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    The best popular science books out in 2023

    When did hominins start cooking? It might be earlier than we thoughtWe know for certain cooking isn’t unique to our species and that it was going on 750,000 years ago. The evidence of hominins deliberately exposing their food to heat is being pushed back further all the time, finds Michael Marshall More

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    The best science fiction television to watch out for in 2023

    From new seasons of The Mandalorian and Severance to a much-anticipated adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, settle in for some stellar shows next year

    Humans

    28 December 2022

    By Bethan Ackerley
    Mark Scout (Adam Scott) in Severance.Atsushi nishijima
    IN THE waning days of 2022, with little to do but gorge on Christmas leftovers, I find myself thinking about the coming year. Because sincere self-reflection is beyond me, however, all those thoughts concern television – and so I have amassed a non-exhaustive list of the nine shows I am most looking forward to in 2023.
    If any TV series gives me hope for the medium’s future, it is Severance, an unsettling workplace dramedy that debuted on Apple TV+ in February. We followed Mark Scout … More

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    How to make honeycomb at home

    Honeycomb, or cinder toffee, isn’t difficult to make, but it reveals the complex science involved in transforming sugar into confectionery, explains Sam Wong

    Humans

    28 December 2022

    By Sam Wong
    Getty Images/iStockphoto
    HONEYCOMB, or cinder toffee, is simple to make, but is a great example of the complex science involved in transforming sugar into confectionery.
    The process begins by heating sugar and water. While pure water boils at 100°C (212°F), the boiling point of a sugar solution is higher. As the solution boils, water evaporates, but the sugar remains, increasing the concentration and raising the boiling point further. At 170°C (338°F), the sugar starts to caramelise: the molecules break apart and recombine, turning it brown and producing delicious flavour molecules.
    By measuring the temperature of a boiling sugar … More

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    Telling the story of Antarctica through 100 objects

    The 250th anniversary of the first documented crossing of the Antarctic circle is being marked with a new book that traces the continent’s history via 100 artefacts from around the world

    Humans

    28 December 2022

    By Alison Flood
    Herbert Ponting/Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images
    THE first documented crossing of the Antarctic circle was made on 17 January 1773 by James Cook on the HMS Resolution. Now, 250 years later, Jean de Pomereu and Daniella McCahey are marking its anniversary in Antarctica: A history in 100 objects, a book that tells the story of the continent via 100 photos and artefacts from around the world.
    The main image is an iconic photograph taken from a grotto in an iceberg in 1911 by Herbert Ponting (pictured below). Ponting was the first professional photographer to travel to Antarctica, after being invited by Robert Falcon Scott to join his ill-fated expedition. The ship is the Terra Nova and the men are geologist Thomas Griffith Taylor and meteorologist Charles Wright.
    Herbert Ponting in Antarctica in 1910Herbert Ponting/Royal Geographical Society via Getty ImagesAdvertisement
    Shaun O’Boyle
    Pictured above are the South Pole Telescope and BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) experiment at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The telescope helped to capture the first image of a supermassive black hole in 2019.
    L: Vestfold Museums: R: United States Navy History and Heritage Command
    Leather goggles to protect against snow blindness, made during Roald Amundsen’s 1910-1912 Antarctic expedition, are shown above left. Pictured to the right of them are mittens knitted by Edith “Jackie” Ronne during an expedition in 1946-48. Ronne was one of the first two women to winter in Antarctica as part of a geographical expedition.
    G. H. Mumm & Cie
    The  image above shows Ernest Gourdon and Paul Pléneau sharing a bottle of champagne in July 1904. This was intended to promote Mumm Cordon Rouge, since the Mumm family was a sponsor of the trip.

    Pablo de León/University of North Dakota
    A spacesuit tested in Antarctica in 2011 for possible use on Mars. (pictured above).

    Sebastian Copeland
    A humpback whale skeleton (pictured above) reconstructed by conservationist and film-maker Jacques Cousteau on King George Island in 1972-73, to raise awareness of whaling.

    Frédéric Perin/Météo France
    An anemometer from a 1908-10 expedition.

    Pictured above is a New Zealand $5 note commemorating Edmund Hillary, whose team was the first to reach the South Pole using overland vehicles, in 1958.
    Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
    The 1602 Kunyu Wanguo Quantu map from China, (pictured above) featuring a vast “Terra Australis” with the inscription “Few have reached these southern regions. So the things are not explored yet”.
    Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
    Coryphaenoides lecointei, a fish specimen collected in the Antarctic on 15 March 1899 (pictured above).

