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40 Articles

Elsewhere on New Scientist

Virtual event Fermilab: Solving the mysteries of matter and energy, space and time Join Fermilab senior scientist Don Lincoln as he explains what the particle physics facility in Illinois has taught us about our universe. Major discoveries made at the lab include the top and bottom quarks – and its future work might be critical for a “theory of everything”. Online on 4 April at 6pm BST/1pm EDT. Tickets are £16. newscientist.com/events Tour Ancient caves, human origins: Northern Spain Mix modern and ancient culture on a trip through northern Spain. Accompanied by New Scientist’s editor in chief Emily Wilson, you will explore caves rich in art created 40,000 years ago, then visit the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to enjoy some world-class contemporary pieces. The seven-day tour starts on 13 June and costs £2999. newscientist.com/tours Podcast Weekly Following the latest report from…

Elsewhere on New Scientist

Not just skin deep

WRINKLES are big business. Around the world, people are living longer and populations are ageing. Most people can expect to make it to their 60s at least. As the number of older people increases, so does the desire to cover up one of ageing’s most prominent signs. Recent market research found that consumers in the US spent $9.1 billion on anti-wrinkle creams and moisturisers in 2021 and will be spending nearly $13 billion in 2027. That expenditure is essentially a vanity project driven by a desire or pressure to look younger. There is no shortage of options, often at astronomical prices. However, there is a growing case for that bill to be picked up by healthcare providers and private insurers. Wrinkles are much more than a cosmetic problem. As we report in…

Rewilding could be a big climate fix

RESTORING the populations of just a few important groups of animals could help capture huge amounts of carbon from the air and thereby play a role in limiting global warming. Climate change research has emphasised the importance of vast forests and seagrass meadows as the most efficient way of storing carbon. But bison, elephants, whales, sharks and other massive wild animals also store carbon in their bodies, while promoting tree and seagrass growth, preventing carbon-releasing wildfires and packing down ice and soil to keep carbon in the ground, says Oswald Schmitz at Yale University. “There’s been scepticism in the scientific community that animals matter, because if you just do the accounting, they’d say animals don’t make up much of the carbon on the planet, so they can’t be important,” he says. “What…

Rewilding could be a big climate fix

Astronauts on the moon could mine water from glass

TINY glass beads on the moon formed by meteoroid impacts might collectively contain as much water as there is in ice near the lunar poles, and could be harvested for water by future expeditions to the moon. Mahesh Anand at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and his colleagues analysed samples returned to Earth by China’s Chang’e-5 lunar probe and found glass beads, known as spherules, that are formed in the extremely hot aftermath of meteoroids hitting the surface of the moon. Using microscopes and spectroscopy to analyse the glass beads, the team found they contained water with the same hydrogen isotopes – atoms of the same element that differ by the number of neutrons they contain – as those found in charged particles ejected by the sun. Previous research has shown…

CERN measurement casts doubt on shock W boson result

A TANTALISING discrepancy from the standard model of particle physics hasn’t persisted in new results from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). While the previous result created a frenzy of hypotheses about new particles and adjustments to the standard model that could account for the discrepancy, there is growing evidence that it wasn’t quite correct. In 2022, researchers analysing archival data from the now-shuttered Tevatron collider in Illinois found that a particle called the W boson seemed to be ever-so-slightly more massive than predicted by the standard model. They found that it had a mass of 80.4335 gigaelectronvolts, while its widely accepted mass was 80.379 GeV. Members of the ATLAS collaboration at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, were in the process of reanalysing their own data, which had always agreed…

CERN measurement casts doubt on shock W boson result

Ancient humans got a taste for roasted snails very early on

BROKEN bits of shell found in a cave in Africa have given researchers the earliest evidence for prehistoric people roasting and eating snails. Excavations at Border Cave in South Africa, near its boundary with Eswatini, turned up the shell fragments in layers of dirt dating from 70,000 to 170,000 years ago. Other studies have pointed to snail consumption at sites in Europe around 30,000 years ago and in Africa around 40,000 years ago. “There is a huge gap from that to our findings,” says Marine Wojcieszak, who led the new work while at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The shell scraps came in a spectrum of colours, so Wojcieszak and her colleagues wondered if cooking had changed their hue. The researchers heated pieces of modern snail shell in a furnace…

