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    Impulse review: An authoritative, if dry, sexual behaviours manual

    Impulse: The science of sex and desire by psychiatrists Jon Grant and Samuel Chamberlain delivers on its bid to answer our hidden questions about sex, but it can be a little perfunctory

    Humans

    1 February 2023

    By Elle Hunt
    Everyone has a question about sex they would like answered – even if it is just “am I normal?”Beatriz Vera/shutterstock
    Impulse: The science of sex and desire
    Jon Grant and Samuel Chamberlain (Cambridge University Press)
    LET’S talk about sex – or not. Many of us have trouble striking the right tone or even finding the right words, caught between obfuscating with the birds and the bees or titillating with undue detail. For the topics too awkward to raise in person, there is always the internet, but its answers are many and highly variable.
    Factor … More

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    Arch-Conspirator review: Ancient Greek tragedy spun into sci-fi gold

    Veronica Roth’s dystopian take on Sophocles’s 2500-year-old tragedy reminds us that human nature is timeless, finds Sally Adee

    Humans

    1 February 2023

    By Sally Adee
    In an unnamed dystopia, citizens face dangerous reproductive rulesGremlin/getty images
    Arch-Conspirator
    Veronica Roth (Tor)
    THERE isn’t much world-building in Veronica Roth’s sci-fi retelling of Sophocles’s classic Greek tragedy Antigone. Then again, in Arch-Conspirator, there isn’t much world. A dusty dystopian city (Thebes in the original, but it isn’t clear where we are in the reboot) is all that remains after a thinly sketched environmental polycrisis has turned humanity into an endangered species.
    Or, at least, that is what a reader surmises. The citizens don’t seem to know much about the arid … More

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    Don’t Miss: Innervate, an EP reflecting on epilepsy by Liza Bec

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

    Humans

    1 February 2023

    BEN HUGHES
    Listen
    Innervate is an EP by composer Liza Bec (pictured above), who almost lost their performance career to a rare epilepsy triggered by playing music. The EP spotlights the roborecorder, an instrument they built. On release 10 February.

    Read
    The Meaning of Geese is teased out by Nick Acheson, whose epic bicycle adventures trace the incoming paths of pink-footed and brent geese as they arrive from Iceland and Siberia to fill the skies of his native Norfolk, UK. On sale from 9 February.
    Dan Weill
    Visit
    Drug experiments and forays into medicines, narcotics and everyday … More

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    Ancient Egyptians used exotic oils from distant lands to make mummies

    A workshop used for mummification at Saqqara in Egypt contains remnants of the substances used to make mummies, revealing many came from southern Africa or South-East Asia

