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    How I gave a TED talk on dark matter

    Giving a TED talk wasn’t easy, but I wanted to make sure my audience came away with a better understanding of dark matter, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

    Humans

    | Columnist

    31 August 2022

    By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
    Chanda Prescod-Weinstein speaks at SESSION 5 at TED2022Gilberto Tadday/TED
    TED talks are increasingly ubiquitous in pop culture. TED’s motto is “ideas worth spreading” and it has become famous for accessible, pristinely produced 10 to 15-minute presentations on big ideas.
    Of course, this makes them a prime target for satire. Sometimes this will take the form of a short, tweeted statement, such as “Black cats are the best cats!”, followed by the note: “Thank you for coming to my TED talk!” I have definitely been an active participant in this satirical TED talk … More

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    Planting Clues review: Intriguing tales about plants’ role in crime

    From working out a dead person’s last meal to the possible poisoning of the Buddha, a new book from David J. Gibson has some great tales about how plants help solve crimes – and are used to commit them

    Humans

    31 August 2022

    By Kate Douglas

    Forensic botany can be a key witness in cases of murder or rapemladenbalinovac/Getty Images
    Planting Clues: How plants solve crimesDavid J. Gibson (Oxford University Press)

    THEY called him the Sherlock Holmes of France – and, in fact, his antics did inspire the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle.

    When Edmond Locard established his forensic science lab in 1912, the world had never seen anything like it. The place wasn’t much to look at – cramped quarters on the fourth floor of the Palais de Justice in Lyon – but there Locard set about laying … More

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    The Directors review: Five intimate short films about psychosis

    Five people in recovery from psychosis guide artist Marcus Coates as he recreates aspects of their experience in this series of disorienting and sometimes very frightening short films, finds Simon Ings

    Humans

    31 August 2022

    By Simon Ings
    Recreating experiences of psychosis leads Marcus Coates to dark placesArtangel/Marcus Coates
    The Directors
    Five short films by Marcus Coates
    At venues in London from 4 September to 30 October
    IN A flat in a social housing block in London’s Pimlico, artist Marcus Coates is being variously nudged, bullied and shocked out of his sense of what is real.
    Controlling the process is Lucy Dempster, a teenager in recovery from psychosis. In his ear, Coates hears Dempster prompt him in how to behave, when to sit, what to touch and what to think … More

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    The James Webb telescope spotted CO2 in an exoplanet’s atmosphere

    The James Webb Space Telescope has gotten the first sniff of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet in another solar system.

    “It’s incontrovertible. It’s there. It’s definitely there,” says planetary scientist and study coauthor Peter Gao of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. “There have been hints of carbon dioxide in previous observations, but never confirmed to such an extent.”

    The finding, submitted to arXiv.org on August 24, marks the first detailed scientific result published from the new telescope. It also points the way to finding the same greenhouse gas in the atmospheres of smaller, rockier planets that are more like Earth.

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    The planet, dubbed WASP-39b, is huge and puffy. It’s a bit wider than Jupiter and about as massive as Saturn. And it orbits its star every four Earth days, making it scorching hot. Those features make it a terrible place to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life (SN: 4/19/16). But that combination of puffy atmosphere and frequent passes in front of its star makes it easy to observe, a perfect planet to put the new telescope through its paces.

    James Webb, or JWST, launched in December 2021 and released its first images in July 2022 (SN: 7/11/22). For about eight hours in July, the telescope observed starlight that filtered through the planet’s thick atmosphere as the planet crossed between its star and JWST. As it did, molecules of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorbed specific wavelengths of that starlight.

    Previous observations of WASP-39b with NASA’s now-defunct Spitzer Space Telescope had detected just a whiff of absorption at that same wavelength. But it wasn’t enough to convince astronomers that carbon dioxide was really there.

    “I would not have bet more than a beer, at most a six pack, on that weird tentative hint of carbon dioxide from Spitzer,” says astronomer Nicolas Cowan of McGill University in Montreal, who was not involved with the new study. The JWST detection, on the other hand, “is rock solid,” he says. “I wouldn’t bet my firstborn because I love him too much. But I would bet a nice vacation.”

