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Brain training apps claim to make us smarter, but there is no evidenceThere are plenty of apps that offer mental exercises claiming to make users smarter the more they play. Not only are they not much fun, but studies show they have no effect on performance, says Adrian Hon More
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
