New Scientist Australian Edition 11-Dec-21

Virtual event Reality+ Virtual reality (VR) technology is advancing apace and some shared VR worlds could be the next phase of the internet. In this talk, philosopher David Chalmers draws on science and philosophy to argue that virtual worlds need not be fake. Instead, he says, they can be genuine, meaningful realities. Join us on 10 February from 6pm GMT (1pm EST). newscientist.com/ns-events Online Covid-19 daily briefing Stay up to date with the most crucial developments in the pandemic with our briefing, updated every weekday. We round up all the latest news, plus give links to exclusive interviews and features. newscientist.com/coronavirus-latest Podcast Weekly Omicron, the new covid-19 variant, has become dominant in South Africa and is spreading fast. The team examines fears that this version of the coronavirus may be more transmissible than the delta variant and better at evading…

THEY say good things come to those who wait. And when it comes to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), we have been waiting long enough. Originally due to launch in 2007, it has been plagued by delays due to engineering problems, the need to find money to meet its soaring costs and, more recently, the covid-19 pandemic. It has now racked up a bill around 20 times its initial budget. Finally set to blast off in a few weeks, this extraordinary machine promises to show us the moment the first stars lit up and solve all manner of cosmic mysteries (see page 36). But given all the effort and the eye-watering expense, will it be worth it? We could compare the project to another feat of engineering, the Large Hadron Collider…

THERE is growing evidence that the new omicron variant of the coronavirus is capable of spreading rapidly in populations with immunity against other variants. A wave of infections around the world looks inevitable, but the big unknown is whether omicron is more or less likely to cause severe disease and deaths. Aris Katzourakis at the University of Oxford says he doubts the variant’s mutations will result in decreased severity, but that it is too early to tell. “We are all worried,” he says. “We are waiting with bated breath.” In South Africa, where the variant was first detected, cases are rising even faster than during previous waves, with numbers doubling every three to four days. But this doesn’t necessarily reflect what will happen elsewhere. The beta variant that was first spotted in…

NAVIGATION via cosmic ray muons could supplement GPS in high latitudes, as well as working underwater and underground. The US Office of Naval Research (ONR) has awarded a contract to UK company Geoptic Infrastructure Investigations to demonstrate navigation in the Arctic where GPS coverage is poor due to positioning of GPS satellites run by the US military, which are mostly at lower latitudes. The firm’s Muometric Positioning System (muPS) uses muons made by cosmic rays instead of the radio signals from satellites used by GPS. When a high-energy cosmic ray strikes the upper atmosphere, a shower of muons rains down. These pass through solid matter, but can be detected by scintillation counters. On average, “one muon will pass through your thumbnail every minute”, says Chris Steer at Geoptic. MuPS has a set of…

DIGITAL covid-19 vaccination certificates for use in the US and the European Union are available to buy on the dark web. Most appear to be fake, but others may be valid entries in national databases that have been leaked, say researchers. Covid-19 restrictions in many countries require proof of vaccination against the coronavirus to access certain places, such as restaurants. Vaccine passports most commonly take the form of a digital record in a smartphone app, presented as a scannable QR code. Emmanouil Vasilomanolakis at Aalborg University in Denmark and his colleagues found 17 marketplaces and 10 shops on the dark web – a collection of websites that can be accessed privately via special browsers – that claim to offer falsified digital vaccine passports for sale. The researchers analysed listings using search engines…

SURVEILLANCE cameras can keep us safe or invade our privacy, and improvements in miniaturisation mean they can now be hidden in almost any object. Now there is a smartphone app that helps users detect such hidden cameras. Commercial devices to spot hidden cameras are available, but carrying a specific device for this purpose is inconvenient. Sriram Sami at the National University of Singapore and his colleagues hope to provide the same function via a standard smartphone. Their system uses a time-of-flight sensor, which emits a beam of infrared light and measures how long it takes to be reflected from an object. The sensors have become increasingly common in smartphones and are used to improve the quality of photographs. Sami and his team created a smartphone app that uses information from these sensors to…