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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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    Nomad Century review: a bold plan to manage climate migration

    Gaia Vince’s new book, Nomad Century: How to survive the climate upheaval, argues that mass migration caused by Earth’s climate crisis could be turned into a plus. Could her plan work?

    Humans

    31 August 2022

    By James McConnachie
    Megacities in the near future could be built on vast swathes of Russia, Canada and ScandinaviaAndriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images
    Nomad CenturyGaia Vince (Allen Lane)
    GAIA VINCE is something of a star in climate science writing. Her debut, Adventures in the Anthropocene, was a compelling blend of climate science reporting and travelogue. Transcendence, her second book, sought to explain human evolution in ambitious “big history” terms – think Yuval Noah Harari meets Matt Ridley.
    Her latest, Nomad Century: How to survive the climate upheaval, offers more big history, though it tackles the future. Vince … 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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    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

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    Nope review: Jordan Peele UFO horror is packed with interesting ideas

    Nope might adopt the flying saucer cliché, but this beautifully shot spectacle from director Jordan Peele breathes new life into the sci-fi horror genre

    Humans

    24 August 2022

    By Chen Ly
    L to R: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Brandon Perea in NOPE, written, produced, and directed by Jordan Peele.Universal Pictures
    Nope
    Jordan Peele
    On general release
    SOMETHING strange is lurking in the clouds above a dusty, unassuming valley deep in southern California. On a horse ranch, taciturn Otis “OJ” Haywood Jr and his sister, the somewhat livelier Emerald, are struggling to save their business, Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, which supplies horses for film and television. Six months earlier, their father, who founded the business, was killed when a nickel mysteriously fell out of … 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.

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