Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Ancient humans may have worn shoes more than 100,000 years ago

    Possible ancient footprints at Goukamma in South AfricaCharles Helm
    Humans may have been wearing shoes for well over 100,000 years, and other hominins like Neanderthals may also have worn footwear. The suggestion stems from the discovery of unusual preserved footprints in South Africa, which may have been made by people wearing sandals.
    “We’re not claiming we have conclusive evidence of this,” says Charles Helm at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa. Instead, Helm and his colleagues want to figure out how to reliably distinguish footprints left by bare … More

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    in Humans

    10 of the best science and technology podcasts

    There are many great science and technology podcastsEuna Park
    There are so many science podcasts out there that choosing one can feel overwhelming. We’ve scoured the internet for classics and little-known gems covering a wide range of topics from space to food to cybercrime. Here are our top picks.

    Should you switch to a gluten-free diet? Is artificial intelligence really out of control? This podcast digs into trends and hot topics in the news to expose the science behind them, separating fact from fiction. In a typical episode, science journalist Wendy Zukerman, the creator and host, talks to scientists and experts and cites research in the field in a style that is upbeat and engaging. The idea for the show came about in 2015 when actor Gwenyth Paltrow suggested that women should steam their vaginas for an energy boost, to rebalance hormones and keep clean. Zukerman felt compelled to bust the myth and has been fact-checking fads on her show ever since.

    You’ve probably heard of RadioLab. Launched in 2002, the award-winning podcast, currently co-hosted by science journalists Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser, recounts a different science or technology-related story every week, often exploring different angles. The show incorporates interviews with experts and first-person accounts by guests into captivating narratives. Recent episodes have delved into a strange internet law that lets tech companies off the hook for what happens on their platforms, the cause of the mysterious Tunguska impact that hit Siberia in 1908 and whether disabled people could actually be the ideal astronauts. Highly recommended for curious people with diverse interests.Advertisement

    It might just be the best podcast name out there. With weekly episodes, the official podcast of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas features in-depth conversations with astronauts, scientists and engineers about the latest developments in human spaceflight. The show just celebrated its 300th episode with special guests talking about what the future holds for humans visiting low-Earth orbit, recorded in front of a live audience. Previously, the show has discussed NASA’s near-term goal to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon’s surface. It often focuses on different aspects of this plan, such as new lunar spacesuits and the first space station to orbit the moon being developed by NASA, called Gateway, which is aiming to support long-term human visits as well as deep space exploration. Each instalment is typically about an hour long, allowing for topics to be covered in detail.

    Want to take a deep dive into a specific branch of science? The podcast’s name stems from the suffix ‘ology’ – the study of something – and consists of long chats between host Alie Ward and experts on diverse and often obscure disciplines, from sciuridology (the study of squirrels) to diabetology (the research and treatment of diabetes). Ward poses questions that bring out little-known aspects of each field while also touching on personal aspects, such as how guests chose their speciality, which often leads to interesting stories.  The idea for the podcast was sparked by the word curiology – writing with pictures. Ward recently dedicated two episodes to this field by delving into emojis, from the origin of the smiley face to behind-the-scenes drama and stats on usage and trends. I give it a thumbs-up.

    A generation of young people is now grappling with the climate crisis – often considered to be the most pressing problem humanity is currently facing. This podcast, which is in its third season, is produced by and for young people and aims to bring their stories to light. While early episodes focused on the experiences of young climate activists, the show is now broader in scope. In the latest episode, storyteller Reece Whatmore imagines a world in which buildings are conceived in collaboration with nature, rather than having human-made materials dominate city landscapes, and talks to biomaterial designers, scientists and engineers who are working to accomplish this goal. By being solution-focused, Inherited tackles a daunting topic in a hopeful way.

