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43 Articles

Elsewhere on New Scientist

Virtual event Memory, the brain and who we are How do our brains store past experiences to make us who we are? Why can memories feel so real? Are there such things as “true” and “false” memories? Psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane offers a new way of thinking about our personal experiences. Watch online at 6pm GMT/1pm EST on 10 November. Also available on demand. newscientist.com/events Tour Norway: Wonders of the Arctic Explore Norway’s beautiful fjords, view the Northern Lights, glimpse whales and polar bears and discover the frozen Svalbard archipelago. Led by New Scientist podcast editor Rowan Hooper, this nine-day tour begins on 2 March 2023 and includes two marine safaris, a dog sled journey that will take you to explore under a glacier, and a plethora of Arctic science. The price is £5549. newscientist.com/tours Podcast Weekly Podcast editor Rowan Hooper…

Elsewhere on New Scientist

Could do better

ON 6 NOVEMBER, the next international climate summit, called COP27, will begin in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Global leaders will once again shake hands, smile for the cameras and get down to the difficult business of negotiating how to mitigate global heating at the end of a year when its devastating effects became more obvious than ever before. Last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow, UK, was billed as the world’s last chance to keep the goal of restricting warming to 1.5°C alive. The Glasgow Climate Pact called on countries to come up with more ambitious plans for limiting or cutting emissions ahead of COP27. Hardly any have done so. Egypt’s own plans would lead to a 50 per cent rise in emissions by 2030, so it isn’t exactly leading by example. And yet…

More floods in Australia

EASTERN Australia is experiencing major flooding for the fifth time in 19 months due to record-breaking wet weather that is predicted to stretch into next year. Across October, heavy downpours have flooded large swathes of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, resulting in four people dying, thousands of people being evacuated, homes and shops being inundated and roads being cut off and damaged. In New South Wales, the worst-affected state, 43 local government areas have now flooded, mostly in rural areas, with some floods spanning hundreds of kilometres. To try to limit the damage, more than half a million sandbags have been dispatched in recent weeks. “We are quite literally sandbagging the state,” said Steph Cooke, emergency services minister for New South Wales, on 22 October. The state was also badly hit by the…

More floods in Australia

Plan to save Greenland glacier

MAJOR engineering companies are looking at plans to slow the melting of a gigantic Greenland glacier, in what would be the first large-scale intervention to preserve ice anywhere in the world. If the scheme goes ahead, and if it works, it could suggest a way to slow sea level rise from Antarctic melt, too. Norway’s Aker Solutions and the Arup Group, based in London, sent representatives to a meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, on 12 October in which proposals were discussed to construct a physical barrier to slow the ingress of relatively warm seawater to the base of the glacier. “The design concept, essentially, is you take a heavy, premade set of concrete foundations that would be gently lowered onto the sea floor and they provide the anchor for a buoyant curtain,” says…

Plan to save Greenland glacier

Quantum watch is ‘a completely new way of measuring time’

A QUANTUM watch can tell time without counting it. This stopwatch-like method of observing quantum experiments is a deceptively simple – and always accurate – way to measure the passage of time. Marta Berholts at Uppsala University in Sweden and her colleagues based the clock on so-called pump-probe experiments. In these, a “pump” laser pulse is sent into a cloud of atoms, raising them to higher energy levels, and then another, less powerful “probe” pulse is used to measure the effect of the pump. These experiments are crucial for many applications in materials science, notably the development of solar panels, but it can be hard to measure how much time passes between the pump and the probe. The new quantum watch, made with helium atoms, solves that problem. “It’s a completely new way…

Quantum watch is ‘a completely new way of measuring time’

High school student sequences genome of his pet angelfish

A 17-YEAR-OLD high school student in California has sequenced the genome of the freshwater angelfish (Pterophyllum scalare) for the first time. Indeever Madireddy sequenced the genome of his pet angelfish Calvin after it died in March this year. “Although my fish was dead, I wanted to preserve it forever,” he says. “So I decided to sequence the genome of the angelfish with the hopes that I could contribute that information to the scientific community, while also paying a small tribute to my pet!” Madireddy did the sequencing at BioCurious, a community lab in Santa Clara, California, that makes advanced equipment available to anyone for a small membership fee. He stored his fish at -80°C at the lab to preserve its DNA, then spent around a month preparing and learning how to sequence…

