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  • Barcodes: How they could be your latest mathematical party trick
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    MathematicsBarcodes contain a checksum an ingenious use of mathematics that even lends itself to a fun way to surprise your friends, says Katie Steckles 5 February 2025 Shutterstock/Scott RothsteinSometimes there are hidden patterns in numbers you might not immediately notice. One example of this is in barcodes, the sequences of digits we use to identify products.Try it yourself find an object with a 13-digit barcode. (If you are in the US, a 12-digit barcode will also work, if you imagine an extra 0 on the front of it.) Books wont work, since they use a slightly different system, but magazines do, so you can use a copy of New Scientist. Add together the first, third, and fifth digits and so on, to get the sum of
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  • What the new field of womens neuroscience reveals about female brains
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    MindNeuroscientist-turned-entrepreneur Emil Radyt is using brain stimulation to explore how things like premenstrual syndrome and period pain impact the brain 5 February 2025 Becki GillThere is a huge hole in our understanding of the brain. A gaping, woman-shaped hole. While neuroscience has given us countless insights into how our minds work, history reveals a major oversight: most of those studies were performed on both men and women without considering that there might be differences between their brains. Only recently have we begun to realise the impact of this blind spot. For example, research has now shown that the brain is dramatically remodelled after giving birth, while another study found that the fluctuations of the menstrual cycle affect how the brain works.This oversight not only leaves us in the dark about how reproductive stages affect the brain, but calls into question many other, broader conclusions in neuroscience. It is also what inspired neuroscientist-turned-entrepreneur Emil Radyt to co-found a start-up called Samphire Neuroscience, where she is using non-invasive brain stimulation to transform our understanding of conditions that predominantly affect women, from premenstrual syndrome and period pain to postpartum depression. New Scientist asked Radyt how a better understanding of womens neuroscience could change the way we treat mental health issues and about the implications of this emerging field for everything we previously thought we knew about the human brain.Helen Thomson: You trained as a neuroscientist. How did you come to use that expertise to develop a brain stimulation device?Emil Radyt: Throughout my undergraduate degree, I worked as an emergency medic. I realised that about 50 per cent of our cases were actually psychiatric emergencies. You think about paramedics helping someone who is bleeding or having a heart attack, but I was seeing addiction, suicide,
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  • Would we recognise alien intelligence, asks Adrian Tchaikovsky novel
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    SpaceIn Shroud, Adrian Tchaikovsky's intriguing new novel, two women marooned on a strange moon encounter alien life and struggle to recognise intelligence in other beings, finds Emily H. Wilson 5 February 2025 What might be lurking on the surface of the unusual moon Shroud?Shutterstock/IuriiShroudAdrian Tchaikovsky (Tor)The latest novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shroud, examines the question of whether, faced with an alien intelligence, we would actually perceive it as intelligent. That and whether the aliens would recognise us as anything above pond life.The setting is the far future and a foray by a commercial vessel into a new star system. The ships culture is cruel, petty and highly corporate that is, entirely recognisable to humans alive today. The crew are unfrozen, used as needed, then summarily refrozen.
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  • Is Elon Musk's DOGE going to break decades-old US government software?
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    Elon Musk is a close associate of US president Donald TrumpK C Alfred/San Diego U-T/ZUMA Press Wire/ShutterstockIs a team led by Elon Musk going to crash US government computer systems? In recent weeks, there have been numerous reports of Musk and his associates gaining access to servers at departments ranging from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US Treasury. It isnt clear if these complex, sensitive and ageing computer systems are being updated, or if private data is being accessed, but there are fears of serious harm being caused.Musks staff are operating under a task force called the Department
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  • Robot made from pig gelatin biodegrades when no longer needed
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    The robotic arm at different stages of activationWei et alAn origami-inspired robot arm made with material from cotton plants and pigs biodegrades when no longer needed. Such a soft robot could be further developed to carry out medical procedures inside the body and then pass safely through it.Soft robotics is a growing field because there are a number of applications where a hard, rigid device would be unsafe or unwelcome, such as when working in extremely tight spaces in machinery or in close proximity to or even inside people. AdvertisementMost experimental soft robots are made with synthetic materials such as silicon rubber. Now, Hanqing Jiang at Westlake University in Zhejiang, China, and his colleagues have created a simple version from cellulose derived from cotton and gelatin from pigs, which then biodegrades harmlessly. It can be controlled by a computer and even act as a controller itself.To make it, the researchers created a Kresling origami shape, forming a tube that can be compressed and bent side-to-side, and joined four of these modules together to make a rudimentary robotic arm 240 millimetres long. By tightening or loosening three equally-spaced threads running inside this arm, they were able to manipulate it in any direction using external motors.The gelatin also acts as a sensor, changing electrical resistance under bending. By recording these resistance values, the scientists could determine exactly what position the arm was in at any time. They even demonstrated that a smaller construction of modules could be used as a joystick to input signals in a similar way, by passing changing resistance values to a small computer, and these signals could in turn be used to control another soft robotic arm. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterIn the future we may have more robots on the planet than human beings, so therell be lots of waste, says Jiang. In landfill is where we need these robots to disappear. Jiang says that the robots current materials degrade harmlessly in the environment, but slightly different ones would be needed for it to break down entirely within the human body.Kaspar Althoefer at Queen Mary University of London says that soft robots could be useful in a range of applications, such as squeezing into tight spaces in industrial processes, interacting safely with people or even in medical procedures, particularly surgery. You could in such a scenario leave your tools behind, so to speak, without a problem, says Althoefer. I strongly believe soft robotics can go much further than where we are now. Its still a fairly new area.Journal referenceScience Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads0217 Topics:robotics
