains’ cells have millions of connections that are pruned away as we get older. Some studies suggest that people with synaesthesia have genetic variations that prevent this pruning from happening normally in certain brain regions, giving them unusual connections between sensory areas.
Being stronger reduces your risk of death
Javier Sanchez Mingorance / Alam

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Here’s the motivation you need for your next trip to the gym: having stronger muscles reduces the risk of dying of any cause, and is especially important in preventing type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Broadly speaking, exercise of any kind is good for you, but unlike aerobic fitness regimes, strength training also helps to build bone, which can decrease your risk of osteoporosis. It can even help to prevent cognitive decline and memory loss in old age. Maintaining and improving your strength throughout life has become such an important, yet forgotten, aspect of general fitness that the UK government recently placed it above aerobic exercise in its new guidelines.
We have 19 different smiles but only one is ‘genuine’
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The 42 facial muscles it takes to break out into a grin are capable of producing 19 different types of smile, but, according to French anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne, only one is ‘genuine’. In 1862 Duchenne identified that the difference between a genuine smile and a fake one lay in the eyes — the orbicularis oculi — to be precise. All smiling involves contraction of the zygomatic major muscles, which lifts the corners of the mouth. But a Duchenne smile is characterised by the additional contraction of the orbicularis oculi, crumpling the skin around the eyes into crows’ feet. Largely overlooked at the time, the Duchenne smile’s reputation has grown. In the 1950s a study found that Duchenne smilers had a 70 per cent chance of living until age 80 compared with 50 per cent for non-smilers. However, more recent findings have suggested that smiles don’t necessarily indicate that we are happy, but instead signal collaboration or bonding.
The hydrogen in your body was formed in the Big Bang
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You may have heard that we are all stardust, but that isn’t strictly true. There are about 20 different elements in the human body, most of which were made inside ancient stars. There’s oxygen, which makes up about half of your body’s mass but only a quarter of its atoms, and then carbon, accounting for another 12 per cent. And just after that, there’s hydrogen, the only element in your body that wasn’t made inside a star long ago and flung into space by a supernova explosion. The hydrogen atoms in your body, accounting for a little over 10 per cent of you, were formed much earlier during the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago.
The smallest insect on Earth is a wasp
The Mymaridae, commonly known as fairyflies or fairy wasps.Scenics & Science / Alamy
There are more than 110,000 known species of wasp, and while we tend to think of them as the black-and-yellow-striped nuisances, wasps come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes. Only one third of species have stings, for instance, and while some live in colonies, the vast majority of wasp species are solitary. There’s even a wasp that can lay claim to the title of smallest insect on the planet. The Mymaridae or fairy wasp has a body length of just 0.139mm, shorter than that of an amoeba.
The first space walker became trapped outside his ship
Over the Black Sea. Museum: Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, Moscow. Author: Leonov, Alexei Arkhipovich.Album / Alamy
Alexei Leonov became the first person to walk in space when, on 18 March 1965, he left the Voskhod 3KD spacecraft for 12 minutes. Although he spent such a short time alone in the vacuum of space, the walk was not without incident. Free from the atmospheric pressures of the spacecraft, his space suit ballooned, preventing him from getting back inside the airlock. Leonov had to bleed his suit of air until it was flexible enough for him to get back inside the ship. Despite the rapid decompression resulting in Leonov developing the bends, he made it back inside safely and returned to Earth shortly afterwards.

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By Michael Marshall

Childbirth may have been difficult for ancient hominins CHRISTIAN JEGOU PUBLIPHOTO DIFFUSION/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
It isn’t just modern humans that have found giving birth painful and dangerous. Growing evidence suggests birth was difficult for our hominin relatives millions of years ago. As a result, earlier hominins like Australopithecus may have needed help to deliver their babies.
Birth is strikingly dangerous for modern humans compared with other primates. Globally, for every 100,000 births in 2017, 211 mothers died. In the worst-affected countries, such as South Sudan, the maternal mortality rate is more than five times that. Many nations have … More

By Michael Marshall

The cerebellum may have had a larger role in human evolution than once thoughtKATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
The key to human evolution may have been at the back of our minds all along – literally. Some of the biggest biochemical differences between human brains and those of other primates are found in the cerebellum, a region at the rear of the brain that has often been overlooked in evolutionary studies.
The finding adds to growing evidence that changes to the cerebellum have been crucial for the origin of the human mind.

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All backboned animals have a cerebellum, which is involved in controlling movement.
“It’s not really associated with much that’s uniquely human,” says Elaine Guevara at Duke University in North Carolina. Instead, neuroscientists seeking to explain the evolution of our brains have tended to focus on the cortex, the thick outer layer of the forebrain – especially the prefrontal cortex, which underpins our ability to consciously decide what to do.
In recent years, some neuroscientists have argued that the cerebellum has changed more than thought during human evolution, and that these changes may have been crucial.

Guevara and her colleagues studied the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex at the molecular level. They took brain samples from humans, chimpanzees and monkeys called rhesus macaques, and extracted DNA from both brain regions.
The team looked to see which parts of the DNA had small molecules called methyl groups attached. Methylation is an example of a so-called epigenetic influence on our genes. Patterns of methylation reflect which genes have been active and inactive during an animal’s life, and they vary between body parts and between species.
Guevara’s team found that the pattern of methylation in human DNA was different to that in chimps and macaques. Crucially, the difference between species was greater in the cerebellum than in the prefrontal cortex, suggesting there had been more changes there during our evolution.
It isn’t clear what the methylation changes did, says Guevara. But there are intriguing clues. Some of the genes where the cerebellar methylation patterns were different are known to be involved in changing the strengths of the connections between neurons, a process thought to be important for learning.
Some of these are also associated with neurodevelopmental differences such as autism and neuropsychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, both of which may be unique to humans or at least more common in humans, says Guevara.
Journal reference: PLoS Genetics, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1009506
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Remains of a 3-year-old child discovered in a cave in Kenya called Panga ya Saidi are the oldest known burial in Africa. Researchers named the child Mtoto, which means “child” in Swahili, and estimate that they lived around 78,300 years ago, making this the oldest deliberate burial found in Africa. “It was a child and someone gave it a farewell,” says Martinón-Torres.

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