New Scientist Australian Edition 10-Dec-22

Survey New Scientist business We are launching a product specifically for businesses that will challenge, inspire and connect curious minds. If you are a senior business leader and use New Scientist at work or for information about the opportunities science presents for business, please take our survey to help us shape this. newscientist.com/ surveyb2b Virtual event The best of New Scientist 2022 Subscribers can now register for this free event, in which our expert panel of journalists reviews the biggest scientific stories of the year and looks forward to 2023. There is also a chance to put your questions to the team. Join us online at 6pm GMT/1pm EST on 13 December. newscientist.com/ decevent1 Podcast Weekly Podcast editor Rowan Hooper talks to Henry Gee, senior editor at the journal Nature and author of A (Very) Short History of Life on…

WHO am I? It is a simple yet profound question, long considered worth grappling with on the basis that self-knowledge is good. Take personality, for instance. Intuitively at least, it makes sense to think that if you know your personality, you will make wiser life decisions, have better relationships and ultimately enjoy greater well-being. That may be true, but studying how accurately we perceive our personality, the subject of our cover story on page 36, is fraught with difficulties. The fact is there is no objective perspective on your personality in the same way there is if you are studying, say, subatomic particles. Add psychology’s shaky reputation when it comes to its findings holding up to repetition and scrutiny and it is easy to see why many people raise an eyebrow at…

THE COP15 biodiversity summit, which began this week, is at risk of setting the world “unrealistic” targets that may undermine conservation action, researchers have warned. Negotiators from most of the world’s countries are gathering in Montreal, Canada, from 7 to 19 December to thrash out a global plan to save nature. The central aim of the conference is to agree a new suite of targets that will “halt and reverse” biodiversity loss by 2030 and have humans living “in harmony” with nature by 2050, according to draft agreements published in June 2022. But even the most optimistic models suggest that the earliest date possible to halt and reverse biodiversity loss is by 2050, says David Obura at Coastal Oceans Research and Development in the Indian Ocean (CORDIO), a non-profit organisation in Kenya.…

ARCHAEOLOGICAL evidence suggests that Homo naledi, a primitive human species with a chimpanzee-like skull, used fire to cook food and navigate dark caves, despite having a brain one-third of the size of ours. “We have massive evidence. It’s everywhere,” says Lee Berger at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. “Lumps of charcoal, thousands of burned bones, giant hearths and baked clay.” The find is still being analysed and remains controversial, but may transform our understanding of the emergence of complex behaviours only expected in largebrained species, such as Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. Fossil bones of H. naledi were first discovered in 2013 in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, and declared a new species in 2015. We now know it was about 144 centimetres tall on average and weighed…

THE connections within the whole brain of an infant fly have been mapped, creating the largest such “connectome” described to date. The work should allow researchers to understand how signals travel through a fly’s brain, how different regions of the brain interact and, ultimately, how specific behaviours are generated at the neural level. Brains are mostly made of cells called neurons, which have long branches linking them together. Neighbouring neurons can signal each other at junctions between the cells called synapses, where one neuron releases a chemical called a neurotransmitter and the other receives it. The map of the neurons in a brain and the synapses is called the connectome. The new whole-brain connectome, created by Marta Zlatic at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues, is that of the larva of a…

A STRANGE system of trenches on Mars may be hiding an enormous plume of hot rock rising from the planet’s core. This could upend our ideas of Mars as a mostly geologically static world and explain why so many marsquakes start near these fissures, in an area known as Cerberus Fossae. Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics, and after a long period of volcanic activity 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, things have largely been calm there. But recent studies, particularly measurements of marsquakes by NASA’s InSight lander, have indicated that something strange might be going on at Cerberus Fossae, which is in a region called Elysium Planitia. Nearly all of the major quakes InSight has measured originated there, and it has felt a low, constant rumble of seismic activity that seems…