    More on these topics: More

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    When did hominins start cooking? It might be earlier than we thought

    We know for certain cooking isn’t unique to our species and that it was going on 750,000 years ago. The evidence of hominins deliberately exposing their food to heat is being pushed back further all the time, finds Michael Marshall

    Humans

    | Columnist

    28 December 2022

    By Michael Marshall
    Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock
    AT THIS time of year, as the temperatures drop, I find myself craving pies. I don’t know what unrecognised geniuses invented pastry and then had the idea to put a casserole inside it, but I owe them an unpayable debt. So let’s talk about the invention of cooking. How long have humans been deliberately exposing their food to heat to make it better?
    You might remember a recent story reporting evidence that hominins were cooking carp fish in an earthen oven around 780,000 years ago in what is now Israel. Previously, the oldest unambiguous evidence of cooking … More

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    The James Webb Space Telescope wasn’t the only big space news in 2022

    While the stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope captured space fans’ attention this year, other telescopes and spacecraft were busy on Earth and around the solar system (SN Online: 12/7/22). Here are some of the coolest space highlights that had nothing to do with JWST.

    Back to the moon

    After several aborted attempts, NASA launched the Artemis I mission on November 16. That was a big step toward the goal of landing people on the moon as early as 2025 (SN: 12/3/22, p. 14). No human has set foot there since 1972. Artemis I included a new rocket, the Space Launch System, which had previously suffered a series of hydrogen fuel leaks, and the new Orion spacecraft. No astronauts were aboard the test flight, but Orion carried a manikin in the commander’s seat and two manikin torsos to test radiation protection and life-support systems, plus a cargo hold full of small satellites that went off on their own missions. On December 11, the Orion capsule successfully returned to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near Mexico (SN Online: 12/12/22).

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    DART shoves an asteroid

    NASA’s DART spacecraft successfully nudged an asteroid into a new orbit this year. On September 26, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test slammed into asteroid Dimorphos, about 11 million kilometers from Earth at the time of impact. In October, NASA announced that the impact shortened Dimorphos’ roughly 12-hour orbit around its sibling asteroid, Didymos, by 32 minutes (SN: 11/5/22, p. 14). Dimorphos posed no threat to Earth, but the test will help inform future missions to divert any asteroids on a potentially dangerous collision course with our home planet, researchers say.

    This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a split stream of dust and rock streaming off the asteroid Dimorphos nearly 12 days after the DART spacecraft smashed into it.NASA, ESA, STSCI, HUBBLE

    Massive Marsquakes

    The InSight Mars lander is going out on a high note. After scientists reported in May that InSight had recorded the largest known Marsquake, roughly a magnitude 5, news came in October that the lander’s seismometer had also detected the rumblings of the two biggest meteorite impacts ever observed on Mars. Those impacts created gaping craters and sent seismic waves rippling along the top of the planet’s crust.

    The details of how those waves and others moved through the Red Planet gave researchers new intel on the structure of Mars’ crust, which is hard to study any other way. The data also suggest that some Marsquakes are caused by magma moving beneath the surface (SN: 12/3/22, p. 12). The solar panels that power the lander are now covered in dust after four years on Mars, a death knell for the mission.

    InSight’s seismometer, seen in the lower left of this artist’s rendition of the lander, detected Mars’ largest known quake this year.JPL-CALTECH/NASA

    Chemistry of life turns up in meteorites

    All five bases in DNA and RNA have been found in rocks that fell to Earth. Three of the nucleobases, which combine with sugars and phosphates to make up the genetic material of all known life, had previously been found in meteorites. But the last two — cytosine and thymine — were reported from space rocks only this year (SN: 6/4/22, p. 7). The find supports the idea that life’s precursors could have come to Earth from space, researchers say.

    A two-gram chunk from this piece of meteorite contains two crucial components of DNA and RNA now identified for the first time in an extraterrestrial source.NASA

    Sagittarius A* snapshot

    The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way became the second black hole to get its close-up. After releasing a picture of the behemoth at the heart of galaxy M87 in 2019, astronomers used data from the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of radio telescopes around the world, to assemble an image of Sagittarius A* (SN: 6/4/22, p. 6). The image, released in May, shows a faint fuzzy shadow nestled in the glowing ring of the accretion disk. That may not sound impressive on its own, but the result provides new details about the turbulence roiling near our black hole’s edge.

    The Event Horizon Telescope revealed this first-ever image of our galaxy’s supermassive black hole.Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration More

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    The James Webb telescope is getting glimpses of small, far-off planets

    BALTIMORE — When the James Webb Space Telescope was first dreamed up, exoplanets hadn’t even been discovered yet. Now the observatory is showing astronomers what it can learn about planets orbiting other stars — including the small ones.

    Since its launch in December 2021, JWST had already “sniffed” the atmospheres of Jupiter-sized planets orbiting searingly close to their stars (SN: 8/26/22). Those intense worlds are interesting, but not the places where astronomers hope to look for signs of life. The telescope is now getting glimpses of atmospheres on known exoplanets of the more terrestrial persuasion, astronomers reported December 13 and 14 at the First Science Results from JWST conference.

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    And JWST is starting to find new rocky worlds too.

    These early peeks at far-off worlds don’t yet reveal a lot about these remote locales. But researchers are buoyed by what JWST’s sharp vision in infrared wavelengths could eventually unearth about the smaller planets beyond our solar system.

    “The main message is, we’re in business,” said University of Montreal astronomer Björn Benneke. “We don’t even have all the observations yet, but they are already quite exciting.”

