Humans

Possible ancient footprints at Goukamma in South AfricaCharles Helm
Humans may have been wearing shoes for well over 100,000 years, and other hominins like Neanderthals may also have worn footwear. The suggestion stems from the discovery of unusual preserved footprints in South Africa, which may have been made by people wearing sandals.
“We’re not claiming we have conclusive evidence of this,” says Charles Helm at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa. Instead, Helm and his colleagues want to figure out how to reliably distinguish footprints left by bare … More

There are many great science and technology podcastsEuna Park
There are so many science podcasts out there that choosing one can feel overwhelming. We’ve scoured the internet for classics and little-known gems covering a wide range of topics from space to food to cybercrime. Here are our top picks.

Should you switch to a gluten-free diet? Is artificial intelligence really out of control? This podcast digs into trends and hot topics in the news to expose the science behind them, separating fact from fiction. In a typical episode, science journalist Wendy Zukerman, the creator and host, talks to scientists and experts and cites research in the field in a style that is upbeat and engaging. The idea for the show came about in 2015 when actor Gwenyth Paltrow suggested that women should steam their vaginas for an energy boost, to rebalance hormones and keep clean. Zukerman felt compelled to bust the myth and has been fact-checking fads on her show ever since.

You’ve probably heard of RadioLab. Launched in 2002, the award-winning podcast, currently co-hosted by science journalists Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser, recounts a different science or technology-related story every week, often exploring different angles. The show incorporates interviews with experts and first-person accounts by guests into captivating narratives. Recent episodes have delved into a strange internet law that lets tech companies off the hook for what happens on their platforms, the cause of the mysterious Tunguska impact that hit Siberia in 1908 and whether disabled people could actually be the ideal astronauts. Highly recommended for curious people with diverse interests.Advertisement

It might just be the best podcast name out there. With weekly episodes, the official podcast of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas features in-depth conversations with astronauts, scientists and engineers about the latest developments in human spaceflight. The show just celebrated its 300th episode with special guests talking about what the future holds for humans visiting low-Earth orbit, recorded in front of a live audience. Previously, the show has discussed NASA’s near-term goal to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon’s surface. It often focuses on different aspects of this plan, such as new lunar spacesuits and the first space station to orbit the moon being developed by NASA, called Gateway, which is aiming to support long-term human visits as well as deep space exploration. Each instalment is typically about an hour long, allowing for topics to be covered in detail.

Want to take a deep dive into a specific branch of science? The podcast’s name stems from the suffix ‘ology’ – the study of something – and consists of long chats between host Alie Ward and experts on diverse and often obscure disciplines, from sciuridology (the study of squirrels) to diabetology (the research and treatment of diabetes). Ward poses questions that bring out little-known aspects of each field while also touching on personal aspects, such as how guests chose their speciality, which often leads to interesting stories.  The idea for the podcast was sparked by the word curiology – writing with pictures. Ward recently dedicated two episodes to this field by delving into emojis, from the origin of the smiley face to behind-the-scenes drama and stats on usage and trends. I give it a thumbs-up.

A generation of young people is now grappling with the climate crisis – often considered to be the most pressing problem humanity is currently facing. This podcast, which is in its third season, is produced by and for young people and aims to bring their stories to light. While early episodes focused on the experiences of young climate activists, the show is now broader in scope. In the latest episode, storyteller Reece Whatmore imagines a world in which buildings are conceived in collaboration with nature, rather than having human-made materials dominate city landscapes, and talks to biomaterial designers, scientists and engineers who are working to accomplish this goal. By being solution-focused, Inherited tackles a daunting topic in a hopeful way.

Food collides with science and history in this bi-weekly podcast co-hosted by journalist Cynthia Graber and author Nicola Twilley. In the most recent episode, the pair examines where fungi and bacteria in a sourdough starter come from by taking part in an experiment in Belgium with microbiologists and bakers. The show also delves into farming, for example by looking at how human faeces could save agriculture and the planet, and new developments, such as lab-grown meat, which made its debut in a US restaurant in July. The show often takes inspiration from listener requests and is sure to fascinate inquisitive food-lovers.

Efforts to undo human-induced damage to wildlife by allowing nature to take over again, called rewilding, have taken off in in recent years. In this podcast hosted by James Shooter, a photographer and filmmaker, listeners are taken behind the scenes of various rewilding initiatives across Europe as he travels to visit them during a year-long trip. Monthly episodes tell the stories of people trying to recover nature, for example experts in the Greater Côa Valley in Portugal, who are trying to improve the co-existence of animal species such as rabbits, Iberian wolves and dung beetles. The host’s passion for conservation makes the show both informative and engaging.

