New Scientist Australian Edition 4-Jun-22

Event Instant expert: Meet your brain Your brain is the most complex organ in your body. It produces your every thought, action, memory and experience of the world. Six expert speakers will teach you how our brains store memories and learn language, and why they need to sleep. Join us on 19 November at the British Library in London. newscientist.com/events Tour Chile: The world capital of astronomy With unique geography and climate, and 70 per cent of the world’s telescopes, Chile truly is the world capital of astronomy. This tour will take you to world-leading observatories, including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Paranal Observatory. Meet local experts and stargaze at sites near San Pedro, Santiago and Vicuña. From 27 March 2023 for 12 days. The cost is…

Event Instant expert: Meet your brain Your brain is the most complex organ in your body. It produces your every thought, action, memory and experience of the world. Six expert speakers will teach you how our brains store memories and learn language, and why they need to sleep. Join us on 19 November at the British Library in London. newscientist.com/events Tour Chile: The world capital of astronomy With unique geography and climate, and 70 per cent of the world’s telescopes, Chile truly is the world capital of astronomy. This tour will take you to world-leading observatories, including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Paranal Observatory. Meet local experts and stargaze at sites near San Pedro, Santiago and Vicuña. From 27 March 2023 for 12 days. The cost is £7999. newscientist.com/tours Podcasts Weekly The team ask what DeepMind’s new…

FOR an industry that supposedly thrives on creativity, fashion has been appallingly slow to innovate to reduce its distinctly uncool environmental footprint. On all three fronts in the planetary crisis – climate change, nature loss and waste – manufacturers and retailers of textiles and clothing could, and must, do better. Their carbon emissions are enormous, thirst for raw materials unsustainable and waste management systems rubbish. As just one example, every year we send 350,000 tonnes of clothing to landfill in the UK. There are growing pockets of green creativity in the industry, but for the most part high-street brands seem intent on doubling down on the “fast fashion” business model that has done so much to line theirs. We as consumers must also shoulder a large portion of the blame, gladly stuffing our…

FOR an industry that supposedly thrives on creativity, fashion has been appallingly slow to innovate to reduce its distinctly uncool environmental footprint. On all three fronts in the planetary crisis – climate change, nature loss and waste – manufacturers and retailers of textiles and clothing could, and must, do better. Their carbon emissions are enormous, thirst for raw materials unsustainable and waste management systems rubbish. As just one example, every year we send 350,000 tonnes of clothing to landfill in the UK. There are growing pockets of green creativity in the industry, but for the most part high-street brands seem intent on doubling down on the “fast fashion” business model that has done so much to line theirs. We as consumers must also shoulder a large portion of the blame,…

A MUCH-vaunted first wave of mini nuclear power stations may produce more radioactive waste than traditional large-scale reactors when generating the same amount of power. Small modular reactors (SMRs) have been mooted by their developers and proponents as a cheaper and faster way to build new nuclear power capacity, with UK prime minister Boris Johnson claiming they could be generating electricity by 2030. The US government has provided financial support to the firm NuScale Power to develop its version of the technology. But to date there has been little independent assessment of how the radioactive waste produced by SMRs would compare with that from their large-scale peers. Lindsay Krall at Stanford University in California and her colleagues used data NuScale Power has shared publicly with US authorities, and extrapolated to model the waste…

MOUNT Vesuvius in southern Italy erupted in AD 79 to devastating effect, destroying several Roman settlements, including Herculaneum to the west of the volcano and Pompeii to the south-east. Analysis of human remains found buried under the ash and pumice that blanketed these ancient towns is revealing new details about the people who died in the eruption. The eruption killed many of Pompeii’s inhabitants, but it didn’t destroy their DNA. The first complete genome from Pompeii has now been sequenced and it reveals genetic markers that haven’t been seen before in ancient Roman DNA. The volcanic ash and debris that covered Pompeii is estimated to have been at least 250°C – hot enough to kill people instantly and, presumably, cause significant damage to their internal tissues as well as their DNA. “There was…