New Scientist Australian Edition 16-Apr-22

Event Why we love Love is an awe-inspiring and complex phenomenon. In this talk, evolutionary anthropologist Anna Machin will take you through a rollercoaster ride of the why, how, who and what of love. She will explain how love evolved as a form of biological bribery, why it is the greatest factor in our health and longevity and the reasons it sits at the centre of what it is to be human. Online at 6pm BST on 5 May and later on demand. newscientist.com/events Discovery tour Ancient caves, human origins: Northern Spain Step back in time to discover how our ancestors lived, played and worked. See one of the oldest known cave paintings at El Castillo, Spain, and experience the wonders of Palaeolithic cave art by torchlight, accompanied by New Scientist writers and local archaeological experts.…

A SMALL discrepancy has sparked a big “if”. Physicists who spent 10 years weighing the W boson, one of the fundamental particles that make up our universe, say it is 0.1 per cent heavier than expected (see page 8). What might be a rounding error in other fields of study could blow open the standard model of particle physics, one of our major theories for understanding, well, everything. If the measurement is correct, that is. We have been here many times before. One of the most memorable cases saw a group of physicists working on the OPERA experiment announce in 2011 that they appeared to have discovered that particles called neutrinos could travel faster than light, breaking one of the seemingly immutable laws of the cosmos. They had spent months checking…

DOCTORS are investigating a mysterious outbreak of liver disease in young children in the UK. So far, there have been 60 cases in England and 11 in Scotland of unexplained hepatitis, or liver inflammation, since the start of the year, most of them in children who are 2 to 5 years old. Case numbers in Wales and Northern Ireland haven’t been released. Although no child has died, a “small number” have needed a liver transplant, said the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) on 8 April. This means they will have to take drugs that suppress the immune system for the rest of their lives, which will leave them at risk of infections. Hepatitis is often associated with specific pathogens, such as the hepatitis C virus, but it can be triggered by many…

HIGH levels of radiation seen during the Russian capture of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine on 24 February were initially put down to tanks stirring up radioactive dust, but researchers now believe this contamination may never have happened. Instead, interference between wireless radiation sensors and unidentified military equipment may have been to blame. Mike Wood at the University of Salford, UK, and his colleagues extracted data from automatic wireless monitoring systems at Chernobyl. He says the pattern of radiation spikes rules out a rolling convoy of military vehicles as it wasn’t clustered around any particular route. The team also calculated whether the radioactive material left in the soil from the plant’s meltdown in 1986 was strong enough to cause the spikes and concluded that, even with conservative estimates, it wasn’t…

A NEW measurement of a fundamental particle called the W boson appears to defy the standard model of particle physics, our current understanding of how the basic building blocks of the universe interact. The result will be heavily scrutinised, but if it holds true, it could lead to entirely new theories of physics. “It would be the biggest discovery since, well, since the start of the standard model 60 years ago,” says Martijn Mulders at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The standard model describes three forces: electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. Particles called bosons serve as mediators for these forces between particles of matter. The weak force, which is responsible for radioactive decay, uses the W boson as one of its messengers. Physicists have tried to find…

WE MAY have figured out the date from which an ancient device often described as the first computer began its calculations. This device, called the Antikythera mechanism, was built sometime between the years 200 BC and 60 BC, and it was used to track time and predict the motions of celestial bodies. A spiral shape inset in the back of the mechanism depicts a 223-month cycle called a Saros, which is based on the amount of time it takes for the sun, moon and Earth to return to the same relative positions and repeat a cycle of similarly timed solar and lunar eclipses. Aristeidis Voulgaris at the Thessaloniki Directorate of Culture and Tourism in Greece and his colleagues used this to calculate a sort of starting date for the Antikythera mechanism, the…