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    Nightmare Fuel review: The psychology that underpins horror films

    Scary movies really get under our skin, but why is this the case and how do film-makers know what will scare us? A new book has some interesting answers

    Humans

    3 August 2022

    By Elle Hunt
    Tuan Tran/getty images
    Nightmare Fuel
    Nina Nesseth
    Tor Nightfire
    I HAVE friends who are so afraid of sharks that they won’t swim in the sea – no matter how enclosed the harbour, or full the beach. When I went cage diving with great whites last year, they were appalled. Yet at the same time, I noticed, they couldn’t wait to see the footage.
    This illustrates the idiosyncratic and inexplicable nature of fear. While our desires tend to run along consistent lines – love, happiness, health and wealth – what frightens us is often intensely personal and even perverse.
    So how do film-makers petrify their audiences? And … More

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    Explorer review: The amazing story of adventurer Ranulph Fiennes

    An intriguing documentary about the life and adventures of Ranulph Fiennes, one of the last hero-explorers of our time, packs an altogether different punch at the end, discovers Simon Ings

    Humans

    3 August 2022

    By Simon Ings

    Ranulph Fiennes: his expeditions were the last of their kindRoyal Geographical Society/Alamy
    Explorer
    Matthew Dyas
    On release now

    EXPLORER is a documentary about Ranulph Fiennes, who led the first expedition to circumnavigate Earth from pole to pole without recourse to flight.
    Its subject emerges slowly from snatches of past documentaries, interviews, home movies and headlines. The film touts Fiennes’s unknowability: a risky strategy for those new to the man and his achievements, though in time it pays off handsomely for director Matthew Dyas.
    Fiennes isn’t motivated by mysterious and delicate internal forces; this … More

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    Don't Miss: Nope, a chilling new sci-fi thriller from Jordan Peele

    Universal Pictures
    Watch
    Nope is Jordan Peele’s latest chiller featuring Daniel Kaluuya (above) who starred in his earlier film Get Out. Ranch owners spot something in the Californian sky. They will wish it was the cloud it resembles. UK cinemas from 12 August.
    Read
    Methuselah’s Zoo is by animal longevity specialist Steven Austad, who asks what we can learn from long-living animals such as centuries-old sharks and tube worms. It is best to study them in the wild, says Austad. On sale 16 August.

    Visit
    Neofossils are plastics made from biomass that could sequester a … More

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    Untangling life's molecular mysteries using AI is a welcome advance

    DeepMind
    “It has not escaped our notice…” With those famous words published in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick described the fundamental genetic significance of the double-helix structure of DNA, based on work by Rosalind Franklin. It was a pivotal moment in biology, allowing us to understand for the first time how living organisms store the recipes for making proteins – the molecular machines that do most of the hard work in our bodies – and pass them down the generations.
    Another major step forward came in 2001, with the draft sequence of almost the entire human genome. That revealed the … More

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    How to make a delicious chilli hot sauce by harnessing fermentation

    It might sound daunting, but fermentation can be used to make hot sauces packed with flavourful compounds, says Sam Wong

    Humans

    3 August 2022

    By Sam Wong
    Shutterstock/Fotema
    HOT sauces are popular all over the world. Many are produced by fermentation, using microorganisms to add depth of flavour and create sauces offering more than just a kick of chilli heat.
    The burning sensation comes from capsaicin, a molecule that activates heat receptors. As Clare Wilson explained in her science of gardening column a fortnight ago, Capsicum plants may have evolved the ability to produce capsaicin to deter mammals from eating them, but our species has developed a perverse taste for the pain it brings.
    If you are following Clare’s tips for growing chillies at home, you might … More

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    A new James Webb telescope image reveals a galactic collision’s aftermath

    It’s not easy being ringed. A newly released image from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, shows the Cartwheel Galaxy still reeling from a run-in with a smaller galaxy 400 million years ago.

    The Cartwheel Galaxy, so called because of its bright inner ring and colorful outer ring, lies about 500 million light-years from Earth. Astronomers think it used to be a large spiral like the Milky Way, until a smaller galaxy smashed through it. In earlier observations with other telescopes, the space between the rings appeared shrouded in dust.

    Now, JWST’s infrared cameras have peered through the dust and found previously unseen stars and structure (SN: 7/11/22). The new image shows sites of intense star formation throughout the galaxy that were triggered by the collision’s aftereffects. Some of those new stars are forming in spokelike patterns between the central ring and the outer ring, a process that is not well understood.

    When the Hubble Space Telescope observed the Cartwheel Galaxy in visible light (left), the spokes between the galaxy’s bright rings were barely visible wisps. JWST’s infrared eyes brought them into vivid focus (right). Near-infrared light (blue, orange and yellow) traces newly forming stars; mid-infrared light (red) highlights the galaxy’s chemistry.Left: Hubble/NASA and ESA; Right: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI and Webb ERO Production Team

    Ring galaxies are rare, and galaxies with two rings are even more unusual. That strange shape means that the long-ago collision set up multiple waves of gas rippling back and forth in the galaxy left behind. It’s like if you drop a pebble in the bathtub, says JWST project scientist Klaus Pontoppidan of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “First you get this ring, then it hits the walls of your bathtub and reflects back, and you get a more complicated structure.”

