Humans

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

Humans

11 January 2023

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Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible is delivered with humour and erudition by Anthony Zee. What better way to get the little grey cells going than by unifying quantum mechanics and special relativity? On sale from 17 January.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Watch
Hearing the Light is a talk by Clara Brasseur about representing telescope data as sound, also called astronomical data sonification. Listen to real data from the Kepler Space Telescope (pictured above) in her online talk on 20 January at 7.30pm GMT.

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Cold People struggle to … More

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

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.

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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
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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

When did hominins start cooking? It might be earlier than we thoughtWe 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 More