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    Buried review: Did the Anglo-Saxons really invade Britain?

    Who were the Anglo-Saxons? Biological anthropologist Alice Roberts’s informed, sophisticated new take digs deep to re-examine their true origins

    Humans

    25 May 2022

    By Michael Marshall

    FEW groups of people exert more power on English imagination than the Anglo-Saxons. They first appear in the historical record in the 1st millennium AD, in the wake of the Roman Empire’s retreat from Britain, and historians have seen them as playing a central role in the emergence of medieval English society. But were they a group who invaded Britain … More

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    Benjamin Franklin's quest to make farts less malodorous

    Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

    Humans

    25 May 2022

    Josie Ford
    Emissions cuts
    Feedback’s recent item on the Royal Institute of Philosophy’s journal pondering the metaphysics of farting – “Is it a thing or an action?” being the chief question – has drawn short shrift from reader Guy Cox. He believes the author should have used that essential method of philosophical inquiry known as “looking it up in a dictionary”. Cox also points out that the subject has previously been expounded on by no less a personage than US writer, inventor and all-round genius Benjamin Franklin.
    Franklin wrote an entire essay urging his fellow natural philosophers to investigate whether they could develop food … More

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    Don't Miss: Star Trek parody The Orville is back for a third season

    Ornette Made In America, USA, 1985. Courtesy of Barbican Centre.
    Visit
    Journeys across Afro-futurism traces Black futures through the medium of film, featuring Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Nyokabi Gethaiga and others. At the Barbican Centre, London, from 2 to 30 June.

    Read
    Beyond Measure documents humanity’s attempts to claw dependable truths from a chaotic universe. James Vincent’s gripping story of how and why we measure just about everything, from radiation to happiness, is published on 2 June.
    Michael Desmond/Hulu
    Watch
    The Orville begins its third season. Starring Adrianne Palicki as Commander Kelly Grayson and Seth MacFarlane as Captain Ed Mercer, they’re out to find strange … More

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    How to analyse your garden soil and choose the plants to suit it

    Finding out how acidic or alkaline your soil is means you can select the right plants for it, and maximise their chance of thriving, says Clare Wilson

    Humans

    25 May 2022

    By Clare Wilson
    mblickwinkel / Alamy Stock Photo
    HAVE you ever wondered why some plants in your garden thrive, while others barely grow no matter how tenderly they are nurtured? It may not come down to your green fingers, but to whether you have chosen the right plant for that spot.
    Most people know they need to consider their local climate and how much sunshine any particular site gets. But you should also choose the right plant for your soil type, which depends on your area’s geology and history. You can find maps of soil type online, but gardens can differ at a local level.
    A first step … More

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    Ice Age Footprints review: Ancient humans’ arrival in North America

    This documentary tracks the quest for the oldest human footprints in North America, and what they can tell us about when people first arrived on the continent

    Humans

    23 May 2022

    By Carissa Wong
    Ancient footprints in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park.GBH/NOVA/WGBH
    Ice Age Footprints
    Directed by Bella Falk and David Dugan
    On PBS on 25 May at 9PM EST, then streaming at pbs.org/nova
    IN January 2020, in a secret location within White Sands Park, New Mexico, geologists Kathleen Springer and Jeffrey Pigati began to dig out a trench in search of ancient human footprints. They hoped to shed light on two long-standing questions about the history of humans in North America: how long ago did people first arrive, and did humans … More

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    Pulsars may power cosmic rays with the highest-known energies in the universe

    The windy and chaotic remains surrounding recently exploded stars may be launching the fastest particles in the universe.

    Highly magnetic neutron stars known as pulsars whip up a fast and strong magnetic wind. When charged particles, specifically electrons, get caught in those turbulent conditions, they can be boosted to extreme energies, astrophysicists report April 28 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. What’s more, those zippy electrons can then go on to boost some ambient light to equally extreme energies, possibly creating the very high-energy gamma-ray photons that led astronomers to detect these particle launchers in the first place.

    “This is the first step in exploring the connection between the pulsars and the ultrahigh-energy emissions,” says astrophysicist Ke Fang of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in this new work.