Ancient humans got a taste for roasted snails very early on

Analysis Artificial intelligence

MICROSOFT researchers have claimed that OpenAI’s GPT-4 is capable of such a wide variety of tasks, in some cases exceeding human ability, that this artificial intelligence model is showing “sparks” of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Is this long-awaited goal near or are these claims just hype? While no standard definition of AGI exists, it is most commonly understood to refer to an AI that can understand and learn any intellectual task that humans are capable of. In a new paper, researchers from Microsoft Research say that they consider AGI to involve the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas and learn from experience – and that GPT-4 meets that criteria, despite only being designed to generate text. “Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that…

Analysis Artificial intelligence

World population could soon peak

THE global population will peak at 8.6 billion in 2050 and decline to 7 billion by 2100 if current trends continue, according to a projection by the Earth4All model from the Club of Rome non-profit organisation. And if the world invests more in reducing poverty and inequality, the number would top out at around 8.5 billion in 2040 and fall to 6 billion by the end of the century. The figures are several billion lower in 2100 than other forecasts. “Even if the numbers are not going to be as scary as some older forecasts, this does not mean that we don’t have a problem,” says Beniamino Callegari at Kristiania University College in Oslo, Norway, one of the authors of the Earth4All report. A big fall in the number of people on…

World population could soon peak

Dormice glow brilliantly under ultraviolet light

GARDEN dormice may not seem particularly flamboyant. In fact, the small, brownish-white rodents spend much of their life trying not to be seen. But new research shows that, under the right light, these animals shine with bright shades of purple and greenish-blue. Photoluminescence occurs when a substance absorbs photons of ultraviolet light and re-emits them at longer wavelengths, often as visible colours. This occurs in many marine animals, in some insects and millipedes and in the plumage of some birds. It encompasses two processes: fluorescence, when photons are re-emitted almost immediately, and phosphorescence, which can last for several minutes. After seeing recent studies that also found photoluminescence in nocturnal mammals such as flying squirrels and springhares, Grete Nummert at Tallinn Zoo in Estonia wondered if garden dormice (Eliomys quercinus) display it too.…

Dormice glow brilliantly under ultraviolet light

Europe averted a crisis over winter, but what happens next time round?

SIX months ago, an energy disaster loomed in Europe. Spiking gas prices, driven in large part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, had sent costs soaring and sparked a worldwide scramble for energy supplies. Headlines warned of a winter of rolling blackouts and fuel shortages, a nightmare scenario that would crash Europe’s economy and endanger lives. Compounding the problem was a once-in-500-year drought, which dramatically cut power output from hydroelectricity and Europe’s already beleaguered network of nuclear power plants. This created an extra gap in generation equal to 7 per cent of Europe’s total electricity demand in 2022, says energy think tank Ember. Yet as the continent enters spring, it appears those doomsday predictions never came to pass. While millions of people experienced a season of cold homes, and factories reduced their output…

Europe averted a crisis over winter, but what happens next time round?

Analysis Artificial intelligence

AN IMAGE of Pope Francis, the leader of the Catholic church, wearing a large, white puffer jacket went viral last week. The 86-year-old pontiff looks stylish, with many people commenting on his fashionable clothes. There is just one problem: the image isn’t real. The picture (right) is part of a set generated by the artificial intelligence Midjourney, which produces images based on text prompts, and were posted on Reddit on 24 March by an artist who goes by the name of u/trippy_art_special. The user’s account has since been suspended, but this image in particular has spread across Twitter, where it has fooled many. Should we be worried? Web culture expert Ryan Broderick has called the pope image “the first real mass-level AI misinformation case”. But the issue has actually been brewing for…

