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    Telluria review: Political dystopia from a bravura Russian writer

    Vladimir Sorokin’s dystopian fantasy is a wild read, mixing political satire with steampunk microstates and a must-have psychotropic drug based on tellurium

    Humans

    16 November 2022

    By Boyd Tonkin
    Medieval hierarchies with futuristic technology rule Earth in TelluriaPreechar Bowonkitwanchai/Shutterstock
    Telluria
    Vladimir Sorokin, Translated by Max Lawton (NYRB Classics)
    WE ARE in Telluria, a tiny state that gives its name to a novel, recently released in translation. A holy war between Europe and Islamic powers has plunged the world into a neofeudal era of micro states. In one of these lives Golden Throat, a singer whose ballads denounce the immorality of the elite; for him, “the benefit of decomposing despotism” is “rich satirical material”. Unsurprisingly, Golden Throat comes to a sticky end. … More

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    Limitless With Chris Hemsworth review: How to live better for longer

    The Hollywood A-lister endures a series of challenges in a bid to extend his life expectancy in this engaging documentary, from climbing 30 metres up a rope dangling over a canyon to fasting for four days

    Humans

    16 November 2022

    By Gregory Wakeman
    National Geographic for Disney+
    Limitless With Chris Hemsworth
    National Geographic
    Airs on Disney+ on 16 November
    ON THE face of it, Thor star Chris Hemsworth lives an idyllic life. The Hollywood A-lister is married to another successful actor, Fast & Furious‘s Elsa Pataky, with whom he has three children.
    But he makes it clear at the start of his documentary Limitless With Chris Hemsworth that he experiences the same mental and health issues as everyone else. Over six episodes, Hemsworth sets out to show that, rather than being overwhelmed by your problems, scientific studies demonstrate that it is much healthier to confront them.
    With … More

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    A Fractured Infinity review: Multiverse plot trope comes of age

    Writers and film makers are always using the multiverse as fuel for their plots, but Nathan Tavares gives it a new twist in A Fractured Infinity, a sci-fi novel about growing up, finds Sally Adee

    Humans

    16 November 2022

    By Sally Adee
    When we are young, we fight off the idea of a final version of ourselvesJonathan Knowles/Getty Images
    A Fractured Infinity
    Nathan Tavares (Titan Books)
    IT SEEMS like the multiverse is everywhere right now, if you’ll pardon the pun. From its origins as a groundbreaking head-exploder of a scientific theory, it seems to have achieved the dubious honour of being the go-to lazy plot twist. But it can also elevate other potentially tired genres. This is the trick Nathan Tavares pulls off in A Fractured Infinity, using it to provide new facets for … More

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    Don’t miss: Strange World, animated sci-fi with Jake Gyllenhaal

    Where might James Bond go next, in terms of science and technology?From Goldfinger to No Time to Die, James Bond has long showcased the latest tech advances. Might 007’s next adventure involve protecting a low-cost, lightweight, high-capacity battery from sinister forces, asks Kathryn Harkup More

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    Early humans may have cooked fish in ovens 780,000 years ago

    The remains of fish teeth at an archaeological site in Israel appear to have been cooked with controlled heat rather than directly exposed to fire

    Humans

    14 November 2022

    By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
    Illustration of hominins cooking fishElla Maru / University of Tel Aviv
    Microscopic changes in the enamel of ancient fish teeth indicate that humans may have been cooking fish in an earthen oven at least 780,000 years ago.
    The findings provide the earliest evidence of actual cooking, as opposed to just throwing meat and bones into a fire, says Irit Zohar at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv, Israel.
    “We’ve developed a methodology that allows us to identify cooking in relatively low temperatures, as opposed to burning,” she says. “You cannot immediately correlate the control of fire with cooking unless you show that the food has been cooked.”Advertisement
    Researchers have previously suggested that humans were cooking meat 1.5 million years ago, based on the discovery of charred animal remains. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people were heating food before eating it, says Zohar.
    “Evidence of charred material doesn’t mean cooking,” she says. “It just means the food was thrown into the fire.”
    Zohar and her colleagues studied a 780,000-year-old settlement in Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel’s northern Jordan river valley. No human remains have been found there, but based on its age and the stone tools at the site, the inhabitants are most likely to have been Homo erectus.
    The researchers noticed clumps of fish teeth – but no bones – around areas where hearths once burned. Most of the teeth belonged to two species of fish known for their nutritional value and good taste – the Jordan himri (Carasobarbus canis) and the Jordan barbel (Luciobarbus longiceps). So they wondered if the fish had been cooked at low heat, which would have made the bones softer and prone to disintegration while preserving the teeth.
    To test their idea, Zohar and her team adapted a technique from human forensic investigations in which X-ray diffraction reveals the sizes of crystals in tooth enamel, which vary according to temperature.
    The researchers carried out cooking and burning experiments on readily available black carp (Mylopharyngodon piceus), heating them at different temperatures up to 900°C (1650°F), and then examined the resulting crystal sizes in the tooth enamel. They also looked at crystal sizes in three fossilised teeth from 3.15-to-4.5 million-year-old Jordan barbel, which had probably never been exposed to high heat.
    Zohar and her colleagues then collected 30 fish teeth from among the tens of thousands available at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov and compared their enamel structures with those of the previously tested teeth.

