New Scientist International Edition 26-Mar-22

Event Eat more, live well Every day we are bombarded with messages about healthy eating, from gimmicky fad diets to the latest superfoods. But what is the truth behind the claims about boosting your gut bacteria or eating foods to improve your mental health? Join nutritional expert Megan Rossi and chartered psychologist Kimberley Wilson for the facts about our emotional relationship with food. At 7pm BST on 21 April at Conway Hall, London, and live-streamed online. newscientist.com/events Academy The science of you It is all about you. Join our world-leading experts as they explore and dissect what it means to be you as an individual, through the lens of science. This short, high-impact course offers fresh and cutting-edge insights into your behaviour, your IQ and your lifespan. Available now at the introductory price of £99. academy.newscientist.com Podcast Weekly The team…

JUST over two years since the official start of the pandemic, tens of millions of people in China have entered lockdown. It is a striking reminder of how things started, and that, despite the feeling in some countries, things are far from over. At the end of January, the huge global wave of covid-19 caused by the faster-spreading omicron variant was ebbing fast, but now cases are ticking up once more. This second wave of omicron has been caused in part by an even faster-spreading subvariant, plus the fact that many nations are dropping measures to contain the virus, as we report on page 8. The emergence of such fast-spreading variants has shifted the pressure points of the pandemic. Many countries that took a heavy toll early on and therefore had a…

ABNORMALLY hot air has hit both of the world’s poles at once, while the extent of Arctic sea ice appears to have been historically low once more this winter. Temperature records were recently broken in Antarctica as warm air swept unusually far into the heart of the continent. Concordia research station, which is high above sea level and has an annual average temperature of -50°C, reached an all-time high of -12.2°C on 18 March, beating the -13.7°C record that was set there in December 2016. Another research station, Vostok, also saw record high temperatures. “The Antarctic [heat] is really extreme. I haven’t seen anything like that. Colleagues haven’t seen anything this extreme,” says Walt Meier at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. A band of westerly winds around…

SOME think the covid-19 pandemic is over – but it most certainly isn’t. On the contrary, around the world, the number of confirmed cases is rising rapidly again. The most concerning situation is in China, where many older people still have no immune protection of any kind and which is currently battling a major outbreak. So why are cases on the rise again, how bad will it be and what could happen next? The omicron variant that first started spreading in November 2021 caused by far the biggest wave of the pandemic to date. Globally, reported covid-19 cases peaked towards the end of January this year, and they were falling nearly as fast as they shot up. But now they have begun to rise sharply again, up by 8 per cent…

ONE of the biggest paradoxes in astrophysics may finally be solved. The question of what happens to information when it falls into a black hole has vexed physicists for decades, and now a group of researchers claims to have figured it out. When Stephen Hawking calculated that black holes should slowly evaporate by emitting radiation – now called Hawking radiation – he also created a problem. His work suggested the radiation should be emitted in a way that depended only on the black hole’s current state and not on what previously fell into it. If correct, it would mean that when matter is pulled into a black hole, all the information about the state of that matter would be destroyed. This isn’t allowed in quantum mechanics, the laws of which require that it…

TINY magnetic waves discovered at the centre of Earth could help illuminate what is going on deep inside our planet. Earth’s core has a solid inner portion and an outer layer made of liquid metal. The difference in temperature between the two drives convection currents in the liquid, and the movement of charged particles in this metal creates the planet’s magnetic field. The motion is turbulent and chaotic, causing the magnetic field to vary over time. Nicolas Gillet at Grenoble Alpes University in France and his colleagues observed Earth’s geomagnetic field between 1999 and 2021 using data from satellites as well as observatories on the ground. The team discovered that the magnetic field around the equatorial region of the core regularly fluctuated. These fluctuations repeated every seven years, drifting westward around the equator…