Humans

By Ibrahim Sawal
These mini brains contain a Neanderthal version of a certain gene
UC San Diego Health Sciences
Miniature brains grown in the lab are helping to reveal how modern humans survived when other hominins died out.
Neanderthals and Denisovans are some of our closest relatives. They lived alongside us about 50,000 years ago when modern humans migrated from Africa towards Europe, but they went extinct shortly after we came into contact with them. This might be because modern humans outcompeted and outsmarted them, but it may have just been bad luck.

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Alysson Muotri at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues wanted to know more about how our brains differed from these other hominins and whether this could affect survival. The team compared the genomes of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans and found a total of 61 genes that differed.
One gene, neuro-oncological ventral antigen 1 (NOVA1), particularly caught their eye. The gene is specifically active during brain development and influences the developing nervous system. The team found that the modern human NOVA1 gene differed from the Neanderthal and Denisovan version by a single base pair
To find out more, the team grew their own ancient human-like brains. They used CRISPR genome editing to change the modern NOVA1 gene in human stem cells to mimic the Neanderthal and Denisovan version, then prompted the cells to develop into a Neanderthal or Denisovan-like brain organoid – a small, simplified version of the organ consisting of clusters of brain cells in a dish. They did the same with standard human stem cells.

As they matured, the ancient human organoids were smaller in diameter, had a more wrinkled cell surface and their cells multiplied more slowly than the modern human ones. “They are quite distinct from modern humans, suggesting that single base alteration can change brain development,” says Muotri.
This alteration also changed the expression of 277 genes compared with the modern human organoids, and caused 113 alternative splicing events – a process that causes one gene to code for multiple proteins, many of which were linked to brain development and synapse formations.
“The fact that virtually all modern humans now carry the modern version of the gene, strongly suggests that the alteration is a benefit to our species,” says Muotri. “If I might speculate, it might suggest that individuals carrying the Neanderthal NOVA1 alteration have a potential different way to process information,” he says, and this therefore may have affected their survival.

Tony Capra at the University of California, San Francisco, says he is excited about these new methods because it allows us to directly test Neanderthal brains. “As it progresses, we will be able to evaluate how the Neanderthal genome worked in more and more complex and realistic models,” he says.
However, because Muorti and his team used a modern human genome with a single change, Capra says this doesn’t truly reflect the entire Neanderthal or Denisovan genome. “It is unlikely that a single “magic” genetic change produced a dramatic positive change in these traits,” says Capra. He says there are many parts of our genome that contribute to cognition and that evolution may have acted on multiple variants with smaller effects.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aax2537
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By Karina Shah

A conch shell found in a cave used by the Magdalenian people of the late Upper Palaeolithic was originally thought to be a cup, but a new analysis suggests they used it as a kind of horn. That would make it the earliest known conch shell horn.
Gilles Tosello at the University of Toulouse in France and his colleagues were investigating objects and cave art found in Marsoulas Cave in the Pyrenees mountains. They revisited a conch shell that was discovered in 1931.
The shell is 31 centimetres long and 18 centimetres wide and once belonged to a large sea snail of the species Charonia lampas that likely lived on the coast of France or Spain.
It has a small narrow hole drilled into the the point of the shell called the apex, and is decorated with fingerprint-shaped ochre red markings.

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“We are pretty sure that this shell was transformed by human action, on the contrary to what was first published in the 1930s,” said Tosello at a press conference on 9 February. Its original discoverers suspected the conch shell was a ceremonial drinking cup.
Tosello and his team came to a different conclusion after examining the inside of the shell with CT scanning and a tiny medical camera.
“The broken part of the apex is very narrow, and the hole inside is perfectly round with a regular edge,” he said. The hole in the apex was most likely drilled to make way for some kind of mouthpiece, such as a small hollow bone to blow into, to protect the lips of the musician.

To test the hypothesis that this was used as an instrument, the team enlisted the help of a horn player to see if they could play the conch shell – the horn player produced three notes close to C, D and C sharp.