Turmeric supplements have been linked to liver damage in five people

TURMERIC supplements and teas may have caused five cases of liver injuries that made people’s skin turn yellow. All those affected recovered with treatment. The spice contains a compound called curcumin, which has slightly eased inflammatory conditions such as arthritis and hay fever in small studies. Some turmeric-related liver injuries have previously been reported to the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Five new incidences were presented at the annual scientific meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology in North Carolina this week. One case, presented by Angeline Luong at the Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center in California, was a 49-year-old woman who developed nausea and vomiting after taking a daily turmeric supplement, at the dose recommended on the packaging, for three months. Her symptoms resolved when she stopped…

Turmeric supplements have been linked to liver damage in five people

Hypnotherapy app eases IBS symptoms in just six weeks

USING a hypnotherapy-based app may ease irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Nerva guides users through a 10-minute hypnotherapy session every day for six weeks. The causes of IBS aren’t fully understood, but disordered signalling between the gut and brain could be a culprit. Hypnotherapy may ease this by directing an individual into a trance-like state and suggesting that their symptoms are improving. In 2016, Simone Peters at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues published promising results of a trial that compared the effects on IBS of in-person hypnotherapy and the low FODMAP diet, which involves eliminating certain foods that can trigger the condition. To make the therapy more accessible, Peters developed Nerva. At the beginning of each session on the app, users are drawn into a trance-like state by being asked to relax…

Dozens of turtle species use vocal sounds to communicate

VOCAL communication is much more widespread in vertebrate animals than we thought. Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues collected recordings from 53 species that were previously thought to be non-vocal: the tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus), the Cayenne caecilian (Typhlonectes compressicauda), the South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxa) and 50 species of turtles. Rather than evolving in many animals independently, the research suggests that vocal communication arose in a common ancestor more than 400 million years ago. Many vertebrates with lungs – a group known as choanate vertebrates – create sounds through structures in their throats as they push air up through the lungs. They use these sounds in social interactions like parental care, mate selection, territory marking and other behaviours that benefit from vocal communication. However, researchers have overlooked at least…

Dozens of turtle species use vocal sounds to communicate

California mountain lions took more risks after huge wildfire

AFTER a 2018 wildfire, mountain lions near Los Angeles were more likely to cross roads, travel further and be active during the daytime – when encounters with people are most likely. The shift to bolder behaviour concerns researchers, who note that increasing wildfires may jeopardise the urban cats’ future. The wooded Santa Monica mountains north of Los Angeles are home to around 100 mountain lions, which, despite being bordered by large highways and human development, have managed to survive by hunting mule deer. After the 2018 Woolsey fire scorched more than 400 square kilometres of land – roughly half of the cats’ habitat – Rachel Blakey, now at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and her colleagues compared data from GPS tracking collars on 17 mountain lions before and after the blaze. They found…

Weather sensors that float forever

SMALL sensors powered only by sunlight could float in the sky indefinitely and make weather-related measurements. Flat objects with two sides can be levitated by what is called photophoresis. This occurs when one of the sides absorbs lots of light and the other very little, creating a difference in temperature. Just like how temperature differences in the atmosphere cause winds, this temperature gradient makes molecules move in such a way as to create a lifting force on the object. Benjamin Schafer at Harvard University and his colleagues designed a device that could use photophoresis to levitate small atmospheric sensors that wouldn’t need motors or batteries to stay aloft. While photophoretic devices have been tested before, the researchers designed a larger version optimised for carrying sensors. Their device consists of two aluminium oxide discs…

Weather sensors that float forever

Cannabis users experience more pain after surgery

PEOPLE who used cannabis within a month before surgery experienced greater pain after their operations than those who didn’t. Given its widespread use, and the fact that cannabis with high amounts of the psychoactive compound THC has been shown to provide some pain relief, researchers wanted to understand how it could affect the experience of pain after surgery. Elyad Ekrami at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and his colleagues looked at data on 34,505 adults who underwent surgery at the centre between January 2010 and December 2020. Of the participants included in the study, 1683 reported using cannabis within 30 days before surgery, while the rest didn’t. Everyone rated their pain 24 hours after surgery on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 indicating no pain and 10 indicating the worst pain possible.…