    Food collides with science and history in this bi-weekly podcast co-hosted by journalist Cynthia Graber and author Nicola Twilley. In the most recent episode, the pair examines where fungi and bacteria in a sourdough starter come from by taking part in an experiment in Belgium with microbiologists and bakers. The show also delves into farming, for example by looking at how human faeces could save agriculture and the planet, and new developments, such as lab-grown meat, which made its debut in a US restaurant in July. The show often takes inspiration from listener requests and is sure to fascinate inquisitive food-lovers.

    Efforts to undo human-induced damage to wildlife by allowing nature to take over again, called rewilding, have taken off in in recent years. In this podcast hosted by James Shooter, a photographer and filmmaker, listeners are taken behind the scenes of various rewilding initiatives across Europe as he travels to visit them during a year-long trip. Monthly episodes tell the stories of people trying to recover nature, for example experts in the Greater Côa Valley in Portugal, who are trying to improve the co-existence of animal species such as rabbits, Iberian wolves and dung beetles. The host’s passion for conservation makes the show both informative and engaging.

    Through the ages, people have often tried to treat medical problems in odd, disgusting or simply ineffective ways. Hosts Sydnee and Justin McElroy, married medics, were therefore inspired to create a podcast that uncovered some of these proposed treatments by digging through the annals of medical history. With new episodes out every Friday, the show also looks at the latest therapeutic fads, such as a pungent plant resin, called asafoetida, which some claim can has a range of medical benefits, and an egg-shaped sound-therapy chamber called a Harmonic Egg. The latest instalment examines the sudden recent uptick of cases of leprosy in Florida, looking at the history of the disease and current treatments. May not be suitable for squeamish people.

    A true crime show for tech geeks. Hosted by Jack Rhysider, who was previously a network security engineer, the podcast showcases stories about the dark side of the internet told by hackers and those who have been hacked. In a recent episode, a member of the Dominican Republic’s cybersecurity incident response team explains the process he went through when he investigated a major cyberattack aimed at his country’s government. Another instalment follows a man who breaks into buildings for a living to test whether they are secure or not. The show is compelling and binge-worthy.

    It is shameless self-promotion, but you may just enjoy our podcasts too. New Scientist Weekly, our flagship show hosted by Timothy Revell and Christie Taylor, takes a closer look at the most fascinating science news stories of the week. If you’re looking for something a bit more off-beat, Dead Planets Society explores crazy ideas such how we could punch a hole in a planet or whether we could destroy the sun – from a physics perspective, of course. And we’ve also got CultureLab, a podcast that could be interviewing the world’s most exciting authors about fascinating books one week and delving into the science behind a movie or TV show another. All available on the main New Scientist Podcasts feed.

    Topics: More

  • 138 Shares139 Views

    in Humans

    Women and men throw spears equally well using ancient atlatl tool

    Archaeologist Michelle Bebber holding an atlatlMetin Eren
    The atlatl, an ancient spear-throwing tool first used thousands of years ago, enables both women and men to launch projectiles with very similar velocities. The discovery, which comes from modern experiments involving atlatls, provides more evidence that prehistoric female hunters would have been as capable as male hunters of putting meat on the table.
    The research started when Michelle Bebber at Kent State University in Ohio began teaching a course in which dozens of students spent a day each semester practising throwing javelins and … More

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    in Humans

    These ancient sand drawings could be a fifth type of palaeoart

    Linda Helm
    TAKE a forked stick and plant one of the prongs in sand. Turn it like a compass and you will etch a perfect circle, as demonstrated (above) on a South African beach by Charles Helm of the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience in Gqeberha.
    Charles HelmAdvertisement
    It is a natural human impulse to draw in the sand, and it seems our ancestors were feeling the same drive at least 136,000 years ago. In 2018, Helm discovered a perfect circle with a central depression on a slab of sandstone (pictured above) in the Garden Route National Park. This area is known for traces of early Homo sapiens, including rock art and the oldest footprint found (pictured below), which dates back about 150,000 years.
    Charles Helm
    The slab was once the surface of a coastal sand flat that has since solidified into rock. Helm has discovered other patterns in the same outcrop that could have been made by people, including grooves, cross-hatches, parallel lines and a perfect triangle (pictured below). The coloured images represent the depth of the impressions.
    Charles Helm
    Helm ruled out natural causes such as wind, water, non-human animals or vegetation, and was left with one possibility – they were made intentionally by people, though they probably didn’t mean much. “I like to think it’s kids playing around,” says Helm.
    He says these sand drawings should be classed as a fifth type of palaeoart, after cave paintings (pictographs), rock engravings (petroglyphs), images carved on trees (dendroglyphs) and arrangements of rocks or earth (geoglyphs). The name he proposes is ammoglyphs, after ammos, the Greek word for sand.

