Lucy

NASA’s asteroid-exploring spacecraft Lucy has made its first up-close observations – and discovered something completely unexpected. The asteroid Dinkinesh not only has a small satellite orbiting it, but that mini-moon is made up of two objects stuck together.Launched in 2021, Lucy is set to visit more asteroids than any other spacecraft so far. Its main mission is to investigate the Trojans, two clusters of asteroids orbiting the Sun at the distance of Jupiter – one ahead of and one behind the giant planet. On the way,…

…

The Flash is finally available on video-on-demand, and it’s perhaps appropriate, if unfortunate, that the big screen outing of the fastest man alive managed to land on VOD in the blink of an eye; such are the continued box office woes of films associated with the DC Extended Universe, the notoriously controversial Ezra Miller, and CGI that leaves a lot to be desired. Though, now that The Flash has made its way to a wider audience, it’s clear as day that the film’s greatest offense was all of those deep fake resurrections…

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is still a few months away from release, but hardcore Hunger Games fans are already eager and ready for more from the world of Panem. It’s been ten years since Mockingjay Part II was released, and in that time, Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal of Katniss Everdeen has become an icon of the genre. So it’s not surprising that audiences are expecting some sort of nod towards Katniss in the new film, which will be a prequel taking place 64 years before the 74th annual Hunger Games. In fact,…

Motherhood changes a person. We all know this. Yet in so-called Weird countries (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) there is very little in the way of ritual to acknowledge this rite of passage, this fundamental transformation. How can this be, Lucy Jones asks, when it is “a transition that involves a whole spectrum of emotional and existential ruptures”?Unlike adolescence, “matrescence” is scarcely marked. Instead, we are expected to get on with it, sublimate all our needs to our new baby, and…

In 1970, the renowned paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found an ancient, nondescript leg bone sitting on the ground in Ileret, Kenya. Now, 53 years on, a research team has found marks on the bone they believe could be evidence of “systematic cannibalism” in the hominin fossil record.Stay in Your Seats, It's Gonna Be a Bumpy Flight | Extreme EarthThe tibia, dated to around 1.45 million years old, has a series of small cut marks perpendicular to the bone. It’s not certain whichspecies the tibia belonged to, but it certainly…

Matrescence, the best book I’ve ever read about motherhood, is a delightfully unusual one. For starters, brief passages that lay out the machinations of nature, and many of its horrors, sit around its chapters. We meet eels that endure five life stages and multiple habitats before breeding once and then dying, and black lace-weaver mother spiders who feed their living bodies to their infants.“Forty spiderlings, which resemble creamy yellow sea pearls, wander over her nonchalantly, devouring, snacking, nibbling, pulling…

We may only ever have 47 of the 207 bones that made up the skeleton of this 3.18-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis specimen known affectionately and widely as Lucy, but it’s been enough to make some incredible discoveries (and stir up more than a few controversies) that have informed human evolution.The latest comes out of the University of Cambridge, where researcher Ashleigh Wiseman digitally reconstructed Lucy’s soft tissue in a 3D computer model for the first time. Recreating the musculature of the leg and…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeCruel!”, “Completely disgusting!”, “Candy ass!” – these are just some of the barbs that Hollywood stars have unleashed upon each other over the years. But which actors said them? And about whom?Julia Roberts and Nick Nolte might have been romantically entangled in I Love Trouble, but they also had a few tangles – and not the good kind – with each other off-set. And even though Ryan…

Disney’s much-anticipated Little Mermaid live-action remake is out this week, which makes the timing of DreamWorks’ new trailer for Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken—which features “evil mermaids,” as well as the perils of high school—feel not entirely coincidental.RUBY GILLMAN, TEENAGE KRAKEN | New TrailerThere’s also a bit of The Princess Diaries in this one, in that a geeky teen gets the “surprise, you’re royalty!” shock of her young life—albeit there are way more giant tentacles involved in this particular fairy tale.…