Culture was once thought to be restricted to humans. But we are discovering more and more examples in animals. In a paper reviewing evidence from several earlier studies that is published in Science this week, zoologist Andrew Whiten at the University of St Andrews, UK, writes that there has been “an explosion of discoveries” showing that animal culture is far more widespread and diverse than we imagined. New Scientist quizzed him about the work. Michael Le Page: Many readers will know that apes and whales have culture, such as tool use in chimpanzees, but you say that even insects have…

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more Lunar living “Fancy buying a house on the Moon?”, an email that plops into Feedback’s inbox asks, continuing, before we have a chance to say, “Not particularly”, “It would cost you £234k a MONTH!” “With Earth becoming increasingly populated and space technology advancing, it won’t be long before lunar living becomes the new normal,” this email, which appears to have come from a price comparison website, asserts. Yes, they were saying that back in ’69, too. Mind you, recent revelations about lunar infrastructure developments such…

We once thought that only our more modern, adaptive immune system had memory. Now a breakthrough in understanding our other, more primitive, immune defences could change how we fight disease FOR immunologists, the covid-19 pandemic has been a steep learning curve. “We’ve learned much more about the host immune response to SARS-CoV-2 in a matter of a few months than we have about many, many other viruses that we’ve dealt with for decades,” says Bali Pulendran at Stanford University in California. At every turn, the virus has confounded expectations, from why it leaves some people unscathed but kills others in…

THESE stunning photos have all been shortlisted in various categories for this year’s World Press Photo Contest, a global photojournalism competition. Luis Tato has been nominated for the top award, World Press Photo of the Year, with his image Fighting Locust Invasion in East Africa. It was shot for The Washington Post and captures the struggle of Kenyan farmers in 2020 as the country was invaded by hundreds of millions of locusts, which ravaged crops and devastated the land.

The standard model of particle physics explains many things, but the strange behaviour of neutrinos isn't one of them, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein THE standard model of particle physics is so named because it is a model of our subatomic universe that is now the standard description of reality for physicists. It is not only widely accepted, but also extensively tested. Although it is unable to account for gravity, it describes every other force and every particle we have ever seen in a laboratory or particle collider – from the familiar electron, which carries a charge and makes up the outer…

Mary Wortley Montagu championed the use of inoculation against smallpox, but her pioneering work is often overlooked, says Jo Willett WITH the world’s attention on vaccines, now feels like a good moment to sing the praises of an often forgotten contributor to their development. Three hundred years ago this month, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu got her daughter inoculated against smallpox with a technique that was unfamiliar to people in Britain at the time – making her child the first person in the West to be protected in this way. Without Montagu’s willingness to adopt a practice she had learned from…

THE devastating impact of the new coronavirus variants is becoming clear. The more transmissible B.1.1.7 variant first identified in the UK is causing a surge of infections and deaths around the world. Is this just the beginning? Could even nastier variants evolve? When considering future variants, there are three main properties to worry about: transmissibility, evasion of immunity to past infection or vaccines, and lethality. Of these, transmissibility is the most important. The new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, is far less lethal than the Ebola virus, but it has killed far more people because it is much better at spreading. We still…

One of our most precise mechanisms for controlling matter has now been applied to antimatter atoms for the first time. Laser cooling, which slows the motion of particles so they can be measured more precisely, can make antihydrogen atoms slow down by an order of magnitude. Antimatter particles have the same mass as particles of ordinary matter, but the opposite charge. An antihydrogen atom is made out of an antiproton and a positron, the antimatter equivalent of an electron. Makoto Fujiwara at TRIUMF, Canada’s national particle accelerator centre, and his colleagues used an antihydrogen trapping experiment called ALPHA-2 at the…

A cache of beautiful crystals collected 105,000 years ago in South Africa is shedding new light on the emergence of complex behaviours in our species. A team led by Jayne Wilkins at Griffith University, Australia, discovered 22 distinctively shaped white calcite crystals at a site in the Kalahari desert called Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter. “They are little rhomboids, really visually striking,” says Wilkins. These geometric crystals didn’t originate at the site and haven’t been modified, so seem to have been deliberately collected and brought to the rock shelter for ornamental purposes. “They don’t seem to have been used for everyday…

Xenobots, named after the frog species Xenopus laevis that the cells come from, were first described last year. Now the team behind the robots has improved their design and demonstrated new capabilities. To create the spherical xenobots, Michael Levin at Tufts University in Massachusetts and his colleagues extracted tissue from 24-hour-old frog embryos which formed into spheroid structures after minimal physical manipulation. Where the previous version relied on the contraction of heart muscle cells to move them forward by pushing off surfaces, these new xenobots swim around faster, being self-propelled by hair-like structures on their surface. They also live between…