    Topics:palaeontology/ancient humans More

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    in Humans

    The human Y chromosome has been fully sequenced for the first time

    A human X (left) and Y chromosome seen with a scanning electron microscopeBIOPHOTO ASSOCIATES/Science Photo Library
    Twenty years after the Human Genome Project was declared complete, the Y chromosome has been fully sequenced for the first time.
    Most people have 22 pairs of chromosomes plus two sex chromosomes – either a pair of X chromosomes or one X and one Y chromosome. Having a Y usually – but not always – results in an embryo developing male characteristics.
    The Y is one of the smallest chromosomes and has the fewest genes coding for proteins. Because it normally has no paired chromosome to swap pieces with prior to sexual reproduction, it is especially likely to accumulate bits of repetitive DNA.Advertisement
    All early methods of DNA sequencing involved breaking DNA up into small pieces, reading their genetic code and then reassembling the pieces by looking for overlaps. This technique doesn’t work with repetitive DNA where lots of the pieces are identical.
    Because of this, the “completed” human reference genome announced in 2003 was actually far from complete. “The Y chromosome just kept being pushed aside,” says Charles Lee at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Connecticut. “It’s a hard chromosome to complete because of all the repetitive sequences.”
    Only in 2021 did a team including Karen Miga at the University of California, Santa Cruz, finally fill in almost all the gaps, and again declare the human genome complete.
    What made this possible is a technique, developed by a company called Oxford Nanopore, that reads the sequence of a single DNA molecule as it goes through a tiny hole, producing pieces that are millions of DNA letters long rather than a few hundred.
    But the “complete” genome sequenced by Miga and her colleagues was a female one, consisting of the 22 normal chromosomes and the X chromosome. Only now have Miga’s team completed the Y chromosome as well, from a person of European descent.
    “The Y chromosome is riddled with complicated structures and includes huge areas where the same blocks of code repeat over and over with minor variations, making its assembly quite challenging,” says Sergey Nurk, who worked on the project before getting a job at Oxford Nanopore. “[The] ability to sequence any-length fragments of DNA was absolutely instrumental for this project.”

    This complete Y chromosome has 106 protein-coding genes, which is 41 more than in the reference genome. But almost all these extra genes are just copies of one gene called TSPY.
    At the same time, Lee’s team has sequenced the Y chromosomes of 43 diverse men, including 21 of African origin. The teams were independent but did collaborate, says Lee.
    However, only three of his team’s Y sequences are gapless, he says. The rest still have between one and five gaps.
    The 43 Y chromosomes show considerable diversity, says Lee. For instance, the number of copies of the TSPY gene ranges between 23 and 39.
    Whether the repetitive DNA in the Y does anything important remains unclear. “I believe there’s a lot to learn about repetitive DNA and we just don’t understand it yet, and so we’ve still dismissed it as junk,” says Lee.
    But most biologists and clinicians have little interest in the repetitive DNA, says David Page at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studies the Y chromosome. The sequencing has also revealed very little that is new about the “euchromatic” parts of the Y that do include genes, he says.
    “The present study [by Miga’s team] represents an incremental advance in our understanding of the euchromatic portions, which were nearly complete 20 years ago,” says Page.

