New Scientist Australian Edition 23-Apr-22

Virtual event A brief history of timekeeping From Stonehenge to atomic clocks, humans have been marking out the passage of time for some 5000 years. Don’t be late to join physicist Chad Orzel on a journey through science and history as he reveals the amazing physics that renders time something we can set, measure and at least try to understand. Watch online at 6pm BST on 12 May. Also available on demand. newscientist.com/events Academy How to think critically and creatively Supercharge your smarts with experts as they teach you to refine your critical thinking skills so that you can be in a better position to evaluate information. You will learn how to think more logically, rationally, scientifically and creatively. The course is available from 28 April and a discounted presale…

Virtual event A brief history of timekeeping From Stonehenge to atomic clocks, humans have been marking out the passage of time for some 5000 years. Don’t be late to join physicist Chad Orzel on a journey through science and history as he reveals the amazing physics that renders time something we can set, measure and at least try to understand. Watch online at 6pm BST on 12 May. Also available on demand. newscientist.com/events Academy How to think critically and creatively Supercharge your smarts with experts as they teach you to refine your critical thinking skills so that you can be in a better position to evaluate information. You will learn how to think more logically, rationally, scientifically and creatively. The course is available from 28 April and a discounted presale price is available now. academy.newscientist.com Podcast Weekly This week, the…

“HOW inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean”. That quote, usually attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, pops up regularly at ocean science conferences, but is no less true for being a cliché. The ocean covers 71 per cent of the planet’s surface and makes up 95 per cent of the area that is habitable by life. Increasingly, it is being exploited by us. As our special report on what has been termed the “blue acceleration” details (see page 38), over the past 20 years, the ocean economy – fish, ships, hydrocarbons, wind energy, cables, tourism and more – has grown explosively. This trend is forecast to continue and the ocean is already feeling the strain. We are at risk of repeating the mistakes of our unsustainable…

“HOW inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean”. That quote, usually attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, pops up regularly at ocean science conferences, but is no less true for being a cliché. The ocean covers 71 per cent of the planet’s surface and makes up 95 per cent of the area that is habitable by life. Increasingly, it is being exploited by us. As our special report on what has been termed the “blue acceleration” details (see page 38), over the past 20 years, the ocean economy – fish, ships, hydrocarbons, wind energy, cables, tourism and more – has grown explosively. This trend is forecast to continue and the ocean is already feeling the strain. We are at risk of repeating the mistakes of our…

THE UK prime minister’s office was targeted multiple times by spyware sold legally to states around the world, claim security experts. The Pegasus software, created by the Israeli firm NSO Group, allows security services to listen in to the microphone on a compromised smartphone, read messages and access sensitive data. The Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto in Canada that has worked for years to examine the use of spyware such as Pegasus, claims that it warned the UK government of attacks in 2020 and 2021. The group says it has found evidence for multiple suspected Pegasus infections of devices used by the prime minister’s office and what was then the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). It claims that the…

THE controversial idea that quantum effects in the brain can explain consciousness has passed a key test. Experiments show that anaesthetic drugs reduce how long tiny structures found in brain cells can sustain suspected quantum excitations. Because anaesthetic switches consciousness on and off, the results may imply that these structures, called microtubules, are a nexus of our conscious experience. According to some interpretations of quantum mechanics, a system can exist in multiple states simultaneously until the act of observing it distils the cloud of possibilities into a definite reality. Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) theory postulates that brain microtubules are the place where gravitational instabilities in the structure of space-time break the delicate quantum superposition between particles, and this gives rise to consciousness. Physicist Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff proposed Orch…