Analysis Artificial intelligence

JWST telescope finds TRAPPIST-1b may have no atmosphere

THE James Webb Space Telescope has looked at a promising star system with exoplanets thought to have an atmosphere, but didn’t find any sign of this. Some models had predicted that such worlds would have thick atmospheres, but their absence could lower the estimate of potentially habitable planets in the cosmos. The TRAPPIST-1 system consists of a red dwarf star with at least seven planets orbiting it, four of which are in the habitable zone – the area around a star where temperatures allow for liquid water. Thomas Greene at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and his team used JWST to study TRAPPIST-1b, the planet closest to the star. They looked at this world before and after it passed behind the star, which is the optimal time to spot how heat…

JWST telescope finds TRAPPIST-1b may have no atmosphere

Why is cancer rising in younger people?

WHEN it comes to cancer research, we regularly hear good news about the number of people benefiting from advances in treatment. But there is one bad news story about the condition that gets little attention. For three decades, there has been a gradual rise in the number of people under 50 being diagnosed with cancer – and we don’t entirely know why. The rise is steepest in bowel cancer, but an increase in incidences is happening with tumours of nearly all the major organs of the body. It is so alarming that it was made a top priority for research in a joint UK-US cancer funding review last month. So, what might the causes be? The incidence of cancer rises with age, mainly because the cells of older people have had longer…

Why is cancer rising in younger people?

Fissures on icy ocean moons may be too rare to provide conditions for life

THE seafloors of Europa and Enceladus may not be prone to fracturing. Such fissures are thought to be important for the prospect of life beneath these moons’ icy shells, so if there isn’t enough stress to cause them, there may also be a shortage of energy and chemicals that potential living organisms would need. We can’t observe the cores of these frigid worlds directly, so we know very little about them. If they fracture often, the fresh rocks revealed could react with the waters overlying them to provide energy and nutrients for potential life in those oceans. Henry Dawson at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues modelled some of the stresses on the icy moons’ rocky cores to see if those stresses could crack the rock. The researchers focused on…

Fissures on icy ocean moons may be too rare to provide conditions for life

Wrinkly graphene could transform hydrogen fuel cells

TINY ripples on graphene’s surface let it split hydrogen 100 times more efficiently than any known chemical catalysts. The discovery could lead to improved hydrogen fuel cells. A one-atom-thick layer of carbon, graphene is essentially a slice of graphite. The latter is an extremely unreactive substance because of its strong carbon bonds. However, Andre Geim at the University of Manchester, UK, and his colleagues have found that graphene, despite also having strong bonds, can be very chemically reactive. This is because it tends not to be totally flat, instead having small undulations in it called nanoripples. These allow it to split hydrogen as effectively as the best catalysts we have today. To show this, the team produced graphene with as few defects as possible to rule out the effects coming from some…

Safe drinking water remains out of reach for billions

AROUND 2 billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water, a major United Nations report has found. Several factors are to blame, says Richard Connor at the UN, the report’s lead author. Rising urban populations, expanding agriculture, a lack of waste water-treatment infrastructure and climate change all play a role, he says. The UN World Water Development Report was published to coincide with the UN’s first major conference on water since 1977, which took place last week in New York. It ended with hundreds of pledges from governments and other organisations, but no internationally binding agreement. The report is intended as an update on progress towards ensuring that everyone in the world has access to safe drinking water by 2030 – one of the UN’s sustainable development goals adopted in 2015. This goal…

Safe drinking water remains out of reach for billions

Asteroid samples contain a building block of RNA

SAMPLES from the asteroid Ryugu contain uracil, one of the four building blocks of RNA. This lends credence to the idea that the ingredients for life were brought to Earth by space rocks. Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft returned 5.4 grams of asteroid dust from Ryugu at the end of 2020, and various labs obtained tiny portions to examine. Yasuhiro Oba at Hokkaido University in Japan and his colleagues steeped their samples first in hot water for 20 hours, then in hydrochloric acid. Lastly, they searched the resulting tea-like extracts for nucleobases, components of DNA and RNA. Even though the researchers started with samples weighing less than 20 milligrams, and only 20 to 30 per cent of the extracts were used for this study, they managed to find uracil, as well as complex…