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    in Humans

    The best TV shows of 2023 so far – science fiction and documentaries

    Foundation season 2 is now out on Apple TV+Apple TV+
    Struggling to choose what to watch? Whether it’s sci-fi, medical dramas or documentaries about the natural world, we have you covered on the CultureLab podcast. New Scientist‘s TV columnist Bethan Ackerley shares a rundown of her top TV choices from 2023 so far, as well as what to look out for the rest of the year. 

    Transcript to follow.Advertisement
    Reviews of some of the shows featured in this episode:  
    Foundation (Apple TV+)
    The Last Of Us (HBO Max and Sky Atlantic)
    Best Interests (Sky Go, Amazon, Apple TV+)
    Wild Isles (BBC iPlayer, Amazon)
    Dead Ringers (Amazon)
    Silo (Apple TV+)
    To read all of Bethan’s TV columns visit newscientist.com/author/bethan-ackerley

    Topics: More

  • 125 Shares169 Views

    in Humans

    Ötzi the iceman was dark-skinned and balding, suggests genome analysis

    The mummified body of Ötzi, who is thought to have lived between 3350 and 3120 BC© South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology/Eurac/Marco Samadelli-Gregor Staschitz
    A new genetic analysis has changed our understanding of Ötzi, the mummified “Iceman” who lived 5300 years ago and was found in a glacier in the Alps.
    The findings reveal that almost all of Ötzi’s DNA was inherited from early farmers, who moved into Europe a few thousand years before he was born.
    The genome also indicates that he had darker skin than any people with predominantly European ancestry today, and may well have … More

  • 163 Shares159 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    Meet Jane Rigby, senior project scientist for JWST and advocate for LGBTQ+ astronomers

    One of a telescope operator’s primary jobs is to keep any stray light out of the instrument. Earthly and other unwelcome photons can swamp the cosmic light from distant stars and galaxies. During more than a decade as a project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, Jane Rigby obsessed over minimizing light leaks — with extraordinary success. The sky looks darker to JWST than most anyone had hoped.

    Rigby herself, now the senior project scientist for JWST, is a source of light.

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    “I remember the light in her eyes,” says astrophysicist Jane Charlton, who met Rigby the summer before her freshman year at Penn State and later advised her research. “Jane had incredible grades, but that’s not necessarily what I look for. The love of astronomy, and passion for that, is what I look for.”

    Nearly three decades later, Rigby’s palpable joy in discussing the success of JWST, which launched on December 25, 2021, has made her one of the public faces of the telescope. She presented the telescope’s first images at the White House and has given keynote speeches at some of the biggest astronomy meetings (SN: 8/13/22, p. 30). During public appearances, she often wears JWST-themed socks, scarves and pins. “I have JWST socks for pretty much every day of the week,” she says.

    She has also lit a path for queer astronomers, as well as others who are historically underrepresented in astronomy. Rigby has been out as part of the LGBTQ+ community since 2000, when she met her now-wife when they were both astronomy graduate students at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She has devoted much of her career to holding the door open for others.

    “I didn’t grow up with any queer role models,” she says. “I hope I’m the last generation for which that’s true.”

    Focusing on the instruments

    Rigby remembers being asked to draw a favorite TV show in preschool. She used up an entire black crayon drawing Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

    Her interest in space crystallized into a career plan at about age 12, after she saw Sally Ride speak at a local college. Ride, the first American woman in space, made Rigby want to be an astronaut.

    “I knew there were two paths to becoming an astronaut: a test pilot or a scientist,” she says. “And it was pretty clear that I was never going to be tall enough to fly the shuttle.” At 5 feet, 2 inches tall, she’s still two inches too short to have been a space shuttle pilot. If she couldn’t make it to space, she saw more potential in science than in flying planes.

