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David Attenborough's A Life On Our Planet is an obituary for the Earth - Wired.co.uk

This is a very different kind of nature show. It's absolutely essential viewing

You know the drill. Gather the family, turn on the television, and settle in for a slice of natural wonder. For decades, David Attenborough has taken us from the jungles of Borneo to the savannahs of Africa from vibrant rainforests to the bleak beauty of the polar regions. But A Life On Our Planet, available to stream now on Netflix, is a very different kind of nature show. Instead of jaw-dropping chase sequences or the jovial dancing of colourful birds, it is a warning. Attenborough calls it his witness statement in truth, its more like a post-mortem on the natural world, a world that humans have systematically conquered, exploited and destroyed. The documentary opens in Chernobyl, perhaps the premier example of the scarring touch of our species a place weve ruined so comprehensively that it will be uninhabitable for centuries. From there, it cuts between Attenboroughs narration grave, emotional, and straight to camera and archive footage, as he talks through how human activities have changed the world in his 94 years on the planet. When Attenborough was born, in 1926, average temperatures were one degree cooler than they are today its not so much the heat, but the speed of the change which has thrown nature out of balance. The first half of A Life On Our Planet charts how the growth of the human population has impacted the natural world during Attenboroughs lifetime, using a blend of archive footage from his earliest work grainy footage of a young Attenborough frolicking with gorillas or meeting members of a remote tribe and more modern shots from his recent documentaries. Read next An on-screen ticker marks the passing of the years between Attenboroughs seminal works each jump forward in time bringing an increase in the human population, a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and a fall in the amount of truly wild nature left. Weve lost 40 per cent of our sea ice in the last 40 years. In the 50 years since fishing boats began venturing into deep waters, theyve stripped the oceans of 90 per cent of their large fish. Jungles that were once home to orangutans and rare birds are gone, replaced by rows of monotonous agriculture half of the fertile land on Earth is now used for farming. Frozen islands, once inaccessible, are open to the seas. And vast plains which once housed millions of grazing animals lie empty. Our blind assault on the planet has finally come to alter the very fundamentals of the living world, Attenborough says, and when the evidence is presented this starkly, its impossible to disagree. Attenborough shows have been criticised in the past for failing to show the full negative effects of climate change. There is no such equivocation here. There are parallels between the documentary and the 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, which spells out exactly what each additional degree of warming will mean for our descendants. As the timeline ticks on, Attenborough gives us a glimpse of the world that someone born today will live in. Wildfires rage. The polar ice caps melt completely in the summer. The Amazon, stripped of trees by deforestation, transforms into a desert. Coral reefs bleach and crumble. Humans starve, as over-farmed land struggles to keep up with the demand. It is a bleak picture an obituary for a planet that had achieved a delicate, beautiful balance known as the Holocene, and maintained it for thousands of years until one species became too powerful, too dominant, too rapacious in its appetites. The future that a clearly emotional Attenborough describes is a series of one way doors points of no return that will make the world less diverse, less vibrant, and a harder place to live. Read next Attenborough does end on a hopeful note, however. He kind of has to. The last section of the documentary outlines the steps that we can collectively take to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and help the natural world recover. Some of them will be familiar eat less meat, widen the use of renewable energy, put pressure on banks and investors still funding fossil fuels. Others are less discussed Attenborough talks passionately about widening opportunities for people in developing countries in the hope that it will lead to a similar fall in birth rate to that experienced in richer parts of the world like Europe and Japan (although balancing increasing living standards with sustainable use of resources will be a tricky challenge). The widening of marine reserves, which have had great success in the Pacific island nation of Palau, to include all international waters would be a major step towards refilling the oceans with life (and food). There is a glimpse here of a sustainable future herds of cattle roam around wind turbines, electric drones rise above the rainforest canopy with freshly picked fruit in tow. But that, Attenborough reminds us, will take urgent, drastic action. The producers of the documentary clearly hope it will be a call to arms a truth thats now impossible to ignore. They end back in Chernobyl, where in the absence of humans rare animals are rebounding, and trees and plants have overrun the city. Read next Its a vital reminder that the fight against the climate crisis isnt just about protecting animals and plants, its about saving our own species. Amit Katwala is WIRED's culture editor. He tweets from @amitkatwala More great stories from WIRED TikTok was conquering the world. But Trumps battle heralds the ugly birth of a new splinternet We now know everything about the next-gen consoles. So which should is better the PS5 or Xbox Series X? Why Netflix keeps cancelling your favourite shows after two seasons Listen to The WIRED Podcast, the week in science, technology and culture, delivered every Friday Follow WIRED on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn Get WIRED Daily, your no-nonsense briefing on all the biggest stories in technology, business and science. In your inbox every weekday at 12pm UK time. by entering your email address, you agree to our privacy policy Thank You. You have successfully subscribed to our newsletter. You will hear from us shortly. Sorry, you have entered an invalid email. Please refresh and try again.

