Humans

Who and what will we become as the future unfolds? Anti-Body at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London is a dance work that uses motion-capture tech to show how our influence extends beyond our physical bodies into the digital world

Humans

28 September 2022

By Alexandra Thompson
The “dancing” visuals in Anti-Body are created by motion-capture techSodium Bullet
Anti-Body
Alexander Whitley Dance Company
Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London, from 6 to 8 October
IN HIS book Homo Deus, writer Yuval Noah Harari asks: “Are organisms just algorithms and is life just data processing?” Is it possible that the human mind could one day be downloaded onto a computer chip?
This existential, unsettling idea is key to Anti-Body, a new dance work from the Alexander Whitley Dance Company, which has its London premiere next week.
At a recent … More

Saving unusual vegetable varieties from extinction is essential for protecting crop diversity, which is under threat from mechanisation, argues Adam Alexander in his richly detailed new book

Humans

28 September 2022

By Chris Stokel-Walker
Adam Alexander seeks out unusual seeds in Luang Prabang market, LaosJulia Alexander
The Seed Detective
Adam Alexander (Chelsea Green Publishing)
CATACLYSMIC headlines about food shortages, broken supply chains and overwhelming heat in the past few months have brought more awareness of where our food comes from. But decades of industrialisation of production have ensured we are still relatively detached from what we eat.
Award-winning film and TV producer Adam Alexander wants to fix that, as he makes clear in his book The Seed Detective: Uncovering the secret histories of remarkable vegetables. … More

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

Humans

28 September 2022

Visit
Science Fiction: Voyage to the edge of imagination invites you to board an imaginary spaceship to explore an unknown planet, guided by an alien AI. Blast off from 6 October at the Science Museum in London.

Read
Body Am I declares neuroscientist Moheb Costandi, whose stories of phantom limbs, rubber hands and other phenomena reveal the central role bodily awareness plays in how we establish a sense of identity. Out on 4 October.

Read
Night Terrors is creative writing lecturer Alice … More

In this award-winning and compelling documentary, rescuing the injured black kites and water birds of Delhi is a family effort, finds Simon Ings

Humans

28 September 2022

By Simon Ings
Salik Rehman and one of the injured birds he works to saveKiterabbit Films
All That Breathes
Shaunak Sen
In UK cinemas from 14 October
“HUNDREDS of birds are falling out of the sky every day,” says Nadeem Shehzad, by far the grumpier of two brothers whose life’s work is to rescue the injured raptors and water birds of Delhi. “What amazes me is that people go on as if everything’s normal.”
In Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, which won a Grand Jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, people aren’t … More

A great corn on the cob must tread the line between under- and overcooked. Here’s why – and how to do it

Humans

28 September 2022

By Sam Wong
New Africa/Shutterstock
FRESH sweetcorn is one of the delights of late summer and early autumn. Its sweetness derives from a genetic variant that emerged some time after corn was first domesticated by people in Central America, about 9000 years ago. This mutation, called su1, stops the plant turning sugar into starch while it grows. Some sugar is instead converted into a different carbohydrate, phytoglycogen, which gives sweetcorn its creamy texture.
After harvesting, enzymes begin converting the sugar into starch, so sweetcorn is best eaten on the day it is picked. Some older varieties of corn can lose as much as half of … More

The standard “one-size-fits-all” approach to diagnosing and treating mental health problems is failing. Personalised treatments could make a big difference

Humans

| Leader

28 September 2022

By New Scientist
Natalia Klenova/EyeEm/Alamy
THERE can be few things more debilitating than going to bed, after a long and tiring day, and being unable to drift off. The harder you try to fall asleep, the more difficult it becomes – a vicious cycle of unwanted wakefulness that takes a significant toll on the lives of millions.
But it doesn’t have to be this way, because a new, more nuanced understanding of insomnia has made it a solvable problem, as we report in our cover story. Underlying this improved understanding is the recognition that there isn’t one type of insomnia but many – a departure … More

Stone spheres found at ancient settlements across the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas could have been playing pieces for a board game involving stone slabs

Humans

27 September 2022

By Jeremy Hsu
Hundreds of stone spheres have now been categorised with AIChristianne Fernee, Konstantinos Trimmis
Mysterious stone spheres could be remnants of an ancient board game played across Aegean and Mediterranean settlements thousands of years ago, according to an analysis helped by artificial intelligence.
“Similar stones have been discovered in Crete, in other Aegean islands, in Cyprus,” says Konstantinos Trimmis at the University of Bristol in the UK. “They’re all coming out of excavations and people are always puzzled about what the stones are.”
To weigh the evidence for competing theories about the stones’ purpose, Trimmis … More

Cognitive archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes says we can learn something about the minds of Neanderthals by studying the stuff they left behind, from painted shells to stalagmite circles. We might even find hints about why they went extinct

Humans

27 September 2022

By Colin Barras
Nabil Nezzar
DID Neanderthals think like us? We used to assume that our closest ancient human relatives, who lived in Europe and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, were concerned only with survival. But in the past few decades we have discovered various things they made that had no clear practical purpose: a shell coloured with red pigment, a deer bone engraved with chevrons and a ring of stalagmites assembled deep inside a cave.
Archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes, honorary fellow at the University of Liverpool, UK, and author of Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art, is fascinated by these artistic – or what she calls aesthetic – objects. She spoke to New Scientist about whether they bring us closer to understanding how Neanderthals thought about the world, and what clues they offer to the species’ mysterious disappearance.
Colin Barras: How can we get inside the Neanderthal mind?
Rebecca Wragg Sykes: Clearly, there are no Neanderthal texts, so we can’t hear descriptions of what they were thinking about the world around them in their own voices. But there is a mass of information in the material they left behind. In a sense, what we can do with those artefacts is limited only by our imagination.
How we can glean information from these artefacts?
One way is to study their technology through a technique called refitting – basically, putting things back together, looking at the sequences they used for knapping, the process of flaking stone blocks to make tools. It’s “slow archaeology”: you excavate meticulously and collect even the tiniest objects. Then you try, piece by piece, to fit those fragments back together. It … More