Shape discovered that can tile a wall and never make a pattern that repeats

MATHEMATICIANS have found a single shape that can be used to cover a surface completely without ever creating a repeating pattern. The long-sought shape is surprisingly simple, but has taken decades to uncover – and could find uses in everything from material science to decorating. Simple shapes such as squares and equilateral triangles can tile, or snugly cover a surface without gaps, in a repeating pattern that will be familiar to anyone who has stared at a bathroom wall. Mathematicians are interested in a more complex version of tiling, known as aperiodic tiling, which involves using shapes that don’t ever form a repeating pattern. The most famous aperiodic tiles were created by mathematician Roger Penrose, who, in the 1970s, discovered that two shapes could be combined to create an infinite, never-repeating tiling.…

Shape discovered that can tile a wall and never make a pattern that repeats

Botox injections alter brain activity linked to emotions

AFTER having Botox injections in the forehead, people’s brains respond in a different way when they see images of faces showing emotion. This may mean they find it harder to interpret others’ emotions. Mitchell Brin – who works at AbbVie, which makes Botox, and at the University of California, Irvine – and his colleagues scanned the brains of 10 women aged between 33 and 40 before they had injections of botulinum toxin, commonly known as Botox, to smooth wrinkles in their foreheads and again two to three weeks later. The study didn’t include any men. The injections paralysed muscles so participants could no longer frown or smile with their whole faces. During functional magnetic resonance imaging of their brains, the participants looked at photos of angry and happy faces interspersed with neutral…

Cheesecake made by a 3D printer

A 3D-PRINTING lab has automated the assembly and cooking of a seven-ingredient cheesecake. “When you bite into it, you kind of feel the flavours hit you in different waves,” says Jonathan Blutinger at Columbia University in New York. “And I think that’s a function of the layering inside of the actual structure.” Blutinger and his colleagues used seven ingredients, including graham crackers, peanut butter and strawberry jam. Any ingredient not already in a paste form went into a food processor. A 3D printer could then build up the cake by depositing the seven paste-like ingredients in layers. A laser beam just a few millimetres wide then lightly browned the outer graham cracker portions (npj Science of Food, doi.org/j3xd).…

Key to sleep may be a high-protein diet

A HIGH-PROTEIN diet may promote deeper sleep, according to a study that found mice and flies that eat more protein are less likely to wake up from movement-related disturbances. When you go to sleep, you stop consciously perceiving the world, including things that may disrupt sleep, says Dragana Rogulja at Harvard University. She and her colleagues fed flies either a high-protein diet or a regular diet for one day. Half as many flies on the high-protein diet woke in response to vibrations from a loudspeaker as flies on a regular diet. A similar experiment in mice produced comparable results (Cell, doi.org/j3xg). “The general idea makes sense. We sleep when our other needs are taken care of,” says Rafael Pelayo at Stanford University in California.…

Parasite from cat faeces killed four sea otters

FOUR sea otters in California have died from infection with a rare strain of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which is primarily found in cats and transmitted through their faeces. This is the first recorded instance of this form of toxoplasmosis in a marine animal, and could mean an unusually virulent strain of the parasite is circulating on land. “Otters are really good at showing what comes from land to sea,” says Melissa Miller at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Their diet of bivalves, which filter water, means runoff contaminated with T. gondii eggs can end up reaching otters. The parasite commonly causes chronic infections in otters, but it is unusual for it to rapidly kill adults, she says. Miller and her team performed necropsies on four southern sea otters (Enhydra…

Parasite from cat faeces killed four sea otters

Orange daisy lures flies by deception The orange-hued South African daisy Gorteria diffusa co-opts genes usually used to grow root hairs and transport iron to create petals that resemble female bee flies. Male flies land in hopes of mating, but end up ferrying pollen to other plants (Current Biology, doi.org/grzg58). Recyclable plastic made from glue A new type of plastic called poly(ethyl cyanoacrylate), or PECA, is easy to recycle and requires no fossil fuels to make it. A team used ethyl cyanoacrylate – the main ingredient in super glue – to create the plastic, which could potentially replace polystyrene (Science Advances, doi.org/grzg99). Shocking bandage helps heal wounds A stretchy bandage that can monitor wounds, release a drug as needed and perform electrical stimulation can accelerate healing. Rats wearing it had better healed wounds after 14…