Tesla's Model S Plaid wasn't the biggest Battery Day announcement - Wired.co.uk

No million-mile battery, but Tesla did announce a new form of in-house battery tech, Tesla Silicon, a $25,000 EV and the 520+ mile, 200mph Model S Plaid

Ahead of Teslas much-hyped Battery Day event on Tuesday, expectations were high. Not only had CEO Elon Musk promised that exciting things would be unveiled at the very insane event in Palo Alto, but murmurs of a major battery breakthrough had Tesla investors on high-alert. Tesla remains a risky investment. The company might be the most valuable car company in the world, dominating the US electric vehicles market with 80 per cent of sales in the first half of 2020, but it still commands less than one per cent of the global automotive market. Although Tesla is on the verge of a record quarter, according to an email Musk sent to employees, the company has long been plagued by issues in battery production, which Musk described on an investor call last year as very fundamental and extremely difficult. This, analysts claim, has been fuelled in equal measures by Teslas dependence on materials such as lithium and cobalt, and the company's lack of manufacturing capacity. If Teslas Battery Day announcements are anything to go by, the company may be about to overcome both of these bottlenecks. Read next Cheaper, Tesla-branded batteries Musk has stated on several occasions that Teslas goal is to develop a battery that costs $100 per kilowatt-hour, a price target that experts claim is necessary to make the cost of electric vehicles competitive. Current battery packs cost around $150 to $200 per kilowatt-hour, with Teslas at the lower end of that scale, which means a battery pack typically costs around $14,000. At this years Battery Day, two years after Musk originally pledged to reach this milestone, the company announced that it finally has a plan to cut battery costs per kilowatt-hour in half, a plan that involves using continuous cylindrical cells as opposed to those with tabs. These new tabless batteries will be produced in-house, which Musk says will help to dramatically reduce costs and, ultimately, allow the company to sell its vehicles for the same price as everyday gas guzzlers. The companys current 2170 cells, which are used in Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, are produced by Panasonic at Teslas Gigafactory in Nevada. We need to make more affordable cars, Musk said. One of the things that troubles me the most is that we dont have a truly affordable car, and that is something we will do in the future. To do that, we need cheaper batteries. These new tabless batteries which Tesla is calling 4860 cells use a shingled spiral design that not only makes for simpler manufacturing, but also delivers 5x the energy, a 16 per cent range increase, and 6x the power of Tesla's existing 2170 batteries. Read next The cells will start production in a pilot gigawatt factory in Fremont. Musk warned that it will take around a year for the company to reach full production capacity, but said the factory systems its building will be the most efficient in the world. "Tesla is aiming to be the best at manufacturing of any company on Earth," Musk says, adding that he sees this as one of the key things that will keep Tesla ahead of its rivals. Tesla wont stop purchasing batteries anytime soon, though. In the run-up to Battery Day, Musk tweeted that the company would continue to use batteries supplied by Panasonic, Chinas CATL, LG Chem, and others. However, the company said its aiming to rapidly ramp up production over the next years to 3 terawatt-hours a year, or 3,000 gigawatt-hours roughly 85 times greater than the capacity of the Nevada plant. Tesla Silicon First we had Apple Silicon, and now we have Tesla Silicon. Described by Musk as awesome and inexpensive, the material can increase range by roughly 20 per cent and costs less than $1.20 per anode per kilowatt-hour. Musk says Tesla will eliminate the current hurdles