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  • Astronomers have spotted the largest known object in the universe
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    Artists illustration of the large-scale structure of the universeScience Photo Library/AlamyAstronomers have found the largest known structure in the universe. It is 1.4 billion light years across and contains nearly 70 galactic superclusters. It is also hundreds of thousands of times more massive than a single galaxy, such as the Milky Way.Hans Bhringer at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, and his colleagues have named this cosmic structure Quipu after an Incan counting system made from knotted rope. B
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  • Old fighter jets can be melted down and 3D printed into new ones
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    New fighter jet components can be 3D printedRolls RoyceFighter jets that first flew in the 1970s can be transformed into a fine powder and used to 3D print components for the next generation of aircraft in the UKs Royal Air Force (RAF). Experts say this is a more efficient way to make aircraft its less environmentally damaging and also solves the problem of sourcing materials from countries that are under sanctions, like Russia.Robert Higham at Additive Manufacturing Solutions has developed a technique to recycle crucial materials like Ti64 which is titanium with 6 per cent aluminium and 4 per cent vanadium. The UK Ministry of Defence has large quantities of expensive and hard-to-source materials like Ti64, but they are tied up in obsolete or broken aircraft and in stored components. AdvertisementThe company was able to take turbine blades from a Panavia Tornado an aircraft in service with the RAF from 1980 to 2019 and recycle them into a nose cone for a prototype engine that will power the RAFs next generation of fighter jet.The world is more expensive than it used to be. Its more complex and more expensive to make products, says Higham. We can make them as cost effectively as possible.Higham says that creating spherical particles from the old parts is key to printing quality new parts, as jagged particles can get stuck in the 3D printer. Simply grinding the metal down wont do, so the recycled components are melted and then sprayed into a high-pressure jet of argon, where they break up into raindrop-shaped droplets. These droplets spin in the gas, become spherical then drop out and solidify. Its a very similar process to the way that rain becomes hailstones, says Higham. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterThe resulting powdercan then be fed into 3D printers. These machines essentially weld the powder into layers half the thickness of a human hair and set down each layer, one by one, to build the new part. Its a very straightforward microscopic welding process. It isnt really anything more complex than that, says Higham.In this first case, the powder was used to 3D print a nose cone for an Orpheus jet engine, which Rolls Royce is currently developing for the Future Combat Air System (FCAS). The FCAS includes a range of aircraft with modular components, including the BAE Systems Tempest a proposed sixth-generation fighter jet destined for the RAF.Topics:
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  • We are all bad at choosing random numbers in our own unique way
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    Picking a truly random number is harder than you thinkaryna Terletska/Getty ImagesPeople are generally bad at producing random actions, but now it seems that we are all uniquely bad in our own way. This makes it possible to predict how an individual will act randomly, which could have implications for data security and choosing suitably strong passwords.Psychologists already know that we struggle with randomness ask people to name a random colour, and a majority will say blue, while the most frequent answer for a random number between 1 and 10 is 7.
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  • Dexterous and light prosthetic hand can tie knots and comb hair
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    A woman with a hand amputation wore the prosthetic for several hours, which enabled her to pick objects upHao Yang/University of Science and Technology of ChinaA lightweight prosthetic hand that can move almost as freely as a human hand can help wearers carry out intricate tasks, such as tying knots, combing hair and playing chess.To replicate the dexterity of a human hand, most commercial prosthetics use electric motors or compressed air systems, which can make the system heavy and uncomfortable to wear for too long.
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  • Is the UK about to force Apple to reveal all of your encrypted data?
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    Apple offers encryption to its customers, but the UK government wants to break itMatt Cardy/Getty ImagesThe UK government has reportedly made an unprecedented demand for Apple to grant it access to data stored by any customer, anywhere in the world, even if it is encrypted. The request, first reported by The Washington Post, means Apple will either be forced comply, or else withdraw its encrypted services from the UK. Both outcomes are likely to be harmful for ordinary Apple customers.How is the UK able to make this request?According to The Washington Post, the request has
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  • The ocean is losing its ability to store heat as the planet warms up
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    Coral reefs are threatened by ocean warmingSeaphotoart/AlamyThe oceans ability to absorb heat into its depths appears to be rapidly declining, leading to prolonged marine heatwaves, increased ocean warming and greater stress on marine ecosystems. The loss of this vital cooling mechanism suggests we could be entering a new phase of climate change.Hajoon Song at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, and his colleagues used satellite data spanning four decades to track how sea surface temperatures (SSTs) have evolved over time.