Let them eat cake

IN 1950, less than 1 per cent of the UK population was clinically obese. Today, that figure stands at 28 per cent. How did this happen? Did the British public suffer a massive collapse of willpower? Of course not. Humans haven’t changed. The food system has. Many people find it hard to imagine that a food “system” really exists, let alone that it could be shaping their own dietary habits. This is because we live deep in this vast, complex machinery of supply and demand, and struggle to see it as a whole. Our new book, Ravenous, aims to go behind the scenes: to show you how the system works, and your place in it. Let’s start with one, crucial cog: the human appetite. Biologically, we are still hunter-gatherers. If you have…

Let them eat cake

Field notes from space-time

THE only science fiction that ever really caught my attention when I was growing up, besides Star Trek and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, was the novel Contact by Carl Sagan. When I was 15, I saw the 1997 film version of this, which he and his wife Ann Druyan had helped adapt for the screen. Later, as a 17-year-old navigating my first semester at university, I read the book, having accepted that I couldn’t just read Mansfield Park on a loop for the rest of my life. Contact eventually became the gateway for me to try more popular science books, those written for general audiences. Until that point, when it came to this genre, I had only read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time – which inspired…

Field notes from space-time

WHEN David Attenborough says in his new documentary series, Wild Isles, that Britain is one of the most nature-depleted places in the world, his words resonate. Yet an accompanying book by Patrick Barkham and Alastair Fothergill brings together photographs that celebrate the stunning wildlife of Britain and Ireland. A reminder, perhaps, of the things we should cherish before it is too late. Often seen in huge, shape-shifting flocks, starlings (top left) are actually in decline. To capture their nighttime roosting behaviour, the Wild Isles team deployed thermal cameras, with the birds’ warmth causing them to show up in bright white. “There’s something very Christmassy about it,” producer Chris Howard said in the show, “all these trees festooned with light.” Great crested grebes, seen at top right during a courtship dance, were once…

Editor’s pick On the true nature of the house cat 11 March, p 46 From Dawn Nelson, Greenwood, Maine, US Many people discount the idea that cats can have emotional bonds with humans. Thus, in “The truth about cats”, Michael Marshall suggests his cat may “just be looking for warmth”, rather than cuddles. Why are feline behaviours emotionally downplayed in this way? People don’t do this with dogs (or other domestic animals for that matter). Consider this. Wolf pups lick the muzzles of adult wolves and this prompts adults to regurgitate food for the pups. Similarly, many dogs lick the faces of their owners. But I have yet to hear someone offhandedly comment: “Your dog isn’t showing you affection, it just wants you to regurgitate food for it.” From Dave Riddlestone, Farnborough, Hampshire, UK This article reminded…

Building your digital twin

Book Virtual You Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield Princeton University Press IMAGINE a future where science has created your twin. Not a flesh-and-blood twin, but one that recreates your flesh and blood, your bones, your heart, your brain – your whole body, in fact – as an exquisitely sophisticated computer model. Your doctors can use this digital twin to work out how you will respond to a particular drug or medical procedure. They can even look further into the future, creating a “healthcast”, a bit like the medical equivalent of a weather forecast, to predict what diseases might befall you or how your lifestyle will affect your health as you age. It is the ultimate in personalised medicine. This is the bold vision set out in Virtual You: How building your digital twin will revolutionize medicine…

Building your digital twin

Ghosts in the brain?

Book Presence Ben Alderson-Day Manchester University Press THE idea that we experience ghostly presences through sensory phenomena is as old as time. But for some time now, we have accepted that many people hear voices, see unexplained phenomena and experience presences for which there is no rational account. So how do we explain them? What do they tell us about how the human brain is wired – or what we mean by the concept of “self”? These questions have preoccupied Ben Alderson-Day, a psychology researcher at Durham University in the UK, for most of his career. In his first book, Presence: The strange science and true stories of the unseen other, he sets out to provide a comprehensive account of what we know so far. Early on, we meet two young men who hear voices. Those…

Ghosts in the brain?

