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    On the Scent review: A timely exploration of the least studied sense

    When journalist Paola Totaro lost her sense of smell, she set out to investigate olfactory impairment. The result, written with her husband Robert Wainwright, is engaging and hopeful

    Humans

    22 June 2022

    By Vijaysree Venkatraman

    There is no cure for anosmia, but “smell training” can helpVictor Dyomin/Getty Images
    On the Scent
    Paola Totaro and Robert Wainwright
    Elliott & Thompson

    EARLY in the covid-19 pandemic, London-based reporter Paola Totaro lost her sense of smell. Feeling trapped in a sensory void, she began investigating the mysteries of smell, and the result is the engaging and timely On the Scent, written with her husband, journalist Robert Wainwright.
    The pandemic has put a spotlight on olfactory impairment. The coronavirus has affected millions of people’s ability to smell, and the symptom has persisted in … More

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    Silt and Spacelines from the Far Out review: The solace of small games

    From global chip shortages to the war in Ukraine, major games studios have to delay their big releases. Luckily, eager players can find solace in smaller games like Silt or Spacelines from the Far Out, says Jacob Aron

    Humans

    22 June 2022

    By Jacob Aron

    Dive into the beautiful, if creepy, underwater world of SiltSpiral Circus
    Silt
    Spiral Circus
    PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch

    AS I have written here before, the covid-19 pandemic and global chip shortage have caused havoc for the video game industry.
    Whether due to the difficulty of collaborating from home, or an inability to produce consoles for eager players, major titles face repeated delays. Even the Russian invasion of Ukraine has contributed, forcing Ukrainian developer GSC Game World to … More

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    How to reap the benefits of crop rotation in your own garden

    Even the smallest vegetable patch can benefit from the principles of crop rotation, says Clare Wilson

    Humans

    22 June 2022

    By Clare Wilson

    Halfpoint Images/Getty Images
    WHEN I finally reached the top of my local area’s long waiting list for allotments, one aspect of vegetable growing that seemed daunting to me was crop rotation. This means dividing your ground into a few different patches and changing where you grow your plant varieties year on year. The intention is to reduce the build-up of pests and diseases, while also improving soil fertility.
    Any guidance I could find on doing this seemed complicated, plus it required more ground than I initially had, since most of the new plot was badly overgrown. But as I learned, you don’t always … More

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    Earth's musical heritage finds an icy home next to global seed vault

    From work by Indigenous musicians to songs from a sci-art pioneer, the Global Music Vault is open for business as a cultural equivalent to the Svalbard Global Seed Bank

    Humans

    22 June 2022

    By Chelsea Whyte

    Disaster recovery: a global music repository joins the global seed bank to preserve Earth’s heritageCourtesy of Global Music Vault
    Global Music Vault
    Spitsbergen, Svalbard archipelago, Norway

    TOWERING over the frozen island of Spitsbergen, the largest in the archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, is a “doomsday vault”. Over 1 million seed varieties from around the world are being held in this mountainside facility, which is designed to preserve agricultural biodiversity and shield global food supplies from disaster. Now, a new kind of deposit is on its way to the mountain – the Global Music Vault … More

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    The Facemaker review: A powerful portrait of plastic surgery's pioneer

    Lindsey Fitzharris’s biography of Harold Gillies, who became the world’s pre-eminent specialist in plastic surgery during the first world war, depicts a forward-thinking, gifted man

    Humans

    22 June 2022

    By Oliver-James Campbell

    AROUND 40 million people were wounded or killed in the first world war. “For the first time… Europe’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities,” writes historian Lindsey Fitzharris in her informative book, The Facemaker.
    Fitzharris introduces us to New Zealand-born ear, nose and throat doctor Harold Gillies. By 1917, he had become the world’s pre-eminent specialist in plastic surgery, developing techniques still used today like the “bishop’s mitre flap” for the nose, or the “tubed pedicle” for severe burns.
    Plastic surgery in the 19th century was crude, with masks … More

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    Don't Miss: Lars Chittka reveals the surprisingly clever mind of a bee

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

    Humans

    22 June 2022

    Courtesy E-WERK Luckenwalde and Karrabing Film Collective/Stefan Korte
    Visit
    Back to Earth at the Serpentine Galleries, London, brings together artists, scientists, poets, film-makers and more. This new exhibition is a response to the climate crisis, accompanied by a series of live events. Closes 18 September.

    Read
    Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them is an irreverent tour of extraordinary numbers in physics, big, small and bafflingly infinite. Be amazed as physicist and YouTuber Tony Padilla reveals the inner workings of reality. Available from 30 June.
    Antonio Carlos Volante/500px/Getty Images
    Watch
    The Mind of a Bee will be explored by Lars Chittka, author of a book … More

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    An otherwise quiet galaxy in the early universe is spewing star stuff

    PASADENA, Calif. — A lucky celestial alignment has given astronomers a rare look at a galaxy in the early universe that is seeding its surroundings with the elements needed to forge subsequent generations of stars and galaxies.

    Seen as it was just 700 million years after the Big Bang, the distant galaxy has gas flowing over its edges. It is the earliest-known run-of-the-mill galaxy, one that could have grown into something like the Milky Way, to show such complex behavior, astronomer Hollis Akins said June 14 during a news conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting.

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    “These results also tell us that this outflow activity seems to be able to shape galaxy evolution, even in this very early part of the universe,” said Akins, an incoming graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. He and colleagues also submitted their findings June 14 to arXiv.org.

