Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Don't Miss: Andor, prequel to the Star Wars spin-off Rogue One

    New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

    Humans

    14 September 2022

    Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in Lucasfilm’s AndorLucasfilm Ltd
    Watch
    Andor takes Star Wars fans back to before the events of Rogue One, and finds Cassian Andor (Diego Luna, pictured above) doing all he can to avoid getting involved with a seemingly doomed rebellion. On Disney+ from 21 September.
    Read
    Stars in Your Hand, by Kimberly Arcand and Megan Watzke, shows how to make models of the cosmos using a 3D printer and 3D computer imaging. Luckily, it includes easy instructions for creating stars and more. On sale from 20 September.
    … More

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    in Humans

    Simple puzzles are revealing why humans are the only talking apes

    Cognitive scientist Gillian Forrester is challenging chimps and gorillas to solve puzzles in an attempt to address the long-standing mystery of how humans evolved the ability to speak

    Humans

    13 September 2022

    By Alison George
    Nabil Nezzar
    IT LIES at the centre of human experience, and yet how our incredible capacity for complex language arose is a mystery. We are still far from understanding why we are the only living ape with such a skill.
    Answering these questions is difficult, not least because speech doesn’t leave its trace in the fossil record. However, we can look to our ape relatives for clues, as cognitive scientist Gillian Forrester at Birkbeck, University of London, is doing. She has developed puzzle mazes for chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and children that shed light on one idea of how language evolved. She tells New Scientist how her findings are challenging our understanding of the brain and painting a clearer picture of how language began.
    Alison George: What inspired you to study the evolution of language?
    Gillian Forrester: I’ve always been intrigued by the efforts to teach chimpanzees to speak, which were going on while I was growing up in the 1980s. They were a massive failure when it came to chimps learning to combine words into more complex phrases.
    This got me intrigued about the common factors between human language and other animal communication systems, and how and why a language system emerged in humans but not for other great apes.
    How do we start to answer that question?
    We don’t have our ancient ancestors to look at to see how things changed over evolutionary time because they are all extinct, and cognition doesn’t fossilise. So all we can do is make suppositions based on their artefacts, such as tools and things they were buried with, to give us an indication of their communication skills. … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Passing through the Milky Way’s arms may have helped form Earth’s solid ground

    Earth’s journey through the Milky Way might have helped create the planet’s first continents.

    Comets may have bombarded Earth every time the early solar system traveled through our galaxy’s spiral arms, a new study suggests. Those recurring barrages in turn helped trigger the formation of our planet’s continental crust, researchers propose August 23 in Geology.

    Previous theories have suggested that such impacts might have played a role in forming Earth’s landmasses. But there has been little research explaining how those impacts occurred, until now, the team says.

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    It’s an intriguing hypothesis, other scientists say, but it’s not the last word when it comes to explaining how Earth got its landmasses.

    To peer back in time, geochronologist Chris Kirkland and his colleagues turned to geologic structures known as cratons (SN: 12/3/10). These relics of Earth’s ancient continental crust are some of the planet’s oldest rocks. Using material from cratons in Australia and Greenland that are billions of years old, the team measured the chemistry of more than 2,000 bits of rock. The analysis let the researchers determine the exact ages of the rocks, and whether they had formed anew from molten material deep within the Earth or from earlier generations of existing crust.

    When Kirkland and his colleagues looked for patterns in their measurements, the team found that new crust seemed to form in spurts at roughly regular intervals. “Every 200 million years, we see a pattern of more crust production,” says Kirkland, of Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

    That timing rang a bell: It’s also the frequency at which the Earth passes through the spiral arms of the Milky Way (SN: 12/30/15). The solar system loops around the center of the galaxy a bit faster than the spiral arms move, periodically passing through and overtaking them. Perhaps cosmic encounters with more stars, gas and dust within the spiral arms affected the young planet, the team suggests.

    The idea makes sense, the researchers say, since the higher density of material in the spiral arms would have led to more gravitational tugs on the reservoir of comets at our solar system’s periphery (SN: 8/18/22). Some of those encounters would have sent comets zooming into the inner solar system, and a fraction of those icy denizens would have collided with Earth, Kirkland and his team propose.