Space telescope glimpses the smallest distant galaxy

THE James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted the smallest galaxy outside our local universe by using the heaviest known cluster of galaxies, called El Gordo, as a giant lens. The mini galaxy is a thousand times less massive than the Milky Way. El Gordo was first discovered in 2011. Follow-up measurements found that it contained so much mass – the equivalent of 3 million billion suns – that it was at the very limit of what standard cosmological theory predicts. This huge mass makes it useful as a gravitational lens, bending and magnifying the light from stars and galaxies on the other side of it that would otherwise be invisible to us. Now, Jose Diego at the University of Cantabria in Santander, Spain, and his colleagues have used JWST to observe the…

Pillars of Creation look even starrier in new JWST image

OUR view of the iconic Pillars of Creation has been transformed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). While these towering clouds of dust and gas, which are 6500 light years away in the Eagle Nebula, look like solid cosmic stalagmites in the classic images from the Hubble Space Telescope, JWST images reveal the stars forming within them. JWST is able to see through the dust because it observes in infrared wavelengths of light, as opposed to visible light that Hubble mostly uses. Infrared light pierces through the clouds of dust and gas to show the young stars that have just formed or are still forming in this stellar nursery. Many of the brightest stars in this image have only recently formed within the pillars and then blown away their surrounding gas.…

Pillars of Creation look even starrier in new JWST image

Analysis Energy

NEVER mind the gas crisis – beneath the UK lies enough free heat to keep the country warm not just this winter, but every winter for decades to come. That is according to UK members of parliament on the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) who wrote to the business secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, on 19 October claiming that there is enough geothermal energy in the UK to meet the country’s annual heating demand for at least a century. “The evidence received by the Committee was clear and consistent: the UK has significant geothermal resources which can contribute to both the UK’s energy security and its transition to net zero,” wrote EAC chair Philip Dunne. Given such huge resources, the EAC argues that the government should be doing much more to bring geothermal projects to fruition…

Analysis Energy

Why mosquitoes bite some people more than others

AN ACIDIC byproduct made by skin bacteria may make some people more attractive to mosquitoes. Maria Elena De Obaldia at the Rockefeller University in New York and her colleagues asked eight people to wear sleeves made from nylon for 6 hours. A nylon swatch from a sleeve was then placed in one of two boxes, with the second box containing nylon worn by another of the participants. A third box held female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, attached to the other boxes via a tunnel. In various fabric combinations, the nylon worn by people with high levels of carboxylic acids in their body odour was the most attractive to the insects (Cell, doi.org/gq3dfc). Bacteria produce these acids when making the waxy substance sebum. It may not be possible to change our production of carboxylic acids. “Human…

Why mosquitoes bite some people more than others

Dyslexia linked to genetic variants

IN THE largest genetic study of dyslexia to date, scientists have identified 42 genetic variants that may influence a person’s chance of having it. Dyslexia, which affects up to 1 in 10 people in the UK to some extent, often affects a person’s ability to read, write and spell. Although the cause is unknown, previous research suggests that dyslexia is inherited, with smaller studies linking it to a few genes. To get a wider view of dyslexia’s potential genetic associations, Michelle Luciano at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and her colleagues carried out a genome-wide association study on 1.1 million adults, mainly of European origin, of whom 51,000 said they had been diagnosed with dyslexia. The researchers identified 42 genetic variants that tended to differ between the participants who did and didn’t have dyslexia.…

Dyslexia linked to genetic variants

Radiation-resistant alloy could boost spacecraft shielding

AN ALUMINIUM alloy that is 100 times more resistant to radiation damage than a common spacecraft material could be used to improve shielding in crew capsules or build houses on Mars. Aluminium alloys are often used in space because they are both lightweight and strong. But when they are exposed to powerful radiation from the sun or galactic rays for long periods of time, their molecular structure can change, making them weaker. In 2019, Stefan Pogatscher at the University of Leoben in Austria and his colleagues created a new alloy by mixing an aluminium and magnesium alloy with zinc and copper, then crushing it at extremely high pressures. The resulting material kept its structure and hardness after being exposed to high levels of radiation. But it also became brittle, which rendered it…