of silicon already used in contemporary batteries the cookie gets gooey and crumbles by using "raw metallurgical silicon". By using raw silicon that is not treated or formed, Tesla claims costs can be reduced substantially. For the cathode, Tesla is moving away from cobalt to nickel, claiming that a high nickel, zero-cobalt cathode will reduce costs by 15 per cent. Musk also announced that the company is also making cathode production facilities in the US that'll eliminate the intermediate stages usually required in turning nickel and lithium into batteries. Not only will this result in cost savings, but it will also make batteries easier to recycle; its even started its own in-house pilot program in Nevada to recycle Tesla products. Read next On the manufacturing front, Tesla said it has also acquired a 10,000-acre mining site to produce even more of battery components in-house: "There really is enough lithium in Nevada alone too electrify the entire US fleet." A $25,000 Tesla Because Tesla is manufacturing its own batteries, it can pack them side by side, removing empty space between them and allowing them to be constructed more densely, which is good for both safety and handling. This means it can integrate the battery components with the car itself, much like a plane's fuel tanks are integrated into the wing instead of separate parts, and to do so Tesla announced that it has built the largest casting machine ever made in Froment. Tesla claims that by making the battery part of the vehicles structure rather than cargo, this will result in a 10 per cent mass reduction, 14 per cent range increase, and 370 fewer parts in the cars. With all these innovations, Tesla could increase range by 54 per cent, achieve a dollar per kilowatt reduction of 56 per cent, and see investment costs per GWh cut by up to 69 per cent. Ultimately, Musk boasted, the company will deliver a "compelling" $25,000 passenger electric vehicle within the next three years. "About three years from now, we're confident we can make a very compelling $25,000 electric vehicle that's also fully autonomous," Musk said. Read next The $140,000 Tesla Model S Plaid In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences. While many had expected that Tesla would close Tuesdays Battery Day event with an update on its million-mile battery, an innovation that the company claims will be able to power its electric cars for more than one million miles over the course of their lifespan, this was a disappointing no-show. Instead, Musk capped off the event with a video of the long-hyped Tesla Model S Plaid. Tesla first showed a video of a Plaid prototype lapping Laguna Seca in 1:36 last year, and according to Musk, it has since slashed this time to 1:30.3. Musk said he expects that time to drop by another three seconds and break the record for the fastest production vehicle of any type. The vehicle, which boasts 1,100 horsepower, a sub-two-second 0-60MPH time, a 200MPH top speed, and the ability to travel 520 miles or more between charges, will start shipping in 2021. These performance stats, would best the recently announced Lucid Air electric car, but that will offer a similar range to the Plaid. More great stories from WIRED They never officially had Covid-19. But coronavirus long-haulers are living in hell The pandemic may finally kill Netflixs 20-year-old DVD business Going out again? These are the best backpacks for work, travel and cycling Listen to The WIRED Podcast, the week in science, technology and culture, delivered every Friday Follow WIRED on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn Get WIRED Daily, your no-nonsense briefing on all the biggest stories in technology, business and science. In your inbox every weekday at 12pm UK time. by entering your email address, you agree to our privacy policy Thank You. You have successfully subscribed to our newsletter. You will hear from us shortly. Sorry, you have entered an invalid email. Please refresh and try again.

