Was the shift to farming really the worst mistake in human history?The notion that our ancestors’ shift from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming was disastrous for our health is well established, but a new study should prompt a rethink, says Michael Marshall More
The notion that our ancestors’ shift from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming was disastrous for our health is well established, but a new study should prompt a rethink, says Michael Marshall
Humans
| Columnist
22 February 2023
By Michael Marshall
Shutterstock/J. Lekavicius
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STOP me if you have heard this one before: the transition to farming was a cataclysmic turn for the worse. Beginning around 12,000 years ago, some of our ancestors started cultivating crops, abandoning the egalitarian and sustainable hunter-gatherer lifestyle that had worked for hundreds of thousands of years. The result was poor health, limited diets, new diseases and unsustainable practices that have culminated with climate change and a sixth mass extinction.
This narrative has become well … More
Fat gets a bad rap, but it is key to making enjoyable foods like confit pork. You can also use the confit method for parsnips, says Sam Wong
Humans
22 February 2023
By Sam Wong
PhotoCuisine/Viel, Pierre Louis/StockFood
FAT is a controversial subject in food science. We have all been told from an early age that it is unhealthy and something we should try to eat less of. But as we have said in New Scientist before, the science that led us to fear it is deeply flawed, and many studies have found that cutting down on fat brings no clear health benefits.
In fact, fats are an essential part of our diet, a vital aid to cooking and key to what makes many of our favourite foods, such as chocolate, so enjoyable. To make smarter … More
The James Webb Space Telescope’s first peek at the distant universe unveiled galaxies that appear too big to exist.
Six galaxies that formed in the universe’s first 700 million years seem to be up to 100 times more massive than standard cosmological theories predict, astronomer Ivo Labbé and colleagues report February 22 in Nature. “Adding up the stars in those galaxies, it would exceed the total amount of mass available in the universe at that time,” says Labbé, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. “So you know that something is afoot.”
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The telescope, also called JWST, released its first view of the early cosmos in July 2022 (SN: 7/11/22). Within days, Labbé and his colleagues had spotted about a dozen objects that looked particularly bright and red, a sign that they could be massive and far away.
“They stand out immediately, you see them as soon as you look at these images,” says astrophysicist Erica Nelson of the University of Colorado Boulder.
Measuring the amount of light each object emits in various wavelengths can give astronomers an idea of how far away each galaxy is, and how many stars it must have to emit all that light. Six of the objects that Nelson, Labbé and colleagues identified look like their light comes from no later than about 700 million years after the Big Bang. Those galaxies appear to hold up to 10 billion times the mass of our sun in stars. One of them might contain the mass of 100 billion suns.
“You shouldn’t have had time to make things that have as many stars as the Milky Way that fast,” Nelson says. Our galaxy contains about 60 billion suns’ worth of stars — and it’s had more than 13 billion years to grow them. “It’s just crazy that these things seem to exist.”
In the standard theories of cosmology, matter in the universe clumped together slowly, with small structures gradually merging to form larger ones. “If there are all these massive galaxies at early times, that’s just not happening,” Nelson says.
One possible explanation is that there’s another, unknown way to form galaxies, Labbé says. “It seems like there’s a channel that’s a fast track, and the fast track creates monsters.”
But it could also be that some of these galaxies host supermassive black holes in their cores, says astronomer Emma Curtis-Lake of the University of Hertfordshire in England, who was not part of the new study. What looks like starlight could instead be light from the gas and dust those black holes are devouring. JWST has already seen a candidate for an active supermassive black hole even earlier in the universe’s history than these galaxies are, she says, so it’s not impossible.
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Finding a lot of supermassive black holes at such an early era would also be challenging to explain (SN: 3/16/18). But it wouldn’t require rewriting the standard model of cosmology the way extra-massive galaxies would.
“The formation and growth of black holes at these early times is really not well understood,” she says. “There’s not a tension with cosmology there, just new physics to be understood of how they can form and grow, and we just never had the data before.”
To know for sure what these distant objects are, Curtis-Lake says, astronomers need to confirm the galaxies’ distances and masses using spectra, more precise measurements of the galaxies’ light across many wavelengths (SN: 12/16/22).
JWST has taken spectra for a few of these galaxies already, and more should be coming, Labbé says. “With luck, a year from now, we’ll know a lot more.” More
New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss
Humans
15 February 2023
ESO
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Echoes from the edge of space and time is a talk by Ziri Younsi, one of the team to take the first picture of a black hole (pictured above) using the Event Horizon Telescope. At the Royal Institution in London at 2pm GMT on 25 February.
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The Great Displacement is Jake Bittle’s compassionate account of the human geography of the US, as climate chaos displaces families, homesteads and whole communities, and states struggle to respond. On sale from 21 February.
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Creature is a ballet adapted for film by Asif Kapadia, … More
Apple TV+’s compelling new science-fiction offering is a retro-futurist piece, more 20th-century US social drama than technofest
Humans
15 February 2023
By Bethan Ackerley
Myrtle Mayburn (Alison Pill) has big doubts about her lunar holiday homeApple TV+
Hello Tomorrow!
Amit Bhalla, Lucas Jansen
Apple TV+
THERE is a certain school of thought that says “real” science fiction must be full of ideas about how science and technology might change our world. This is often called “hard” sci-fi, and there are those who view any deviation from this style with as bellicose an attitude as possible.
I am not a purist: I prefer to think of sci-fi as a broad church, with the power to imagine almost … More
Modern humans who have inherited genetic variants related to circadian rhythms from extinct hominins are more likely to be morning people
Humans
15 February 2023
By Carissa Wong
Genetics may explain why some of us find mornings easier than othersoatawa/iStockphoto/Getty Images
Genetic variants that some people have inherited from their Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestors may increase the odds that they are morning rather than evening people.
“This was really exciting to us, and not expected,” says Tony Capra at the University of California, San Fransisco. “Neanderthals and Denisovans passed on DNA that increased our morningness, and this has been retained in modern human populations.”
Following a split from our common ancestor with archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Denisovans around … More
People in romantic relationships in 45 countries were asked how strongly they agreed with statements such as “just seeing my partner excites me”
Humans
14 February 2023
By Alice Klein
Research into love may help us understand the emotion and increase understanding between culturesKathrin Ziegler/Digital Vision/Getty Images
People in relationships report being more in love if they live in a country with high living standards, greater gender equality and a community‑centred culture.
To find out how experiences of love differ, Piotr Sorokowski at the University of Wrocław, Poland, and his colleagues surveyed 9474 adults in any form of romantic relationship across six continents.
The participants were given 45 statements, such as “just seeing my partner excites me”, and were asked how strongly … More