AIs built by Meta beat human experts at Diplomacy game

TWO AIs built by Meta can beat expert human players at the classic first world war strategy game Diplomacy. The AIs had to learn how to partly cooperate with other players, an element most other game-playing AIs don’t have to take into account. “There’s a quite unique feature here of Diplomacy being collaborative and competitive at the same time, which makes it exciting,” says Georgios Yannakakis at the University of Malta, who wasn’t involved in the study. Diplomacy involves up to seven players fighting for control of European territories. To build a proficient AI player, a team led by researchers at Facebook’s parent company Meta first tried a typical AI trial-and-error algorithm called reinforcement learning. This technique has helped AI dominate games such as chess, Go and poker, but the team found it…

AIs built by Meta beat human experts at Diplomacy game

Weedkiller impairs visual learning in bumblebees

BUMBLEBEES exposed to glyphosate, the world’s most popular type of weedkiller, found it harder to learn and remember colours linked to rewards – which could undermine their ability to locate food for the colony. Marjo Helander at the University of Turku in Finland and her colleagues investigated how glyphosate, in this case in the herbicide Roundup Gold, affected buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) in colour-based learning and memory tests. Over five rounds, bees chose between different-coloured artificial flowers, five containing a sugar reward and five a bad-tasting quinine solution. Unexposed bees got better at finding the reward in each round. But in bees exposed to the herbicide, learning fell to effectively zero after three rounds. In a memory test two days later, unexposed bees performed near the level they had in the fifth round…

Weedkiller impairs visual learning in bumblebees

Proton’s stretchiness remains a puzzle for particle scientists

THE proton is stretchier than we thought, according to new measurements. But physicists are divided on whether this anomaly will persist in future experiments or if our fundamental picture of the proton’s structure will need to change. Protons contain three smaller particles called quarks, which are held together by other particles called gluons, as well as very short-lived “virtual” particles. When a proton is exposed to electric and magnetic fields, these internal constituents move about according to their charge, causing the proton to deform, or stretch. The extent to which the proton can be stretched is determined by its electric and magnetic polarisabilities, two quantities that have been measured many times and that tell us about the proton’s internal structure. In 2000, an early measurement of these found that as you examine…

Proton’s stretchiness remains a puzzle for particle scientists

Robotic laser can target and kill cockroaches

RESEARCHERS have created a device that uses machine vision to spot cockroaches and zap them with a laser. They say the method could offer a cheaper and more environmentally friendly alternative to insecticides. Ildar Rakhmatulin at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues equipped a laser with two cameras and a small computer running an AI model that can be trained to target certain types of insect. The researchers tested several different lasers and found that a 1600-milliwatt device was able to kill a German cockroach (Blattella germanica) at a distance of up to 1.2 metres in around a second. These pests are commonly found in homes on all continents except Antarctica and the allergens they produce can worsen asthma and cause allergic reactions in some people. The cockroaches were placed in…

Gases from asteroid are studied on Earth

FOR the first time, researchers are analysing pristine gases from an asteroid. These were collected by Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft, which visited the asteroid Ryugu from 2018 through 2019. Ryugu probably formed near the edge of our solar system before being flung towards Earth. To find out more, researchers examined gases from rock samples. These gases indicate how long Ryugu’s surface has been exposed to space radiation – about 5 million years, according to the new analysis. That is consistent with asteroids near Earth, not in the outer solar system, so Ryugu must have migrated inwards from its birthplace at least millions of years ago (Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add8141 and DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo7239; Science, doi.org/jhkp).…

Gut bacterium eases liver disease in mice

ALTERING the gut microbiome could help reduce the harmful effects of nicotine on the liver. Previous studies suggest that smoking tobacco or using nicotine patches can lead to a build-up of nicotine in the gut, which has been linked to more severe non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Now, research by Frank Gonzalez and Lulu Sun at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland and their team has found that a gut bacterium that degrades nicotine can reduce the severity of this condition in mice. The team identified a species of bacterium called Bacteroides xylanisolvens that degrades nicotine using an enzyme called NicX (Nature, doi.org/gq3kvb). Sun suggests that a probiotic containing the enzyme could be developed for use in people.…

