New Scientist Australian Edition 29-Jan-22

Discovery tour Darwin’s Galapagos The trip of a lifetime to the islands made famous by the father of evolution, Charles Darwin. Led by conservationist Jo Ruxton, the trip begins with a visit to Quito in Ecuador, followed by eight days exploring the Galapagos aboard a chartered yacht. Spot sea lions, marine iguanas and blue-footed boobies. The tour starts on 27 March – get more details and book your place online. newscientist.com/tours Academy Consciousness: The deepest mystery For more than 2000 years, great minds have struggled to understand how the human brain creates a subjective experience. Now we are inching towards an explanation, which makes this the perfect time to take our neuroscience course on consciousness. Learn at your own pace with our expert-led course. Find out more online. academy.newscientist.com Podcast Weekly The UK is being told to “learn to live…

IN 1855, Michael Faraday wrote a letter to the UK parliament alerting MPs to the state of the river Thames, which was used both as a sewer and a source of drinking water. He had conducted an experiment in which he sank pieces of paper to see at what point they disappeared from view in the turbid water. Barely any depth at all, he found, concluding that the river had become a cesspool. “If we neglect this subject, we cannot expect to do so with impunity,” he warned. Parliament neglected the matter, and was punished. In 1858, the Great Stink enveloped London, necessitating vast expenditure to quell the stench. The curtains in the Houses of Parliament were soaked in bleach in a bid to keep the miasma out. It failed, and…

ONE month after its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has arrived at its destination. On 24 January, the spacecraft fired its thrusters for about 5 minutes to place it into its final orbit, and now it is ready to calibrate its mirrors and scientific instruments before peering out into the universe. The telescope is at a gravitationally stable spot called a Lagrange point, where all the forces on the spacecraft balance out to keep it in place, orbiting the sun along with Earth. This particular Lagrange point, called L2, is about 1.5 million kilometres away from the planet in the direction opposite to the sun. It won’t stay parked directly at the Lagrange point, but will wobble back and forth around it in what is called a halo orbit,…

WESTERN AUSTRALIA, which has mostly dodged the coronavirus by sealing itself off from the rest of the world, has scrapped its plan to reopen next month based on concerns about the omicron variant. But researchers say there may be little point in waiting longer before letting the virus in. The state, which has a population of 2.7 million, has recorded just 1300 covid-19 cases and nine deaths to date. It has achieved this by heavily restricting travel from the rest of Australia and other countries. In December 2021, the state’s premier, Mark McGowan, announced that Western Australia would restore travel freedoms on 5 February, when 90 per cent of its population aged 12 and over was expected to be double-vaccinated. But on 20 January, McGowan cancelled the reopening, citing fears of an…

THE UK government has for a third time declined to release the expected emissions savings for measures in its landmark plan to meet the UK’s carbon targets, in a decision that critics have called deeply unhelpful and concerning. When the Net Zero Strategy was published last October, officials said its policies on everything from electric cars to nuclear power were collectively enough to put the UK back on track for its legally binding carbon targets in coming years. But the savings from individual policies weren’t released, making it impossible to scrutinise the claims and drawing criticism over a lack of transparency. The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) refused a New Scientist freedom of information request for a spreadsheet of the savings in December. Weeks later, it rejected an appeal…

FACEBOOK’S parent company, Meta, is building the world’s most powerful AI-specific supercomputer to develop improved speech-recognition tools, automatically translate between different languages and help create its 3D virtual metaverse. Although far from complete, the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) is up and running and has already overtaken Meta’s previous fastest supercomputer. That machine was designed in 2017 and ran on 22,000 powerful graphics processing units (GPUs), which, despite being designed for playing games, are highly effective tools to train AI models with. At the moment, RSC has only 6080 GPUs, but they are more powerful than those in the older machine and it is already three times faster at training large AI models than its predecessor. When RSC is completed in mid-2022, it will consist of 16,000 GPUs and be almost three times more…