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New Scientist

Issue: 19/06/2010

Ref: NS190610

Availability: 73 in stock.

No.2765

 

• David King: No cause for climate despair

  Editorial p3

  There are ways around the impasse over a global emissions deal, says the UK's former chief scientist

• China plans to put out its coalfield fires

  News > Upfront p4

  The regional government of Inner Mongolia says it will spend $29.4 million a year to put out more than 60 fires that burn at seven of its coalfields

• Important stem cell lines could be denied funding

  News > Upfront p4

  A single sentence in donor consent forms calls into doubt the future of numerous human embryonic stem cell lines

• US pollsters argue over public view on climate change

  News > Upfront p4

  A new survey suggests that climate science scandals don't bother people in the US much – but hot words have been exchanged about global warming polls

• US animal researchers face criminal charges

  News > Upfront pp4-5

  Staff at the University of Wisconsin-Madison could face jail or heavy fines for carrying out decompression experiments on sheep for the US navy

• 60 Seconds

  News > 60 Seconds p5

  Cheap drug that could save 100,000 lives a year, creationism in Russia, a global biodiversity monitor, and more

• British public 'relaxed' about synthetic life

  News > Upfront p5

  Government-funded "dialogue" shows people see synthetic biology as a natural extension of biological knowledge

• Hayabusa: The falcon has landed – what's it caught?

  News > Upfront p5

  A capsule from the spacecraft has landed in Australia – now we must wait to find out if it contains the first asteroid sample brought back to Earth

• Thank the Soviets for Afghan mineral bounty

  News > Upfront p5

  A trillion-dollar bounty of iron, copper and other minerals has been found in Afghanistan – thanks to maps made during the Soviet occupation

• First replicating creature spawned in life simulator

  News > This Week pp6-7

  The organism, which inhabits the mathematical universe known as the Game of Life, might just tell us something about our own beginnings

• Is it time to say goodbye cool world?

  News > This Week p8

  International climate negotiators may be on the brink of abandoning emissions targets aimed at limiting warming to 2 °C

• Himalayan ice is stable, but Asia faces drought

  News > This Week p9

  The glaciers that feed Asia's largest rivers aren't going to vanish soon – but 60 million Asians will suffer water shortages by 2050

• Clean-up of oil spill may cause long-term damage

  News > This Week p10

  Methods of mopping up the oil hitting the shore from the Gulf spill must be carefully assessed to be sure they don't do more harm than good

• If there's life on Mars, it could be right-handed

  News > This Week p10

  Some Earth life can consume both left- and right-handed nutrients, which could complicate the hunt for extraterrestrial life

• Sea snail venom provides potent pain relief

  News > This Week p12

  The venom has been used to develop a pill that is 100 times as potent as leading treatments against nerve-related pain

• World's first plastic antibody works in mice

  News > This Week p12

  Antibodies made entirely from plastic save mice injected with deadly bee venom

• Has Jupiter sent cosmology down a false trail?

  News > This Week p14

  The planet Jupiter may be skewing the measurements of cosmic microwaves supporting the standard model of cosmology

• Weakened flu virus proves ideal vaccine

  News > This Week p14

  A "crippled" influenza vaccine provokes the same immune response as a natural infection – without causing illness

• Thundercloud gamma rays hint at origins of lightning

  News > In Brief p16

  Mysterious gamma ray bursts that occur in the first moments of a storm, as lightning jumps between clouds, hint at where lightning comes from

• Why spiderweb glue never lets go

  News > In Brief p16

  Spiderweb glue is not only sticky, it is also elastic like chewing gum – making it 100 times stronger than tacky glues

• You needn't be a queen bee to give birth to one

  News > In Brief p16

  Worker honeybees have been shown to give birth to new queens, and can do so at any time

• Young stars found at record-breaking distances

  News > In Brief p16

  New stellar life found at the Milky Way's edge could be from a cannibalised galaxy

• Genetic on-off switch key to evolution of complex life

  News > In Brief p17

  Such switches could explain how colonies of single cells evolved into multicellular organisms

• How the brain deals you a poor hand

  News > In Brief p17

  Our mental image of the size and position of our hands seems not to match with reality

• Male voices reveal owner's strength

  News > In Brief p17

  Men and women can accurately assess a man's upper body strength based on his voice alone

• Refashioned rat livers could boost transplants

  News > In Brief p17

  Livers stripped bare of their original tissue then recoated with new cells have been successfully transplanted into rats for the first time

• Clouds add depth to computer vision

  Technology > News p19

  A single camera watching the shadows of clouds moving across a landscape can allow a computer to calculate topography

• Protozoan swimming style identifies water toxins

  Technology > News p19

  A new device provides low-cost testing of fluid for toxins by analysing the swimming of protozoa

• Space shuttle's rudder could cut aircraft noise

  Technology > News p19

  Redesigning airliners' rudders to double as a brake could make them quieter as they come in to land, an Airbus patent suggests

• Blogs and tweets could predict the future

  Technology > Feature pp20-21

  Analysing people's online musings could be used to predict everything from car sales to unemployment rates and stock prices

• Electron 'invisible ink' promises purer nanocrystals

  Technology > Feature p21

  A new technique for sending secret messages written with atoms also improves the nanocrystals used in computer chip manufacture