Physical neural net could make aircraft wings that morph

A MECHANICAL neural network composed of beams, motors and sensors can learn to carry out several different tasks, just like its software equivalent, and could lead to aircraft wings that change shape during flight to maintain efficiency or minimise turbulence. Modern AI research relies on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which mimic brain structure by creating grids of artificial neurons connected by synapses. Just as the human brain learns new behaviours by bolstering synaptic connections, ANNs learn by adjusting the digital values stored to represent them. Ryan Lee at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his team borrowed that concept to create a mechanical neural network in which the strength of connections between neurons is replaced by beams of variable stiffness. Instead of processing digital data, the mechanical version processes forces applied to…

Physical neural net could make aircraft wings that morph

Smartphone data can show death risk Data from just 6 minutes of walking, collected by smartphone sensors, may be enough to predict a person’s risk of dying in the next five years, according to information on 100,655 people in the UK Biobank study. Participants wore motion sensors for one week (PLoS Digital Health, doi.org/jhkc). Hair follicles grown in lab for first time Mature hair follicles have been grown using mouse tissue in a lab for the first time – a move that could one day treat hair loss. The follicles reached up to 3 millimetres long. The team is now working to recreate the experiment using human cells (Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add4603). One chip transmits all internet traffic A single computer chip has transmitted a record 1.84 petabits of data per second via a fibre-optic…

THERE is something about Mars that captivates us. Throughout history, different cultures and individuals have looked at the blood-red beacon in the night sky and filled it with whatever their imaginations associated with the unknown. Across time, Mars has been the celestial embodiment of warrior gods, an astrological talisman of spiritual influence, a venue for utopia and the wellspring of horrors beyond belief. Even today, our relationship with the Red Planet continues to evolve. Of the five planets that are visible to the naked eye, Mars is easily the most dramatic, and its observable behaviours have informed our cultural interpretations of it. Yet from the flighty apparition of Mercury in the twilight to the extraordinary beauty of Venus in the gathering evening, the unflinching progress of Jupiter and the laboured march…

Field notes from space-time

LAST Christmas, I woke early in the morning, which is unusual for me. Not only am I a practising Jew, but it has been a few decades since I was a kid in the household of my non-Jewish parent, waking up eager for gifts. But Christmas 2021 was different. NASA – in partnership with the European Space Agency and other organisations – was launching the next in its series of Great Observatories. I was up early because I wanted to watch and because I was nervous as hell: what if it blew up during launch? The final price tag for the instrument NASA calls the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was $10 billion. This sounds like a literally astronomical sum of money, but to situate it in context: Disney’s Marvel Cinematic…

Field notes from space-time

STANDING at 1.65 metres tall, the world’s largest digital camera has been unveiled at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. At the end of 2024, it will be installed at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory on the summit of Cerro Pachón in Chile. In its home in the Andes mountains, it will catalogue about 20 billion galaxies over the next 10 years as part of a project called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The 15 terabytes of data that the LSST Camera will collect every night will advance our knowledge of the universe, helping researchers unpack the nature of mysterious dark matter and better understand how galaxies are formed. The LSST Camera works like any other digital camera, but it is much bigger. Its 189 sensors take in light…

Editor’s pick

Condolences and green funeral suggestions 8 October, p 24 From Helen Gould, Saratoga, New South Wales, Australia Graham Lawton, we feel something of your loss of your beloved wife Clare; our hearts go out to you. On the subject of green funerals, my husband was a co-editor of the book Biochar for Environmental Management and says one good option is to pyrolyse a body to turn it into charcoal. That is what I want to happen to my remains. I hope that, after my funeral and when my biocharred body has cooled down, my friends will take some charcoal home to use in their garden soil. This will help store carbon away from the atmosphere and build soil health. From Stephen Lismore, Sheffield, UK I was immensely moved by Graham’s farewell to his wife Clare. So sorry…

Out of the inferno

Film The Blaze (En Plein Feu) Quentin Reynaud Release pending THIS summer, France recorded more wildfires than ever before, with over 62,000 hectares destroyed by 20 August. Since January, the area hit by wildfires in France is 7.5 times greater than the annual average of the 15 years up to 2021, with one huge fire near Bordeaux forcing 10,000 residents to flee. The Blaze (En Plein Feu), a French film that debuted at the London Film Festival earlier this month, is clearly a case of art imitating life. Directed by Quentin Reynaud and starring André Dussollier as Joseph, and Alex Lutz as his son, Simon, it focuses on how the pair try to escape the ever increasing threat of a wildfire, overcoming many obstacles as they make their way to the coast. The film was shot…