    Humans

    1 February 2023

    By Michael Marshall
    Illustration of the underground embalming workshop in Saqqara in ancient EgyptNikola Nevenov
    An underground workshop found at an ancient Egyptian burial site contains ceramic vessels with traces of the substances used to make mummies. They include resins obtained from as far away as India and South-East Asia, indicating that ancient Egyptians engaged in long-distance trade.
    “We could identify a large diversity of substances which were used by the embalmers,” says Maxime Rageot at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Few of them were locally available.”
    The workshop, dating from around 600 BC, was discovered in 2016 at Saqqara, which was the burial ground of Egyptian royalty and elites for centuries. “It was used as an elite cemetery from the very earliest moment of the Egyptian state,” says Elaine Sullivan at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wasn’t involved in the study.Advertisement
    Close to the pyramid of Unas, archaeologists led by Ramadan Hussein, also at the University of Tübingen, found two vertical shafts dug into the ground. One was 13 metres deep and led to the embalming workshop, while the other was 30 metres deep and led to burial chambers. Hussein died in 2022.
    It is the first Egyptian embalming workshop to be found underground, says team member Susanne Beck at the University of Tübingen. This may have been to keep the process secret, but it also had the advantage of keeping decaying bodies cool.
    In the workshop, the team found 121 beakers and bowls. Many were labelled: sometimes with instructions like “to put on his head”, sometimes with names of embalming substances and sometimes with administrator titles.
    Vessels from the embalming workshop© Saqqara Saite Tombs Project, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
    The researchers chose the nine beakers and 22 bowls with the most legible labels for analysis. They studied the chemical residues left in the bowls to find out what substances had been used during embalming and mummification.
    A host of substances, including plant oils, tars, resins and animal fats, were discovered. Two examples were cedar oil and heated beeswax. Many of the substances were known to be used in mummification, but some were new.
    One new substance was dammar, a gum-like resin obtained from trees in India and South-East Asia. The name “dammar” is a Malay word.
    The team also found elemi: a pale yellow resin resembling honey that comes from trees in the rainforests of South Asia and southern Africa.
    The dammar and elemi show that Egyptian embalming drove early globalisation, says Philipp Stockhammer at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, another member of the team. “You really needed to transport these resins over large distances.” It fits with other evidence of long-distance trade at the time.
    The ancient Egyptian elite liked exotic goods as much as modern capitalists, says Sullivan. At times when the state was powerful and organised, “we see a great interest in the outside world and in connections to the outside world and bringing those things from the outside world together”.
    Stockhammer and Sullivan both say that the substances were transported by chains of traders. “The Egyptians don’t have to be going to the eastern side of India themselves,” says Sullivan.

    The researchers were also able to translate two new words. Many texts on mummification refer to antiu and sefet. The former had been tentatively translated as “myrrh” or “incense”, and the latter as “a sacred oil”. However, because they were written on pieces of pottery with residue inside, it was possible to identify them. It turns out antiu is a mixture of oils or tars from conifers. Meanwhile, sefet is an unguent – an ointment or lubricant – containing plant additives.
    Many of the substances had antibacterial and antifungal properties, and were combined into elaborate mixtures. For Stockhammer, the complexity of the substances displays “enormous personal knowledge that was accumulated through these centuries of experience of embalming human individuals”.
    That fits with textual evidence that priests tasked with embalming were important people with considerable skill, says Sullivan. “They would have needed to have a lot of ritual knowledge and a lot of material knowledge,” she says. The body had to be preserved physically and rites had to be performed correctly according to the Egyptian religion. It was “both a spiritual and physical practice”.

    More on these topics: More

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    How to use science (and a dash of acid) to improve your scrambled eggs

    How do you like your eggs in the morning? If the answer is extra-soft and scrambled, you need to follow these top tips for a perfect result, says Sam Wong

    Humans

    25 January 2023

    4kodiak/Getty Images
    IN THE three years since I started this column, I have somehow avoided writing about eggs, even though I cook them for breakfast most weekends. What is there to learn about such a simple food?
    Quite a lot, it turns out. An egg may look the same from day to day, but it is undergoing subtle changes even before you crack it open. Water vapour and carbon dioxide escape through tiny pores in the shell, raising the pH of the egg white. Air diffuses into the shell, expanding the tiny air sac inside. For this reason, a fresh egg sinks … More

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    Don’t Miss: Star Wars animation The Bad Batch is back with a vengeance

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

    Humans

    25 January 2023

    Star Wars: The Bad BatchDisney
    Watch
    Star Wars: The Bad Batch returns for its second season. Presumed dead by the Empire, Clone Force 99 must decide whether to live in hiding or risk everything by fighting. Watch the animated series now on Disney+.

