New Scientist Australian Edition 2-Apr-22

Event Instant expert: Meet your brain Find out everything you have ever wanted to know about the most fascinating object in the universe: your brain. Six expert speakers will teach you how our brains learn to speak, how they store memories, why they need to sleep and what we understand about empathy, emotions and consciousness. At the British Library in London on 23 April at 10am BST. newscientist.com/events Discovery Learn to dig Join us on an interactive tour of key Mycenaean sites, including a three-day “behind the ropes” experience at Mycenae, one of the most important archaeological sites in Greece, where you will learn how to explore, map and excavate with resident archaeologists. Accompanied by Christofilis Maggidis, president of the Mycenaean Foundation, and New Scientist editorial staff, this tour starts on 23 September and lasts for…

“THE time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining,” US president John F. Kennedy once said. It is an adage that Europe must now wrestle with. With spring blossoming even as war continues to darken the continent, it is hard to spend too much time thinking about next winter. Yet the geopolitical uncertainty created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means volatile energy prices are guaranteed this year. UK energy bill projections for October have yo-yoed with oil and gas prices in recent weeks, from a high of £3000 a year on average to a still-very-high low of £2500. Governments must act now. The European Union already has – its recent energy strategy mandates that gas stores be replenished by winter and calls for a diversification of gas supplies. This…

UNUSUALLY warm ocean temperatures have turned corals white on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in the first-ever mass bleaching under the cooling conditions created by the La Niña weather pattern. An official analysis of aerial surveys published on 25 March found mass bleaching across all four of the reef’s management areas, with the north and central parts of the World Heritage Site worst hit. The impact has been less severe in the south of the reef. “What we’re seeing at the Great Barrier Reef is very worrying,” says Miriam Reverter at the University of Plymouth in the UK. Warmer oceans under climate change have led to an increase in mass-bleaching events at the world’s largest reef: this is the sixth since modern records began in 1988, and the fourth in just seven years. Ocean temperatures…

NATURAL selection was at work on Bronze Age Britons, ancient DNA reveals. Within the past 4500 years, evolution has acted on genes involved in the production of vitamin D – which people living in Britain are sometimes short of due to a lack of sunlight for much of the year. The genetic changes have had knock-on effects on other traits, from the ability of people to digest milk to their skin colour. One of the ways evolutionary change can happen is through natural selection: genetic variants that are beneficial become more common in the population because individuals that carry them are more likely to reproduce. In recent years, geneticists have collected DNA from the remains of thousands of people who lived in Britain over the millennia, so it is possible to see natural…

AN ARTIFICIAL intelligence that mimics the operation of a standard computer within its neural network could speed up certain calculations. Researchers have used it to put an AI inside an AI and play Pong. If you want a computer to do something, you have to write code that manipulates bits of data. But if you code an AI-driven neural network, you have to train it with feedback before it can do anything. For instance, a neural network can distinguish between photos of cats and dogs after being shown thousands of examples and told if its guesses are correct. Now Jason Kim and Dani Bassett at the University of Pennsylvania have a new approach, in which a neural network runs a code, just like an ordinary computer. A neural network is a series of…

THE two genes for the protein that is mainly responsible for allergic reactions to cats have been deleted from cat cells using CRISPR gene editing. It is a first step towards creating hypoallergenic cats, says US-based company InBio. “The estimated timeline for this is several years,” says Nicole Brackett, who leads the CRISPR cat team at InBio. About 15 per cent of people have allergic reactions to cats. The main cause of this is a small protein called Fel d 1 that is secreted by salivary and skin glands. It is spread over cats’ fur when felines clean themselves and can become airborne as the fur dries. Fel d 1 consists of two different subunits, and there are two genes, called CH1 and CH2, encoding each subunit. When Brackett and her colleagues compared…