Out of the inferno

The safari just outside your office

Podcast BBC Earth Podcast BBC Studios Natural History Unit YouTube and major platforms “WHEN I was a child, I got chased by a warthog.” With this unlikely holiday story from Botswana, co-host Rutendo Shackleton begins Safari, the first episode of a new season of the BBC Earth Podcast, an exploration of the natural world for those who may not be quite as confident navigating it. A creation of the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, it is a conversational, slickly produced podcast that seeks to engage more than it informs. Yet it does both effectively, prompting the listener to take a closer look at whatever nature is near them. Safari invites city folk to view their immediate surroundings with the same curiosity and wonder with which they might look for lions, leopards, rhinos elephants and African buffalo…

Clear and present emissions

Book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War Neta C. Crawford MIT Press IN JUNE, the secretary-general of NATO announced that the military alliance would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. As the website Energy Monitor reported, observers objected to important details being left vague, such as which countries it covered. Since the first international climate summit, military emissions have been largely exempt from reporting and reduction targets. It is time this changed, says Neta Crawford, an international relations expert at the University of Oxford. In her new book, The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the rise and fall of US military emissions, she puts numbers to the emissions produced by NATO’s largest member, the US military. Using only publicly available sources, she finds that in 2019 the US military and its…

Clear and present emissions

Read The Milky Way Smells of Rum and Raspberries writes astrophysicist Jillian Scudder. Her offbeat tour of the universe, with its weird and wonderful facts, will have us looking at the night sky afresh. On sale 3 November. Watch Manifest’s fourth season continues the uncanny story of airline passengers who landed five years too late. It stars Josh Dallas and Melissa Roxburgh as Ben and Michaela Stone (pictured). The first half of the season comes to Netflix on 4 November. Visit The Pluto Story is astronomer Ian Robson’s tale of Pluto’s demotion from planet to dwarf planet. Robson’s talk will be at Augustine United Church, Edinburgh, UK, and livestreamed on YouTube at 7.30pm GMT on 4 November.…

The film column

FROM her high-rise in a future Kuala Lumpur, where goods flow freely, drone-propelled, while people stay in their apartments, Unoaku – in a brilliant, almost voiceless performance by Okwui Okpokwasili – ekes out her life. There are herbs on her windowsill and vegetables growing in hydroponic cabinets built into her walls. If she is feeling lazy, a drone will deliver a meal that she can simply drop, box and all, into boiling water. Unoaku’s is a world of edible packaging, smart architecture, living rugs that she spritzes daily – and profound loneliness. She lives by herself, and so does everybody else. Though Remote was filmed during the covid-19 lockdowns, it would be a mistake to consider it just another “lockdown movie”. Unoaku’s world is by no stretch a world in crisis, still…

The film column

BENEATH grey skies in China’s Sichuan province, a fighter jet-like drone prepares to take off. Its mission: to release silver iodide into the atmosphere in a scientifically dubious attempt to trigger rainfall and help combat a drought associated with the worst heatwave the world has seen since records began. A few thousand kilometres to the west, meanwhile, authorities in Pakistan declare a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions” – caused not by a lack of rain, but by far too much of it, resulting in deadly floods. The events of just one day – 25 August 2022, to be exact – are stark evidence of our new climate reality. Never have the dangers of global heating been so terrifyingly obvious. Yet in terms of global action, we are in many ways going…

It’s all about the money

To reduce carbon dioxide emissions and adapt to a hotter world with ever-more extreme weather, each country must invest huge amounts of money. But lower-income nations don’t have much to spend. At the COP15 climate meeting in 2009, high-income countries promised to provide $100 billion a year in climate funding, mostly in the form of loans. This target has yet to be achieved. For instance, according to Oxfam, the reported amount of funding for 2017/18 was $60 billion, but the true amount was $20 billion. Part of this climate funding is meant to go towards adaptation, such as improving flood defences. Last year at COP26, high-income nations promised to double adaptation funds to $40 billion a year. Once again, much of this money has failed to be provided, with pledges so far…

