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This week's magazine

22 August 1998

Issue 2148

New Scientist issue 2148 cover
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On the cover

Features

Chocket man

News

Playing ball

Opinion

Miracles on demand
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Editor's picks

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Chocket man

Features
New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Bowels of the beasts

Features
New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Why god plays dice

Features
New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

The arbitrary ape

Features

Table of contents

News

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Playing ball

A MOLECULAR "softball" with room for two smaller molecules inside has been developed to speed up reactions. Julius Rebek and his colleagues at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, made the complex from two curved molecules stitched together with hydrogen bonds, like two halves of a softball. The softball opens and closes once …

News

Waspish behaviour

News

Testing times

News

Taking the bait

News

Radio silence

News

Ice no obstacle

News

Your computer in their power

News

Humble pie all round

News

Titan turns into billion-dollar firework

News

Volcanic lightning gave early Earth its fix

News

Tooled up

News

Technology

. . .

News

Technology

. . .

News

Technology

. . .

News

Role reversal

News

Magnetic shift

News

Fancy a spot of dinner?

News

Feathered saviours

News

Fibre bound

News

Lethal weapon

News

For sale: souvenirs of a close encounter

News

Why we're all charged up over DNA

News

Technology

Happy birthday HAL

News

Humans

Forbidden sex

News

Handle with care

News

Ragged edge

News

Badgers on trial

News

Telling turds

News

Robotic guide

News

Universal signals

News

Clean green rockets

News

In the mood

News

Return to Tara

News

Field sports

News

Promising pesticides get a taste of real life

News

A cure for quacks

News

Field fresh

News

Hot zone

News

Biotech controls

News

Meet Kismet ...

News

Plant power

News

At last, a hob that can feel the heat

News

Technology

Hidden messages

News

Technology

Lucky electrons

News

Technology

Who was first?

News

Humans

Fertility index

News

Humans

The crying game

News

Humans

How pornography turns women on too

News

Save our pathogens

News

Salt and vitriol

News

Opinion

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Miracles on demand

AS ALTERNATIVE therapies for illnesses both serious and slight boom in the West, there is growing pressure for governments to pay up for treatments of unknown efficacy and for testing the latest "miracle"—just in case there is something to it. It would be nice to think that these changes signal the emergence of a more …

Opinion

Who's holding the potato?

Opinion

Features

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Chocket man

ONE warm day in July last year, Derek Willis was in his garage in Newcastle upon Tyne pondering a nasty problem. As a passionate rocket enthusiast, he had designed and built dozens of small rockets. But he was fed up with handling the dangerous propellants that blasted them into the sky. If he spilt a …

Features

Bowels of the beasts

Features

Why god plays dice

Features

The arbitrary ape

Features

More

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

AT THE end of June, in the Danish city of Aarhus, members of the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) signed a protocol banning certain chemical pollutants. The protocol obliges members to eliminate or control 16 organic chemicals, or groups of chemicals, that can travel through the atmosphere and cause pollution far away from where …

Forum

Back to the bomb

Forum

What an ice breaker

Forum

Buy, buy, buy!

Forum

Counting the days

Books & Arts

On a hiding to nothing

Books & Arts

Montreal

Books & Arts

Spent cartridge

Books & Arts

Measure for measure

Books & Arts

Perfecting the past

Books & Arts

Stepping out

Books & Arts

Warrior king

Books & Arts

Meaty bones

Books & Arts

All together now

Books & Arts

Regulars

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

Feedback

TWO WEEKS ago we listed some of the abstruse error messages that long-suffering readers have been receiving from their computers. Now we find that these have been elevated into an art form. A compilation of error-message haiku poems is circulating on the Internet. Here are three of our favourites: A file that big? It might …

Regulars

The Last Word

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word

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