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    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

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    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

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    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

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    Alice Roberts interviewed by a 10-year-old about her novel, Wolf Road

    Academic, broadcaster and author Alice Roberts has just published her first children’s novel, Wolf Road. Set during the ice age 30,000 years ago, it follows the story of Tuuli, a prehistoric girl on a journey to her tribe’s summer camp who meets a strange boy on the way.
    As this is Alice’s first children’s novel, New Scientist decided that the best person to quiz her about it was culture editor Alison Flood’s 10-year-old daughter Jenny, a big reader. Jenny asked Alice all the most important questions, including if people would really have made pets of wolf cubs, how Alice knows what life was like for people 30,000 years ago, and if she would rather live then or now.
    Alice Roberts will be speaking at New Scientist Live in October. Tickets on sale now.

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    Spiral galaxies might have been lentil-shaped before becoming starry whirls

    The Milky Way might have once looked more like a legume than a starry whirlpool.

    Over their unfathomably long lifetimes, spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are generally thought to morph into lentil-shaped “lenticular” galaxies and then into elliptical blobs (SN: 4/23/18). But an analysis of nearby galaxies suggests that our galaxy, and others like it, was once lenticular, astronomer Alister Graham reports in the July Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. If correct, Graham’s proposed update to the evolutionary sequence of galaxies would rewrite the history of the Milky Way.

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    “Lenticulars have always been sort of the abandoned stepchild of [galaxy] morphology,” says astronomer Christopher Conselice of the University of Manchester in England, who wasn’t involved in the study. But this paper puts them into focus, he says, as being a major aspect of how galaxies change.

    Lenticulars get their name from the way their entire halo of stars, when viewed edge on, bulges in the middle and thins out toward the sides, much like a lentil. These galaxies exhibit a confusing mix of properties that’s made their presumed place in the middle of galaxy evolution sequences rather suspect.

    “We’ve known for a while that that’s almost certainly not correct,” Conselice says. Particularly puzzling is that lenticulars, despite their spiral-like disks, don’t have lots of gas, which hinders them from producing new stars. Spiral galaxies do have lots of star-forming gas, and scientists aren’t sure why lenticular galaxies don’t.

    Graham, of Swinburne University of Technology in Hawthorn, Australia, found new clues to this mystery of galaxy evolution by considering black holes.

    Most galaxies harbor a supermassive black hole in their center, and when galaxies merge, so do those black holes. This makes the mass of a galaxy’s black hole a kind of record of its past collisions. If a galaxy got big by gobbling up its neighbors rather than by sucking up surrounding gas, its black hole should be hefty relative to the swarm of stars that surrounds it.

    Using images from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, Graham compared the black hole and stellar masses of about 100 nearby galaxies. For galaxies of the same shape, he saw that black hole mass and stellar mass tend to be linked in a predictable way — except for the lenticular galaxies.

    When Graham took a closer look at the lenticulars, he realized they are actually two distinct groups that had been lumped together: those that have lots of interstellar dust and those that do not. This division, which he previously reported in the May Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, could have been a superficial aesthetic difference. But the galaxies’ black hole masses suggest otherwise.

    Dust-poor and dust-rich lenticulars have entirely different relationships between their black hole masses and stellar masses, suggesting different histories and explaining the apparently scattered behavior of lenticular galaxies. The dusty galaxies tend to have a heftier supermassive black hole than the ones found in both spirals and dust-poor lenticulars. Dust-poor lenticulars are usually on the small side in terms of both black hole mass and stellar mass.

    This led Graham to conclude that spiral galaxies are actually in between the two types of lenticulars, evolutionarily speaking. His new analysis suggests that dust-poor lenticulars become spirals after capturing small “satellite galaxies” and other minor mergers — bumping up their black hole masses — and scooping up nearby gas.

    When spirals collide with other substantial galaxies, he proposes, they become dust-rich lenticulars — and indeed, he adds, every dust-rich lenticular in his dataset was previously recognized as the remnant of a spiral galaxy merger. Collisions between these dust-rich lenticulars are then enough to finally erode the galaxies’ discs of stars and destroy their dust, producing blobby elliptical galaxies. 

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    Black holes are a good tracer of galaxy evolution, Conselice says, but the new sequence could be controversial. One issue, he says, is that lenticular galaxies in the nearby universe are usually such lightweights that they would need to merge tens or even hundreds of times — far more than the expected average of around three over 10 billion years — to form a large spiral galaxy.

    But things might have been different in the early universe, he adds. Long ago, there could have been more massive lenticulars. Figuring that out might be possible with the James Webb Space Telescope, which can see incredibly faint infrared light, so is allowing scientists to peer farther away — and further back in time — than ever before (SN: 12/16/22).