    Last year, researchers with the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory, or LHAASO, in China announced the discovery of the highest-energy gamma rays ever detected, up to 1.4 quadrillion electron volts (SN: 2/2/21). That’s roughly 100 times as energetic as the highest energies achievable with the world’s premier particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. Identifying what’s causing these and other extremely high-energy gamma rays could point, literally, to the locations of cosmic rays — the zippy protons, heavier atomic nuclei and electrons that bombard Earth from locales beyond our solar system.

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    Some gamma rays are thought to originate in the same environs as cosmic rays. One way they’re produced is that cosmic rays, shortly after being launched, can slam into relatively low-energy ambient photons, boosting them to high-energy gamma rays. But the electrically charged cosmic rays are buffeted by galactic magnetic fields, which means they don’t travel in a straight line, thus complicating efforts to trace the zippy particles back to their source. Gamma rays, however, are impervious to magnetic fields, so astrophysicists can trace their unwavering paths back to their origins — and figure out where cosmic rays are created.

    To that end, the LHAASO team traced the hundreds of gamma-ray photons that it detected to 12 spots on the sky. While the team identified one spot as the Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova about 6,500 light-years from Earth, the researchers suggested that the rest could be associated with other sites of stellar explosions or even young massive star clusters (SN: 6/24/19).

    In the new study, astrophysicist Emma de Oña Wilhelmi and colleagues zeroed in one of those possible points of origin: pulsar wind nebulas, the clouds of turbulence and charged particles surrounding a pulsar. The researchers weren’t convinced such locales could create such high-energy particles and light, so they set out to show through calculations that pulsar wind nebulas weren’t the sources of extreme gamma rays. “But to our surprise, we saw at the very extreme conditions, you can explain all the sources [that LHAASO saw],” says de Oña Wilhelmi, of the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg.

    The young pulsars at the heart of these nebulas — no more than 200,000 years old — can provide all that oomph because of their ultrastrong magnetic fields, which create a turbulent magnetic bubble called a magnetosphere.

    Any charged particles moving in an intense magnetic field get accelerated, says de Oña Wilhelmi. That’s how the Large Hadron Collider boosts particles to extreme energies (SN: 4/22/22). A pulsar-powered accelerator, though, can boost particles to even higher energies, the team calculates. That’s because the electrons escape the pulsar’s magnetosphere and meet up with the material and magnetic fields from the stellar explosion that created the pulsar. These magnetic fields can further accelerate the electrons to even higher energies, the team finds, and if those electrons slam into ambient photons, they can boost those particles of light to ultrahigh energies, turning them into gamma rays.

    “Pulsars are definitely very powerful accelerators,” Fang says, with “several places where particle acceleration can happen.”

    And that could lead to a bit of confusion. Gamma-ray telescopes have pretty fuzzy vision. For example, LHASSO can make out details only as small as about half the size of the full moon. So the gamma-ray sources that the telescope detected look like blobs or bubbles, says de Oña Wilhelmi. There could be multiple energetic sources within those blobs, unresolved to current observatories.

    “With better angular resolution and better sensitivity, we should be able to identify what [and] where the accelerator is,” she says. A few future observatories — such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array and the Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory — could help, but they’re several years out. More

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    The people who built Stonehenge may have eaten raw cattle organs

    By Corryn Wetzel
    Fossilised human faeces from Durrington Walls, EnglandLisa-Marie Shillito
    The people who built Stonehenge probably ate cattle organs and shared leftovers with dogs, according to an analysis of parasites trapped in ancient faeces.
    Fossilised excrement roughly 4500 years old was discovered several years ago at Durrington Walls, a Neolithic settlement in England thought to have housed the people who built Stonehenge. Previous research suggests the village held a few thousand residents who travelled to the location seasonally to erect the stone pillars.
    Piers Mitchell at the University of Cambridge and his team analysed 19 faecal fossils, determining that some were from humans and some from dogs. When they examined the faeces under a microscope, they saw the eggs of a type of parasite called a capillariid worm, which they could identify from its lemon-like shape. This led them to conclude that the sample came from someone who had eaten raw organs of an infected bovine.Advertisement
    “We know they must have been eating internal organs such as the liver, where this parasite would normally live, and they were also feeding it to their dogs, because the dogs had the same kind of parasite,” says Mitchell.
    The villagers probably ate raw, parasite-laden organs when a cow wasn’t cooked thoroughly. “We can see these beautiful parasite eggs from thousands of years ago, which haven’t been damaged by the cooking process,” says Mitchell.
    One sample of dog excrement contained eggs from a freshwater fish tapeworm, which Mitchell says is an especially intriguing find because fish were not a common food at the settlement. He suspects the raw fish was transported from a faraway village for a feast at Stonehenge then consumed by the dog.
    “[The results] show a really interesting way that humans were living with their companion animals thousands of years ago – they were still treating their dogs as one of the family even back then,” says Mitchell. “It’s given us this wonderful window of evidence that we didn’t have before.”
    Journal reference: Parasitology, DOI: 10.1017/S0031182022000476

