Humans

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

Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan star in Netflix’s film The Dig, which reimagines the excavation at Sutton Hoo, where a 27-metre burial ship was uncovered

Humans 3 February 2021
By Francesca Steele
Flawless: Carey Mulligan as Edith Pretty and Ralph Fiennes as Basil Brown
Larry Horricks/Netflix

The Dig
Simon Stone
Available on Netflix

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BASIL BROWN, played in The Dig by Ralph Fiennes, was the principal archaeologist behind the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England. It is now considered one of the most important finds in Britain, the majesty of its 27-metre burial ship and 7th-century Anglo-Saxon treasures reframing historians’ view of the so-called Dark Ages.
However, it was very nearly missed – and Brown wasn’t always acknowledged for his efforts. He was a self-educated archaeologist and astronomer, who spent much of his income as a tenant farmer and insurance agent on that education. Being an independent scholar without an academic post was an irregularity that led to the omission of his name at the British Museum’s display of the Sutton Hoo treasures for decades.
The Dig, based on the novel of the same name by John Preston, rights that wrong. It is directed by Simon Stone with a distinctly British tone of restraint worthy of film producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, who made the 1990s hits Howards End and The Remains of the Day.
The film approaches English passions cautiously, shining a light on Brown’s incredible contribution, as well as that of Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), the landowner who hired Brown to dig under the mounds on her estate because she had a “feeling” they would find something of note.
Fiennes and Mulligan are flawless as the excavators that the professionals underestimate, imbuing their characters with an intelligent zeal for the field that isn’t dampened by their places in society: he’s a lowly contractor for the Ipswich Museum, she’s a wealthy widowed landowner who went to finishing school. They share a quiet determination and mutual respect, initially arguing over which of the 18 mounds to tackle first, but finding common ground in the soil and its secrets. “That’s life what’s revealed,” Brown says in a thick Suffolk accent. “And that’s why we dig.”

Brown forms a friendship with Pretty’s young son Robert, a keen amateur archaeologist. It is all the more affecting as we learn that Pretty is dying so Robert will soon be an orphan (Pretty died in 1942).
“The Dig is obsessed with class boundaries. It fizzes with curbed passions amid honey-coloured fields”
This is a film of two halves, the first about archaeology, the second concerned with the personal lives of the people behind the dig. The first half is more successful, illustrating the patience necessary for excavation, especially in England where it is always raining, exposing fragile finds to the elements. It also reveals the dangers. In one of their earliest conversations, Pretty rescues Brown when the earth falls in on him and he claws desperately at the dirt. It is a good illustration of the risks an ordinary man took to exhume historical artefacts, only to be cast aside later.
Like Howards End and The Remains of the Day, The Dig is obsessed with class boundaries. It fizzes with curbed passions amid the honey-coloured English fields, the indomitable march of time making each ordinary moment both horribly transient, as the second world war calls up young men to die in the background, and simultaneously everlasting.
History is made of such things, and forgotten items – like Anglo-Saxon gold and Brown himself – can be retrieved.
In the second half, we learn more about other characters on the dig, including supercilious chauvinist Charles Phillips (Ken Stott) who arrives from the British Museum to oversee things. Then there are archaeologists Stuart Piggott (Ben Chaplin) and his wife Peggy Piggott (Lily James), whose strained marriage disintegrates before our eyes as Peggy forms an attachment with good-looking photographer Rory (Johnny Flynn).
The acting is impeccable, particularly from James, but the romance and domestic crises feel a little heavy-handed in a film that is otherwise so self-possessed. The Dig doesn’t need such frills. Like Sutton Hoo, the treasures aren’t showily arranged but lie quietly, in the silences between people, and in simple shared hopes that stretch across generations.
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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

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

Watch
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.

Read
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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