    Rigby’s first experience using a telescope for research, as an undergraduate student at Penn State, was stymied by light leaks. She, Charlton and another student traveled to western Texas to use the telescope at the McDonald Observatory. They were looking to catch light from a distant quasar filtering through a diffuse and mysterious cloud of cosmic gas. These small, dense clouds appear to be packed with heavy elements from supernova explosions, but surprisingly, they’re not found in galaxies’ centers where a lot of stars are born and dying. “We were, at that time, trying to figure out what they were,” Charlton says. “As we still are.”

    After a night of guiding the telescope by hand, the group realized that light from something other than the quasar — maybe an alert light on an instrument panel — had flooded the telescope. The trio tracked it down, covered it with tape and tried again. The same thing happened night after night. Ultimately, they returned to Pennsylvania with no quasar data.

    “It didn’t work,” Rigby says. “But it was really fun. I was learning everything, trying to learn how the telescope worked.”

    Jane Rigby has had the opportunity to observe at many notable telescopes around the world, including the Magellan telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, shown here around 2011.J. Rigby

    Since then, Rigby has used many major telescopes, from those at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to the Magellan telescopes in Chile to the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes. Along the way, her research developed a theme: investigating how galaxies grow and change along with the super­massive black holes hiding within.

    But her approach is less “How can I answer this burning question?” and more “What can I do with this shiny new instrument?”

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    “I’m a very observational astronomer,” she says. “I will use any telescope I can get my hands on.”

    All that telescope time meant she was ready to join the JWST team when the opportunity came.

    “Because she had seen data from Spitzer and Hubble,” JWST’s precursors, says astronomer Matt Mountain of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C., “she knew what she was looking for.”

    Meeting the James Webb Space Telescope

    Rigby began working on JWST in 2010, when she took a job at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., as the telescope’s deputy operations project scientist.

    One of the first things she did was read the report of an independent review panel that found that the telescope was mismanaged, over budget by billions of dollars and would launch years later than originally planned (SN: 11/11/10). “I’ve certainly been four years from launch multiple times,” she says.

    Before launch, most of her time was devoted to making sure that changes to the telescope’s design wouldn’t mess up the science. She imagined possible ways to use JWST and met with other team members to make sure the final telescope would deliver on those goals. Would the telescope materials glow or release gases that could freeze to the machine? Could JWST use two cameras simultaneously? Could it study moving targets, like asteroids within the solar system (SN: 11/5/22, p. 14)?

    “Because she is a working scientist who really wanted to use the data,” Mountain says, “she was an ideal choice for operations scientist,” a job she moved up to in 2018. “In these complex spaces, with all the engineering, the personalities, the politics at NASA, working with contractors, she always keeps her eye on the prize: What science are we trying to do?”

    Rigby bridged the divide between the science and engineering teams, helping them speak a common language. Her job has been “a lot of active listening and soft power, a lot of synthesizing and a dose of specialized technical expertise,” she says. “Oftentimes I’m the big-picture person in a room full of specialists.”

    Thousands of people worked on the James Webb Space Telescope, shown here at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 2017.Desiree Stover/NASA

    Engineer Larkin Carey removes the cover that kept the telescope’s instruments safe from contaminants and stray light while it was being assembled and tested.CHRIS GUNN/NASA

    After the telescope launched, got in position and unfolded itself — “the six-month unwrapping of the Christmas present,” Rigby says — her job shifted to characterizing how well the telescope works. In practically every metric, it’s a dream come true.

    There’s better-than-expected image quality, higher sensitivity, faster response times and a longer potential mission lifetime than predicted before launch — and practically no light leaks. The telescope’s great golden mirrors are exposed to space, and light can scatter off dust grains on the mirrors, registering on images as faint, diffuse patterns the team calls “wisps” and “claws,” or a ghostly streak dubbed “the lightsaber.” But the mirrors proved remarkably dust-free, meaning the sky appears incredibly dark.

    “It’s not an accident that the telescope works so well,” she says. “That was careful work beforehand.”

