Humans

Nearly forty years of letters between the two scientists who co-developed the paradigm-changing Gaia hypothesis make for fascinating, humanising reading

Humans

24 August 2022

By Adam Vaughan
James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis corresponded for nearly 40 years.Tim Cuff/Alamy
Writing Gaia
Edited by Bruce Clarke and Sébastien Dutreuil
Cambridge University Press
HERE’S something for the archive: “The New Scientist one seems to have stirred up some interest including an amazing number of crank letters of a gentle and non-aggressive kind,” wrote the late independent scientist and polymath James Lovelock, in a letter to biologist Lynn Margulis.
The “cranks” were responding to an article in this magazine, dated 6 February 1975. In it, Lovelock presented the idea and world view of Earth as a self-regulating system, the Gaia hypothesis, to a wider … More

Green roofs have existed for more than 2000 years, but, along with living walls, they are becoming more popular – and provide major eco-benefits, writes Beronda L. Montgomery

Humans

| Columnist

24 August 2022

By Beronda L. Montgomery
JSMimages/Alamy
SOME of my favourite writing spaces of late have had a living wall – a vertical garden of plants – or a bountiful green roof. There is something very soothing to me about being in a space with a visible, robust community of plants.
Green roofs aren’t new: they have been reported to exist as early as 500 BC, in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But they appear to have become more common recently, or at least my noticing of them has become more frequent. I have seen them at hotels, restaurants and my current and former workspaces.
Living walls and green … More

Nope might adopt the flying saucer cliché, but this beautifully shot spectacle from director Jordan Peele breathes new life into the sci-fi horror genre

Humans

24 August 2022

By Chen Ly
L to R: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Brandon Perea in NOPE, written, produced, and directed by Jordan Peele.Universal Pictures
Nope
Jordan Peele
On general release
SOMETHING strange is lurking in the clouds above a dusty, unassuming valley deep in southern California. On a horse ranch, taciturn Otis “OJ” Haywood Jr and his sister, the somewhat livelier Emerald, are struggling to save their business, Haywood’s Hollywood Horses, which supplies horses for film and television. Six months earlier, their father, who founded the business, was killed when a nickel mysteriously fell out of … More

Taken from Anna EscardÓ’s book Science Illustration: A history of visual knowledge from the 15th century to today, these images range from Galileo’s watercolours to a sketch from Einstein’s notebook

Humans

24 August 2022

By Gege Li
TASCHEN
THESE seminal scientific images, taken from the new book Science Illustration: A history of visual knowledge from the 15th century to today by Anna EscardÓ (published by Taschen), are more than just a treat for the eyes.
The lateral view of the human brain, shown above, is taken from French physician and anatomist Jean-Baptiste Marc Bourgery’s Atlas of Human Anatomy and Surgery. First published in 1831, this textbook is known as the most comprehensive ever produced on human anatomy.Advertisement
By courtesy of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBACT), Central National Library of Florence, Ban of Reproduction; The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; By courtesy of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBACT), Central National Library of Florence, Ban of Reproduction
The three images above show, from left to right: nerve synapses called the calyces of Held, drawn in 1934 by Santiago RamÓn y Cajal, whose neuron doctrine showed that the nervous system isn’t continuous, but is made from discrete cells; Albert Einstein’s 1905 sketch of a puzzle game from his relativity notebook; and watercolour illustrations of the moon by Galileo Galilei, based on observations made with a telescope he constructed in 1609 that was powerful enough to examine objects in the night sky.
NASA/T. Benesch, J. Carns
Shown above is NASA’s 2012 image of two “doughnuts” of charged particles, or plasma, surrounding Earth, an example of how computer graphics have created more precise and realistic depictions of invisible phenomena. These rings are called Van Allen radiation belts. NASA launched two probes in 2012 to better understand these regions and space weather more widely.
“Scientific illustrations allow the conveyance… of complex scientific concepts,” says EscardÓ. “Even today… it is still necessary to use illustration as a tool to capture images that can only be made through this medium.”

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Morfydd Clark (Galadriel)Amazon Studios
Watch
The Rings of Power takes us back to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, where Morfydd Clark (above) plays a younger (but still ancient) Galadriel in Amazon’s bid to tell Sauron’s origin story. On Prime Video from 2am BST on 2 September.
Read
Taxi from Another Planet records the unlikely conversations between astrobiologist Charles Cockell and taxi drivers about aliens and space exploration. So is Mars our plan B? Will we understand aliens? And what if we are alone? On sale from 30 August.

