New Scientist Australian Edition 22-Jan-22

Academy How your brain works The human brain is the most complex object in the universe. But what makes it so unique? How does it create thoughts and memories? And what is conscious reality? Learn the answers to all these questions with a course from New Scientist Academy. Find out more online. academy.newscientist.com Event Instant Expert: Frontiers of Cosmology A one-day master class in which six expert speakers will guide you on a 13.8-billion-year journey through the cosmos. On the way, you will learn what happened at the big bang, find out what we know about dark matter, discover the mysteries still surrounding black holes and understand what gravitational waves tell us about the history of the universe. Join us for this in-person event on 26 March at the British Library, London. newscientist.com/ns-events Podcast Weekly The first ever pig-to-human heart…

“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These are three unalienable rights emphasised by the US Declaration of Independence as being the duty of their leaders to protect and secure. The third one gives perhaps most pause for thought. What should governments – and all of us – be doing to maximise societal and personal happiness? Indeed, what even defines happiness? Politicans and philosophers have wrangled over the apparent contradictions and conflicts that such questions throw up for centuries. Meanwhile, a simple equivalence has come to be made across the world. Many believe that happiness comes with having a bigger cake and eating it, so only economic growth and the pursuit of material progress can provide happiness. Having basic material needs such as food, shelter and clothing covered will, of course, always be…

THE massive explosion of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in Tonga last week was its most powerful eruption since AD 1100. The after-effects have been felt around the globe. As New Scientist went to press, the damage was still being assessed. The volcano, located about 65 kilometres north of Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa, exploded at 5.10pm local time on 15 January. Satellite images show a mushroom cloud of ash billowing 30 kilometres high and later sweeping more than 3000 kilometres west to Australia. A sea level gauge at Nuku’alofa recorded a tsunami wave of 1.19 metres before it stopped recording, according to Hannah Power at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Videos posted to social media show waves crashing into houses in Tonga. Large waves also reached Japan, prompting evacuation orders, and Peru, where…

A TEAM of researchers claims to have shown that a high-voltage electric field generated using wind and rain can boost crop yield, but other scientists say the results should be treated with caution. The effectiveness of using electric fields to stimulate crop growth, known as electroculture, is far from established, despite being tested in Europe, the US and China. A “golden age” is dawning for the technology, one Chinese scientist told New Scientist in 2019. Now, Jianjun Luo at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues have grown two sets of peas in a greenhouse, one of which was exposed to an electric field. Previous tests have drawn electricity from the grid to create the field, but Luo’s one used a small device – a triboelectric nanogenerator – to…

A ROBOT piloted by a ball of algae can swim through water and move around obstacles, powered only by photosynthesis. Neil Phillips at the University of the West of England, UK, and his colleagues wanted to build a robot with no electronic parts, meaning it wouldn’t interfere with any electromagnetically sensitive measurement instruments. The team inserted a marimo, a ball of algae that forms naturally in freshwater currents, inside a 3D-printed plastic spherical shell equipped with vents. When the group submerged the shell in water and exposed it to light, the marimo produced oxygen from photosynthesis, which pushed the shell away from the light. “We’ve looked at a different way of doing things,” says Phillips. “We’re going back to biological processes, so, in this case, there are no motors, there are no…

A NEW handheld device combines laser scanning technology with cameras to produce precise 3D depictions in colour. It could be used for everything from infrastructure inspection to robot vision. At the heart of this is a technology called lidar, which measures the distance to surfaces using a laser. Each measurement records a point in space, building a “point cloud” to show surfaces and objects in 3D. Unlike a camera, the point cloud gives exact distances and sizes, but the images are monochromatic, so they can be hard to interpret. To address this, the lidar in ExynPak, a handheld scanner from Exyn Technologies in Philadelphia, is combined with an AI system that drapes real-time colour data from two specialised cameras over the lidar point cloud. ExynPak scans as far as 100 metres, showing…