    The JWST data also showed an extra bit of absorption at wavelengths close to those absorbed by carbon dioxide. “It’s a mystery molecule,” says astronomer Natalie Batalha of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the team behind the observation. “We have several suspects that we are interrogating.”

    The amount of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere can reveal details about how the planet formed (SN: 5/11/18). If the planet was bombarded with asteroids, that could have brought in more carbon and enriched the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. If radiation from the star stripped away some of the planet atmosphere’s lighter elements, that could make it appear richer in carbon dioxide too.

    Despite needing a telescope as powerful as JWST to detect it, carbon dioxide might be in atmospheres all over the galaxy, hiding in plain sight. “Carbon dioxide is one of the few molecules that is present in the atmospheres of all solar system planets that have atmospheres,” Batalha says. “It’s your front-line molecule.”

    Eventually, astronomers hope to use JWST to find carbon dioxide and other molecules in the atmospheres of small rocky planets, like the ones orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 (SN: 12/13/17). Some of those planets, at just the right distances from their star to sustain liquid water, might be good places to look for signs of life. It’s yet to be seen whether JWST will detect those signs of life, but it will be able to detect carbon dioxide.

    “My first thought when I saw these data was, ‘Wow, this is gonna work,’” Batalha says. More

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    Writing Gaia review: The letters of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis

    Nearly forty years of letters between the two scientists who co-developed the paradigm-changing Gaia hypothesis make for fascinating, humanising reading

    Humans

    24 August 2022

    By Adam Vaughan
    James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis corresponded for nearly 40 years.Tim Cuff/Alamy
    Writing Gaia
    Edited by Bruce Clarke and Sébastien Dutreuil
    Cambridge University Press
    HERE’S something for the archive: “The New Scientist one seems to have stirred up some interest including an amazing number of crank letters of a gentle and non-aggressive kind,” wrote the late independent scientist and polymath James Lovelock, in a letter to biologist Lynn Margulis.
    The “cranks” were responding to an article in this magazine, dated 6 February 1975. In it, Lovelock presented the idea and world view of Earth as a self-regulating system, the Gaia hypothesis, to a wider … More

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    Why I love the proliferation of green roofs and living walls

    Green roofs have existed for more than 2000 years, but, along with living walls, they are becoming more popular – and provide major eco-benefits, writes Beronda L. Montgomery

    Humans

    | Columnist

    24 August 2022

    By Beronda L. Montgomery
    JSMimages/Alamy
    SOME of my favourite writing spaces of late have had a living wall – a vertical garden of plants – or a bountiful green roof. There is something very soothing to me about being in a space with a visible, robust community of plants.
    Green roofs aren’t new: they have been reported to exist as early as 500 BC, in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But they appear to have become more common recently, or at least my noticing of them has become more frequent. I have seen them at hotels, restaurants and my current and former workspaces.
    Living walls and green … More

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    Don't Miss: NASA's first steps toward new moon mission via Orion trial

    Morfydd Clark (Galadriel)Amazon Studios
    Watch
    The Rings of Power takes us back to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, where Morfydd Clark (above) plays a younger (but still ancient) Galadriel in Amazon’s bid to tell Sauron’s origin story. On Prime Video from 2am BST on 2 September.
    Read
    Taxi from Another Planet records the unlikely conversations between astrobiologist Charles Cockell and taxi drivers about aliens and space exploration. So is Mars our plan B? Will we understand aliens? And what if we are alone? On sale from 30 August.

    More

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    The Genetic Age review: Is genetic engineering a costly distraction?

    Matthew Cobb’s latest book is a disturbing history of genetic engineering, which asks whether it is worth the money – or the risk

    Humans

    24 August 2022

    By Michael Marshall
    Gene editing, exemplified by CRISPR technology, has elicited both hopes and fearsELLA MARU STUDIO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
    The Genetic Age
    Matthew Cobb
    Profile Books
    FOR more than 50 years, biologists have been genetically engineering organisms in increasingly precise ways. From the early, crude methods of the 1960s and 1970s, to the modern “gene editing” exemplified by CRISPR technology, genetic engineering has elicited great hopes and terrifying fears.
    In his disturbing and readable new book The Genetic Age: Our perilous quest to edit life, biologist and science historian Matthew Cobb tells the story of this field. … More