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4 articles from Guardian Unlimited Science

Could whistling shed light on the origins of speech?

Whistled languages exist on every inhabited continent – now some scientists think similar dialects could have preceded the spoken wordFor centuries, shepherds from the small village of Aas in the French Pyrenees led their sheep and cattle up to mountain pastures for the summer months. To ease the solitude, they would communicate with each other or with the village below in a whistled form of the...

William Shatner will boldly go into space with Bezos’s Blue Origin – report

Neither actor nor Blue Origin has commented on mission as some point out report appears same day as promotion for his new albumHe was once Starfleet’s youngest captain, a fearless explorer leading the USS Enterprise on an intergalactic odyssey. Now the actor who famously portrayed Captain James Tiberius Kirk on Star Trek for four decades is reportedly set to boldly go on a real-life space...

How standup comedy helped me conquer anxiety, depression – and fear of public speaking

Finding a humorous angle to some of my darkest episodes – and sharing them with strangers – was strangely cathartic“Have you gone mad?” asked one friend. “You’re so brave. I could never do that. Wouldn’t meditation be wiser?” said another. For someone with a long history of depression and anxiety, plus a morbid fear of public speaking, taking up standup comedy might seem like a...

Can we talk to aliens? And should we colonise space? We ask the expert

Astrophysicist Jacco van Loon on the hunt for alien life, why logic can solve the climate crisis and what happens when the sun becomes a red giantFor years, astrophysicists have been saying that alien life must exist, but finding out where and in what form has proved elusive. We may be edging closer: a team from the University of Cambridge has discovered a new class of habitable planets they claim...