New Scientist

Virtual event Secrets of the Large Hadron Collider Join particle physicist Clara Nellist, part of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, for a deep dive into the past, present and future of the largest particle collider ever built. Find out how the LHC expands our knowledge of the universe and learn what it is like to work on one of the world’s greatest physics experiments. Catch it on 7 February at 6pm GMT/1pm EST. Tickets cost £14. newscientist.com/events Tour Chile: The world capital of astronomy With unique geographical and climate conditions – and 70 per cent of the world’s large telescopes – Chile is the global capital of astronomy. Join New Scientist features editor and astronomer Abigail Beall to explore the Atacama desert and visit world-leading observatories. The 12-day tour begins on 27 March and costs…

A FEW months into the covid-19 pandemic, it was rare to have a conversation without antibodies, vaccines and viruses being mentioned in the same breath. More than three years on, we shouldn’t let that interest wane – especially as we face one of the coronavirus’s latest variants, XBB.1.5, or “Kraken” as some have named it. It certainly appears to be deserving of its monster moniker. This subvariant of omicron is now the dominant strain in the US and is spreading rapidly throughout Europe and Asia. It is the most transmissible subvariant discovered yet, due to changes in its spike protein, the part of the virus targeted by vaccines. The World Health Organization has warned that it may also have the best ability to evade our immune defences to date, although vaccines will…

A RARE green comet hailing from the outermost edges of the solar system passed by Earth this week, and is now heading back into the black. This lump of ice usually dwells in the Oort cloud, a belt of icy objects that orbit up to 100,000 times as far from the sun as Earth. But on 1 February, it came within about 45 million kilometres of our planet – about 120 times the distance between Earth and the moon. The comet, called C/2022 E3, takes about 50,000 years to complete its orbit around the sun, so its last pass by Earth was in the Stone Age, when our ancestors still coexisted with Neanderthals. Those early humans may have been able to see C/2022 E3 in the sky, and it was possible to spot…

AN EVOLUTION experiment involving beetles has provided the first direct evidence that caring for offspring results in the accumulation of more genetic mutations in a population, affecting how animals evolve. Some of the mutations are likely to be harmful, but there is also a positive side, as having more variation may allow populations to adapt and evolve more quickly when circumstances change. “You’re holding in a lot of deleterious stuff,” says Rahia Mashoodh at the University of Cambridge. “But also, you’re holding in potentially a lot of good stuff that is going to help you rapidly adapt.” Mutations constantly occur in cells, meaning that all animals have mutations their parents didn’t. Every human has around 50 to 100 new mutations, for instance. Many of these make no difference, a few might be…

DEEPMIND has developed an artificial intelligence that can solve tasks it has never seen before as quickly and as accurately as humans – a possible step towards generally intelligent AI. The AI, called Adaptive Agent or AdA, works in a 3D virtual world where it is asked to solve tasks that involve navigating, planning and manipulating objects. Humans are excellent at solving new problems, including in environments they haven’t seen before. For instance, once you have learned to drive a car, it is relatively straightforward to drive one in another country. AI systems, however, tend to be able to solve only the problems they are trained to master and struggle if the rules change. Much of DeepMind’s success with game-playing AIs, such as its chess-playing AlphaZero, has come from reinforcement learning, where an AI…

DOLPHINS that collaborate with humans to catch fish in Laguna, southern Brazil, have a higher rate of survival than those that don’t work with people. While dolphins that practise the technique seem to catch more fish, some of the survival benefit is because the dolphins avoid being caught in trammel nets used for fishing in other areas by the coast, says Mauricio Cantor at Oregon State University, whose team has been studying the behaviour with underwater cameras and microphones for 12 years. Between May and August, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) drive migrating schools of mullet (Mugil liza) towards the coast, where fishers are waiting. When the dolphins do a final deep dive to drive the fish closer to shore, fishers drop their nets – but they have to act at exactly the…