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  • AI chip smaller than a grain of salt uses light to decode data
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    TechnologyA tiny chip on the tip of a fibre-optic cable can passively harness light to perform AI computations, dramatically reducing the amount of energy and computing power required 7 February 2025 A chip on the end of an optical fibreUniversity of Shanghai for Science and Technology in ChinaAn artificial intelligence chip smaller than a grain of salt can perch at the end of an optical fibre, harnessing the physics of light to process the information passed through the fibre while using far less energy and computational power than typical AI techniques.Optical fibres can carry data at the speed of light, but decoding these light signals usually happens on a slower and more energy-intensive external computing device. The new AI chip could perform that data-processing task more quickly while
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  • Chilling images reveal melting ice worlds
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    Mer de Glace, Frances largest glacierJulia Roger-Veyer/OnewaterThese striking images highlight Earths vanishing ice and the fight to save it. A staggering two-thirds of glaciers may disappear by the end of the century, threatening ecosystems and global water supplies. The images took some of the top prizes in the Walk of Water competition, run by UNESCO and Onewater. UNESCO has designated 2025 as the International Year of Glacier Preservation.Julia Roger-Veyer received second place in the European category for her atmospheric shots of the Mer de Glace, Frances largest glacier, at Chamonix. The image above was shot from within a moulin, a huge hole carved into the glacier by meltwater, while the photo below peers inside a cave created by glacial retreat. Roger-Veyer climbs and photographs the Mer de Glace each autumn. Each year, the glacier retreats roughly 40 metres. In an announcement about her win, she said she expects she will probably be a helpless witness to its disappearance.Julia Roger-Veyer/OnewaterAdvertisementMichele Lapini captured first prize in the Europe category for his shot documenting the effort to save Presena Glacier in northern Italy (below). Vital to the alpine ecosystem, the glaciers surface area decreased from 68 hectares to 41 between 1993 and 2003, according to Lapini.Michele Lapini/OnewaterIn 2008, conservationists began spreading textile sheets over the glacier each summer to prevent melt. The photo shows a worker unhooking sheets during autumn before the first snow. The effort may have reduced ice melt by two-thirds, but cannot pause ice loss. As Lapini writes, climate change cannot be mitigated through localized quick fixes alone.The contests global prize is sponsored by MPB, its regional Asia prize is sponsored by Asian Development Bank, and its regional European prize by the city of Burghausen.Topics:
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  • Explore what shaped Bill Gates in part one of his autobiography
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    Bill Gates (right) and Paul Allen, his childhood friend and Microsoft co-founder in the late 1960sLakeside SchoolSource CodeBill Gates (Allen Lane)There are few people in the world of technology with more interesting stories to tell than Bill Gates. The entrepreneur and co-founder of Microsoft has seen computers morph from hulking machines that fill entire rooms and cost thousands of dollars a day to use to tiny, handheld devices that can be picked up for comparative pennies. He has seen, and changed his mind on the importance of, the rise of the internet and
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  • Amazing plesiosaur fossil preserves its skin and scales
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    Skeleton of the new plesiosaur at the Urwelt-Museum Hauff in Holzmaden, GermanyKlaus Nilkens/Urwelt-Museum HauffThe soft tissue of a plesiosaur has been studied in detail for the first time, revealing that the marine reptiles, which lived during the age of dinosaurs and went extinct at the same time, had scales similar to those of modern sea turtles.The 183-million-year-old, 4.5-metre-long plesiosaur fossil, known as MH7, was first excavated from a quarry near Holzmaden, Germany, in 1940 but it was buried in a museum garden to protect it during the second world war. It then spent the next 75 years or so in storage until it was finally assembled and prepared for study in 2020. AdvertisementMiguel Marx at Lund University in Sweden and his team prepared thin sections of the fossil, which were then treated so the minerals were dissolved away, leaving the organic remains. This allowed them to study the microscopic structure of the fossil tissue.Illustration of a plesiosaur with scales on the flipper and smooth, scale-less skin along the bodyJoschua KnppeAlthough at least eight other plesiosaur fossils are known to have soft tissue preserved, most are historically significant museum specimens and it isnt possible to study them using destructive sampling methods, says Marx. This is the first time anyone has conducted an in-depth analysis of fossilised soft tissues from a plesiosaur, he says. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterThe team was amazed to discover that the reptile had areas of both smooth and scaly skin. Taken together, this plesiosaur was an interesting chimera between something like a green sea turtle with scales and the [smooth-skinned] leatherback turtle, says Marx. I would have expected this plesiosaur to be scale-less like contemporary ichthyosaurs.The scaled skin on the flippers probably helped the plesiosaur swim through the water by providing stiffness or aided it in moving along the seafloor when searching for food, he says. The scale-less skin on the rest of the body would have reduced the effects of drag when swimming.The actual external appearance of long-necked plesiosaurs is really anyones guess, but now we have a better idea thanks to this new fossil, says Marx.Journal reference:Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.01.00Topics:
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  • The perfect boiled egg takes more than half an hour to cook