• Flexible nanocircuits can be drawn with heat

  Technology > Feature p22

  A hot nanoscale pen can draw circuits on graphene – atom-thick sheets of carbon – opening the way to electronics more compact than silicon allows

• Pulses of darkness let digital data travel farther

  Technology > Feature p22

  Optical fibres can carry data for longer distances if it is encoded in pulses of darkness – and a laser-like device has been built to exploit this

• The fruit fly formerly know as Drosophila

  Comment and Analysis pp24-25

  The famous fly is about to be renamed – and that's a bad idea, says ecologist Kim van der Linde, while geneticist Amir Yassin says change is overdue

• Jesse Ausubel: Let there be (no) light

  Opinion > Interview p25

  The director of the Census for Marine Life weighs up the options for his next big experiments: darkening the skies and quietening the oceans

• Quantum dogma

  Letters p26

  Michael Brooks provided an exciting overview of some of the more counter-intuitive implications of quantum mechanics, but did not delve into perhaps the greatest...

• What's in a word?

  Letters p26

  Christine Kenneally describes how linguists Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson have challenged Noam Chomsky's theory of a universal grammar in language (29 May, p...

• Enigma Number 1600

  Opinion > Enigma p26

• Diverse and stable

  Letters p27

  The warm temperature of the tropics undoubtedly contributes to the high biological diversity seen there, as stated in Emma Young's article (24 April, p...

• For the record

  Letters p27

  • The DOI was wrong in our article on shape-shifting islands (5 June, p 10). The correct reference is DOI: 10. 1016/j. gloplacha. 2010...

• Life on Io

  Letters p27

  I was interested in Stephen Battersby's speculation that there could be subsurface liquid water present on some of the solar system's moons, and...

• Like falling off a bike

  Letters p27

  Harry Collins's article on tacit knowledge includes a prohibitively complex formula for riding a bike (29 May, p 30...

• The eyes have it

  Letters p27

  Despite the tone of your editorial, evolutionary biologists cannot use the argument of a lack of design in regard to mammal eye structure to support...

• Wood in space

  Letters p27

  The Royal Society made an inspired choice, rather than an odd one, in deciding to celebrate its 350th anniversary by sending a piece of wood...

• Liar, liar: Why deception is our way of life

  Opinion > Essay pp28-29

  From little fibs to outright propaganda, falsehood is second nature – but in a wired-up world, it could be disastrous, says psychologist Dorothy Rowe

• Genome at 10: The project few wanted

  Features > Cover Story pp30-31

  Far from welcoming the human genome project, many biologists argued that it made no sense

• Genome at 10: Medicine's slow revolution

  Features > Cover Story pp32-33

  Genetic testing is already saving lives, and the numbers benefitting should soon grow dramatically

• Genome at 10: Meet your ancestors

  Features > Cover Story p33

  Gene-testing companies promise to find distant relatives or show that you're related to famous historical figures. Should you believe them?

• Genome at 10: A dizzying journey into complexity

  Features > Cover Story pp34-35

  We thought the machinery of the cell was beautifully elegant – but it has turned out to be a hideously complicated mess that goes wrong all too often

• Genome at 10: Faster, cheaper... worse

  Features > Cover Story p35

  Sequencing genomes is now much faster and cheaper, but not better – yet. The next generation of sequencing technology will take results to a new level

• Genome at 10: Information overload

  Features > Cover Story p36

  Sequence data is flooding in ever faster. The trouble is making sense of it all

• Genome at 10: The hunt for the 'dark matter'

  Features > Cover Story pp36-37

  We know many diseases are partly inherited, so geneticists are baffled by their failure to find the genetic variants responsible

• Desktop cosmos: Small is beautiful for big physics

  Features > Feature pp38-41

  Atoms cooled to within a whisker of absolute zero could reveal the cosmos's darkest secrets – without spaceships, giant lasers or billion-dollar budgets

• Drastic measures save plastic treasures

  Features > Feature pp42-45

  Is plastic indestructible? Far from it: with iconic artefacts crumbling before our eyes, we'll have to think fast to preserve the 20th century's legacy

• Quiz: A question of science

  Features > Feature pp46-47

  Do you know a weasel from a wimpzilla? Try this quiz, presented by New Scientist at the Cheltenham Science Festival. Questions by Stephen Battersby

• Bonobos have a secret

  Opinion > Books & Arts p48

  In Bonobo Handshake, Vanessa Wood comes to the realisation that these apes have a vital lesson for us humans

• Skipping along with the heavyweights of time

  Opinion > Books & Arts p49

  Introducing Time: A graphic guide by Craig Callender and Ralph Edney is a breathless ride through philosophy and physics that hides some big ideas

• Two ways of retelling Botswana's fight against AIDS

  Opinion > Books & Arts p49

  Saturday is for Funerals by Botswanan judge Unity Dow and Harvard researcher Max Essex lace stories with science in a rare dose of hope and resilience

• What will happen to the green and pleasant land?

  Opinion > Books & Arts p49

  Turned Out Nice: How the British Isles will change as the world heats up by Marek Kohn is a lucid, thoughtful and intimate geography

• Carefully crafted subliminal suggestions

  Feedback p64

  The equivalent of 50 blue whales in bacon, heating babies, Egypt shifts continents, and our World Cup competition

• Carriers of death

  The Last Word > Last Word Answer p65

• Stick that!

  The Last Word > Last Word Answer p65

• Cold snap

  The Last Word > Last Word Question p65