YOU could be forgiven for being completely confused when it comes to consuming low-calorie or artificial sweeteners. Some days, the headlines are full of praise for their beneficial effects on health, helping people to lose weight by replacing their favourite sugary drinks and treats with similar-tasting diet versions. At other times, we are told low-calorie sweeteners are linked with serious health conditions, from raising blood pressure to an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. Just last month, a large study of French adults claimed to have found an association between consuming sweeteners and an increased risk of heart disease. Allison Sylvetsky, an associate professor in the department of exercise and nutrition sciences at George Washington University, Washington DC, is trying to unpick the science involved in this controversial topic. Her work…

Water, water everywhere

IT LOOKS like there is nothing below the thick, hot clouds we are falling through. But descend a little further and the vista opens up to show an ocean as far as the eye can see. Its surface is steaming, feeding water vapour into the sky. Plunging into the waves, it is hot at first, but cools as we travel further into the darkness, the pressure becoming immense. We dive down hundreds of thousands of metres until we reach the bottom where, instead of rock, the sea floor is made of ice. We have landed on a water world. When astronomers began discovering planets outside our solar system in the 1990s, they realised that alien worlds come in an array of orbits, masses, sizes and compositions. These exoplanets couldn’t be placed…

Water, water everywhere

Sweetening the pot

DELICIOUS meals don’t get much simpler than a baked sweet potato. But a little science can tell us how to maximise this dish’s sweetness and deepen its flavour. Sweet potatoes are between 1 and 2.5 per cent sugar when raw, but they get sweeter as they cook thanks to the work of amylase enzymes that break down starch into simple sugars. These enzymes are most active at 75°C (167°F). A study from 2012 found that the sugar content of one type of sweet potato was almost five times higher after baking for 90 minutes, mainly due to an increase in maltose. A fragrant aroma and soft texture are also important to the experience, and the cooking method has a big effect here. Another study analysed the aroma compounds produced by baking, boiling…

Sweetening the pot

Cryptic crossword #95 Set by Wingding Scribble zone Answers and the next quick crossword next week ACROSS 1 Massachusetts woman’s illness (6) 4 Short reptile appears before us – a sign of spring (6) 9 One politician with every charge (7) 10 South-East Asian plant resembling insect to audience (5) 11 One leaving ball for exams (5) 12 Spots damaged section (7) 13 Stormy autumn? Thank ancient ruler (11) 18 Volatile oil near part of aeroplane (7) 20 Carnivore decapitated wizard (5) 22 Taste shown by religious leader returning after university (5) 23 Novel pie treatment for food connoisseur (7) 24 At home with bananas under control (2,4) 25 13’s city is not quite number one (6) DOWN 1 After a short time, yeti synthesised part of molecule (6) 2/16 Stone is liquid in Bolivian city, under lithium (5,6) 3 Lifeless pinniped having lost tail in salty water (4,3) 5 Grab a…

Almost the last word

Joe Average Who is the average person in the world, and what is their age, location, physical appearance etc.? Hillary Shaw Newport, Shropshire, UK The “average” person in the world today is male, Chinese, around 40, living near the Myanmar border, working in the service sector on $30,000 a year, with two children, living in a large city like Kunming. However, by the mid-21st century, this person would have had to emigrate to India, maybe take a small pay cut and change sex to remain “average”. The hard bit would be ageing just five years by 2050. Jeff Dickens Banchory, Aberdeenshire, UK Even if we were to identify Joe Average, studies indicate that they would almost certainly not realise their averageness and may forcefully deny it. When people are asked to rate their own abilities and performance on a…

Almost the last word

Holy nitpicking Nitpicking often draws criticism, but Gérard Lucotte, Areki Izri and Thierry Thomasset didn’t let that deter them from publishing their sixth article in a series of keen looks at some old hairs. It is called “Nits of louse on the hairs of Holy Maria-Magdalena: A SEM-EDX study”. Lest there be confusion, let’s be specific about the hairs. The study says they come from “a large lock” of Mary Magdalene’s hair that was “arranged in a dedicated reliquary” in the basilica of the village of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in southern France. The authors go on to explain that Mary Magdalene is “the most abundantly cited women [sic] of the four Gospels”. Lucotte, Izri and Thomasset perused 10 hairs in two ways: with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). In slightly…

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