This is what life on Venus might look like – and how we'll find it - Wired.co.uk

The discovery of phosphine on Venus hints at life in its clouds, but finding out won’t be easy

An image captured by Nasas Magellan spacecraft shows impact craters and volcanic activity on the surface of Venus. Any life that may exist on the planet will almost certainly be found high up in its atmosphere It sounds ridiculous, bizarre, even stupid. Life on Venus, the hottest planet in the Solar System? This is a world often regarded as Earth gone wrong, where extreme climate change has turned it into one of the closest approximations of hell weve ever seen. And now were told it might be home to alien life. Its a discovery that if proved true would have profound consequences for how we view our place in the universe. The only problem? Proving it. The idea of life on Venus is not new, and dates back to at least the 1960s when the late American astronomer Carl Sagan discussed the possibility. If small amounts of minerals are stirred up to the clouds from the surface, it is by no means difficult to imagine an indigenous biology in the clouds of Venus, he wrote in a paper in Nature in 1967. Now, more than five decades later, scientists have discovered phosphine on Venus. Phosphine a compound of phosphorous and hydrogen is thought to be a potential biomarker. In other words, we know it can be produced by life, and its detection hints at biological production. [We tried] to iterate down the list of options to explain the phosphine being present, says Sukrit Ranjan from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a co-author on the discovery paper in Nature Astronomy. All of that has come up short. So were left with things we have not yet fully ruled out. That includes chemistry and biology that we dont know about yet. Read next Phosphine can be produced by a number of non-biological processes. These include geological sources like volcanic activity, or even extreme pressure environments where hydrogen is squeezed together such as on Jupiter and Saturn. On Earth, phosphine is also produced by certain anaerobic microbial life, which requires little oxygen. Similar extreme life forms could, maybe, have made their home in the Venusian clouds. This discovery is incredibly exciting, says Sarah Rugheimer from the University of Oxford, whose research involves looking for life on exoplanets, worlds beyond the Solar System. Its either a chemistry thats really different and unusual, or its life. The discovery was led by Jane Greaves from Cardiff University, using two telescopes on Earth the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile to observe a signature of phosphine in radio observations of Venus. Its presence, in the atmosphere of Venus, 50 kilometres above the surface, is believed to be in a region that could be hospitable to life, outside of the hellish conditions on the surface of the planet where high temperatures and pressures render life as we know it unthinkable. Before we even begin to consider the possibility of its production by life on Venus, however, there are a number of hoops to jump through. First, other astronomers will need to try and reproduce the results, using the same or other telescopes, to check if the phosphine is really there. Astronomers will then want to conduct further experiments to investigate ways that phosphine can be produced, and see if they can rule out non-biological processes. [We need] lots more laboratory studies [and] calculations to nail down some of the fundamental parameters, says Ranjan. Read next After that, we could consider sending missions to investigate the phosphine in more detail, perhaps even one day looking for life itself on Venus. But it will likely be a very cautious progress until we get to that point. There are already a number of missions to Venus on the drawing board. Nasa is considering two proposals to the planet, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, the former of which would include an atmospheric probe that could possibly look for gases like phosphine. Several other missions are also in the works. India plans to launch a mission this decade, while Russia has long talked about sending a spacecraft there, having led much of the previous Venus exploration in the 1970s and 80s. Europe, too, is considering a mission called EnVision in 2032. Many of these missions, however, are designed with other goals in mind such as mapping the surface of Venus, or looking for volcanic activity. In order to look for life, if it were really there, we would need a new type of mission. Ultimately we will want to sample the atmosphere, and get that sample back to test it, says Richard Ghail from the Royal Holloway University of London, the lead on the EnVision proposal. That means some sort of balloon with a sample return [capability], or a large enough balloon with some of the kit on it. Such a mission would likely be years or even decades away, but in the more near-term, there are things that could be done. The US private company Rocket Lab hopes to launch a small mission to Venus as soon as 2023, which would include an atmospheric probe, and the company is looking into what small instruments it could include that could look for life. Scientists will also want to continue studying the atmosphere of Venus from Earth, not only to independently confirm the presence of phosphine, but to investigate the different processes that can produce it back here in laboratories. If, after all of these studies, the signs continue to point to life, then we can begin to wonder what sort of life that might be. At the moment, its thought this would be some sort of airborne microbe in the Venusian sky, living in droplets originating from the planets thick clouds. Read next Our best guess is some sort of microbial life living in the cloud droplets, says William Bains from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was also a co-author on the paper. The chances of there being life on the surface are spectacularly small. This is much more likely to be in the clouds. We do know there are airborne microbes on Earth, so if the conditions are just right on Venus, theres an alluring possibility they are present there too. Conditions on Venus are not ideal. These droplets would get extremely hot as they fell from the sky, killing any microbial life present. Instead, it might be that the droplets are in a continuous cycle of evaporation and falling, with microbes clinging along for the ride. You have a cycle operating in the clouds, says Bains, who also says that perhaps even some of the droplets would fall to the surface, although its unlikely any life would survive that journey. It would be baked into charcoal-like stuff, he explains. Its a tantalising possibility but for now it remains just that. If the phosphine discovery holds up, and we cant explain it via non-biological processes which most scientists would agree is still the most likely outcome then things could get very intriguing. Venus has long been overshadowed by other more alluring targets in the search for life, such as Mars or Jupiters moon Europa. Now, with this phosphine discovery, our Solar Systems own version of hell could find itself at the top of the list. It will probably take more than a decade to hammer down whats happening, says Rugheimer. Phosphine is very interesting as a bio-signature. Its just coming from one of the places we would least expect life. More great stories from WIRED They never officially had Covid-19. But coronavirus long-haulers are living in hell The pandemic may finally kill Netflixs 20-year-old DVD business Going out again? These are the best backpacks for work, travel and cycling Listen to The WIRED Podcast, the week in science, technology and culture, delivered every Friday Follow WIRED on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn Get WIRED Daily, your no-nonsense briefing on all the biggest stories in technology, business and science. In your inbox every weekday at 12pm UK time. by entering your email address, you agree to our privacy policy Thank You. You have successfully subscribed to our newsletter. You will hear from us shortly. Sorry, you have entered an invalid email. Please refresh and try again.