Visit Titanosaur: Life as the biggest dinosaur will be looming large at London’s Natural History Museum until 7 January 2024. Prepare to gawp: Patagotitan mayorum was four times the weight of the museum’s Diplodocus, Dippy. Read Sleeping Beauties are dormant innovations in nature and human history, such as prehistoric bacteria with the ability to fight off modern antibiotics. They are investigated here by evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner. Out on 6 April in the UK and US. Listen How to Fix the Internet, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s podcast, recently aired a chat with artist Trevor Paglen (pictured). His art creates a physical manifestation of today’s internet, so tomorrow’s can be better.…

Maths by the book

Book Once Upon a Prime Sarah Hart HarperCollins (UK, out 13 April) and Macmillan (US, out 11 April) DID you know that cycloids, the curves traced by a point on a circle as it rolls along a straight line, appear in Moby-Dick? Or that Leo Tolstoy made extensive use of calculus in War and Peace? Or that George Eliot talked about taking “a dose of mathematics every day” and that this interest is central to her novel, Daniel Deronda? These are just some of the stories you will come across in Once Upon a Prime: The wondrous connections between mathematics and literature. Sarah Hart, a mathematician at Birkbeck, University of London, traces mathematical references in literature going as far back as Aristophanes in 414 BC, and argues that we should see mathematics and literature as…

Maths by the book

Timing a bit off in dino thriller

Film 65 Scott Beck and Bryan Woods On general release in cinemas AFTER an asteroid hits his spaceship, astronaut Mills (Adam Driver) crash-lands on Earth while transporting a cargo of intergalactic voyagers kept in cryosleep. But this turns out to be Earth 65 million years ago and, alongside the only other survivor, a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), Mills must stay alive in a prehistoric world populated by killer dinosaurs. That is the premise of 65, a new film written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods that throws up a number of issues – starting with its title, which is intended to refer to the number of years (in millions) since the end of the Cretaceous period. The problem is that, in 2012, the International Commission on Stratigraphy revised the end of…

The truth about wrinkles

ON HER 120th birthday, Jeanne Calment – generally regarded as the oldest person ever to have lived – proved she still had her wits about her: “I’ve only got one wrinkle,” she wisecracked, “and I’m sitting on it.” Funny, but untrue. The Frenchwoman was, by then, extremely wrinkly. On the Fitzpatrick Wrinkle Scale, she would have been a shoo-in for the top category, with deep wrinkles and discoloured skin that had lost its elasticity. Quelle surprise. She may not have been as old as she claimed, but she was at least 97. Anybody who lives to 100 or so can expect the same. Historically, this has been regarded by many as a purely cosmetic problem. Wrinkles, sags and bags are, in some cultures, considered unsightly or an unwanted sign of how old…

The truth about wrinkles

Head in the clouds

WHEN Nalini Nadkarni first ventured into the canopy of a cloud forest, almost nothing was known about this unique ecosystem. To explore it, she and a small group of pioneers had to develop special tree-climbing techniques, which, over the intervening four decades, have allowed her and others to unlock the mysteries of forest canopy biology. Monteverde in Costa Rica, where Nadkarni does much of her fieldwork, is home to some remarkable species, including the resplendent quetzal. But it turns out that the entire ecosystem depends on a more modest and unlikely group of organisms called epiphytes. These tree-dwelling plants – which include a dreamy array of wonders from ephemeral mosses that drip off branches and luscious ferns that nestle in crevices to a dazzling variety of orchids – act like…