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    How do you cook your eggs?The Daniel Heighton Food Collection/AlamyCooking a perfect boiled egg takes at least half an hour, physicists have claimed, as they say the best method for a tasty and nutritious breakfast involves switching repeatedly between pans of different temperatures.As anyone who has ever struggled to get an egg to their liking will know, an even boil is difficult because the yolk and white cook at different temperatures. Cooking at a vigorous boil works for the white, which requires temperatures of 85C (185F) for optimum consistency, but can also result in a hard yolk, which only needs 65C (149F). Chefs have found immersing the egg in a water bath at a steady temperature of between 60C and 70C (140F and 158F) can lead to better cooked yolks, but this sous vide method also risks an undercooked white. AdvertisementNow, Ernesto Di Maio at the University of Naples, Italy, and his colleagues have found a better way to evenly boil an egg, by swapping it between boiling water and 30C (86F) water every two minutes for eight cycles, taking a total of 32 minutes.Many people have tasted [the egg cooked in this way], and they were amazed by the taste and the texture, says Di Maio. Yes, it takes more time than usual cooking, but I think if you love someone, you should invest your time to do something properly. This is how to properly do an egg.To develop this method, Maio and his team first created a model of how an egg cooks by calculating the way energy spreads from the shell to the centre over time, using two equations to describe this process. By solving these equations, they found that the best way to evenly cook it would be to alternate between two different temperatures, which allows the two parts to cook separately. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterThe many ways to cook an eggPellegrino Musto and Ernesto Di MaioAfter cooking eggs in this way, the team studied them using spectrometry and an MRI-like scanner. The researchers found that proteins in the egg yolk were less denatured and in the white they were more denatured, in each case meaning that part was better cooked, than in soft-boiled or sous vide eggs. They then asked people to try the eggs cooked with their method, and found that the egg white was slightly sweeter and the yolk was less sweet than in eggs cooked in other ways. They also found the whites texture was similar to a soft-boiled egg, while the yolk was more like a sous vide egg.The periodic egg also contained a higher amount of nutrients, such as antioxidants called polyphenols, compared with soft-boiled or sous vide eggs, though Di Maio and his team dont know why.Its fun and its good for a laugh, says Peter Barham at the University of Bristol, UK. Spending 30 minutes taking an egg in and out two different temperatures of water just to get it to cook slightly better than you would by others means where you can leave it alone is, shall we say, not very practical.Cooking food using alternately hot and cold environments isnt a new idea, says Herv This at AgroParisTech in France. It is not original, as it was proposed about one century ago for meat. It is also important to compare the eggs cooked in this way to eggs cooked sous vide at different temperatures, as this can dramatically change the cooked egg, he says.Journal reference:Communications Engineering DOI: 10.1038/s44172-024-00334-wArticle amended on 6 February 2025We have corrected the name of the journalTopics:
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  • London Underground mutant mosquitoes have surprisingly ancient origins
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    Culex pipiens f. molestus is a form of mosquito found in cities all over the worldblickwinkel / Alamy Stock PhotoA form of mosquito associated with the London Underground evolved to live in human environments long before subterranean railways sprung up in the 19th century.Culex pipiens f. molestus is found in cities all over the world, but it became widely known as the London Underground mosquito after the second world war, when it was the scourge of Londoners sheltering in tube stations during the Blitz. AdvertisementIt is closely related to a bird-biting form of the same species known as Culex pipiens f. pipiens, and biologists thought the molestus form had evolved in urban environments within the past few centuries.To learn more about its origins, Lindy McBride at Princeton University and her colleagues analysed the DNA of 790 mosquitoes from 44 countries around the world, including the molestus and pipiens forms as well as some closely related species.The results suggest that, rather than arising in London tube tunnels, the molestus mosquito probably evolved in the Middle East thousands of years ago. There are three main lines of evidence for this. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterFirst, the molestus form is genetically closer to pipiens populations from the Mediterranean basin than it is to pipiens populations in northern Europe. They are like close cousins to these Mediterranean pipiens mosquitoes, says McBride, suggesting that one arose from the other.Also, molestus mosquitoes from the eastern Mediterranean region are genetically more variable than molestus in underground habitats from northern Europe. This suggests that they have been present in the eastern Mediterranean for a significantly longer period of time, says McBride.Finally, the pipiens form doesnt exist in the Middle East. This makes it much easier to imagine how the ancestors of the molestus mosquitoes could have colonised the region and evolved to bite humans in isolation, without interbreeding with the bird-biting pipiens insects, says McBride.Based on the teams analysis of genetic mutations, it is almost certain that the molestus mosquitoes are far more ancient than previously thought, says McBride. Our calculations tell us that it must have been at least 1000 years ago and more likely 2000 to 10,000 years ago [that they evolved]. This lines up perfectly with the development of agriculture in the Middle East.Instead of evolving from scratch in urban underground spaces, molestus was already primed for city life thanks to much older adaptations, she says. Once established in cities, it has likely evolved further.The crowded environments of cities may lead to new hybrids between the bird-biting and human-biting forms, which would have public health implications, says McBride. Even if hybridisation is rare, these mosquitoes may show intermediate behaviour and increased ability to transmit West Nile [virus] from birds to humans.Reference:Biorxiv DOI: 10.1101/2025.01.26.634793Topics:
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  • Humpback whale songs have patterns that resemble human language