    The galaxy, called A1689-zD1,­ shows up in light magnified by Abell 1689, a large galaxy cluster that can bend and intensify, or gravitationally lens, light from the universe’s earliest galaxies (SN: 2/13/08; SN: 10/6/15). Compared with other observed galaxies in the early universe, A1689-zD1 doesn’t make a lot of stars — only about 30 suns each year — meaning the galaxy isn’t very bright to our telescopes. But the intervening cluster magnified A1689-zD1’s light by nearly 10 times.

    Akins and colleagues studied the lensed light with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, a large network of radio telescopes in Chile. The team mapped the intensities of a specific spectral line of oxygen, a tracer for hot ionized gas, and a spectral line of carbon, a tracer for cold neutral gas. Hot gas shows up where the bright stars are, but the cold gas extends four times as far, which the team did not expect.

    “There has to be some mechanism [to get] carbon out into the circumgalactic medium,” the space outside of the galaxy, Akins says.

    Only a few scenarios could explain that outflowing gas. Perhaps small galaxies are merging with A1689-zD1 and flinging gas farther out where it cools, Akins said. Or maybe the heat from star formation is pushing the gas out. The latter would be a surprise considering the relatively low rate of star formation in this galaxy. While astronomers have seen outflowing gas in other early-universe galaxies, those galaxies are bustling with activity, including converting thousands of solar masses of gas into stars per year.

    Galaxy A169-zD1 (pictured, in radio waves) exists in the universe’s first 700 million years.ALMA/ESO, NAOJ and NRAO; H. Akins/Grinnell College; B. Saxton/NRAO/AUI/NSF

    The researchers again used the ALMA data to measure the motions of both the cold neutral and hot ionized gas. The hot gas showed a larger overall movement than the cold gas, which implies it’s being pushed from A1689-zD1’s center to its outer regions, Akins said at the news conference.

    Despite the galaxy’s relatively low rate of star formation, Akins and his colleagues still think the 30-solar-masses of stars a year heat the gas enough to push it out from the center of the galaxy. The observations suggest a more orderly bulk flow of gas, which implies outflows, however the researchers are analyzing the movement of the gas in more detail and cannot yet rule out alternate scenarios.

    They think when the hot gas flows out, it expands and eventually cools, Akins said, which is why they see the colder gas flowing over the galaxy’s edge. That heavy-element-rich gas enriches the circumgalactic medium and will eventually be incorporated into later generations of stars (SN: 6/17/15). Due to gravity’s pull, cool gas, often with fewer heavy elements, around the galaxy also falls toward its center so A1689-zD1 can continue making stars.

    These observations of A1689-zD1 show this flow of gas happens not only in the superbright, extreme galaxies, but even in normal ones in the early universe. “Knowing how this cycle is working helps us to understand how these galaxies are forming stars, and how they grow,” says Caltech astrophysicist Andreas Faisst, who was not involved in the study.

    Astronomers aren’t done learning about A1689-zD1, either. “It’s a great target for follow-up observations,” Faisst says. Several of Akins’s colleagues plan to do just that with the James Webb Space Telescope (SN: 10/6/21). More

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    Gravitational wave ‘radar’ could help map the invisible universe

    It sounds like the setup for a joke: If radio waves give you radar and sound gives you sonar, what do gravitational waves get you?

    The answer might be “GRADAR” — gravitational wave “radar” — a potential future technology that could use reflections of gravitational waves to map the unseen universe, say researchers in a paper accepted to Physical Review Letters. By looking for these signals, scientists may be able to find dark matter or dim, exotic stars and learn about their deep insides.

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    Astronomers routinely use gravitational waves — traveling ripples in the fabric of space and time itself, first detected in 2015 — to watch cataclysmic events that are hard to study with light alone, such as the merging of two black holes (SN: 2/11/2016).

    But physicists have also known about a seemingly useless property of gravitational waves: They can change course. Einstein’s theory of gravity says that spacetime gets warped by matter, and any wave passing through these distortions will change course. The upshot is that when something emits gravitational waves, part of the signal comes straight at Earth, but some might arrive later — like an echo — after taking longer paths that bend around a star or anything else heavy.

    Scientists have always thought these later signals, called “gravitational glints,” should be too weak to detect. But physicists Craig Copi and Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, took a leap: Working off Einstein’s theory, they calculated how strong the signal would be when waves scatter through the gravitational field inside a star itself.

    “The shocking thing is that you seem to get a much larger result than you would have expected,” Copi says. “It’s something we’re still trying to understand, where that comes from — whether it’s believable, even, because it just seems too good to be true.”

    If gravitational glints can be so strong, astronomers could possibly use them to trace the insides of stars, the team says. Researchers could even look for massive bodies in space that would otherwise be impossible to detect, like globs of dark matter or lone neutron stars on the other side of the observable universe.“That would be a very exciting probe,” says Maya Fishbach, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who was not involved in the study.

    There are still reasons to be cautious, though. If this phenomenon stands up to more detailed scrutiny, Fishbach says, scientists would have to understand it better before they could use it — and that will probably be difficult.

    “It’s a very hard calculation,” Copi says.

    But similar challenges have been overcome before. “The whole story of gravitational wave detection has been like that,” Fishbach says. It was a struggle to do all the math needed to understand their measurements, she says, but now the field is taking off (SN: 1/21/21). “This is the time to really be creative with gravitational waves.” More