Humans

Bryn Nelson’s extraordinary book asks why we let a vital natural resource, human faeces, get flushed away when we could be using it to heal guts, improve soil and understand our past

Humans

14 September 2022

By Chelsea Whyte
Clinical-looking modern toilets may help fuel unhelpful notions that faecal matter is disgustingShutterstock/Oasisamuel
Flush
Bryn Nelson (Hachette)
ASK me to name the world’s best invention, and I will always give the same answer: the toilet. Its ability to whisk waste away to a safe place where potential pathogens and odours can do no harm isn’t to be sniffed at. But an unusual book has convinced me that toilets make it too easy to waste our waste.
Bryn Nelson’s Flush: The remarkable science of an unlikely treasure explains the many ways … More

From Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater statues, walking to oblivion, to Carl Chun’s detailed illustration of an octopus, a new book explores how our oceans have inspired art through the centuries

Humans

14 September 2022

By Alison Flood
Jason deCaires Taylor, RubiconJason deCaires Taylor
A WOMAN is immortalised, gazing at her phone, part of an anonymous crowd of sculptures by British artist Jason deCaires Taylor. But this is no ordinary setting: deCaires Taylor’s pH-neutral marine cement figures (above) are 14 metres underwater off the coast of Lanzarote, Spain, and will eventually be reclaimed by the sea. The work’s name, Rubicon, draws from the idea the crowd, and the world, are heading towards a point of no return as temperatures rise.
The image of Rubicon is taken from a new book, Ocean: Exploring the marine world, which details how our oceans have been a “symbol of infinity, beauty, solitude, isolation, danger, happiness, weightlessness and longing” in art through the centuries. Featuring more than 300 images ranging from Roman mosaics to nautical cartography, Ocean also highlights how climate change has affected the seas.
NNtonio Rod, Trachyphyllia, from Coral ColorsNNtonio RodAdvertisement
NNtonio Rod (Antonio Rodríguez Canto) took 25,000 photos over the course of a year to make the award-winning time-lapse film Coral Colors (2016), from which the striking still Trachyphyllia (see above), featured in the book, is taken. Rod wanted his film to raise awareness of corals as they become more vulnerable to climate change-related bleaching.
Biodiversity Heritage Library/Contributed by MBLWHOILibrary
Ocean also features marine biologist Carl Chun’s stunning illustration of an octopus (Muusoctopus, formerly Polypus levis), drawn from a specimen collected near the Kerguelen Islands in the south of the Indian Ocean during the 19th century. The illustration (above) is included in Die Cephalopoden, Chun’s seminal 1910 work on cephalopod molluscs.
Book publisher Phaidon Editions

More on these topics: More

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

Humans

14 September 2022

Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) in Lucasfilm’s AndorLucasfilm Ltd
Watch
Andor takes Star Wars fans back to before the events of Rogue One, and finds Cassian Andor (Diego Luna, pictured above) doing all he can to avoid getting involved with a seemingly doomed rebellion. On Disney+ from 21 September.
Read
Stars in Your Hand, by Kimberly Arcand and Megan Watzke, shows how to make models of the cosmos using a 3D printer and 3D computer imaging. Luckily, it includes easy instructions for creating stars and more. On sale from 20 September.
… More

In unstable times we need to think clearly about the future. There is a lot to learn from David Christian’s Future Stories: A user’s guide to the future, an ambitious book with a Big History approach

Humans

14 September 2022

By Elle Hunt
Facing the scenarios ahead is vital – while we can still do somethingBrian Jackson/Alamy
Future Stories
David Christian (Penguin Random House)
NOW more than ever, it feels like the future is uncertain: the times, they are unprecedented. Adam Tooze, an economic historian at Columbia University in New York City, recently described the global outlook as a “polycrisis”, remarkable not only for the number of risks currently active, but also their volatility.
As well as the pandemic, we have the invasion of Ukraine, inflation, pressures on food and energy markets and upheavals in … More

Cognitive scientist Gillian Forrester is challenging chimps and gorillas to solve puzzles in an attempt to address the long-standing mystery of how humans evolved the ability to speak

Humans

13 September 2022

By Alison George
Nabil Nezzar
IT LIES at the centre of human experience, and yet how our incredible capacity for complex language arose is a mystery. We are still far from understanding why we are the only living ape with such a skill.
Answering these questions is difficult, not least because speech doesn’t leave its trace in the fossil record. However, we can look to our ape relatives for clues, as cognitive scientist Gillian Forrester at Birkbeck, University of London, is doing. She has developed puzzle mazes for chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and children that shed light on one idea of how language evolved. She tells New Scientist how her findings are challenging our understanding of the brain and painting a clearer picture of how language began.
Alison George: What inspired you to study the evolution of language?
Gillian Forrester: I’ve always been intrigued by the efforts to teach chimpanzees to speak, which were going on while I was growing up in the 1980s. They were a massive failure when it came to chimps learning to combine words into more complex phrases.
This got me intrigued about the common factors between human language and other animal communication systems, and how and why a language system emerged in humans but not for other great apes.
How do we start to answer that question?
We don’t have our ancient ancestors to look at to see how things changed over evolutionary time because they are all extinct, and cognition doesn’t fossilise. So all we can do is make suppositions based on their artefacts, such as tools and things they were buried with, to give us an indication of their communication skills. … More

Paul de Gelder’s Shark and David Shiffman’s Why Sharks Matter aim to turn the all-too-common public panic about the predator into interest in their conservation

Humans

7 September 2022

By Elle Hunt
A bull shark (Carcharhinus leucas) swimming in the Pacific Oceanshutterstock/Leonardo Gonzalez
Shark, Paul de Gelder (HarperCollins) and Why Sharks Matter, David Shiffman (Johns Hopkins University Press)
BY FEBRUARY 2009, Paul de Gelder had spent thousands of hours in the water as part of his job as a diver in the Australian Navy.
Early one morning, he was conducting a counterterrorism trial, swimming solo around Sydney Harbour, when he was attacked by a 3-metre-long shark. The fish slammed into him with its jaws, pinning de Gelder’s right hand to his leg. He recalls … More

A dystopian future isn’t inevitable. By prioritising the needs of our children and grandchildren today, we can give them a world without poverty, discrimination and so many other evils, says William MacAskill

Humans

| Comment

7 September 2022

By William MacAskill
Simone Rotella
CURRENTLY, society does little to care for its future. In my new book, What We Owe the Future, I make the case for longtermism: the view that we should be doing much more to protect the interests of generations to come. Longtermism puts the needs of our children and grandchildren front and centre in our moral thinking, and takes seriously the sheer scale of the future that may be ahead of us.
Why should we look so far ahead? The case for longtermism is grounded in three key ideas.
The first is that future people matter. The moral worth … More

From a parched Earth, Song Ji-an joins a lunar mission to find out how her sister died. With nods to the 1972 Solaris and Alien, word-of-mouth hit The Silent Sea is an intriguing show, says Bethan Ackerley

Humans

7 September 2022

By Bethan Ackerley
Song Ji-an (Bae Doona) joins a mission that finds a terrifying truthNetflix
The Silent Sea
Director Choi Hang-yong
Netflix
IF YOU live in Europe, this seems an appropriate time to watch The Silent Sea. With even rainy nations touched by what may be the continent’s worst drought in 500 years, it is easier than ever to imagine an arid future for Earth.
This South Korean sci-fi thriller debuted on Netflix in December last year to little fanfare, but its acolytes have spread the word and it is now a word-of-mouth … More