    When asked about such successes, and her own, Rigby points to a huge amount of work by tens of thousands of people. “I understand the desire to humanize something that can seem really big and impersonal. But I don’t like the singling out,” she says. “I try to reflect it back to the team.” It took thousands of people and tasks to ensure JWST’s success. Engineer Larkin Carey, with Ball Aerospace, for example, cleaned every square centimeter of the telescope’s mirrors by hand with a tool like a shaving brush, Rigby says.

    With the telescope working so well, Rigby could turn her attention to the scientific questions. She helps lead an observing program called TEMPLATES, looking at galaxies whose light has been magnified by foreground objects to get a glimpse at how the galaxies form stars. At a June meeting in Albuquerque of the American Astronomical Society, Rigby shared how the TEMPLATES team found hydrocarbons, “the same stuff that smoke is made of,” in a galaxy whose light dates back more than 12 billion years — the furthest back in time such molecules had ever been seen.

    Early in July, Rigby became the senior project scientist for JWST; it’s her job to figure out how to get the most and best science out of the telescope.

    Research colleagues describe her as superhuman. “I don’t know how she does everything that she does, and does everything well,” says TEMPLATES collaborator Keren Sharon of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. And Rigby’s enthusiasm is abundant: “She gets giddy,” Sharon says. “It could be about figuring out a bug, or discovering this super exciting thing about a galaxy that we didn’t know before … and she’s literally bouncing. Her face lights up.”

    With data from the James Webb Space Telescope, Rigby and colleagues found signs of hydrocarbons in this galaxy (red ring, shown in false color) more than 12 billion light-years from Earth. A second, closer galaxy (blue) lined up perfectly to magnify the light from the more distant one.J. SPILKER, S. DOYLE, NASA, ESA, CSA

    Opening doors for others

    Rigby wants anyone to be able to experience and pursue that enthusiasm. When she started attending American Astronomical Society meetings in the 1990s, she didn’t know there was a secret LGBTQ+ networking dinner. “You had to know it existed. That was a little closety. But it’s where people were.”

    At the time, there was a lack of protection from employment discrimination and no guarantee of institutional support for astronomers with same-sex partners. Rigby recalls accepting a fellowship at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., and immediately having to request health insurance benefits to cover her partner.

    “That’s awkward,” she says. “You want to be talking about your science and your telescope proposals, not how can I get health insurance for my family because we’re different.” Finding other LGBTQ+ astronomers was “a lifeline,” she says.

    These days, the meet-up at AAS is too big to go out to dinner. At a January 2023 meeting in Seattle, “we lost count at 120 people. We had to spill out into the hallway,” Rigby says. “That feels good.”

    Seeing queer astronomers like Rigby so far along in their careers was helpful to Traci Johnson, a data scientist who was a graduate student in astronomy in Sharon’s lab at the University of Michigan. Johnson identifies as lesbian and nonbinary and came out during graduate school. “I realized it is possible to be out, and be happy, and also have a really amazing career,” Johnson says.

    Rigby has taken an active role in encouraging inclusivity, though she seems to be up against the legacy of JWST’s namesake. Many astronomers have called for the telescope to be renamed because James Webb was NASA administrator at a time when the U.S. government fired employees for being gay.

    Rigby won’t comment on the telescope’s name. But her support for LGBTQ+ astronomers is clear. Rigby was a founding member of the AAS Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy, which works to promote equality for LGBTQ+ astronomers within the field; has co-organized conferences on making astronomy more inclusive; and authored a recent white paper urging the astronomy community to address diversity, inclusion and harassment. A current priority is making sure trans people feel safe and welcome.

    Rigby doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as “the gay astronomer.” She knows her contributions to astronomy extend far beyond any particular group. But she says the leadership skills, resilience and ability to shift her perspective that she has learned through living and organizing as a member of the LGBTQ+ community have made her a better astronomer. They’re skills she transfers to her role as a leader at NASA.

    “The whole vision is, you get to bring your authentic self to work,” she says. “And work embraces your authentic self.” More