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Rowan Hooper, managing editor

Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve, UK cinemas

Aliens have landed on Earth, but instead of sending in an action hero to fight them, Arrival dispatches linguist Amy Adams to attempt to communicate with them. The result is a different, more moving and more intriguing film than you might expect from the premise. “Language is the first weapon drawn in a conflict,” we are told. The big question the military want her to ask the aliens: what is their purpose on Earth? The twist in Arrival will leave you pondering for days, but this movie is far more about human understanding, memory, love and fortitude – and linguistics – than it is about alien invasion.

Discover the real science behind the liguistics in Arrival in our review

Stephanie Pain, consultant

There have been plenty of reasons to shout at the TV this year, but I’ve only screamed out loud once. And yes, it was that jaw-dropping footage of snakes versus newly hatched iguanas that set Twitter alight and the tabloid papers spluttering. Every time David Attenborough presents us with a new natural history blockbuster, you think there can’t be any stories he hasn’t already told and the filming can’t get any better – but there are, and it does. The marine iguanas’ race to the sea was just the start. When Komodo dragons clash, we see every shining drop of spittle and every glinting scale; when Nubian ibexes dance their way down sheer cliffs, we see their hooves in action. And thanks to remote camera technology, the snow leopard, elusive for so long, now comes so close you could reach out and touch it. Almost unbelievably magnificent.

Victoria Turk, technology editor

A mysterious disappearance, a shady research facility, a girl with telekinetic powers and a monster in the woods. Stranger Things has all the twists you might hope for in a supernatural thriller, brought to life in a meticulously recreated 1980s setting. Complete with a synth-heavy soundtrack and Winona Ryder in a starring role, the throwback aesthetic makes for a delightful homage to classic science fiction films. But make no mistake: this show isn’t a breezy nostalgia trip – you’ll be on the edge of your seat.

Frank Swain, communities editor

In recent years, we’ve seen a crop of films exploring the multiverse, from the literal Another Earth to the hallucinatory Coherence. Taking its place alongside these is ARQ, a cat-and-mouse thriller that adopts the same stuck-in-a-time-loop premise as the Tom Cruise blockbuster Edge of Tomorrow, but throws a chaotic twist into the mix: what if both the cat and the mouse knew they’d been through this all before?

Julian Richards, head of production

Up to the fifth floor, past the cafe. Many of the displays hadn’t changed since I last visited as a child in the 1970s. So what? The huge gleaming cylinder of the Black Knight rocket – from the days when the UK had its own space programme – still hung over my head, frozen in mid-flight. The planetarium is still introducing handfuls of visitors to the constellations. The lighting is still as stark as a chapel. And look, you wouldn’t believe it, but over there, under a plastic covering, those stones are bits of the moon.

Liz Else, associate editor/Culture editor

There is nothing like being up a creek without a paddle. And veteran film-maker Werner Herzog knows all about that – think of his Aguirre, The wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo, where everyone goes mad negotiating increasingly hostile environments as they pursue inherently insane quests. So when Herzog tackles the origins and future of the internet, no matter how faux naively, we really do know where he stands. You only have to watch the mournful contribution of space pioneer Elon Musk, or the sharp words of prescient academic Jonathan Zittrain to get the message. I really liked it, despite the sound of distant drums upstream.

Rowan Hooper

As my second choice, I have gone for the final part of Cixin Liu’s trilogy, which was published in English this year. “Epic” is far too small a word for it: I haven’t read many books as ambitious or far-reaching in their scope as this. Based around the first contact with an alien species, presciently located in the Proxima Centauri system only 4 light years away from Earth, Liu has created an extraordinarily imaginative work, full of mind-bending science and science fiction.

Simon Ings, Culture editor

This year, I’ve been working a lot from home – on the 33rd floor of a desert-facing block built atop a deserted shopping mall. It’s in Dubai, home to three million residents, of whom only 15 per cent are citizens. Colleagues who look askance at this compact, stripped-down corporate city-state live mostly in London, a much stranger, more amorphous place, whose appetites, if we are to believe Deyan Sudjic, director of London’s Design Museum, shape the geographies of cities as far apart as Bournemouth and Baghdad. Sudjic’s The Language of Cities tries to make sense of all the world’s cities in 219 pocket-sized pages. It proved to be one of the oddest good books I have ever read – which didn’t surprise me in the least.