How to take better photos with your Samsung Galaxy camera - Wired.co.uk

Get awesome pet shots and cinematic horizons with our guide to the best Samsung phone photography tips and tricks

Samsung has been overtaken by Huawei and Google's Pixel cameras in recent years but its Galaxy phones still offer a huge amount to anyone into smartphone photography. The cameras on Samsungs phones offer a lot more flexibility than say the iPhone, making them much more appealing to those who know a thing or two about photography. Youve got a variety of modes and the ability to take control of key settings, for starters. The tips in this piece apply to the latest 2020 models, such as the just-launched Samsung Galaxy Note 20 series, as well as the existing Samsung Galaxy S20 series. Some of them will also apply to older models, too. Its also worth saying that you wont need to install any special apps to take advantage of any of this advice. All of the tricks can be used with the native Samsung camera app, so you can get started right out of the box. Read next Engage Pro Mode All recent Samsung phones do a fantastic job of taking great pictures in the standard automatic mode. But for those that have outgrown auto, heading to Pro mode gives you scope to show your photographic nous. With it, you can control ISO, shutter speed, white balance and more. You can even get creative by altering saturation, contrast and so on think of it a bit like creating your own filters. Some Samsung models, such as the Samsung Galaxy S10 also have the ability to choose between two different apertures, depending on how much light is in the scene. This option has been removed from newer models like the Galaxy S20 and the Note 20. While in Pro mode, you can also switch on raw format recording. Those who are used to shooting with proper cameras will be familiar with the format it gives you scope to adjust certain things in editing programs such as Photoshop and can come in handy if you cant quite get your exposures spot on at the scene. Pro tip: To find Pro mode, you might have to head to the 'More' tab from the main screen of the camera app. Read next Capture the best frame As with many smartphones, you can elect to record a short video with each photo you take. With Samsung models thats called 'Motion Photo' and needs to be activated by tapping an icon on the main camera screen. It looks like a square with a play (triangle) icon inside it. This feature is great for capturing a little bit of motion with your shot to bring your images to life, but it can also be used to freeze the best moment. If youve got a bounding dog or toddler who wont sit still, you can extract the best frame from a motion picture without worrying too much about capturing the perfect moment at the time you take the shot. Let them play, let them wriggle, and worry about getting the right frame later. Its also helpful for portraits and group shots where youve almost always got a blinker threatening to spoil an otherwise great photograph. Experiment with resolutions and aspect ratios Your Samsung will have a default resolution and aspect it will record at usually 12 megapixels and 4:3. But, especially the newer models such as the Galaxy S20 Ultra, have huge resolutions just begging to be played with. If you tap on the aspect ratio icon within the main camera app (it looks like a square with 3:4 written inside it), youll be given a range of different options to choose from. If youre using the S20 Ultra or the Note 20 Ultra, the one that will leap out at you is the 3:4 108MP resolution option. You probably dont want to use this for every day shots of your dinner or your neighbours dog, but if you want to capture something super detailed then its worth giving it a go. Read next Beyond that, its also worth experimenting with different aspect ratios to give your photos a creative edge. Were all familiar with the 1:1 ratio thanks to Instagram, but the more cinematic 16:9 option is great for landscapes and wide-angle scenes, allowing you to experiment with unusual compositions. You can also select 'Full' to fill the screen of your phone its worth trying this out, especially if you mainly look at your photos on your phone, itll really make the most of the larger screen sizes of models like the Galaxy S20 Ultra. Activate Single Take This is a feature which is easy to miss, or ignore. Swipe to the left (on the S20 series, S10 series, Note 20 series, Note 10 series) from the main camera screen and youll be taken to 'Single Take' mode. With this, the camera will take a number of different shots and videos all at once, later recommending the best shot for you. Its a neat option when you want to concentrate on the moment in front of you rather than worry too much about composition and so on. Try moving the phone around the scene while capturing a 'Single Take' to give you plenty of variety to choose from, too. Read next Use the S Pen for a remote release The S Pen on the Note series models can be used for all sorts of wild gestures but one of the truly useful functions is remote release. That gives you scope to capture fantastic portraits and group shots without having to awkwardly stretch out your arm to fit everyone in or use a dreaded selfie stick. It works via Bluetooth and can be used up to 10 metres away from your phone youll also need a small tripod or something stable to rest your phone on. Once youve got yourself and your friends into position, give the button on the S pen a tap and itll take a picture. You can double tap the button to switch between using the rear camera and the selfie camera. Wed recommend using the higher-quality rear camera for the best shots. Experiment with Live Focus Read next If you want to create shallow depth of field portraits, then the best thing to do is head to the Live Focus mode. You might have to head to the 'More' section in the standard camera app to find the option, depending on how you have the app set up. Once there, you can use it in its default setup, but its also worth spending some time getting to know its various options a little better. For example, switching to the wide-angle option (represented by an icon that looks like two trees) allows you to capture better environmental type shots, showing more of your subjects background. Its great for people, but also other subjects, such as pets. Beyond that, you might also want to experiment with the different bokeh options. Bokeh is the name given to the out of focus area, and can be a standard or generic 'blur', but you can also choose different options, including 'big circle', 'spin', and 'zoom'. Some are a little on the gimmicky side, but theyre also pretty fun. Try out Samsung's Intelligent features At their best, smartphones include lots of features that take the guesswork out of photography. When it comes to Samsung phones, youll find them equipped with 'Intelligent Features' that can come in really handy. Read next Tap the cog icon in the top left hand corner of the native camera app, and you should see the Intelligent Features options right at the top of the screen. Make sure 'Scene optimiser' is switched on to make sure the best settings are automatically applied to your shots, while 'Shot suggestions' is particularly helpful when trying to line up landscape shots nothing says amateur like a wonky horizon. With this feature turned on, a level will be shown on screen to help get things as straight as possible. More great stories from WIRED The French town that created its own Amazon Google got rich from your data. DuckDuckGo is fighting back Which face mask should you buy? The WIRED guide Listen to The WIRED Podcast, the week in science, technology and culture, delivered every Friday Follow WIRED on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn Get The Email from WIRED, your no-nonsense briefing on all the biggest stories in technology, business and science. In your inbox every weekday at 12pm sharp. by entering your email address, you agree to our privacy policy Thank You. You have successfully subscribed to our newsletter. You will hear from us shortly. Sorry, you have entered an invalid email. Please refresh and try again.

