Humans

Dale Greenwalt’s book is a gripping look at palaeobiology, a field achieving incredible insights into ancient life on Earth

Humans

11 January 2023

By Simon Ings
The palaeontology collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural Historychip clark/museum of natural history
Remnants of Ancient Life
Dale Greenwalt (Princeton University Press)
WHAT is a fossil made of? Mineralised rocky fossils are what first spring to mind, but others, like the fossils of the Burgess Shale in Canada, are made of pure carbon and can be thought of as proto-coal. There are also tantalising Cretaceous insects preserved in amber.
Whatever they are made of, fossils contain treasures. The first really good microscopic study of mineralised dinosaur bone was able to reveal its … More

New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

11 January 2023

Read
Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible is delivered with humour and erudition by Anthony Zee. What better way to get the little grey cells going than by unifying quantum mechanics and special relativity? On sale from 17 January.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Watch
Hearing the Light is a talk by Clara Brasseur about representing telescope data as sound, also called astronomical data sonification. Listen to real data from the Kepler Space Telescope (pictured above) in her online talk on 20 January at 7.30pm GMT.

Read
Cold People struggle to … More

Brain training apps claim to make us smarter, but there is no evidenceThere are plenty of apps that offer mental exercises claiming to make users smarter the more they play. Not only are they not much fun, but studies show they have no effect on performance, says Adrian Hon More

Depriving rhubarb plants of light for several weeks forces them to grow fast and gives an earlier harvest, says Clare Wilson

Humans

11 January 2023

By Clare Wilson
GAP Photos/Clive Nichols
I HAVE just finished one of the few winter jobs at my allotment: preparing my rhubarb patch, including setting up one of the plants to be forced. This means covering it with a large container to make the stalks grow more quickly in search of light.
If you have the space, I highly recommend getting a few rhubarb plants as they are so easy to grow. I give mine little attention, but each spring they produce a huge crop when there isn’t much home-grown produce around. Technically, rhubarb stems are a vegetable as they are the plant’s leaf stalks, but … More

Science and reason generate reliable knowledge about the world, but they have their limits. Exploring them can shed light on what knowledge really is, and should help us gain more of it

Humans

| Leader

11 January 2023

Lagano/Shutterstock
SCIENCE is the culmination of humanity’s attempts to reason about the world. It produces knowledge in a reliable way, and it has done so with great success. It has revealed many of nature’s secrets, from the molecular machinery inside cells to the grand scheme of how the universe began and evolved to what we see today. But for all their undoubted achievements, science and reason have their constraints.
Our species is unique (as far as we know) in its ability to know what we don’t know. That alone might make us duty bound to explore the limits of knowledge and … More

Noah Baumbach’s version of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel may reflect the book’s complexity, but ultimately it could well justify fears the book is unfilmable

Humans

9 January 2023

By Gregory Wakeman
A scene from White Noise, showing, from left to right, Greta Gerwig (Babette), May Nivola (Steffie), Adam Driver (Jack), Samuel Nivola (Heinrich) and Raffey Cassidy (Denise)WILSON WEBB / NETFLIX ©2022
White Noise
Noah Baumbach
Netflix, selected cinemas, including UK’s ICA on 5 January
White Noise is brimming with ideas. And why wouldn’t it be? This film is the latest from writer-director Noah Baumbach, who created The Squid and The Whale and Marriage Story, smart, painful satires chronicling the breakdown of relationships.
Baumbach adapted White Noise from the eponymous book (which won author Don … More

We pay little attention to the feeling of awe, but, as Dacher Keltner’s new book argues, it can make our lives more meaningful – and could even help us engage with huge problems like the climate crisis

Humans

4 January 2023

By Sarah Phillips
Mountain peaks are a sure way to create feelings of aweTetra Images, LLC/Alamy
Awe
Dacher Keltner (Allen Lane)
IN JANUARY 2019, when Dacher Keltner was present at his younger brother Rolf’s bedside during the last moments of his life, he felt many things. Perhaps the most surprising was awe: “I felt small. Quiet. Humble. Pure. The boundaries that separated me from the outside world faded.”
Awe is something that Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has now considered extensively. In 1988, when he asked his mentor Paul Ekman … More