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    Humpback whales in the South PacificTony Wu/Nature Picture Library/AlamyHumpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are remarkably similar to those seen in human language. While this doesnt mean the songs convey complex meanings like our sentences do, it hints that whales may learn their songs in a similar way to how human infants start to understand language.Only male humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) sing, and the behaviour is thought to be important for attracting mates. The songs are constantly evolving, with new elements appearing and spreading through the population until the old song is completely replaced with a new one. AdvertisementWe think its a little bit like a standardised test, where everybodys got to do the same task but you can make changes and embellishments to show that youre better at the task than everybody else, says Jenny Allen at Griffith University in Gold Coast, Australia.Instead of trying to find meaning in the songs, Allen and her colleagues were looking for innate structural patterns that may be similar to those seen in human language. They analysed eight years of whale songs recorded around New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean.The researchers started by by creating alphanumeric codes to represent every song from every recording, including around 150 unique sounds in total. Basically its a different grouping of sounds, so one year they might do grunt grunt squeak, and so well have AAB, and then another year they might have moan squeak grunt, and so that would be CBA, says Allen. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterOnce all the songs had been encoded, a team of linguists had to figure out how best to analyse so much data. The breakthrough came when the researchers decided to use an analysis technique that applies to how infants discover words, called transitional probability.Speech is continuous and there are no pauses between words, so infants have to discover word boundaries, says Inbal Arnon at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. To do this, they use low-level statistical information: specifically, sounds are more likely to occur together if they are part of the same word. Infants use these dips in the probability that one sound follows another to discover word boundaries.For example, in the phrase pretty flowers, a child intuitively recognises that the syllables pre and tty are more likely to go together than tty and flow. If whale song has a similar statistical structure, these cues should be useful for segmenting it as well, says Arnon.Using the alphanumeric versions of the whale songs, the team calculated the transitional probabilities between consecutive sound elements, making a cut when the next sound element was surprising given the previous one.Those cuts divide the song into segmented sub-sequences, says Arnon. We then looked at their distribution and found, amazingly, that they follow the same distribution found across all human languages.In this pattern, called a Zipfian distribution, the prevalence of less common words drops off in a predictable way. The other striking discovery is that the most common whale sounds tend to be short, just as the most common human words are a rule known Zipfs law of abbreviation.Nick Enfield at the University of Sydney, who wasnt involved in the study, says it is a novel way of analysing whale song. What it means is that if you analyse War and Peace, the most frequent word will be twice as frequent as the next and so on and the researchers have identified a similar pattern in whale songs, he says.Team member Simon Kirby at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says he didnt think the method would work. Ill never forget the moment that graph appeared, looking just like the one we know so well from human language, he says. This made us realise that wed uncovered a deep commonality between these two species, separated by tens of millions of years of evolution.However, the researchers emphasise that this statistical pattern doesnt lead to the conclusion that whale song is a language that conveys meaning as we would understand it. They suggest that a possible reason for the commonality is that both whale song and human language are learned culturally.The physical distribution of words or sounds in language is a really fascinating feature, but theres a million other things about language that are just entirely different from whale song, says Enfield.In a separate study published this week, Mason Youngblood at Stony Brook University in New York found that other marine mammals may also have structural similarities to human language in their communication.Menzeraths law, which predicts that sentences with more words should be composed of shorter words, was present in 11 out of 16 cetacean species studied. Zipfs law of abbreviation was found in two out of five species where available data made it possible to detect.Taken together, our studies suggest that humpback whale song has evolved to be more efficient and easier to learn, and that these features can be found at the level of notes within phrases, and phrases within songs, says Youngblood.Importantly, the evolution of these songs is both biological and cultural. Some features, like Menzeraths law, may emerge through the biological evolution of the vocal apparatus, whereas other features, like Zipfs rank-frequency law [the Zipfian distribution], may require the cultural transmission of songs between individuals, he says.Journal reference:Science DOI: 10.1126/science.adq7055Journal reference:Science Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads6014Topics:
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  • How futurism took an abrupt right turn in the 20th century
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    A painting by Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, wife of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and a fellow futuristBenedetta Cappa Marinett Galleria dArte Moderna di Rome/ AlamyThe word futurism was born in a car crash. At least, that is the story that poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti told back in 1909, when he coined the term in an editorial for French newspaper Le Figaro. He and some friends had spent a wild night drinking and arguing about art when they decided to hop into Marinettis 1908 Fiat and speed down an Italian road. Startled by two cyclists, Marinetti lost control of the
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  • Asteroid 2024 YR4 may hit Earth in 2032 - how worried should we be?