Britain's big cat hunters won't quit searching for mystery animals - Wired.co.uk

For more than 50 years, people have reported sightings of big cats in the British countryside. Now, armed with drones and podcasts, a new generation of big cat hunters is taking up the search

Eight years ago, while he was driving down a winding country road in east Dorset, Mike Coggan experienced something he cannot explain. On his way home, just after midnight, he saw a black labrador run out into the road in front of him. Then he looked again. I got a really good view of it in my headlights, for several seconds; though it felt much longer. I was petrified. I couldnt scream. There wasnt isnt a doubt in my mind. It was running just in front of my car. I could see this long, muscular black body, and this huge tail that curled up. There was no mistaking it for anything else. When I got back, I googled black leopard and the hair on my arms stood up. For eight years, hes been expecting the story to break. I thought, someones got to get something soon. Coggan runs Grizzly, a video and animation studio based in Dorset. We had some downtime, and all this kit lying around. We sat round, thinking what can we invest some time into? The result is a documentary. I really wanted there to be a conclusion weve either got to find one of these animals, or look hard enough as to suggest theyre not there. Coggan and his team decided to take on a decades-old legend with tech lots of tech and in doing so stumbled right into the heart of why the British big cat mystery is still so compelling. In 60 years of scientific and technological innovation, there has never been so much as a shred of evidence no smartphone footage, no bodies, no physical or biological trace that convincingly suggests that the UK is home to a wild population of big cats. Yet despite this, the numbers of sightings have never slowed. According to the British Big Cats Society a group that catalogues big cat sightings in the UK there has been a big spike in new sightings during lockdown. And now a new generation of big cat hunters has taken up the mantle. Read next The Grizzly team started with ten camera traps. They captured footage of some deer, and then some of the traps stopped working, so Grizzly invested in a thermal drone. But they still werent coming up with any sightings. Its still just a lottery draw as to whether youre going to be within a 50-mile radius of one, Coggan says. Scoring images of a big cat started to seem like an impossible goal. If ones going to be found, then its going to run in front of a taxi driver with a dash cam, he says. We do come to a conclusion in the documentary, but its not a particularly satisfying one. Satisfying conclusions are hard to come by in this gig, as Rick Minter the de facto authority on British big cats can attest. Like Coggan, Minter came to the subject after an encounter of his own. Taking a break from a meeting at a countryside hotel, he looked out over the surrounding fields and saw what he now thinks was a small female black leopard. It was a good sighting, he says for about 50 seconds or so, long enough to exclude everything else. I really challenged myself to confirm what it was. Minter had seen the press reports, but until that moment hadnt given the subject any thought. I had what youd call an agnostic disinterest. At the time, he was an analyst at what is now Natural England, a government body advising on the responsible management of the countryside. Straight away, I saw the bigger picture. With my blue-skies management hat on, I thought if there are more of these things around, weve got an apex predator on our hands, and most people dont even realise it. Since leaving the agency, Minter has dedicated much of the last decade to British big cats, investigating the phenomenon, logging evidence, producing a fortnightly podcast and writing a book on the subject. He says he has twice briefed official countryside organisations on the animals and how to manage them, though these meetings were never logged. Full briefings, but they were off the record of course. These things do go on under the radar, he says. Unlike Coggan, Minter isnt interested in proving the cats exist. Im not thumping the table wanting these cats to become widely accepted; Id be worried about the culture shock. To me the topic is about naturalising animals, requiring a citizen science process to help reveal more evidence and learn how these alpha predators are adapting to their niche. The sightings are nothing new. The first rumours of a wild big cat on the loose are more than half a century old, as police in the Surrey village of Godalming logged 342 sightings of The Surrey Puma between 1964 and 1966. The latest reported big cat sighting came just last month. In the intervening years, there have been thousands of sightings these are just the ones we know about and dozens of monikers: the Beast of Exmoor, the Highland Panther, the Fen