Humans

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.

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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

What have covid-19 closures done to art galleries and museums? From virtual tours of mothballed shows to advanced tech like lidar, they are finding new, more personal ways to wow audiences

Humans 3 February 2021
By Simon Ings
Curious Alice is a VR experience created by the V&A and HTC Vive Arts
Kristjana S Williams, 2020

Exhibitions
IN NOVEMBER, the International Council of Museums estimated that 6.1 per cent of museums globally were resigned to permanent closure due to the pandemic. The figure was welcomed with enthusiasm: in May, it had reported nearly 13 per cent faced demise.
Something is changing for the better. This isn’t a story about how galleries and museums have used technology to save themselves during lockdowns (many didn’t try; many couldn’t afford to try; many tried and failed). But it is a story of how they weathered lockdowns and ongoing restrictions by using tech to future-proof themselves.

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One key tool turned out to be virtual tours. Before 2020, they were under-resourced novelties; quickly, they became one of the few ways for galleries and museums to engage with the public. The best is arguably one through the Tomb of Pharaoh Ramses VI, by the Egyptian Tourism Authority and Cairo-based studio VRTEEK.
And while interfaces remain clunky, they improved throughout the year, as exhibition-goers can see in the 360-degree virtual tour created by the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent in Belgium to draw people through its otherwise-mothballed Van Eyck exhibition.
The past year has also forced the hands of curators, pushing them into uncharted territory where the distinctions between the real and the virtual become progressively more ambiguous.
With uncanny timing, the V&A in London had chosen Lewis Carroll’s Alice books for its 2020 summer show. Forced into the virtual realm by covid-19 restrictions, the V&A, working with HTC Vive Arts, created a VR game based in Wonderland, where people can follow their own White Rabbit, solve the caterpillar’s mind-bending riddles, visit the Queen of Hearts’ croquet garden and more. Curious Alice is available through Viveport; the real-world show is slated to open on 27 March.
Will museums grow their online experiences into commercial offerings? Almost all such tours are free at the moment, or are used to build community. If this format is really going to make an impact, it will probably have to develop a consolidated subscription service – a sort of arts Netflix or Spotify.

What the price point should be is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t help for institutions to muddy the waters by calling their video tours virtual tours.
But the advantages are obvious. The crowded conditions in galleries and museums have been miserable for years – witness the Mona Lisa, imprisoned behind bulletproof glass under low-level diffuse lighting and protected by barricades. Art isn’t “available” in any real sense when you can only spend 10 seconds with a piece. I can’t be alone in having staggered out of some exhibitions with no clear idea of what I had seen or why. Imagine if that was your first experience of fine art.
Why do we go to museums and galleries expecting to see originals? The Victorians didn’t. They knew the value of copies and reproductions. In the US in particular, museums lacked “real” antiquities, and plaster casts were highly valued. The casts aren’t indistinguishable from the original, but what if we produced copies that were exact in information as well as appearance? As British art critic Jonathan Jones says: “This is not a new age of fakery. It’s a new era of knowledge.”
With lidar, photogrammetry and new printing techniques, great statues, frescoes and chapels can be recreated anywhere. This promises to spread the crowds and give local museums and galleries a new lease of life. At last, they can become places where we think about art – not merely gawp at it.
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New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans 3 February 2021
NASA on Unsplash

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Earth, But Not As We Know It is a free online event by London’s Science Museum on 13 February, bringing James Lovelock and his peers into a conversation about his controversial idea that Earth acts like a living organism.

Zoonar GmbH/Alamy

Explore
Manchester Science Festival returns from 12 February with an online programme on our changing climate and ideas for a better future. There are photography exhibitions and talks on everything from improving air quality to eco-anxiety.

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The Genes That Make Us by Edwin Kirk combines his experiences from lab work and clinical practice to present stories from a revolution in medicine — one that may ultimately change what it means to be human.
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State-of-the-art special effects combined with a compelling story makes Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian viewing to be savoured on Disney+

Humans 3 February 2021
By Bethan Ackerley

The Mandalorian
Created by Jon Favreau
Disney+

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WHEN George Lucas set out to create Star Wars, he wanted to use special effects that had never been seen before. Over the course of the franchise’s history, that dream has been pursued relentlessly with mixed results.
The original Star Wars trilogy was brought to life by Lucas’s visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) through a groundbreaking combination of blue screens, miniatures, puppets and camera trickery. The prequel films (released between 1999 and 2005) were ambitious too, pioneering the use of digital film and fully computer-generated characters, but relied heavily on digital effects that didn’t always stand up to scrutiny. Since 2015, the latest Star Wars films have showcased some stunning effects, but it is now in TV show The Mandalorian that the series’ most exciting technological developments are taking place.
Set five years after Return of the Jedi, The Mandalorian follows a bounty hunter tasked with finding The Child (a pointy-eared alien better known to fans as Baby Yoda). Unable to surrender the infant to his nefarious client, the Mandalorian is forced to traverse the galaxy to protect his charge from remnants of the Empire.
So far, so Star Wars. Yet what makes The Mandalorian so special is how it builds on the successes and failures of every story in the franchise, especially when it comes to technology. Though you wouldn’t know it, the many alien worlds it features aren’t filmed in deserts and tundras around the world, but are instead realised by ILM on just one stage in Los Angeles, nicknamed “the Volume”.

“The many alien worlds of The Mandalorian are realised on a single stage in Los Angeles called ‘the Volume’”
This cavernous set is encircled by LED panels on its 6-metre walls and ceiling. Instead of shooting actors against green screens and adding a virtual background later, environments – Tattooine’s desert plains, say – are projected onto the walls during filming, blending seamlessly with practical props.
The advantages of this approach are manifold. While shooting with green screens means lighting and reflections have to be tweaked in post-production – a difficult task and part of why the prequel trilogy was so maligned – the Volume accurately lights a scene while it is being filmed, so every world our hero steps onto (in his gleaming beskar armour, no less) feels like a real location.
Those alien planets can be edited on set, so the crew can quite literally move mountains. ILM also uses Unreal Engine from Epic Games, the firm behind Fortnite, to create 3D environments in real time in the Volume. The screens respond to positional data from a camera, so as it moves, the setting shifts to provide realistic changes in perspective.
Beyond the Volume, the show builds on the techniques of its predecessors, using puppetry and animatronics alongside actors to create believable aliens. You only have to look at fans’ reactions to The Child and to “Frog Lady”, season two’s amphibious breakout star, to see how successfully they have been realised. Even old-school miniatures are used.
The Mandalorian represents the next generation of technology in Star Wars, which is fitting for a brand so obsessed with lineage. That doesn’t mean it should be judged on this alone. It is also a compelling story about fatherhood and duty, albeit one with meandering side quests that sometimes divide viewers. Yet with a universe this beautifully realised, who wouldn’t stop to take in the view from time to time?

Bethan also recommends…
TV
Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian
Disney+
This fascinating series explores key elements of The Mandalorian. A highlight is the episode looking into how composer Ludwig Göransson built the cool soundtrack around giant recorders.
Film
Empire of Dreams: The story of the Star Wars trilogy (2004)
Ken Burns
The original Star Wars films were taken from the brink of disaster and made into a global phenomenon. This documentary tells the tale.

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