    “If you could look in the more distant universe, you could potentially see some of these galaxies when they’re first forming, or when they’re evolving,” Conselice says. “We could potentially really test this idea.” More

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    Alice Roberts: Archaeology can create a world for stories to unfold in

    Alice Roberts has a lot on her plate: she is a biological anthropologist, an author and a broadcaster, as well as professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham, UK. But she has also found time to write her first children’s book, Wolf Road. Set during the ice age 30,000 years ago, it follows the story of Tuuli, a prehistoric girl on a journey to her tribe’s summer camp who meets a strange boy on the way.
    Roberts joins New Scientist culture editor Alison Flood to talk about how she found writing fiction, the research she did for the novel and why she thinks it is important for children to know more about their past. “I wanted to write about the ice age,” she says. “I wanted to immerse people in that kind of ancient environment, in that ancient time, and use archaeology to build a world that then a story could unfold in.”
    Alice Roberts will be speaking at New Scientist Live in October. Tickets on sale now.

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    Ancient Babylonian arson in Jerusalem revealed by chemical clues

    Aerial view of the excavation site in Jerusalem, at the foot of the Temple MountYair Izbotski/City of David
    Archaeologists have reconstructed how Babylonian invaders burned down a building in Jerusalem more than 2500 years ago, using chemical clues in the debris.
    The building was destroyed as part of the Babylonian conquest of the Kingdom of Judah, which is presented as a turning point in the story of Judaism in the Hebrew Bible.
    Beginning in 601 BC, Judean kings launched a series of unsuccessful rebellions against the Babylonians, who had taken control of the region … More

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    Origin of Indo-European languages traced back to 8000 years ago

    The ancestor of Indo-European languages may have been spoken by farmers in southern Turkey 8000 years agoOdyssey-Images / Alamy Stock Photo
    The common ancestor of Indo-European languages, which are now spoken by close to half the world’s population, was spoken in the eastern Mediterranean around 8000 years ago, according to an analysis of related words.
    Indo-European languages, spanning from English to Sanskrit, have long been thought to share a common ancestor. The first linguist to make this link, William Jones, said in a lecture in 1786 that no linguist could examine Greek, Latin and Sanskrit together “without believing them to have sprung” from some common ancestor.
    But researchers have struggled to agree on the origin story of this so-called proto-Indo-European language, says Paul Heggarty, who is now at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. There are two main hypotheses, he says.Advertisement
    The first suggests that the language originated in the steppe region, north of the Black Sea, no earlier than 6500 years ago and then spread across Europe and parts of Asia with the domestication of horses.
    The second, known as the farming theory, argues that the language was spoken far earlier and originated in the north of the Fertile Crescent, in what is now south-east Turkey and north-west Iran, as early as 9500 years ago and spread to other regions with the rise of farming.
    To test these hypotheses, Heggarty and his colleagues created a database consisting of 170 words, such as “night” and “fire”, and their translations in 161 Indo-European languages, including 52 non-modern languages, such as ancient Greek.
    By analysing shared patterns between the words, the researchers could estimate how related the languages were to each other and try to piece together when one language split into two new languages. “Languages don’t really have a date of birth, but you can see where there’s a split,” says Heggarty. “English is related to German, but these lineages separated from each other around 2000 years ago.”
    Using this analysis, the team estimates that the root of all Indo-European languages dates back to around 8100 years ago. There is a good chance it originated in the Fertile Crescent as hypothesised by the farming theory, the researchers report. But while the farming theory suggests a close link between Indo-Iranic languages, such as Hindi, and Balto-Slavic languages, such as Latvian, the study found no clear evidence for this.
    Instead, the researchers theorise that Indo-European languages spread in multiple directions from the Fertile Crescent. “One of those directions took it to the steppe, and from there, there was a secondary expansion to Europe,” says Heggarty.

    They think this European expansion would have happened about 5000 years ago, as proposed by the steppe hypothesis. It is backed up by ancient DNA data that suggests there was a massive migration into Europe from the steppe region around that time. The team suggests that the Indo-Iranic branch of the language broke off earlier, around 7000 years ago.
    This new “hybrid” idea therefore takes aspects of both the steppe and farming hypotheses. “This is the best framework to be working with now, as more research is coming in, especially from ancient DNA,” says Heggarty.
    James Clackson at the University of Cambridge says this study is unlikely to be the final word on the origin of the Indo-European language family, but says it is a step in the right direction. “The creation of the open access database [of word meanings] is particularly welcome and I’m very grateful to the authors,” he says.

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