Tiger. In 1995, the government mounted an official investigation into The Beast of Bodmin, our most famous felid. It came up empty-handed. Read next But these expert denials don't seem to have deterred big cat spotters. Its not like people are reporting hyenas and flamingos consistently, says Minter, but they are reporting leopard, lynx and puma. The cats are seen by ordinary people, going about their daily business: groups of dogwalkers, cars full of policemen, beaters on a country estate. Some are higher profile in 2014, Clare Balding was just three minutes into her BBC Radio 4 programme Ramblings, when she saw an enormous dog-size black cat sauntering up the road. Most of the sightings are of panthers, or melanistic leopards, with muscular hindquarters, black coats and long, looping tails. The rest of them are made up by puma and lynx. Many witnesses claim never to have had heard of the phenomenon before their encounter, having no choice but to believe their own eyes. The cats mean different things to different people. To some, they are paranormal. To others, theyre part of a government conspiracy. Cryptozoologists and folklorists both claim them as their own. The most credible theory suggests that the cats are descended from wild-scale releases in 1976, in the months leading up to the Dangerous Wild Animals Act: a piece of legislation intended to halt the growing trend of large exotic pets by implementing a costly license fee. There is one piece of titillating scientific evidence that points to the cats existence. In 2013, Andrew Hemmings, a senior lecturer at the Royal Agricultural University, examined the skeletal remains of animals that had been eaten by an unidentified large predator and found that in some cases, the tooth marks suggested that a big cat, rather than a badger, fox or a dog was responsible. But not everyones so sure. Robin Allaby, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Warwick, works mainly with ancient DNA, but just over ten years ago he started a side-line in ecological forensics. In 2012, the National Trust requested that he test the wounds on deer carcasses, after a spate of suspiciously cat-like kills. Foxes, Allaby says. We found foxes all over them. Since then, his genotyping service has tested carcasses sent by farmers, landowners and Rick Minter every few months. Occasionally weve found domestic cat hits, though nothing like a panther. In animals, Allaby says, size is easily changed and quick to evolve. As an evolutionary geneticist I am interested in whether domestic cats are going feral and stepping into a bigger niche. I am perfectly prepared to believe that there are very, very big moggies out there. The most compelling piece of evidence for the existence of the animals, by some way, is the eyewitness accounts, thousands of them, that pile up year after year. But eyewitness testimony is not all that it seems, as anomalistic psychologist Christopher French explains. For most people, the strongest evidence they can conceive of is their own personal experience, but perception and memory can be faulty, in lots of different ways. Read next Our intuitive understanding of perception, French says, is inaccurate. It is in fact a constructive process; the brain fills in gaps, such as colour and dimension, that the eyes cannot see. Memory suffers the same pitfalls. Unlike a video camera, our recollection of events is incomplete: when you remember something, youre basing the event on memory traces that were formed at the time, but youre also filling in gaps. Perception is constructive; memory is reconstructive. Add to that the influence of top-down processing, where were influenced by our beliefs, plus memory conformity, where one persons account influences another persons memory and theres a lot of room for error. In this field, just two things are certain. That the cats are seen; and that so long as they are seen, people will try to find them. Aside from the sense of community and the media coverage, its the lure of something so utterly mysterious, French tells me. And then theres the hope that maybe, just maybe youll be the one to demonstrate that theyre out there and prove the scientists wrong once and for all. Every so often a large species thought to be extinct does turn up. Its what behavioural psychologists would call partial reinforcement. Thats the strongest kind of reinforcement there is. The desire to stray past the boundaries of our knowledge is in our nature. Weve always sought out mythical beasts, French says. Think of bestiaries and medieval maps, here be dragons. Weve always stood at the edge of the known, looking out, yearning for whats beyond. More great stories from WIRED The French town that created its own Amazon Google got rich from your data. DuckDuckGo is fighting back Which face mask should you buy? 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The new PlayStation 5 looks like a giant broadband router - Wired.co.uk

