Humans

We know for certain cooking isn’t unique to our species and that it was going on 750,000 years ago. The evidence of hominins deliberately exposing their food to heat is being pushed back further all the time, finds Michael Marshall

Humans

| Columnist

28 December 2022

By Michael Marshall
Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock
AT THIS time of year, as the temperatures drop, I find myself craving pies. I don’t know what unrecognised geniuses invented pastry and then had the idea to put a casserole inside it, but I owe them an unpayable debt. So let’s talk about the invention of cooking. How long have humans been deliberately exposing their food to heat to make it better?
You might remember a recent story reporting evidence that hominins were cooking carp fish in an earthen oven around 780,000 years ago in what is now Israel. Previously, the oldest unambiguous evidence of cooking … More

CERN-inspired stories, a feminist retelling of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and a new deep future from Annalee Newitz: sci-fi fans have a lot to look forward to in 2023

Humans

28 December 2022

By Sally Adee
In The Lies of the Ajungo, a boy journeys into the desert to save his motherTimothy Allen/The Image Bank/Getty Images, NASA
The Terraformers
Annalee Newitz (Tor Books)
This deep future from New Scientist columnist Annalee Newitz stars a Lone Ranger type and her partner, a telepathic moose. The mission: to keep interlopers off a planet under construction. Things go awry.
Collision
Edited by Rob Appleby and Connie Potter (Comma Press)
Authors worked with particle physicists at the CERN lab near Geneva, Switzerland, on this anthology, in which Stephen Baxter and Margaret Drabble’s thought-provoking stories do more … 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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From new seasons of The Mandalorian and Severance to a much-anticipated adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, settle in for some stellar shows next year

Humans

28 December 2022

By Bethan Ackerley
Mark Scout (Adam Scott) in Severance.Atsushi nishijima
IN THE waning days of 2022, with little to do but gorge on Christmas leftovers, I find myself thinking about the coming year. Because sincere self-reflection is beyond me, however, all those thoughts concern television – and so I have amassed a non-exhaustive list of the nine shows I am most looking forward to in 2023.
If any TV series gives me hope for the medium’s future, it is Severance, an unsettling workplace dramedy that debuted on Apple TV+ in February. We followed Mark Scout … More

Honeycomb, or cinder toffee, isn’t difficult to make, but it reveals the complex science involved in transforming sugar into confectionery, explains Sam Wong

Humans

28 December 2022

By Sam Wong
Getty Images/iStockphoto
HONEYCOMB, or cinder toffee, is simple to make, but is a great example of the complex science involved in transforming sugar into confectionery.
The process begins by heating sugar and water. While pure water boils at 100°C (212°F), the boiling point of a sugar solution is higher. As the solution boils, water evaporates, but the sugar remains, increasing the concentration and raising the boiling point further. At 170°C (338°F), the sugar starts to caramelise: the molecules break apart and recombine, turning it brown and producing delicious flavour molecules.
By measuring the temperature of a boiling sugar … More

In a future where climate change has devastated Florence’s iris fields, a perfumer makes a hard choice in the Hugo award-winning novelist Arkady Martine’s short story

Humans

14 December 2022

By Arkady Martine
Bekologic
Elena could give the lecture half-asleep. She’d done it more than once: earbuds shoved in haphazard in the dark and micbead balanced on her sternum, the rest of her cocooned in 30 pounds of weighted blanket. Warm, serene and bodiless. When she needed to do an onboarding for someone in a time zone radically askew to her circadians, she’d even skip VR. The lecture didn’t need an image, just a voice. In Elena’s opinion, it worked better with just a voice. She had the data analytics to prove it, and those data analytics earned her the top end of her salary band. … More

My mental health cratered this year after the death of my wife, Clare. Getting out into the natural world has helped me to cope, says Graham Lawton

Humans

| Columnist

14 December 2022

By Graham Lawton
Lake Edward in Queen Elizabeth National Park, UgandaRadek Borovka/Shutterstock
I WON’T mourn the passing of 2022. It has been an annus horribilis for me, my family and our friends. Clare, my life partner of nearly 30 years, wife for 24 of them and mother of my three children, ended her own life in August after enduring a chronic pain syndrome for the best part of a year. I became her carer as her pain spiralled into an abyss of torture. I tried everything I could to save her life, but I failed. … More