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    Asteroids have the potential to cause widespread destructionmuratart/ShutterstockTelescopes around the world are currently trained on a building-sized asteroid hurtling in Earths direction, in an effort to try to understand whether it might hit us. Our current best guess is that this object, called 2024 YR4, has a 1-in-53 chance of striking in 2032, the highest risk of any known asteroid. But what does that number really mean, and when should we start panicking?Astronomers are continuously tracking thousands of asteroids as they move through our solar system. This information is then collated at the Minor Planet Center,
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  • New device can scan your face in 3D from hundreds of metres away
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    A new imaging device can capture 3D scans of human faces from hundreds of metres awayAongus McCarthy, Heriot-Watt UniversityFrom 325 metres away, your eyes can probably distinguish a persons head from their body and not much else. But a new laser-based device can create a three-dimensional model of their face.Aongus McCarthy at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland and his colleagues built a device that can create detailed three-dimensional images, including ridges and indentations as small as 1 millimetre, from hundreds of metres away. It uses an imaging technique called lidar, emitting pulses of laser light that collide with objects then reflect back into the device. Based on how long each pulse takes to return, lidar can determine an objects shape. AdvertisementTo get to this level of detail, the team had to carefully calibrate and align many different components, says McCarthy, such as the tiny parts that direct the laser pulses inside of the device. To enable it to distinguish single particles of light, the researchers used a light-detecting sensor based on an incredibly thin piece of superconducting wire, a component that isnt common in lidar. Filtering out sunlight that could enter the detector and degrade the image was another challenge.The researchers tested their lidar system on a roof near their lab by taking detailed three-dimensional images of a team members head from 45 and 325 metres away. On a smaller scale, they captured Lego figurines from a distance of 32 metres.The imaging system could scan Lego characters from 32 metres awayAongus McCarthy, Heriot-Watt UniversityIn another test, they imaged a segment of a communication tower that was a kilometre away. That was a very tough test because of the bright background, and we had no control over what we could put in the scene [that we were imaging], says McCarthy.Feihu Xu at the University of Science and Technology of China, whose team previously used lidar for imaging from 200 kilometres away, says that McCarthy and his colleagues achieved remarkable results when it comes to the depth resolution of their device. It is the best so far, he says.Lidar is only becoming more relevant for modern technology, says Vivek Goyal at Boston University in Massachusetts. He says that being able to create detailed three-dimensional maps of surroundings will be crucial for autonomous vehicles and even some robots but the new device will have to be made smaller and more compact before it can be used for this purpose.Journal referenceOptica DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.544877Topics:
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  • George R. R. Martin finally finishes a physics paper
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    Josie FordA game of (wild) cardsFeedback doesnt have the time or inclination to pick through every edition of the American Journal of Physics, but fortunately New Scientists physics reporters Alex Wilkins and Karmela Padavic-Callaghan are contractually obligated to do so. Hence our newfound familiarity with a paper entitled Ergodic Lagrangian dynamics in a superhero universe.The most immediately striking point is the two-person author list. One, Ian Tregillis, is a theoretical physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a published writer. The other is George R. R. Martin, the noted author of sci-fi and fantasy books like Nightflyers, Fevre Dream and, of course, the A Song of Ice and Fire series, which was adapted for television as Game of Thrones. This is his first peer-reviewed physics publication.Tregillis and Martin have developed a teaching exercise, aimed at advanced undergraduates in physics. Its based on Wild Cards: a collection of stories set in a shared universe, edited by Martin and Melinda Snodgrass.AdvertisementThe stories premise is that an extraterrestrial virus has got loose on Earth and infected many humans. As Tregillis and Martin explain: Of every 100 latent carriers who experience viral expression within their bodies 90 experience a fatal outcome; 9 are physically mutated, often profoundly so; and 1 obtains a superhuman ability.The teaching exercise is built around this fixed empirical 90:9:1 rule. Students are encouraged to imagine that they are theorists living in the Wild Cards universe and to try to work out why the virus affects people in these proportions. The point is to offer students a problem with no known solution, to encourage creative research.Feedback gets where they are coming from, but we do wonder if this is going to fly. Plenty of educators tie their lessons to pop culture phenomena as a hook for reluctant students, but this only works if the phenomenon in question is genuinely well known. With the best will in the world, Feedback isnt sure if that can be said for Wild Cards.However, we wonder if there might be some better options for advanced physics noodling, drawing on fictional universes with a bit more cachet. How does the Snap work in Avengers: Infinity War? It seems to propagate instantly, necessarily breaking the speed of light. Or what about the cosmology of Iain M. Bankss Culture novels?We are also surprised that they havent done the obvious one: what causes the irregular, elongated seasons in A Song of Ice and Fire? One viable explanation is that the planet has a pronounced orbital wobble, but in that case why do the years-long winters only afflict the continent of Westeros? There seems to be no cultural memory of them on Essos at all. Is there something specific in the atmospheric dynamics that occasionally provides Westeros with a decade of blizzards?Sorry, we got sidetracked there. Speaking of getting sidetracked: George, would you please just finish The Winds of Winter and get onto A Dream of Spring, so we can all find out whether your planned ending for the series is any better than the damp squib the TV writers came up with? It cant be worse than the bit where they killed the main baddie and all his subordinates conveniently disintegrated can it?Animal templatesIn the ongoing vein of generative AIs say the stupidest things, reporter Matthew Sparkes draws our attention to a paper on the arXiv entitled Owls are wise and foxes are unfaithful: Uncovering animal stereotypes in vision-language models. The study focused on DALL-E 3, an AI that generates images based on text prompts. Researchers gave it prompts like generate an image of a gentle animal and recorded which creatures the AI drew.With frankly distressing predictability, given what we know about AIs recapitulating sexist and racist tropes, DALL-E 3 pumped out a torrent of stereotypes. All the loyal animals were dogs, wise animals were mostly owls and mischievous animals were mainly raccoons and foxes. Feedback is pretty sure dogs can be mischievous our last dog was incredibly sneaky when it came to stealing cat food or finding streaks of fox poo in which to roll but DALL-E 3 evidently takes a more one-dimensional view of canines.We cannot even bring ourselves to repeat the libel against cats perpetrated by DALL-E 3, in case Feedbacks felines read this.Fortunately, other AIs are doing better. For instance, in mid-January, Apple suspended its AI news notification system after it repeatedly supplied ludicrously misleading headlines, including Netanyahu arrested. Oh wait, no, thats not better.All the sleepA press release alerts Feedback to a study published in Functional Ecology on 5 January on the evolution of dormancy behaviours like torpor and hibernation. By examining which animals can become dormant and which cant, the researchers conclude that torpor and hibernation have evolved independently several times among warm-blooded animals.Some might interpret this as evolutions tremendous creativity and flexibility on full display. Feedback, however, interprets it as evolution having failed us. Its cold, dark and wet where we are, and Feedback quite fancies hibernating. Three months ought to do it.Got a story for Feedback?You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This weeks and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.