Last night’s major PlayStation 5 event edited down to only the vital info

A new console launch is always cause for excitement, even in the midst of a pandemic. Enter Sony with its big PS5 unveiling, imaginatively titled 'PS5: The Future of Gaming Show', which teased more than it satisfied, but gave us a good opportunity to see what the next generation of games will look like. Assuming you haven't already skipped to the good stuff, let's get to it. What did I miss? Sony mainly used the event as an extended sizzle reel for the eclectic collection of exclusives coming to the console, though it wasn't clear which would launch with the console later this year. The most immediately interesting were Spider-Man: Miles Morales, a follow-up to last year's hugely popular game featuring the lead from the critically acclaimed animated movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Horizon: Forbidden West, a sequel to the equally popular Horizon: Zero Dawn. The latter, in particular, looked stunning. Sony also revealed the console itself and a bunch of peripherals, but declined to say how much the PS5 would cost at launch. Nor did it clear up many of our burning questions, such as the exact nature of the system's backward compatibility with previous consoles. Also, well, you've seen the photos. Read next Yes, how big is that thing and will it lie flat? Sony hasn't released the dimensions, but you can use the size of the disc drive as a guide. By that measure, it's likely the console is noticeably taller than the PS4 Pro and even larger than the famously chunky original Xbox One. That is a very rough guesstimate, however, and should be treated as such, but it already has us glancing at our home entertainment rack with concern. To your other question, yes, it will lie flat. Sony released images of the console in the horizontal position with it sitting on some kind of stand. It's not, we hasten to add, the console's most flattering angle. Like the chunky Xbox Series X, the PS5 is clearly designed to be stood tall. It's also worth noting there are two versions of the console. One with a 4K Blu-ray drive and one is the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition and has no optical drive ideal for people who won't mind paying over the odds for their games. So how powerful is the PlayStation 5, exactly? We can't say, but Sony has released some details in previous events. We know, like the Xbox Series X, the PlayStation 5 is powered by an eight-core AMD processor and a custom GPU based on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture. Everything we've seen and heard so far suggests the Xbox will have a slight raw performance advantage over the PS5, but Sony has a trick up its sleeve which might give it an edge. Read next While both consoles are adopting fast solid state drive (SSD) akin the flash memory in your phone, Sony's is reportedly much faster. So fast, in fact, that textures and game assets can be streamed directly from the SSD rather than being held in the system's memory (RAM) as is traditional. In a demo of its Unreal Engine 5 earlier this year, Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney said "the storage architecture on the PS5 is far ahead of anything you can buy on anything on PC for any amount of money right now. Its going to help drive future PCs." You can watch that demo below. In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences. This new SSD will have a dramatic impact on loading times. In a previous demonstration of Marvel's Spider-Man, fast travelling on the PS4 Pro took 15 seconds; the same function reportedly takes just 0.8 seconds on the PS5. What about the controller? The new controller, now dubbed DualSense, has several interesting features. Read next One is something Sony is calling adaptive triggers. One example given of how these will affect gameplay was shooting a bow and arrow, pressing down on the trigger to draw an arrow back would have a different tactile sensation to firing a shotgun, or driving an off-road vehicle through rocky terrain. The other key feature is the controllers haptic feedback, which replaces the standard rumble. Sony says that the difference between this and old rumble is night and day. Crashing into a wall with a car, for example, will feel very different to making a tackle in a future version of Madden, for example. You should also be able to tell whether you're running through long grass or mud just from the controller feedback. The controller, which will use a USB Type-C connector for charging, will apparently be heavier than the DualShock 4 and lighter than the current Xbox controller. They kept on talking about "ray tracing". What is that? It's an advanced rendering technique relied on for years by Hollywood visual effects teams. It tries to simulate the way light bounces off objects, producing impressively life-like graphics and amazing reflections. Ray tracing is already available on current-gen gaming PCs running Nvidias RTX graphics cards. Anything else? For now, no. You can watch the whole reveal below if you like and check back soon for our selection of the most interesting games from the PS5 reveal. Read next In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences. More great stories from WIRED Google got rich from your data. DuckDuckGo is fighting back The Animal Crossing fans running in-game businesses Inside the 'bullshit' get-rich-quick world of dropshipping The secret behind the success of Apple's AirPods The UK's lockdown rules, explained Follow WIRED on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn Get The Email from WIRED, your no-nonsense briefing on all the biggest stories in technology, business and science. In your inbox every weekday at 12pm sharp. by entering your email address, you agree to our privacy policy Thank You. You have successfully subscribed to our newsletter. You will hear from us shortly. Sorry, you have entered an invalid email. Please refresh and try again.