Graham Lawton, executive editor

It may not be the done thing toÌęrecommend a book I wrote, butÌęthis really is my pick of the year.ÌęEvery society has stories aboutÌęwhere the cosmos and itsÌęinhabitants came from. The oldestÌęwe know of is the 2700-year-oldÌęEnuma Elish from Babylon, butÌęthey surely go further back. TheirÌęcreators did not have much to goÌęon: more often than not they fellÌęback on the supernatural. We canÌędo better because science hasÌęsupplied us with origin storiesÌęgalore. In this book I’ve broughtÌętogether 53 of the most important,Ìęunexpected and quirky, from theÌębig bang to belly button fluff viaÌęthe formation of Earth, the originÌęof life, the dawn of civilisationÌęand the age of invention. WithÌęinfographics by Jennifer DanielÌęand an intro by Stephen Hawking.

Jeff Hecht, consultant

The annual Lowell Folk Festival is a weekend that reminds me just how deeply embedded music is in human nature, and how well it can cross boundaries. The wonderfully varied performers included a family of Cajun musicians from Louisiana, an escaped Iraqi political prisoner now living in Arizona, who played the oud (a fretless Arabian lute), and King Sunny Adé from Nigeria playing juju, a hybrid of traditional Yoruba praise music and drums with guitar and keyboard. It made me wonder afresh if our ancestors made music way before they had words.

Adrian Barnett, researcher/writer

Any book that reminds me of The Naked Ape gets my vote. And Rick Shenkman’s book shows how instinctive responses override rationality on many occasions, so that what we do at society level may make little sense. I greatly enjoyed its insights but didn’t expect it to become quite so blisteringly relevant.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Loving it
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Easier on the eye

“Dancing moirĂ© patterns turn the structure from a silhouette into a shimmering presence“

“I’m trying to be a bit unnerving. My primary goal is to chisel away at the sense of reality“

You’re in the bath and the soap slips out of your hand, leaving a smell on your skin that reminds you of your grandmother’s bathroom.

A mere 25 words have done what state-of-the-art virtual reality technology still can’t: made you feel in a different position, and like you can touch and smell things that aren’t there, all triggered by your personal memories.

So what is VR good for? That was the question exercising some of the world’s foremost practitioners last Sunday at Sheffield Doc/Fest, a documentary film festival in the UK. They were mostly sceptical, but the immersive experiences on offer at the event let us make up our own minds, and see the progress of people involved in many different arts and media in finding effective ways to hook the technology up to hearts and minds.

The production that had the biggest effect on me was also one of the simplest. Home: Aamir uses a sequence of 360-degree video scenes shown in a headset and a voice-over to describe the journey of a refugee from Sudan who is trying to get to the UK.

Its creators recorded the visuals by taking a cluster of six small GoPro cameras to the unofficial migrant camp known as the Jungle in Calais, France, and other stages of Aamir’s terrifying odyssey. The voice is an actor’s, speaking Aamir’s own words edited by a dramatist at the National Theatre in London.

The piece offers no way to interact directly, leaving me free to look about the camp as I would in reality, lingering on things that caught my eye while listening to Aamir’s words.

It is easy to imagine a conventional 2D documentary with similar images and text, but then I would see only what the film-makers chose to show me through their unalterable choices of frame, composition and sequencing. The all-round video allowed freer, more spontaneous, less aestheticised views of what was there to be seen.

Limited reality

For me, two of the least successful productions were also the most ambitious, and had the biggest queues. Both put you inside a high-resolution animation wearing a virtual spacesuit and give you virtual hands that can grip certain virtual objects when you press buttons on controls in your real hands. The interaction this allows is frustratingly limited, though.Ìę

Mars 2030, made in collaboration with NASA, allows you to survey a Martian landscape accurately modelled on the real thing. But if you want to take even one small step in it, you have to use the controls rather than your own legs.