Head in the clouds

Black holes from a previous universe

ALMOST exactly 50 years ago, when I was a PhD student, I wrote an article in this magazine about the mounting evidence for black holes, regions of space in which gravity is so strong that light can never escape. Today, there is no longer any doubt about their existence. We know they form from collapsing stars and that supermassive ones sit at the centres of galaxies. We have even taken a picture of two of them. But in my article I also mentioned a more speculative possibility: that smaller black holes might have formed in the early universe, shortly after the big bang. I was working on this idea under the supervision of Stephen Hawking, who had started to think about such a possibility just a few years earlier. Our work…

Black holes from a previous universe

BLACK HOLE CANDY

Perhaps the most important offshoot from the idea of primordial black holes (see main story) was that it motivated Stephen Hawking to consider the quantum effects of black holes. In particular, he discovered that black holes emit Hawking radiation. Only primordial black holes can be small enough for this radiation to cause them to disappear in the lifetime of the universe. Thinking about this also led Hawking to the black hole information paradox: quantum theory says information cannot be destroyed, but he argued that information would be lost when a black hole evaporates. He later changed his mind about this and we are still pondering the resolution of this paradox today. Hawking radiation is one of the most important discoveries in 20th-century physics. It unifies three previously disparate areas of physics: quantum…

At the heart of the Crab

SOME constellations force you to look at them. Their brightest stars are so clear, even in a night sky full of light pollution, that they draw you in. Others sit there quietly, waiting for you to find them. This week, we are looking for one of the latter. Cancer is a humble constellation, nestled in between its louder neighbours Gemini and Leo. Without any particularly bright stars of its own, Cancer is the faintest of all the zodiacal constellations, which makes it tricky to find. But once you have spotted it, there will be something beautiful waiting for you: the Beehive cluster (pictured right). Cancer is visible from all over the world, and April is a great time to see it. Start by locating three bright stars: Regulus in Leo and the…

At the heart of the Crab

Cryptic crossword #106 Set by Wingding Scribble zone Answers and the next quick crossword next week ACROSS 7 Parts of beetles kept by retired party leader (6) 8 Nauseating reference writer recalled (6) 9 Round rodent returned to get vegetable (4) 10 Rooms in submarines where mutated coral is absorbing potassium (8) 11 Complicated head teacher went fishing (7) 13 Drug found in urine collected by steward on vacation (5) 15 Gather army for an audience (5) 16 Fish and lion in experiment (7) 18 Bromine in wheat, perhaps affecting the brain (8) 19 Killed a great number (4) 21 Two goats upset antelope (3-3) 22 South American animal gets cystitis after one move (6) DOWN 1 Bloodsucker starts to frustrate law enforcement agents (4) 2 Extremely ardent turtles in disagreement (2,11) 3 Large mammal spread out, top to bottom (7) 4 Unusual dam on top of dyke (5) 5/6 Omicron spike…

Almost the last word

In bad taste How was rhubarb found to be edible? It certainly isn’t palatable raw. Chris Robinson London, UK As a child in the north of England, I was often kept quiet with a stick of rhubarb and a saucer of sugar: dip and bite. I imagine that the many periods of starvation in human history expanded the boundary of what is considered edible. Robert Bernstein Santa Barbara, California, US In rural Connecticut as a child, our farmer neighbour gave me some of her raw rhubarb and I was delighted at the tart flavour. I only stopped eating rhubarb later when I found out that its oxalic acid can have some harmful effects. What “isn’t palatable” for one person may be delicious to another. The mystery to me? How anyone can think that bitter cilantro (coriander) or kale…

Almost the last word

Nihilism and hypergunk Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism aren’t for everyone. Or maybe they are. Jonas Werner, a philosopher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, published a crisp, perhaps irresistible, 16-page-long jotting called “Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism”. The matter isn’t as simple as some people assume. Nor are some of its concepts, though they have colourful names. “Gunky objects”, for instance. Gunky objects, says Werner, are “objects such that every part of them has a proper part”. Gunkiness has to do with how-many-ness. How-many-ness is seldom simple. Werner explains: “There are distinctions between countable gunk (a gunky object that has not more than countably many non-overlapping parts), gunk of higher cardinalities, and hypergunk.” Hypergunk is a variety of gunk that possesses particular mathematical qualities. Parts of the philosophy community have…

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