Along with the decorative ochre markings – which match paintings found on the walls of the original cave – there are smears of a brown, organic residue around the conch shell. Although there is not enough to determine what the residue is, it was probably used as a sort of glue to fix the mouthpiece into the shell, says Tosello.
The team have now produced a 3D model of the conch shell to investigate how it was used by the Magdalenian people as a musical instrument, without damaging the original artefact.
It’s not surprising that the Magdalenian people played instruments as music is an inherent part of any cultural system, says Francesco d’Errico at the University of Bordeaux in France.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abe9510
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Paul SayedListen
Octave of Light, featuring soprano Beth Sterling, is an album of exoplanet music by David Ibbett, guest composer at Fermilab in Illinois, and astronomer Roy Gould, who have turned exoplanet spectra into musical chords.

Read
The Raven’s Hat by Jonas Peters and Nicolai Meinshausen is a series of engaging games that seem unsolvable — until you translate them into mathematical terms. Hours of fun for anyone who took maths seriously at school.
Netflix
Watch
Tribes of Europa, a near-future German sci-fi series on Netflix, follows siblings Kiano, Liv, and Elja, who are fighting for their lives on a continent split into warring tribal states. Available from 19 February.
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As real spacecraft begin to arrive at the Red Planet, let’s celebrate with Mars-based games like Surviving Mars, where you build colonies, and Tharsis, where you captain a doomed spacecraft

Space 10 February 2021
By Jacob Aron
A Martian base explodes in Red Faction: Guerrilla
Deep Silver Volition
Red Faction: Guerrilla
Deep Silver Volition

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PC, PlayStation 3 and 4, Xbox 360 and One, Nintendo Switch
Kerbal Space Program
Squad
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Tharsis Choice Provisions PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
THIS month sees a trio of real-life spacecraft arrive at Mars, so in honour of their voyages I thought I’d run through my own jaunts to the Red Planet in game mode.

Mars is a common locale for many first-person shooters, with games in the Doom, Destiny and Call of Duty series all featuring levels on its dry, dusty surface, but they rarely do very much interesting with the setting.
One exception is Doom Eternal, which I reviewed last year. As you fight your way through endless demon hordes, it becomes clear you must journey to hell through a portal at the centre of Mars. How? Why, by commandeering a massive laser on Mars’s moon Phobos and blasting a gigantic crater into the planet’s surface.
Speaking of blowing things up on Mars, the Red Faction series makes a selling point of having “destructible terrain”, essentially letting you knock down walls and buildings to progress through the game. This is still a rarity in video games, partly because of the technical difficulties in rendering destruction on the fly, but also because letting players destroy everything makes it hard to impose any narrative structure.
My favourite of the series, Red Faction: Guerrilla, solves this by throwing narrative structure out of the window, then throwing the window out of the window. You play Alec Mason, a freedom-fighter attempting to overthrow the tyrannical rulers of Mars, but forget all that – what matters here is that you are given mining charges, trucks and a really big hammer and then encouraged to destroy everything in sight. It is incredibly satisfying, even if you are setting the course of Martian settlement back decades.
“Kerbal Space Program lets you build pretty much any spacecraft you can imagine; mine tend to blow up”
If you fancy something a bit more constructive, Surviving Mars, which I reviewed in 2019, puts you in charge of building a colony from the ground up. I enjoyed the challenges of managing water, oxygen and electricity supplies as I plotted out various domed habitats on the Martian soil. The game is just tricky enough that you feel like you are struggling to survive without it being too disheartening when a bunch of your colonists die in a dust storm.
Offworld Trading Company is similar but puts you slightly further into the future, with Mars settled and corporations vying to exploit its natural resources. The game is ruthlessly capitalist and sees you exploiting markets to get one over on your rivals or make a hostile takeover.
If your dreams of being Elon Musk revolve around building rockets rather than becoming a billionaire, Kerbal Space Program is for you. With a bewildering array of capsules, engines and more, you can pretty much construct any spacecraft you can imagine. Whether you can get it off the ground is another matter – mine tend to blow up. Once in orbit, there is a whole solar system analogue to explore, with dusty Duna as Kerbal’s version of Mars.
Finally, for a darker look at what astronauts heading to Mars might face, there is Tharsis. It is set aboard the first crewed ship to the Red Planet, which has been damaged by a micrometeoroid storm, meaning you have to repair the ship and shepherd the crew to safety. Unusually, the game takes inspiration from board games, so you roll virtual dice to achieve objectives such as putting out a fire. This leaves things slightly more up to chance than I would like, making it hard to strategise, but no one ever said getting to Mars would be easy.
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By Sam Wong
Tetiana Vitsenko/Alamy
What you need
1 egg yolk
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp Dijon mustard 250 ml vegetable oil
OIL and water famously don’t play well together. Water is a polar molecule, with a negative charge concentrated around the oxygen atom and a positive charge at the two hydrogen atoms. This means that water molecules attract each other, the hydrogen atoms forming bonds with the oxygen atoms of nearby molecules. Oil, on the other hand, is made from non-polar molecules, which aren’t attracted by the water molecules, so it is hard for them to mingle.
If you shake … More