Realism took a further knock when I discovered I could walk right through another astronaut, though I did feel a lurch in my stomach as I did so. That happened again when I drove a rover recklessly down a steep slope, but when I tried driving off a cliff, my stomach was already getting less impressed.

The second space epic was the BBC’s Home – An Immersive Spacewalk Experience. This delivers you to the International Space Station, where you move around more realistically than in Mars 2030 by swinging gibbon-like between virtual handholds.

Like the Mars simulator, it succeeds in gamifying an educational experience, but I still felt that reading astronauts’ personal accounts could give a much richer sense of life in microgravity – detailing the feelings of nausea, disorientation and loss of taste that current technology just can’t replicate.

Such text-based “VR” goes back millennia, a fact given due credit in a discussion titled “VR: The Machine to Make Us More Human?” In other words, can new immersive media make us more empathetic by causing us to feel we are individually present among other people in a virtual scene?

The panel responded with refreshing quantities of cold water. Clint Beharry, whose job at the non-profit Harmony Institute in New York is to explore such phenomena, pointed out that the century-old technology of radio can also create deeply immersive experiences, and books are so immersive that reading them causes him to frequently miss his subway stop.

Tony Prescott, a psychologist and director of the research centre Sheffield Robotics, went one step further: life itself is immersive, yet we forget most of it, he said, so why should immersive technology make a difference?

Future theatre

The way forward is shown by something common to the creators of the two Home pieces: theatre. Home: Aamir was made by the National Theatre, and Tom Burton, co-director of the spacewalk experience, has worked in immersive theatre, which blurs distinctions between venue and set, actors and audience.

The speakers in Sheffield agreed that this type of medley of expertise – and not just technological innovation and capacity – is needed to make VR work.

For instance, one of the biggest challenges in 360-degree video is directing the viewer’s attention where you want it to go. Burton’s answer is to look to the millennia-long traditions of theatre and magic tricks, and the findings of psychology, to learn how to make people see what’s not there, and not see what is.

The Alternate Realities Summit took place on 12 June 2016 at Sheffield Doc/Fest

John’s heart stopped when he was kicked in the chest. His brain was starved of oxygen and he stopped communicating. For years, at best he seemed minimally conscious, at worst, vegetative. That is until he was put into a brain scanner and asked to imagine he was playing tennis. Up lit his pre-motor cortex. How about walking through a house? On went the parahippocampal gyrus. The neuroscientists watching his brain asked him to think “tennis” for “yes”, and “house” for “no”, and so John began a conversation for the first time in 15 years.

Adrian Owen’sÌęteam at the University of Western Ontario in Canada had been having conversations like this for six years before John got his chance to prove his consciousness using this technique. But this was not like any of the other conversations. John told them something they could not have known otherwise: that he was not in pain.

Owen’s case studies are among the most memorable pieces in Tracing the edges of consciousness, the latest part of the Wellcome Collection’s States of Mind show, which kicked off in October 2015 with Ann Veronica Janssens’s Yellowbluepink.

Owen’s exhibit isn’t aesthetically arresting: it’s just a small screen displaying simple explanatory text and the crucial fMRI images, with a displayed on the wall alongside. But it achieves something that people have been trying to do for centuries – it makes a thought visible.

Home of the mind

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. The scans make blood in the brain visible, and Owen’s method ensures that the patterns correspond to thoughts. The thoughts themselves elude us, just as they did RenĂ© Descartes centuries ago. His book Man, published in 1662, years after its author’s death, confronts visitors as they enter the exhibition. It lies open at an illustration of a dissected brain that reveals the pineal gland, where he thought the mind, or soul, was to be found.

As insightful as Descartes was wrong, Santiago RamĂłn y Cajal transformed neurology in the early 20th century with beautiful ink drawings of brain cells, a line of which fill a nearby wall.

Knowing the work of Descartes and Cajal is one thing; seeing the originals of these remarkable maps of the immaterial is another matter. Even the exhibition’s science adviser Anil Seth, co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, UK, said he had never seen the original Cajal drawings before. As he told me, the day-to-day work of science is pretty mundane, so a working scientist can marvel over these artefacts quite as much as a member of the public can.

