Is our evolving relationship with tech shifting our view of reality?This year saw the launch of ChatGPT, an AI that anyone can converse with, and the news that a quantum computer simulated a wormhole. Are our sensibilities about what is real changing, asks Chanda Prescod-Weinstein More
Galaxies that helped transform the early universe may have been small, round and green.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted “Green Pea” galaxies dating to 13.1 billion years ago. These viridescent runts, spotted just 700 million years after the Big Bang, might have helped trigger one of the greatest makeovers in cosmic history, astronomers said at a January 9 news conference in Seattle at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting.
Green Peas first showed up in 2009 in images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ambitious project to map much of the sky. Citizen science volunteers gave the objects their colorful name. Their greenish hue is because most of their light comes from glowing gas clouds, rather than directly from stars.
Science News headlines, in your inbox
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your email inbox every Thursday.
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
These galaxies are rare in the present-day universe. Astronomers think that the ones that do exist are analogs of galaxies that were more plentiful in the early universe.
“They’re a bit like living fossils,” said astrophysicist James Rhoads of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Coelacanths, if you will,” referencing a fish thought to be extinct until it showed up off the coast of South Africa in 1938 (SN: 12/2/11).
These galaxies leak much more ultraviolet light, which can rip electrons from atoms, than typical galaxies do. So Green Peas dating to the universe’s first billion years or so could be partly responsible for a dramatic and mysterious cosmic transition called reionization, when most of the hydrogen atoms in the early universe had their electrons torn away (SN: 1/7/20).
Three ancient Green Peas turned up in JWST’s first image, released in July 2022 (SN: 7/21/22). The objects look red in JWST’s infrared vision, but the wavelengths of light they emit are like those of the previously discovered Green Peas. The findings were also published in the Jan. 1 Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“This helps us explain how the universe reionized,” Rhoads said. “I think this is an important piece of the puzzle.” More
Science and reason generate reliable knowledge about the world, but they have their limits. Exploring them can shed light on what knowledge really is, and should help us gain more of it
Humans
| Leader
11 January 2023
Lagano/Shutterstock
SCIENCE is the culmination of humanity’s attempts to reason about the world. It produces knowledge in a reliable way, and it has done so with great success. It has revealed many of nature’s secrets, from the molecular machinery inside cells to the grand scheme of how the universe began and evolved to what we see today. But for all their undoubted achievements, science and reason have their constraints.
Our species is unique (as far as we know) in its ability to know what we don’t know. That alone might make us duty bound to explore the limits of knowledge and … More
Brain training apps claim to make us smarter, but there is no evidenceThere are plenty of apps that offer mental exercises claiming to make users smarter the more they play. Not only are they not much fun, but studies show they have no effect on performance, says Adrian Hon More
Dale Greenwalt’s book is a gripping look at palaeobiology, a field achieving incredible insights into ancient life on Earth
Humans
11 January 2023
By Simon Ings
The palaeontology collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural Historychip clark/museum of natural history
Remnants of Ancient Life
Dale Greenwalt (Princeton University Press)
WHAT is a fossil made of? Mineralised rocky fossils are what first spring to mind, but others, like the fossils of the Burgess Shale in Canada, are made of pure carbon and can be thought of as proto-coal. There are also tantalising Cretaceous insects preserved in amber.
Whatever they are made of, fossils contain treasures. The first really good microscopic study of mineralised dinosaur bone was able to reveal its … More
New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss
Humans
11 January 2023
Read
Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible is delivered with humour and erudition by Anthony Zee. What better way to get the little grey cells going than by unifying quantum mechanics and special relativity? On sale from 17 January.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Watch
Hearing the Light is a talk by Clara Brasseur about representing telescope data as sound, also called astronomical data sonification. Listen to real data from the Kepler Space Telescope (pictured above) in her online talk on 20 January at 7.30pm GMT.
Read
Cold People struggle to … More
Depriving rhubarb plants of light for several weeks forces them to grow fast and gives an earlier harvest, says Clare Wilson
Humans
11 January 2023
By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Clive Nichols
I HAVE just finished one of the few winter jobs at my allotment: preparing my rhubarb patch, including setting up one of the plants to be forced. This means covering it with a large container to make the stalks grow more quickly in search of light.
If you have the space, I highly recommend getting a few rhubarb plants as they are so easy to grow. I give mine little attention, but each spring they produce a huge crop when there isn’t much home-grown produce around. Technically, rhubarb stems are a vegetable as they are the plant’s leaf stalks, but … More