… More

Matthew Cobb’s latest book is a disturbing history of genetic engineering, which asks whether it is worth the money – or the risk

Humans

24 August 2022

By Michael Marshall
Gene editing, exemplified by CRISPR technology, has elicited both hopes and fearsELLA MARU STUDIO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
The Genetic Age
Matthew Cobb
Profile Books
FOR more than 50 years, biologists have been genetically engineering organisms in increasingly precise ways. From the early, crude methods of the 1960s and 1970s, to the modern “gene editing” exemplified by CRISPR technology, genetic engineering has elicited great hopes and terrifying fears.
In his disturbing and readable new book The Genetic Age: Our perilous quest to edit life, biologist and science historian Matthew Cobb tells the story of this field. … More

The idea of plant consciousness may be wild, but finding objective ways to probe their inner lives could bring benefits to us all

Humans

| Leader

24 August 2022

HelloRF Zcool/Shutterstock
TAKE a look at that plant sitting on the windowsill or tree in the local park. What might it be feeling? Could it be thinking? Experiments are probing the idea of plant cognition, even going so far as to suggest they possess some form of consciousness.
As wild as it sounds, it isn’t a new idea. The field of “plant neurobiology” began in 2006, aimed at understanding how plants process information from their environment.
It is now clear that plants are capable of complex communication and can intricately sense their surroundings, ideas that were originally dismissed. But proponents of plant … More

An analysis of thigh and forearm bones from Sahelanthropus tchadensis suggests the early hominin was mainly bipedal, but the claim is controversial

Humans

24 August 2022

By Clare Wilson
3D models of the femur and ulnae of Sahelanthropus tchadensisFranck Guy / PALEVOPRIM / CNRS – University of Poitiers
The ancestors of humans may have been walking on two legs by about 7 million years ago – a million years earlier than had been thought. But the finding, which comes from analysing a damaged thigh bone and two forearm bones, is controversial.
Estimates vary for when the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees split from each other but broadly converge on about 6 million years ago. This is also the age of the earliest fossil of a bipedal hominid, called Orrorin tugenensis.
The thigh bone, or femur, analysed in the latest study was discovered in the Lake Chad Basin in Chad. It was among thousands of bone pieces initially uncovered in 2001, almost all of which weren’t from primates.Advertisement
The first hominin fossils identified among the bone pieces were fragments of skull and a few teeth. These were identified as a new and very early hominin species named Sahelanthropus tchadensis, dating from about 6 to 7 million years ago.
A later method of fossil dating, based on analysing different forms of the element beryllium, pushed the estimate further back to somewhere between 6.5 and 7.5 million years ago.
In 2004, a femur found among the bone pieces was identified as potentially belonging to a hominin by Aude Bergeret-Medina and Roberto Macchiarelli at the University of Poitiers in France. They later lost access to it, but in 2020 they published work based on measurements and photographs that argued that its shape suggests the owner didn’t walk on two legs.
Now, Franck Guy, who is also at the the University of Poitiers, and his colleagues, who still have access to the fossils, have published a full analysis of the femur as well as two forearm bones, including computed tomography scans to see their internal structure. It took so long partly because the team didn’t initially have the right expertise to analyse bones other than the skull, says Guy.
It is unknown if all the hominin bones came from the same individual or from several, but the researchers have assumed they belong to S. tchadensis as this was the only large primate with bones found at the site.
The researchers compared the S. tchadensis thigh and forearm bones with those from modern humans as well as chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and some extinct hominins and great apes. They conclude that S. tchadensis spent some time clambering in trees but usually walked on two legs, based on several features of the femur that they say are closer to those of modern humans than great apes that usually walk on four limbs. These include the distribution of thicker sections of the dense outer layer of bone, called the cortex, and the presence of a rough surface at the top of the femur where the buttock muscles attach.
“When on the ground they would have preferred to move bipedally. [When in trees] they would sometimes choose to use clambering. All the features point to this kind of behaviour,” says Guy.

But Macchiarelli isn’t convinced. This is partly because the small angle the femur makes with the pelvis is more similar to that seen in quadrupedal apes, he says. “It’s mechanistically unstable to walk on two legs with a small angle.”
Other primates that mainly walk on four legs occasionally stand up and walk on two, which could be why S. tchadensis has some features of bipedalism, says Macchiarelli. “There’s a bipedal signal in any primate,” he says.
Fred Spoor at the Natural History Museum in London says the authors “make a good case” for bipedalism, but that the debate is likely to continue. “Unless you have a time machine, you can’t go back and see for yourself,” he says.
The question is an important one because more recent hominins such as the australopiths both walked on two legs and climbed in trees as recently as 3 to 4 million years ago, he says. “That would mean that for the first 3 million years [of our history] there was this mixed locomotion, and not much was happening.”
Kelsey Pugh at the American Museum of Natural History in New York says it would be useful to compare the S. tchadensis femur with a wider range of living and extinct primates. “It will be vital for independent teams of palaeoanthropologists to study these exciting fossils in the coming months,” she says.
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04901-z
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