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has drawn criticism for suggesting a weird object passing through the solar system could be an alien spacecraft. But he insists we must keep an open mind when nature throws us a curveball

Space 10 February 2021
By Leah Crane

Rocio Montoya

IN 2017, something strange came hurtling through our cosmic neighbourhood. Astronomers only spotted it once it was already on its way out, so they didn’t get a proper look. But from the few observations we did get, it was clear that the object wasn’t from around here – its trajectory indicated that it came from another star system. It was dubbed ‘Oumuamua, which means “scout” in Hawaiian, and categorised as the first interstellar object we have ever seen in our cosmic neighbourhood.
Not long after ‘Oumuamua was spotted, Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, made waves by proposing that it may be a piece of alien technology. “‘Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization,” Loeb wrote in a pre-print paper.
It is certainly weird. Observations suggested it is likely to be either flat or cigar-shaped, tumbling end over end every 7 hours or so and accelerating at a pace seemingly greater than could be accounted for by gravitational forces alone. Loeb’s colleagues have since come up with various natural explanations for what we glimpsed of ‘Oumuamua’s features, including the idea that it is some sort of giant fractal snowflake. But he is adamant we should at least be open to the possibility that it could be evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial civilisations.
Loeb has now written a book about it called Extraterrestrial: The first sign of intelligent life beyond Earth. Here, he tells New Scientist about the possibility of advanced alien life and how humans might respond to it.

Leah Crane: You say … More

By Michael Marshall
A 2700-year-old face cream
Dr. Bin Han, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Some Chinese noblemen were using cosmetic face cream 2700 years ago. Archaeologists have found an ornate bronze jar containing the remains of a face cream, which was made from a mixture of animal fat and a rare substance called moonmilk that is found in caves.
The discovery is the earliest evidence of a Chinese man using cosmetics, although there is older evidence of Chinese women doing so.
In 2017 and 2018, Yimin Yang at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues … More

We are relying on specialist knowledge to guide us through the coronavirus pandemic – so it is more important than ever to grasp what expertise is and where it comes from, says Roger Kneebone, author of a new book on the subject

Humans 3 February 2021
By Richard Webb

Rocio Montoya

IF ROGER KNEEBONE is an expert, he has spread his expertise widely. Trained as a medical doctor, he spent many years working as a trauma surgeon in the township of Soweto in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the height of apartheid, before returning to the UK to become a general practitioner in rural Wiltshire.
Now in his third career as a professor of surgical education at Imperial College London, he has been at the forefront of many innovations aimed at widening the scope of influences that students are exposed to. These include setting up a Centre for Performance Science with the neighbouring Royal College of Music and helping to devise the Chemical Kitchen project, which exposes chemistry undergraduates to lab skills through the “non-threatening” parallel of cooking.
Kneebone has also tried his hand at many extracurricular activities, from flying light aeroplanes and learning to juggle to building harpsichords – with varying degrees of success, he freely admits. He recently wrote a book, Expert: Understanding the path to mastery. Drawing on the experiences of people from musicians to magicians and tailors to taxidermists – and some scientific and medical experts for good measure – it examines the ubiquitous, but understudied, process of becoming an expert.
Richard Webb: Experts are very much in the public eye at the moment.
Roger Kneebone: I finished writing the book just before the UK’s March covid-19 lockdown began. But now more than ever we need to think about how we make use of the most valuable aspect of expertise – the wisdom based on experience that allows people to give sensible guidance about what to do … More