    The effect probably means that the Cartwheel Galaxy has a long road to recovery ahead — and astronomers don’t know what it will look like in the end.

    As for the smaller galaxy that caused all this mayhem, it didn’t stick around to get its picture taken. “It’s gone off on its merry way,” Pontoppidan says. More

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    How the secrets of ancient cuneiform texts are being revealed by AI

    Much of the world’s first writing, carved into clay tablets, remains undeciphered. Now AI is helping us piece together this ancient Mesopotamian script, revealing the incredible stories of men, women and children at the dawn of history

    Humans

    3 August 2022

    By Alison George
    Chris Malbon
    BEHIND a locked door in the British Museum, London, there is a beautiful library with high, arched ceilings. Inside this secret room, Irving Finkel opens a drawer and pulls out a clay tablet. Cracked and burnt, it is imprinted with the tiny characters of the world’s oldest written language. It is a list of omens. Another drawer reveals another tablet. “This is a prayer to the god Marduk,” says Finkel, who is assistant keeper of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures at the museum, and one of only a handful of people in the world who can read this long-dead script, known as cuneiform, fluently.
    Behind us, a photographer is meticulously capturing images of this writing, with lights positioned to highlight the indented etchings. This work is part of a revolution, one that is using today’s computing power to bring this 5000-year-old record back to life and unlock new secrets of the world’s first civilisation.
    Although this system of writing was deciphered 165 years ago (See “Reading the signs“), the majority of texts that use it have never been translated into modern languages – a fiendishly complicated task that relies on experts such as Finkel. Now, thanks to developments in artificial intelligence, computers are being trained to read and translate cuneiform, to put fragmented tablets back together to recreate ancient libraries and even predict bits of missing text. These tools are enabling the earliest works of literature to be read in full for the first time since antiquity, giving insights into stories that later appeared in the Bible and shedding light on civilisations at the dawn of history.
    The story of … More

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    Two black holes merged despite being born far apart in space

    Signals buried deep in data from gravitational wave observatories imply a collision of two black holes that were clearly born in different places.

    Almost all the spacetime ripples that experiments like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, see come from collisions among black holes and neutron stars that are probably close family members (SN: 1/21/21). They were once pairs of stars born at the same time and in the same place, eventually collapsing to form orbiting black holes or neutron stars in old age.

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    Now, a newly noted marriage of black holes, found in existing data from U.S.–based LIGO and its sister observatory Virgo in Italy, seems to be of an unrelated pair. Evidence for this stems from how they were spinning as they merged into one, researchers report in a paper in press at Physical Review D. Black holes that are born in the same place tend to have their spins aligned, like a pair of toy tops spinning on a table, as they orbit each other. But the pair in this case have no correlation between their respective spins and orbits, implying that they were born in different places.

    “This is telling us we’ve finally found a pair of black holes that must come from the non-grow-old-and-die-together channel,” says Seth Olsen, a physicist at Princeton University.

    Previous events that have turned up in gravitational wave observations show back holes merging that aren’t perfectly aligned, but most are close enough to strongly imply family connections. The new detection, which Olsen and colleagues found by sifting through data that the LIGO-Virgo collaboration released to the public, is different. One of the black holes is effectively spinning upside down.

    That can’t easily happen unless the two black holes come from separate places. They probably met late in their stellar lives, unlike the black hole littermates that seem to make up the bulk of gravitational wave observations.

    In addition to the merger between unrelated black holes, Olsen and his collaborators identified nine other black hole mergers that had slipped through the prior LIGO-Virgo studies (SN: 8/4/21).

    “This is actually the nice thing about this type of analysis,” says LIGO scientific collaboration spokesperson Patrick Brady, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee who was not affiliated with the new study. “We deliver the data in a format that can be used by other people and then [they] will have access to try out new techniques.”

    To compile so many new signals in data that had already been gone over by other researchers, Olsen’s group lowered the analytical bar a little.

    “Out of the 10 new ones,” Olsen says, “there are about three of them, statistically, that probably come from noise,” rather than being definitive black hole merger detections. Assuming that the merger of black holes strangers is not among the errant signals, it almost certainly tells a tale of black hole histories distinct from the others seen so far.

    “It would be [extremely] unlikely for this to come from two black holes that have been together for their whole lifespan,” Olsen says. “This must have been a capture. That’s cool because we’re finally able to start probing that region of the [black hole] population.”

    Brady notes that “we don’t understand the theory [of black hole mergers] well enough to be able to confidently predict all of these types of things.” But the recent study may point to new and interesting opportunities in gravitational wave astronomy. “Let’s follow this clue to see if it really is reflecting something rare,” he says. “Or if not, well, we’ll learn other things.” More