    Read
    Of Ice and Men is historian Fred Hogge’s entertaining take on our relationship with ice. It has shaped civilisations, from freezing our food to saving lives in medicine, as well as via melting glaciers due to climate change. On sale in the UK from 2 … More

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    M3gan review: A chilling sci-fi film about the dangers of AI care

    It pays to know what you really need from a sophisticated learning machine, particularly if you don’t want a killer robot on your hands, says Simon Ings

    Humans

    25 January 2023

    By Simon Ings
    Cady (Violet McGraw) listens as the android M3gan reads to hergeoffrey short/universal studios
    M3gan
    Gerard Johnstone
    On general release
    AFTER doing something unspeakable to a school bully’s ear, chasing him through a forest like a wolf and then driving him under the wheels of a passing car, M3gan, the world’s first “Model 3 Generative Android”, returns to comfort Cady, its inventor’s niece. “We’ve learned a valuable lesson today,” it whispers.
    So has the audience: before you ask a learning machine to do something for you, it helps if you know what that thing … More

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    Lots of Tatooine-like planets around binary stars may be habitable

    SEATTLE — Luke Skywalker’s home planet in Star Wars is the stuff of science fiction. But Tatooine-like planets in orbit around pairs of stars might be our best bet in the search for habitable planets beyond our solar system.

    Many stars in the universe come in pairs. And lots of those should have planets orbiting them (SN: 10/25/21). That means there could be many more planets orbiting around binaries than around solitary stars like ours. But until now, no one had a clear idea about whether those planets’ environments could be conducive to life. New computer simulations suggest that, in many cases, life could imitate art.

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    Earthlike planets orbiting some configurations of binary stars can stay in stable orbits for at least a billion years, researchers reported January 11 at the American Astronomical Society meeting. That sort of stability, the researchers propose, would be enough to potentially allow life to develop, provided the planets aren’t too hot or cold.

    Of the planets that stuck around, about 15 percent stayed in their habitable zone — a temperate region around their stars where water could stay liquid — most or even all of the time.

    The researchers ran simulations of 4,000 configurations of binary stars, each with an Earthlike planet in orbit around them. The team varied things like the relative masses of the stars, the sizes and shapes of the stars’ orbits around each other, and the size of the planet’s orbit around the binary pair.

    The scientists then tracked the motion of the planets for up to a billion years of simulated time to see if the planets would stay in orbit over the sorts of timescales that might allow life to emerge.

    A planet orbiting binary stars can get kicked out of the star system due to complicated interactions between the planet and stars. In the new study, the researchers found that, for planets with large orbits around star pairs, only about 1 out of 8 were kicked out of the system. The rest were stable enough to continue to orbit for the full billion years. About 1 in 10 settled in their habitable zones and stayed there.

    Of the 4,000 planets that the team simulated, roughly 500 maintained stable orbits that kept them in their habitable zones at least 80 percent of the time.

    “The habitable zone . . . as I’ve characterized it so far, spans from freezing to boiling,” said Michael Pedowitz, an undergraduate student at the College of New Jersey in Ewing who presented the research. Their definition is overly strict, he said, because they chose to model Earthlike planets without atmospheres or oceans. That’s simpler to simulate, but it also allows temperatures to fluctuate wildly on a planet as it orbits.

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    “An atmosphere and oceans would smooth over temperature variations fairly well,” says study coauthor Mariah MacDonald, an astrobiologist also at the College of New Jersey. An abundance of air and water would potentially allow a planet to maintain habitable conditions, even if it spent more of its time outside of the nominal habitable zone around a binary star system.

    The number of potentially habitable planets “will increase once we add atmospheres,” MacDonald says, “but I can’t yet say by how much.”

    She and Pedowitz hope to build more sophisticated models in the coming months, as well as extend their simulations beyond a billion years and include changes in the stars that can affect conditions in a solar system as it ages.

    The possibility of stable and habitable planets in binary star systems is a timely issue says Penn State astrophysicist Jason Wright, who was not involved in the study.

    “At the time Star Wars came out,” he says, “we didn’t know of any planets outside the solar system, and wouldn’t for 15 years. Now we know that there are many and that they orbit these binary stars.”

    These simulations of planets orbiting binaries could serve as a guide for future experiments, Wright says. “This is an under-explored population of planets. There’s no reason we can’t go after them, and studies like this are presumably showing us that it’s worthwhile to try.” More