Humans

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

Stone Age people in Europe appear to have recorded the reproductive habits of animals with markings on cave paintings, hinting at the early origins of writing

Humans

4 January 2023

By Alison George
Cave painting from Lascaux, France, showing a bull marked with a sequence of linesJoJan/Wikipedia/CC-BY-4.​0
Stone Age people living in Europe 20,000 years ago may have devised a simple form of writing to record the habits of the animals they hunted, according to a study of mysterious symbols on artefacts and cave walls. If confirmed, this would push back the earliest known appearance of a proto-writing system by at least 10,000 years.
At least 400 caves in Europe, such as Lascaux and Chauvet in France and Altamira in Spain, have … 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

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

Humans

4 January 2023

HBO/Warner Media
Watch
The Last of Us moves from award-winning video game to TV show, with Pedro Pascal (pictured above) as Joel Miller, a smuggler who escorts a teenage girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), across a post-apocalyptic US. On HBO from 15 January.

Read
Emotional Ignorance by neuroscientist Dean Burnett tracks the author’s journey after the death of his father from covid-19, as he explores where our emotions come from and what purpose they serve. On sale from 12 January.
Paul Craft/shutterstock
Visit
The Science of Dreams reveals how and why we dream, and how to enhance our … More

Annalee Newitz’s new novel examines the dark side of “uplifting” animals to a state of self-awareness – and asks whose intelligence is being used as the template, finds Sally Adee

Humans

4 January 2023

By Sally Adee
Terraforming means creating human values as much as physical placesTithi Luadthong/shutterstock
The Terraformers
Annalee Newitz (Tor Books on sale 2 February)
IN A deep future tens of thousands of years from now, animals have been brought into the so-called Great Bargain: in saving Earth from the consequences of the Anthropocene, a deal has been struck between all creatures, and humans now include everyone in managing the shared land.
But to participate, you need to be a person, and for that you must pass an intelligence assessment. So while relations between species look … More

The 250th anniversary of the first documented crossing of the Antarctic circle is being marked with a new book that traces the continent’s history via 100 artefacts from around the world

Humans

28 December 2022

By Alison Flood
Herbert Ponting/Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images
THE first documented crossing of the Antarctic circle was made on 17 January 1773 by James Cook on the HMS Resolution. Now, 250 years later, Jean de Pomereu and Daniella McCahey are marking its anniversary in Antarctica: A history in 100 objects, a book that tells the story of the continent via 100 photos and artefacts from around the world.
The main image is an iconic photograph taken from a grotto in an iceberg in 1911 by Herbert Ponting (pictured below). Ponting was the first professional photographer to travel to Antarctica, after being invited by Robert Falcon Scott to join his ill-fated expedition. The ship is the Terra Nova and the men are geologist Thomas Griffith Taylor and meteorologist Charles Wright.
Herbert Ponting in Antarctica in 1910Herbert Ponting/Royal Geographical Society via Getty ImagesAdvertisement
Shaun O’Boyle
Pictured above are the South Pole Telescope and BICEP (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) experiment at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The telescope helped to capture the first image of a supermassive black hole in 2019.
L: Vestfold Museums: R: United States Navy History and Heritage Command
Leather goggles to protect against snow blindness, made during Roald Amundsen’s 1910-1912 Antarctic expedition, are shown above left. Pictured to the right of them are mittens knitted by Edith “Jackie” Ronne during an expedition in 1946-48. Ronne was one of the first two women to winter in Antarctica as part of a geographical expedition.
G. H. Mumm & Cie
The  image above shows Ernest Gourdon and Paul Pléneau sharing a bottle of champagne in July 1904. This was intended to promote Mumm Cordon Rouge, since the Mumm family was a sponsor of the trip.

Pablo de León/University of North Dakota
A spacesuit tested in Antarctica in 2011 for possible use on Mars. (pictured above).

Sebastian Copeland
A humpback whale skeleton (pictured above) reconstructed by conservationist and film-maker Jacques Cousteau on King George Island in 1972-73, to raise awareness of whaling.

Frédéric Perin/Météo France
An anemometer from a 1908-10 expedition.

Pictured above is a New Zealand $5 note commemorating Edmund Hillary, whose team was the first to reach the South Pole using overland vehicles, in 1958.
Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
The 1602 Kunyu Wanguo Quantu map from China, (pictured above) featuring a vast “Terra Australis” with the inscription “Few have reached these southern regions. So the things are not explored yet”.
Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
Coryphaenoides lecointei, a fish specimen collected in the Antarctic on 15 March 1899 (pictured above).

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