    One of the smaller planets that JWST looked at is GJ 1214b, which has frustrated astronomers since its discovery in 2009 (SN: 12/16/09). The planet is a sub-Neptune, meaning its size is somewhere between that of a rocky world like Earth and a gaseous one like Neptune.

    “What the heck are sub-Neptunes?” asked astronomer Eliza Kempton of the University of Maryland in College Park. They could be balls of rock with thick hydrogen and helium atmospheres, or maybe water worlds (SN: 2/22/12). “What we’d like to do with atmospheric characterization is measure their atmospheres and see which is which,” Kempton said.

    Previously, astronomers tried to observe the makeup of GJ 1214b’s atmosphere by watching how starlight filtered through it. But the atmosphere is thick and hazy, blocking astronomers’ ability to detect individual molecules in it.

    Instead of watching the planet pass in front of its star, Kempton and colleagues used JWST to look for the glow of the planet right before it disappeared behind the star. And it worked: After 38 hours of observing, the researchers detected the planet’s infrared glow, Kempton said in a December 13 presentation.

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    There’s more work to do, but the initial data suggest the planet has a lot of chemical components, possibly including water and methane. It’s also enriched in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

    As for knowing what kind of world GJ 1214b is, “I’d say we’re not quite there yet,” Kempton said. It could be a watery planet, she said, or a gassy planet that has lost a fair amount of its lighter elements.

    The telescope also had its first look at the tantalizing TRAPPIST-1 system, Benneke said in a different December 13 presentation (SN: 12/13/17). Discovered in 2017, the system contains seven Earth-sized worlds that are probably rocky. Three of those planets might have the right temperatures for liquid water to exist on their surface, making them particularly interesting targets for JWST and other telescopes to look for signs of life.

    But TRAPPIST-1 is a small, red star called an M dwarf, a type of star that is notorious for violent flares and strong radiation. For years, astronomers have debated whether planets around these stars would be hospitable to life, or if the stars would strip their planets’ atmospheres away (SN: 6/14/17).

    “If the TRAPPIST planets don’t have atmospheres, then we need to move on” from M dwarfs in the search for extraterrestrial life, says astronomer Mercedes Lόpez-Morales of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved in the new JWST observations.

    JWST’s first look at one of those potentially habitable worlds, TRAPPIST-1g, did not reveal any clear signs of an atmosphere. But the telescope looked at the planet for only about five hours. With more observations, an atmosphere should be detectable if it’s there, Benneke said.

    JWST is getting into the planet-hunting game too, said astronomer Kevin Stevenson on December 14. The telescope double-checked a potentially interesting observation from another telescope and confirmed that it had seen a rocky, Earth-sized world around a nearby M dwarf. This proves that JWST has the precision to find such worlds.

    “It is an exciting result, perhaps the first discovery of an exoplanet by JWST,” said Stevenson, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. The planet orbits its dim star every two days, so it’s probably around 225° Celsius on the surface — likely too hot to be habitable, he says. “It’s more like an exo-Venus than an exo-Earth.”

    While it’s still early days, the researchers emphasized, the forecast for planet hunting using JWST is good.

    The results are paving the way for future observatories too, said astrophysicist John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Astronomers’ wish list for future missions includes a telescope that can dig even further into the details of potentially habitable worlds.

    “If it’s not impossible,” Mather said, “let’s do it.” More

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    The first planet found by the Kepler space telescope is doomed

    The first planet ever spotted by the Kepler space telescope is falling into its star.

    Kepler launched in 2009 on a mission to find exoplanets by watching them cross in front of their stars. The first potential planet the telescope spotted was initially dismissed as a false alarm, but in 2019 astronomer Ashley Chontos and colleagues proved it was real (SN: 3/5/19). The planet was officially named Kepler 1658b.

    Now, Chontos and others have determined Kepler 1658b’s fate. “It is tragically spiraling into its host star,” says Chontos, now at Princeton University. The planet has roughly 2.5 million years left before it faces a fiery death. “It will ultimately end up being engulfed. Death by star.”

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    The roughly Jupiter-sized planet is searingly hot, orbiting its star once every three days. In follow-up observations from 2019 to 2022, the planet kept transiting the star earlier than expected.

    Combined data from Kepler and other telescopes show that the planet is inching closer to the star, Chontos and colleagues report December 19 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    “You can see the interval between the transits is shrinking, really slowly but really consistently, at a rate of 131 milliseconds per year,” says astrophysicist Shreyas Vissapragada of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

    That doesn’t sound like much. But if this trend continues, the planet has only 2 million or 3 million years left to live. “For something that’s been around for 2 to 3 billion years, that’s pretty short,” Vissapragada says. If the planet’s lifetime was a more human 100 years, it would have a little more than a month left.

    Studying Kepler 1658b as it dies will help explain the life cycles of similar planets. “Learning something about the actual physics of how orbits shrink over time, we can get a better handle on the fates of all of these planets,” Vissapragada says. More