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  • Why an increasing belief in alien visitations is a real-world problem
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    Elaine KnoxAbout a fifth of the UKs population now believes Earth has probably been visited by aliens. Probably is not certainly, but the number is still high. It is higher still in the US, where belief in UFOs has risen from 34 per cent in 2007 to 42 per cent in 2023. This is a real shift and a societal problem.Odd ideas such as fortune telling and belief in ghosts have always had some currency. But such sympathies tend to be offshoots of religious traditions involving the supernatural, and have little connection to shifting political trends.By contrast,
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  • A thrilling guide to the Indiana Jones-like world of meteorite hunting
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    A bolide (bright) meteor, in remote CanadaStocktrek Images, Inc./AlamyThe Meteorite HuntersJoshua Howgego (Oneworld (UK, on sale now; US, 13 May))One evening in July last year, a couple from Prince Edward Island in Canada returned home after walking their dogs to find grey, dusty debris near their door. At first, they thought something had fallen off the roof, but the footage from their doorbell camera revealed something different. Theyd had a lucky escape.While they were out, a space rock thought to have been somewhere between the size of a golf ball and a baseball and
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  • Volcano-scorched Roman scroll is read for the first time in 2000 years
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    The PHerc.172 scroll as revealed by X-ray imagingVesuvius ChallengeAn ancient Roman scroll has been read for the first time since it was charred in the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius two millennia ago, thanks to artificial intelligence and a high-powered X-ray facility.The papyrus scroll was one of 1800 rescued from a single room in an ornate villa in the Roman town of Herculaneum during the 1750s, which is now the Italian town of Ercolano. All of them were carbonised by the heat of the volcanic debris that buried them. AdvertisementInitially, locals unknowingly burned the scrolls as firewood, but once it was discovered that they contained text, they were saved. Around 200 have since been painstakingly opened and read by mechanical devices based on clocks, which slowly tick and prise the scrolls open millimetre by millimetre.Three of these scrolls are kept at the University of Oxfords Bodleian Library, having been gifted by the future King George IV in 1804. The then-prince of Wales had traded a troop of kangaroos to King Ferdinand IV of Naples in exchange for the scrolls. (The Neapolitan king was constructing an elaborate garden and a collection of animals for his lover.)One of these three scrolls, known as PHerc. 172, has now been imaged and analysed using machine learning algorithms. It was scanned at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, home to an extremely high-powered X-ray machine known as a synchrotron, and the resulting data was made available to participants in the Vesuvius Challenge a competition with a $700,000 grand prize for interpreting text from scrolls. Keep up with advances in archaeology and evolution with our subscriber-only, monthly newsletter.Sign up to newsletterThis method is much better than trying to open the scrolls mechanically, says Peter Toth, a curator at the Bodleian Library. The only problem, or risk, is that the imaging is so special that it cannot be done here, which means that the scroll had to leave the premises. And we were very, very nervous about that, he says.Researchers have so far revealed several columns of text, with about 26 lines in each column. Academics are now hoping to read the whole scroll, but can already make out the Ancient Greek word , meaning disgust. Toth suspects that it will relate in some way to the philosopher Epicurus, as so many of the other scrolls found at the same site have.PHerc. 172 was the only one of the three scrolls at the Bodleian Library deemed stable enough to travel, and then only in a specially 3D-printed case inside another padded box. The hope is that the technology can improve so much [in the future] that the items do not have to travel anywhere, but the technology can come to us, says Toth.Topics:
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  • Cuddling koalas show unexpected sociable side in surprising video
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    Koalas are usually regarded as solitary animals, but new footage is revealing a more gregarious side.Darcy Watchornat Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, filmed male koalas grooming each other, playing, smelling each others genitals and spending long periods together in close physical contact. They were being ridiculously cute, says Watchorn. AdvertisementAdult male koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus) generally avoid each other. If they do interact it is usually aggressive and involves fights over females, often leading to serious injuries.Watchorn thinks the extraordinary friendliness he observed was the result of too many koalas being crowded together. The population at the colony at Cape Otway in southern Victoria exploded after koalas were released there in the 1980s, but habitat fragmentation meant there was little space in which they could disperse.He captured the behaviour in 2015, but only released the footage now after realising the significance of these interactions, the likes of which have never been seen before. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterOn the flip side, he also observed and filmed a darker side of koala behaviour. It involved an unsuccessful mating between a male and a female, who had a young joey that had only been out of its pouch for a few days. The joey climbed onto the males back while its mother ascended into the tree canopy without him.Whilst it was incidental, it kind of looked like he stole the joey and ran away, says Watchorn. Then, after a little bit of time, the joey was quite annoying him. It was trying to come off his shoulder, around to his front where they would often sit with their mothers.Eventually, the male grabbed the joey, bit him and forced him out of the tree. He fell 7 metres to the ground.Watchorn realised that without intervention, the joey would almost certainly be eaten by a fox or die of exposure. I should have sat there and observed what happened without intervening, but, instead, I scooped up the joey, caught the mum and reunited them, he says. At the end of my study, a few months later, that joey was looking really good and big and fat and healthy.Journal reference:Australian Mammalogy DOI: 10.1071/AM24033Topics:animals
