Mars in focus NASA has fixed the orbit of its Mars Global Surveyor so that the probe can spend the summer taking photographs of Martian scenery, including the controversial "Face on Mars", spotted by the Viking mission more than twenty years ago. Other targets include the Mars Pathfinder and Viking lander sites. The spacecraft's elliptical 11.6-hour orbit ranges … News
Magic numbers A FEW years ago John Major said he wanted to create a nation at ease with itself. If he was still Britain's Prime Minister such an idea would never make it off the political drawing board these days—unless, that is, someone invented a way of measuring national ease on a numerical scale, so that targets … Opinion
Market forces SUPPOSE that money, as well as being at the root of all evil, is the "elementary stuff" of the economic realm. That it is, in its own setting, every bit as fundamental as the subatomic particles of the physical world. As a metaphor, you might have no trouble swallowing that one. But what if the … Features
TAPE-WORMS occur in up to 60 per cent of the fox population of some regions of Germany, reports Debora MacKenzie (This Week, 10 January, p 13) . And the tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis have now turned up in foxes in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Netherlands. It is a rare disease, but Johannes Eckert … Forum
Feedback FEEDBACK has been soundly ticked off by New Scientist's Scottish readers, several thousand of whom have pointed out that the word "jobbie", described on 21 March as an Antarctic neologism, has in fact been used universally in Scotland ever since the first clansman donned a kilt (see Letters, this issue). Be that as it may, … Regulars