    Earth was probably covered mostly by oceans billions of years ago, and the energy delivered by all those comets would have fractured the planet’s existing oceanic crust — the relatively dense rock present since even earlier in Earth’s history — and excavated copious amounts of material while launching shock waves into the planet. That mayhem would have primed the way for parts of Earth’s mantle to melt, Kirkland says. The resulting magma would have naturally separated into a denser part — the precursor to more oceanic crust — and a lighter, more buoyant liquid that eventually turned into continental crust, the researchers suggest.

    That’s one hypothesis, but it’s far from a slam dunk, says Jesse Reimink, a geoscientist at Penn State who was not involved in the research. For starters, comet and meteorite impacts are notoriously tough to trace, especially that far back in time, he says. “There’s very few diagnostics of impacts.” And it’s not well-known whether such impacts, if they occurred in the first place, would have resulted in the release of magma, he says.

    In the future, Kirkland and his colleagues hope to analyze moon rocks to look for the same pattern of crust formation (SN: 7/15/19). Our nearest celestial neighbor would have been walloped by about the same amount of stuff that hit Earth, Kirkland says. “You’d predict it’d also be subject to these periodic impact events.” More

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    in Humans

    The Silent Sea review: South Korean series is a slice of space horror

    From a parched Earth, Song Ji-an joins a lunar mission to find out how her sister died. With nods to the 1972 Solaris and Alien, word-of-mouth hit The Silent Sea is an intriguing show, says Bethan Ackerley

    Humans

    7 September 2022

    By Bethan Ackerley
    Song Ji-an (Bae Doona) joins a mission that finds a terrifying truthNetflix
    The Silent Sea
    Director Choi Hang-yong
    Netflix
    IF YOU live in Europe, this seems an appropriate time to watch The Silent Sea. With even rainy nations touched by what may be the continent’s worst drought in 500 years, it is easier than ever to imagine an arid future for Earth.
    This South Korean sci-fi thriller debuted on Netflix in December last year to little fanfare, but its acolytes have spread the word and it is now a word-of-mouth … More

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    in Humans

    We need to act now to give future generations a better world

    A dystopian future isn’t inevitable. By prioritising the needs of our children and grandchildren today, we can give them a world without poverty, discrimination and so many other evils, says William MacAskill

    Humans

    | Comment

    7 September 2022

    By William MacAskill
    Simone Rotella
    CURRENTLY, society does little to care for its future. In my new book, What We Owe the Future, I make the case for longtermism: the view that we should be doing much more to protect the interests of generations to come. Longtermism puts the needs of our children and grandchildren front and centre in our moral thinking, and takes seriously the sheer scale of the future that may be ahead of us.
    Why should we look so far ahead? The case for longtermism is grounded in three key ideas.
    The first is that future people matter. The moral worth … More

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    in Humans

    Two new books about sharks reveal how and why we should conserve them

    Paul de Gelder’s Shark and David Shiffman’s Why Sharks Matter aim to turn the all-too-common public panic about the predator into interest in their conservation

    Humans

    7 September 2022

    By Elle Hunt
    A bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas) swimming in the Pacific Oceanshutterstock/Leonardo Gonzalez
    Shark, Paul de Gelder (HarperCollins) and Why Sharks Matter, David Shiffman (Johns Hopkins University Press)
    BY FEBRUARY 2009, Paul de Gelder had spent thousands of hours in the water as part of his job as a diver in the Australian Navy.
    Early one morning, he was conducting a counterterrorism trial, swimming solo around Sydney Harbour, when he was attacked by a 3-metre-long shark. The fish slammed into him with its jaws, pinning de Gelder’s right hand to his leg. He recalls … More

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    in Humans

    Child’s foot was removed 31,000 years ago in earliest known amputation

    A 31,000-year-old Stone Age skeleton has been found with the lower part of its leg cleanly removed, and the bones reveal that the child survived for several years after it happened

    Humans

    7 September 2022

    By Clare Wilson
    The left tibia and fibula end suddenly (on the left) where they were cutTim Maloney
    A Stone Age child living 31,000 years ago in what is now Borneo seems to have had their leg carefully amputated above the foot and survived for several years afterwards.
    This suggests that the hunter-gatherer community the person was part of had the medical skills to stop someone bleeding to death or dying from infection – both common hazards of amputation before modern medicine, says Maxime Aubert at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.
    Before the latest finding, … More

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    in Space & Astronomy

    Here’s the James Webb telescope’s first direct image of an exoplanet

    This is the first picture of an exoplanet from the James Webb Space Telescope.