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  • Scientists fear losing essential climate data during Trump upheaval
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    Elon Musk (left) heads the Department of Government Efficiency task force created by US president Donald Trump (right)Brandon Bell/Getty ImagesClimate scientists are increasingly alarmed about losing access to essential data about the planet as the administration of US president Donald Trump pursues an overhaul of US federal agencies. This includes an effort to remove references to climate change from government websites.On 5 February, the website for the Global Monitoring Laboratory at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) went offline. It
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  • DeepSeek has burst the AI hype bubble now all bets are off
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    Leader and TechnologyThe Chinese firm threatens the dominance of Silicon Valleys AI elite, and its innovations show the technology could be more affordable and less costly to the environment 5 February 2025 Josef Kubes/AlamyIn poker, the value of the cards in your hand is often less important than what your competitors think you might hold. You dont need a royal flush as long as you can convince others you have one.Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, knows this well, having played poker extensively during his student days. Following the astronomical success of its generative artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, the company has convinced many backers that it holds all the aces, telling the world that scale is the key to progress and that betting on this will reap big rewards.On 21 January, Altman announced Stargate, a $500-billion plan to build vast data centres for future AI models. As he said in an interview in 2023: Its totally hopeless to compete with us.AdvertisementBut Chinese AI company DeepSeek now looks to have called his bluff. It sent shock waves through Silicon Valley over the past two weeks with the release of AI models that are apparently as capable as OpenAIs best, but at a fraction of the cost and computational power (see Does DeepSeek show a way to slash the energy demands of AI?). This young upstart, with less than a tenth as many employees as OpenAI, has punctured the idea that US companies hold some secret recipe for building AI or that they need such enormous resources to do so.DeepSeek has punctured the idea that US companies hold a secret recipe for building AIFor those concerned about the accumulation of power in Silicon Valley, the arrival of competition is welcome, but DeepSeeks model brings concerns of its own. For one thing, its answers stick closely to the Chinese governments party line, and it even censors itself in real time. Security researchers have also warned that it lacks robust guardrails against inappropriate use.Nevertheless, its arrival on the scene suggests there are huge innovations in generative AI yet to come. Plus, cheaper models that require less computational power should open the door to entirely new applications for the technology, which may also make it affordable to more people and less damaging to the planet. With more players around the table, the stakes couldnt be higher.Topics:
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  • Indoor cannabis farms in US use more energy than all other agriculture
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    An indoor cannabis farm in CaliforniaShutterstock/Liudi HaraIndoor cannabis cultivation in the US uses more energy than all outdoor agriculture in the country combined. This generates a large and growing emissions footprint that often goes unrecognised.Consumers are led to believe that this is natures medicine and that its green in every sense of the word, says Evan Mills at Energy Associates, a consultancy in California. Theres lots of greenwashing.More than 60 per cent of the 24,000 tonnes of cannabis grown
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  • Ancient relative of geese is the earliest known modern bird
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    Vegavis iaai was an ancient relative of ducks and geese, but it dived for fish like grebes or loonsMark WittonA 69-million-year-old skull found in Antarctica has been identified as a relative of geese and ducks, making it the oldest known modern bird.It belongs to a species that was first identified two decades ago named Vegavis iaai, which lived in the late Cretaceous Period alongside the last dinosaurs. But because only fragments of skulls had been found previously, scientists had been unable to agree what kind of bird it was or whether it was instead a bird-like, non-avian dinosaur. AdvertisementThe fossil skull was discovered in 2011 on Vega Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula. However, it was encased in rock so hard that excavators had to spend hundreds of hours chipping away at the surrounding stone before it could be scanned to reveal its internal details.Patrick OConnor at Ohio University, who worked on the analysis, says two features of the almost complete skull only ever occur in modern birds. First, the upper beak is primarily comprised of a bone called the premaxilla, while a second bone, the maxilla, is greatly reduced in size and contributes to only a small portion of the bony palate.Second, in modern birds, the forebrain is massive relative to the rest of the brain; in pre-modern birds and near-bird dinosaurs like Velociraptor, these areas are proportionally much smaller. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month.Sign up to newsletterWhile Vegavis has features that clearly mark it as being in the same group of waterfowl as ducks and geese, it would have looked very different, says OConnor. The birds beak shape, jaw musculature and hind limbs suggest it was highly specialised for diving in pursuit of fish.It would probably be easily mistaken for modern grebes or loons, which are only distantly related to ducks and to each other, he says.Jacqueline Nguyen at the Australian Museum in Sydney says this ancient species has been subject to a lot of debate among avian evolutionary scientists, but the new research helps settle the argument.Together, [the evidence] suggests that Vegavis looked and foraged quite differently from its duck and geese relatives, and that this may have been an evolutionary experiment in the early history of this group of birds, she says.Journal reference:Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08390-0Topics:
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