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    Night Sky review: Engaging show about a portal to another planet

    By Josh Bell
    Amazon Prime Video
    Night Sky
    Holden Miller, Daniel C. Connolly
    Amazon Prime Video, 20 MayAdvertisement

    GETTING older is never easy, but ageing couple Franklin and Irene York are able to take refuge from their ailments and frustrations by going out to “see the stars“.
    Played by J. K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek, the main characters of Amazon Prime Video’s Night Sky don’t just use a telescope to gaze at the heavens. Instead, they descend into a cellar hidden under the floorboards of a shed in their backyard, walk down a dank tunnel and open a bizarre, alien-looking door.
    There, they find a chamber that, somehow, transports them to a room on what appears to be another planet. They look out the window at a view that no one else on Earth gets to experience. Or so they believe.
    Night Sky, created by Holden Miller and Daniel C. Connolly, starts slowly, spending plenty of time with Franklin and Irene as they go about their daily business in small-town Illinois, with the sci-fi elements of the story often fading into the background.
    Simmons and Spacek are such strong actors that Night Sky would have been engrossing simply as a story about a loving couple headed into their twilight years, reckoning with nostalgia and regret. The first episode doesn’t deal with much more than that, at least until the end, when Irene discovers a mysterious man inside the underground portal.
    The interloper, Jude (Chai Hansen), both disturbs and invigorates the Yorks, leading them to new discoveries about the device they have been using for the past 20 years without ever questioning it. He also has an agenda of his own, which, just like everything else in Night Sky, unfolds slowly over the course of the first six episodes.
    The glacial plot progression can be frustrating, especially when the focus shifts away from the Yorks to other storylines whose connections to the main narrative take a while to coalesce.
    The second episode introduces a mother and daughter living in rural Argentina, protecting a strange chapel and reluctantly taking orders from a dangerous secret society. The dynamic between Stella (Julieta Zylberberg) and her teenage daughter Toni (Rocío Hernández) isn’t as emotionally rewarding as the Yorks’s lived-in relationship, but their direct involvement in the vague conspiracy lends their scenes a bit more excitement.
    Still, the character development is as incremental as that relating to the plot, and some of the show’s detours look more like dead ends. The Yorks’s nosy neighbour goes through an entire unrelated drama on his own just so he can circle back to poking around the shed and making an actual impact on the plot. There are plenty of scenes of similarly dubious relevance involving secondary characters that contribute to the lethargic pacing.
    Maybe there will be satisfying answers in the remaining two episodes of the eight-episode first series, but, for now, Night Sky is more about insinuations and atmosphere than explanations. There are references to “quantum entanglement” and “spooky action at a distance”, but nothing definitive about the origins or mechanics of the Yorks’s portal, or the related projects of the apparently globe-spanning ancient order that Stella and Toni belong to.
    There is usually enough enticement to keep watching until the next episode, though, and even when the show seems to be spinning its wheels, Simmons and Spacek find lovely grace notes in their performances.
    Night Sky‘s most affecting and engaging moments have nothing to do with intergalactic travel or transdimensional portals, however. No special effect matches Irene delivering a heartbreaking monologue about the death of the Yorks’s adult son, or Franklin comforting his granddaughter Denise (Kiah McKirnan) at her father’s grave.
    These characters are on their way to learning the secrets of the universe, but they have already lived long enough to know what truly matters.

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