Through the ages, people have often tried to treat medical problems in odd, disgusting or simply ineffective ways. Hosts Sydnee and Justin McElroy, married medics, were therefore inspired to create a podcast that uncovered some of these proposed treatments by digging through the annals of medical history. With new episodes out every Friday, the show also looks at the latest therapeutic fads, such as a pungent plant resin, called asafoetida, which some claim can has a range of medical benefits, and an egg-shaped sound-therapy chamber called a Harmonic Egg. The latest instalment examines the sudden recent uptick of cases of leprosy in Florida, looking at the history of the disease and current treatments. May not be suitable for squeamish people.

A true crime show for tech geeks. Hosted by Jack Rhysider, who was previously a network security engineer, the podcast showcases stories about the dark side of the internet told by hackers and those who have been hacked. In a recent episode, a member of the Dominican Republic’s cybersecurity incident response team explains the process he went through when he investigated a major cyberattack aimed at his country’s government. Another instalment follows a man who breaks into buildings for a living to test whether they are secure or not. The show is compelling and binge-worthy.

It is shameless self-promotion, but you may just enjoy our podcasts too. New Scientist Weekly, our flagship show hosted by Timothy Revell and Christie Taylor, takes a closer look at the most fascinating science news stories of the week. If you’re looking for something a bit more off-beat, Dead Planets Society explores crazy ideas such how we could punch a hole in a planet or whether we could destroy the sun – from a physics perspective, of course. And we’ve also got CultureLab, a podcast that could be interviewing the world’s most exciting authors about fascinating books one week and delving into the science behind a movie or TV show another. All available on the main New Scientist Podcasts feed.

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Archaeologist Michelle Bebber holding an atlatlMetin Eren
The atlatl, an ancient spear-throwing tool first used thousands of years ago, enables both women and men to launch projectiles with very similar velocities. The discovery, which comes from modern experiments involving atlatls, provides more evidence that prehistoric female hunters would have been as capable as male hunters of putting meat on the table.
The research started when Michelle Bebber at Kent State University in Ohio began teaching a course in which dozens of students spent a day each semester practising throwing javelins and … More

Linda Helm
TAKE a forked stick and plant one of the prongs in sand. Turn it like a compass and you will etch a perfect circle, as demonstrated (above) on a South African beach by Charles Helm of the African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience in Gqeberha.
Charles HelmAdvertisement
It is a natural human impulse to draw in the sand, and it seems our ancestors were feeling the same drive at least 136,000 years ago. In 2018, Helm discovered a perfect circle with a central depression on a slab of sandstone (pictured above) in the Garden Route National Park. This area is known for traces of early Homo sapiens, including rock art and the oldest footprint found (pictured below), which dates back about 150,000 years.
Charles Helm
The slab was once the surface of a coastal sand flat that has since solidified into rock. Helm has discovered other patterns in the same outcrop that could have been made by people, including grooves, cross-hatches, parallel lines and a perfect triangle (pictured below). The coloured images represent the depth of the impressions.
Charles Helm
Helm ruled out natural causes such as wind, water, non-human animals or vegetation, and was left with one possibility – they were made intentionally by people, though they probably didn’t mean much. “I like to think it’s kids playing around,” says Helm.
He says these sand drawings should be classed as a fifth type of palaeoart, after cave paintings (pictographs), rock engravings (petroglyphs), images carved on trees (dendroglyphs) and arrangements of rocks or earth (geoglyphs). The name he proposes is ammoglyphs, after ammos, the Greek word for sand.