    They found that the fish teeth from the human settlement had enamel structure patterns indicating that they had been exposed to temperatures of 200°C to 500°C (390°F to 930°F) and hadn’t been directly exposed to the fire. Combined with there being nearly no fish bones nearby and the teeth being discovered near a controlled fire source, the findings suggest that the fish were probably cooked whole, perhaps in an earthen oven, says Zohar.
    Notably, the results reveal that humans weren’t just eating fish raw and throwing the heads into the fire, because the tooth enamel would have shown exposure to much higher temperatures, she says.
    “Each parameter in itself doesn’t mean cooking, but each one fits together like a puzzle so that we can say, ‘OK, now we see that it’s correlated to cooking’,” says Zohar.
    Fish are more nutritious, easier to digest and safer to eat when cooked, says Zohar. The fact that these populations were cooking their fish provides evidence of their advanced cognitive abilities, which were perhaps greater than many scientists have previously believed. “If they already knew how to control fire, then it’s just logical that they would use it for cooking,” she says.
    Journal reference: Nature Ecology & Evolution, DOI: 10.1038/s41559-022-01910-z
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    More on these topics: More

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    Despite reaching 8 billion people, we must plan for population decline

    The number of people on the planet has hit a huge milestone at 8 billion, but fertility rates are falling fast in many countries, which means planning for an older population

    Humans

    | Leader

    9 November 2022

    Shutterstock/Artem Musaev
    THERE are soon to be 8 billion of us and counting. Yet while the world’s population is still growing fast overall, in many countries, the numbers are declining or will do soon.
    Take the three largest. The population of China will begin to fall soon and could halve by 2100. India’s will peak around 2050. And the US population would fall from the 2030s if not for immigration.
    So there are two distinct issues to deal with: rapid population growth in some nations and population declines in others.Advertisement
    Many see limiting population growth as vital for tackling various environmental catastrophes unfolding around the world, as we report on in our article “What will a population of 8 billion people mean for us and the planet?” Yet for wealthy Westerners to call for lower-income countries to control their populations simply in the name of protecting nature is hypocritical in the extreme, given that the rich have vastly larger environmental footprints. What’s more, there is often more than a whiff of racism to such calls.
    That said, there are good reasons for fast-growing countries to try to limit further population growth, as discussed in our article “Tackling population growth is key to fighting climate change”, not least because rapid increases can lead to more poverty. What’s more, two of the key factors in lowering fertility rates are educating women and respecting their rights, which all countries should be doing anyway.
    Declining populations can be seen as a good thing in some ways – less pressure on wildlife, more space and so on. But having fewer working-age people and more older people is a huge economic challenge.
    Apart from increasing immigration, there is no sure-fire way to stem individual nations’ population decline. This means that, in many parts of the world, governments need to be readying care and pensions systems to cope with ageing populations.
    These trends are highly predictable over the next few decades, so there is absolutely no excuse for failing to prepare. It is also hugely important to invest in health. An ageing population has much less impact if people remain healthy well into old age.

    More on these topics: More

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    Sentience review: Inside a controversial new idea about consciousness

    We are still struggling to account for consciousness. A new hypothesis by psychologist Nicholas Humphrey challenges the basis of the discussion and argues sentience isn’t what we think

    Humans

    9 November 2022

    By Philip Ball
    Why did evolution invest in giving humans so much feeling about their world?Jonathan Knowles/getty images
    Sentience: The invention of consciousness
    Nicholas Humphrey (Oxford University Press)
    THERE is a shelf in my brain – and in my study too – where I store theories of consciousness, and this is where psychologist Nicholas Humphrey’s new book, Sentience, will reside. Each of these theories and hypotheses can seem compelling in the moment, especially given the confidence with which they tend to be presented. They are usually unlike each other; often, they are diametrically opposed.
    For example, in Sentience … More

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    The Song of the Cell review: A love letter to life's most basic unit

    From the pioneering days of IVF to modern gene editing, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s ambitious book explores how far we have come in understanding the cell – and how far we still have to go

    Humans

    9 November 2022

    By Jason Arunn Murugesu
    In less than 50 years, the IVF process has gone from pioneering to commonplaceNevodka/Alamy
    The Song of the Cell
    Siddhartha Mukherjee (Bodley Head)
    ON 25 July 1978, Louise Joy Brown was born at Oldham General Hospital in the UK. The first child to be born following IVF, she was called a miracle baby by some, a test-tube baby by others, and a representation of the “degeneration of Western morals” by at least one.
    A hundred years earlier, Walther Flemming, a German scientist, coined the term chromatin, meaning coloured substance, while he … More