On the fringes

All exhibitions aim to modify the visitor’s consciousness, but Seth’s own piece in this show messes with your mind more directly than most. Spend enough time with his touchscreen brain-trainer and you could give yourself grapheme-colour synaesthesia, in which letters evoke specific colours – as they did for the novelist Vladimir Nabokov (the exhibition also has some fun with watercolours of Nabokov’s alphabet).

Synaesthesia is a perfect topic for the Wellcome Collection to address, given its remit of mediating between art and science. It’s a pity that another notable synaesthete, the painter Wassily Kandinsky, is represented in the show by a book of his art theory rather than his art. That said, his 1914 book ConcerningÌęthe Spiritual in Art explores the connections the artist perceived between music and painting, and his augmented perception of colour, to make a case for abstract art. In both art and science, as Seth said, it’s on the fringes of consciousness that the interesting stuff happens.

Not all the fringes are as enjoyable to explore as synaesthesia. The Whisper Heard, a 2003 sound and video installation by , mingles the voice of the artist’s young son, learning to speak for the first time, with that of a man trying to do the same thing as an adult after a stroke has affected the language centres of his brain. It’s nice to hear the child’s voice and heartbreaking to hear the man’s, although his struggle to recall and form words creates a sort of frightening poetry.

The show also covers such juicy topics as sleepwalking, lucid dreaming, nightmaresÌęand false memory. Mapping a no-man’s land between art and science, the work here helps give the exhibition something of a cabinet of curiosities feel rather than our familiar, more sober museums. That makes it interestingly hard to immediately classify exhibits. On a shelf, for instance, there is a ring-binder, a dull-looking professional report, with the title: (2014). As I considered the nightmarish possibilities of this, I wondered if it was an artist’s particularly deadpan joke (it wasn’t).

There was one exhibit that left me baffled. Next to Francis Crick’s notes on consciousness were some other items from the late biologist’s archive: a collection of plasticine objects. I searched the display case for a label – in vain. So I asked Seth, who knew Crick, what they were. He didn’t know. No one did. That’s why there was no label. With Crick’s consciousness gone, there were no words.

States of Mind: Tracing the edges of consciousness, Wellcome Collection, London, to 16 October

To celebrate the launch of the exhibition at London’s Science Museum, żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” is offering readers a unique, money-can’t-buy prize of a VIP trip to the Science Museum in London for two people.

Unlocking Lovelock goes inside the mind of one of the world’s most famous living scientists and inventors, James Lovelock – best known for formulating the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that Earth is a self-regulating system, which has had a huge influence on the ways environmental scientists view issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

Featuring previously unseen materials, the exhibition gives a unique insight into Lovelock’s creativity, personality and unconventional ideas.

The full prize package includes:

– A personal tour of the Unlocking Lovelock exhibition

– An exclusive tour of , a massive labyrinth of storerooms housing more than 170,000 of the museum’s collection items, many of which have never been on public display.

– Lunch in the at the Science Museum

– Tickets to a screening in the museum’s

– A £50 voucher for the

– A copy of James Lovelock’s latest book, A Rough Ride to the Future

– A night in the Hilton London Hyde Park located in an iconic, grade II listed building with a prime location, overlooking Britain’s most famous park. In keeping with the hotel’s tradition, the recently refurbished guest rooms are elegantly designed with the modern traveller in mind.

To be in with a chance of winning this exclusive prize, simply answer the following question:

For what theory is James Lovelock best known?

Fill in our entry form by the end of 7 May for your chance to win. Be sure to put “Lovelock competition” in your message as well as the answer to the question For what theory is James Lovelock best known?.

Whatever your purpose in London, the Hilton London Hyde Park aims to create a warm, welcoming and homely atmosphere in its recently refurbished guest rooms.

(Image: Philippe Kok)

This shy little gecko is fittingly economical with its bold colouring. Only the males of Gonatodes timidus – such as the top two lizards in the photo above – get the high-vis paint job, and then only on their heads. No surprise, then, that the species was scientifically named just two years ago after of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, came across it in Iwokrama Forest Reserve, Guyana.

