New Scientist

Event The Search for Dark Matter Why do researchers believe in the existence of a substance we can’t see and that no one has directly detected? Particle physicist Jocelyn Monroe and a panel of New Scientist journalists offer a deep dive into the science of dark matter. Join us at Conway Hall in London, or online, on 7 June at 7pm BST/2pm EDT. Tickets are free to this subscriber-only event. newscientist.com/events Tour The science of rewilding: Coombeshead, UK Explore rewilding in the heart of the English countryside. At the Rewilding Coombeshead project, you will see how water buffalo, wild boar and beavers can help restore wetlands and other ecosystems. Hosted by New Scientist’s staff writer Graham Lawton, along with leading ecology experts, the weekend tour begins on 1 September. Tickets from £649. newscientist.com/tours Podcast Weekly The world’s largest organism by…

THE industrialised food system is approaching a crossroads. Though it undoubtedly produces more than enough food, it is butting up against ethical and environmental limits. The system, especially factory farming, is doing great damage to the environment, biodiversity, water resources and animal welfare. It is also ultimately self-defeating as soils can’t sustain it for much longer – by some estimates we have just 60 harvests left. But environmental and ethical concerns sometimes come into conflict. As the influential philosopher Peter Singer points out on page 43, it is arguably ethical – from an animal welfare point of view – to eat pasture-raised beef, but the greenhouse gas emissions are still huge. There are two basic options to change this. One is futuristic: increased intensification of arable farming on smaller areas of land,…

SIXTEEN people have benefited from an experimental mRNA therapy that replaces a faulty enzyme behind a rare inherited condition, the biotech company Moderna announced on 19 May. This is great news for those with this condition, but its significance extends further: if this kind of mRNA therapy proves to be safe and effective, it could help treat a huge range of conditions and might even revolutionise medicine. The people in the trial, aged 1 year and up, have a condition called propionic acidemia. This is caused by mutations in the gene for an enzyme that helps break down some components of proteins. When the enzyme is faulty, cells in the liver can’t do their job and toxic chemicals build up in the blood, damaging many organs, from the heart to the…

CHARGED atoms could be taken to their lowest temperature allowed by the laws of physics with the help of sunlight. In the 1990s, several people won Nobel prizes for working out how to make atoms extremely cold with precisely controlled laser light. Now, Amanda Younes and Wesley Campbell at the University of California, Los Angeles, have found that some parts of the cooling process could be done with light straight from the sun. The researchers calculated how a positively charged barium atom, or ion, kept in a device called an ion trap could be cooled in two steps. First, it would be hit with a laser to slow it down, reducing its energy and therefore its temperature. Then, the temperature could be lowered further by decreasing the atom’s entropy – a measure of the…

A MESSAGE has been sent to Earth from a spacecraft orbiting Mars, to simulate potential communication from an advanced alien civilisation. On 24 May, a spacecraft at Mars, the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), was used to send a coded message – just a few kilobytes in size – to our planet. Picked up by radio receivers on Earth, groups of astronomers and enthusiasts then set to work decoding it, a potential dry run for first contact. “This kind of experiment is long overdue,” says Franck Marchis at the SETI Institute in California, who helped to coordinate the event. “We have been searching for extraterrestrial signals for more than 60 years, but we never really thought about what receiving and decoding such a signal would be like.” The project, called A Sign in Space,…

MOBILE phones seized in US criminal investigations are being sold online with personal data like emails, bank details and nude photos intact. Security experts warn that the practice enables hackers to buy phones and commit the same crimes with the same data and victims. Various US states have laws letting police forces dispose of lost-and-found items if they aren’t collected within a certain time, as well as devices that were used or seized in criminal investigations. Richard Roberts at the University of Maryland and his colleagues bought 228 mobile phones that were being disposed of by police departments on the auction site PropertyRoom, paying an average of just $18. Although many of the phones were protected by a PIN, the researchers were able to access 61 of them: 49 weren’t locked at all…