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A human X (left) and Y chromosome seen with a scanning electron microscopeBIOPHOTO ASSOCIATES/Science Photo Library
Twenty years after the Human Genome Project was declared complete, the Y chromosome has been fully sequenced for the first time.
Most people have 22 pairs of chromosomes plus two sex chromosomes – either a pair of X chromosomes or one X and one Y chromosome. Having a Y usually – but not always – results in an embryo developing male characteristics.
The Y is one of the smallest chromosomes and has the fewest genes coding for proteins. Because it normally has no paired chromosome to swap pieces with prior to sexual reproduction, it is especially likely to accumulate bits of repetitive DNA.Advertisement
All early methods of DNA sequencing involved breaking DNA up into small pieces, reading their genetic code and then reassembling the pieces by looking for overlaps. This technique doesn’t work with repetitive DNA where lots of the pieces are identical.
Because of this, the “completed” human reference genome announced in 2003 was actually far from complete. “The Y chromosome just kept being pushed aside,” says Charles Lee at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Connecticut. “It’s a hard chromosome to complete because of all the repetitive sequences.”
Only in 2021 did a team including Karen Miga at the University of California, Santa Cruz, finally fill in almost all the gaps, and again declare the human genome complete.
What made this possible is a technique, developed by a company called Oxford Nanopore, that reads the sequence of a single DNA molecule as it goes through a tiny hole, producing pieces that are millions of DNA letters long rather than a few hundred.
But the “complete” genome sequenced by Miga and her colleagues was a female one, consisting of the 22 normal chromosomes and the X chromosome. Only now have Miga’s team completed the Y chromosome as well, from a person of European descent.
“The Y chromosome is riddled with complicated structures and includes huge areas where the same blocks of code repeat over and over with minor variations, making its assembly quite challenging,” says Sergey Nurk, who worked on the project before getting a job at Oxford Nanopore. “[The] ability to sequence any-length fragments of DNA was absolutely instrumental for this project.”

This complete Y chromosome has 106 protein-coding genes, which is 41 more than in the reference genome. But almost all these extra genes are just copies of one gene called TSPY.
At the same time, Lee’s team has sequenced the Y chromosomes of 43 diverse men, including 21 of African origin. The teams were independent but did collaborate, says Lee.
However, only three of his team’s Y sequences are gapless, he says. The rest still have between one and five gaps.
The 43 Y chromosomes show considerable diversity, says Lee. For instance, the number of copies of the TSPY gene ranges between 23 and 39.
Whether the repetitive DNA in the Y does anything important remains unclear. “I believe there’s a lot to learn about repetitive DNA and we just don’t understand it yet, and so we’ve still dismissed it as junk,” says Lee.
But most biologists and clinicians have little interest in the repetitive DNA, says David Page at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who studies the Y chromosome. The sequencing has also revealed very little that is new about the “euchromatic” parts of the Y that do include genes, he says.
“The present study [by Miga’s team] represents an incremental advance in our understanding of the euchromatic portions, which were nearly complete 20 years ago,” says Page.

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Foundation season 2 is now out on Apple TV+Apple TV+
Struggling to choose what to watch? Whether it’s sci-fi, medical dramas or documentaries about the natural world, we have you covered on the CultureLab podcast. New Scientist‘s TV columnist Bethan Ackerley shares a rundown of her top TV choices from 2023 so far, as well as what to look out for the rest of the year. 

Transcript to follow.Advertisement
Reviews of some of the shows featured in this episode:  
Foundation (Apple TV+)
The Last Of Us (HBO Max and Sky Atlantic)
Best Interests (Sky Go, Amazon, Apple TV+)
Wild Isles (BBC iPlayer, Amazon)
Dead Ringers (Amazon)
Silo (Apple TV+)
To read all of Bethan’s TV columns visit newscientist.com/author/bethan-ackerley

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The mummified body of Ötzi, who is thought to have lived between 3350 and 3120 BC© South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology/Eurac/Marco Samadelli-Gregor Staschitz
A new genetic analysis has changed our understanding of Ötzi, the mummified “Iceman” who lived 5300 years ago and was found in a glacier in the Alps.
The findings reveal that almost all of Ötzi’s DNA was inherited from early farmers, who moved into Europe a few thousand years before he was born.
The genome also indicates that he had darker skin than any people with predominantly European ancestry today, and may well have … More

Academic, broadcaster and author Alice Roberts has just published her first children’s novel, Wolf Road. Set during the ice age 30,000 years ago, it follows the story of Tuuli, a prehistoric girl on a journey to her tribe’s summer camp who meets a strange boy on the way.
As this is Alice’s first children’s novel, New Scientist decided that the best person to quiz her about it was culture editor Alison Flood’s 10-year-old daughter Jenny, a big reader. Jenny asked Alice all the most important questions, including if people would really have made pets of wolf cubs, how Alice knows what life was like for people 30,000 years ago, and if she would rather live then or now.
Alice Roberts will be speaking at New Scientist Live in October. Tickets on sale now.

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