    “We’re actually measuring photons from the atmosphere of the planet itself,” says astronomer Sasha Hinkley of the University of Exeter in England. Seeing those particles of light, “to me, that’s very exciting.”

    The planet is about seven times the mass of Jupiter and lies more than 100 times farther from its star than Earth sits from the sun, direct observations of exoplanet HIP 65426 b show. It’s also young, about 10 million or 20 million years old, compared with the more than 4-billion-year-old Earth, Hinkley and colleagues report in a study submitted August 31 at arXiv.org.

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    Those three features — size, distance and youth — made HIP 65426 b relatively easy to see, and so a good planet to test JWST’s observing abilities. And the telescope has once again surpassed astronomers’ expectations (SN: 7/11/22).

    “We’ve demonstrated really how powerful JWST is as an instrument for the direct imaging of exoplanets,” says exoplanet astronomer and coauthor Aarynn Carter of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

    Astronomers have found more than 5,000 planets orbiting other stars (SN: 3/22/22). But almost all of those planets were detected indirectly, either by the planets tugging on the stars with their gravity or blocking starlight as they cross between the star and a telescope’s view.

    To see a planet directly, astronomers have to block out the light from its star and let the planet’s own light shine, a tricky process. It’s been done before, but for only about 20 planets total (SN: 11/13/08; SN: 3/14/13; SN: 7/22/20).

    “In every area of exoplanet discovery, nature has been very generous,” says MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager, who was not involved in the JWST discovery. “This is the one area where nature didn’t really come through.”

    In 2017, astronomers discovered HIP 65426 b and took a direct image of it using an instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. But because that telescope is on the ground, it can’t see all the light coming from the exoplanet. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a lot of the planet’s infrared wavelengths — exactly the wavelengths JWST excels at observing. The space telescope observed the planet on July 17 and July 30, capturing its glow in four different infrared wavelengths.

    “These are wavelengths of light that we’ve never ever seen exoplanets in before,” Hinkley says. “I’ve literally been waiting for this day for six years. It feels amazing.”

    Pictures in these wavelengths will help reveal how planets formed and what their atmospheres are made of.

    “Direct imaging is our future,” Seager says. “It’s amazing to see the Webb performing so well.”

    While the team has not yet studied the atmosphere of HIP 65426 b in detail, it did report the first spectrum — a measurement of light in a range of wavelengths — of an object orbiting a different star. The spectrum allows a deeper look into the object’s chemistry and atmosphere, astronomer Brittany Miles of UC Santa Cruz and colleagues reported September 1 at arXiv.org.

    That object is called VHS 1256 b. It’s as heavy as 20 Jupiters, so it may be more like a transition object between a planet and a star, called a brown dwarf, than a giant planet. JWST found evidence that the amounts of carbon monoxide and methane in the atmosphere of the orb are out of equilibrium. That means the atmosphere is getting mixed up, with winds or currents pulling molecules from lower depths to its top and vice versa. The telescope also saw signs of sand clouds, a common feature in brown dwarf atmospheres (SN: 7/8/22).

    “This is probably a violent and turbulent atmosphere that is filled with clouds,” Hinkley says.

    HIP 65426 b and VHS 1256 b are unlike anything we see in our solar system. They’re more than three times the distance of Uranus from their stars, which suggests they formed in a totally different way from more familiar planets. In future work, astronomers hope to use JWST to image smaller planets that sit closer to their stars.

    “What we’d like to do is get down to study Earths, wouldn’t we? We’d really like to get that first image of an Earth orbiting another star,” Hinkley says. That’s probably out of JWST’s reach — Earth-sized planets are still too small see. But a Saturn? That may be something JWST could focus its sights on.  More