Now it’s a poster reptile for the Amazon Species Report 2010-2013 from conservation organisation WWF. The report compiles all the new Amazon rainforest species named during those years – an impressive total of 441 plants and animals. With rainforest habitat continually being lost, though, biologists had better keep catching them while they can.

More extraordinary lizard colour schemes are on show in “Fighting iguanas are real-life Game of Thrones dragons“.

Journal reference:

(Image: USGS/ESA)

An underwater view up through the ice on a forest pond? A frosty window in negative? An abstract charcoal drawing? No: this is the work of the Landsat 8 satellite as it looked down on the southern tip of Greenland on 30 May this year. Those bold black branches are fjords, with crystal-like glaciers feeding into them, and the smudge on the left is cloud. The ultimate fate of the ice is barely visible in the black sea as the white specks of icebergs.

Landsat 8 is not in orbit to make art, of course, and the scientific story of Greenland’s ice sheet is far from pretty. In the past decade it has lost huge amounts of ice – new understanding of what is happening to this and other ice sheets led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to estimate that the world’s seas are likely to rise by up to 0.98 metres by 2100. Ironically, around Greenland itself the sea level may well fall.

This isn’t the only impressive image in Landsat’s portfolio: take a look at the geometric brilliance of Kansas, graphic evidence of deforestation in Brazil or the path that a tornado scoured across Massachusetts.

(Image: MVO Volunteer scientists)

Flying a kite over the flanks of an erupting volcano might sound like fiddling while Rome burns. The citizen scientists on the Caribbean island of Montserrat have a deadly serious objective, though. By attaching cameras to their kites, they can take pictures like this, allowing them to monitor the restless giant that dominates, and constantly changes, their island, threatening their homes and lives.

ČŃŽÇČÔłÙČő±đ°ù°ùČčłÙ’s SouffriĂšre Hills volcano has been causing earthquakes and puffing out gas and ash since it blew its top in 1995, . The landscape is forever changing as a result: dozens of volcanic mudflows each year pose a constant threat to the island’s people.

Active volcanic landscapes are normally monitored from a plane or a helicopter, but the cost usually makes surveys infrequent. So some local people have taken aerial photography into their own hands, with the help of researchers from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh and the Montserrat Volcano Observatory in Salem.

Twenty-two volunteers have been flying ultra-robust GoPro HD Hero2 cameras attached to kites over the Belham River valley. The image above was stitched together using 16 separate kite-shots. This up-to-date, aerial view of the mud-filled valley has already helped rule out the possibility of building a bridge across it.

Jonathan Stone of the University of East Anglia presented the work to a meeting at the Royal Geographical Society in London on Friday.

(Image: Erika PatrĂ­cia Quintino)

Time to say goodbye to this howler monkey as it disappears into the boa constrictor that has just squeezed it to death. The photo, snapped in a forest in the Brazilian Amazon, is the first documented case of a snake killing and eating a monkey of the Atelid family.

Just before midday, the victim ventured away from her group into a tree where the 2-metre-long snake was hiding. Erika Patrícia Quintino, a researcher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, heard the doomed monkey making a distress call before witnessing the snake strike. The boa hit its prey in the head, then wrapped itself twice around her body. Although another adult female nearby screamed, then approached to bash the boa with her hands, the snake was undeterred. The monkey then moved away to watch her comrade’s grisly end from a safe distance.

According to the researchers, the monkey probably died within 5 minutes. The snake kept gripping its prey and then, 15 minutes later, it started swallowing the monkey head first before hanging from a branch with its tail. By coiling and uncoiling itself for 76 minutes, it gradually consumed the whole animal. Then it returned to the spot where it had attacked the monkey.

The snake was seen in the same tree two days later – normal behaviour for boas, which often wait in one spot for as long as a month. The strategy may be particularly effective in areas like this, where forest cover is patchy, because monkeys tend to use the same routes repeatedly. By clearing more and more of the Amazonian forest, we may be creating fresh hunting ground for monkey-hungry boas.

Journal reference: