Issue 2172 | Magazine cover date: 6 February 1999 | New Scientist

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6 February 1999

Issue 2172

New Scientist issue 2172 cover

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On the cover

Features

You can't beat experience

News

Give them credit for some brains

Opinion

Half the story

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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.

You can't beat experience

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.

Eco-nomics

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.

Out of this world

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.

Cunning plumbing

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 Lopsided Universe

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.

Give them credit for some brains

NEANDERTHALS may have looked stocky and brutish, but weight for weight, modern humans are just as robust. That's the conclusion of a researcher who borrowed techniques from structural engineers to measure the strength of hominid and Neanderthal bones. Given Neanderthals' wide, heavy bones, most anthropologists had assumed that their lives were dominated by brute force …

News

Chimp version of HIV finally linked to human epidemic

News

Butterfly effect

News

Stars burst

News

Borrowed time

News

Iced bugs

News

Sour taste

News

Healthy mouth, healthy baby

News

To the rescue ...

News

Caesareans are safer

News

Space station blues

News

Growing problem

News

Poisoned seas

News

Painful choices

News

Knocked out in the quarter finals, but still they get the trophy

News

Floppy snaps

News

Great shakes

News

Wrong number . . .

News

Technology

Underdogs up in arms

News

Last orders

News

Send in the clouds

News

Wind breakers

News

Earth

The company of wolves

News

It's catching

News

Mixed feelings

News

Chainsaw massacre

News

Aw, shucks

News

Bright idea

News

Getting it taped

News

The secret of zone 14

News

A nightmare revisited

News

Turned on itself

News

Cut the bull

News

Global bug alert

News

First for GM food

News

Warming to carbon cuts

News

Escape from Earth

News

Pretty poor privacy may lurk inside processors

News

The one to watch

News

Technology

Violence blackout

News

Technology

The mains man

News

Technology

Magic marker

News

Cherry aid

News

The female gene

News

Against the grain

News

I spy with my duck's eye

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.

Half the story

STRANGE though it might seem given the billions spent on HIV research since the early 1980s, it is only this week that we have finally found out exactly where the virus came from. HIV-1 was first found in western central Africa and researchers have always suspected that the virus passed to humans from chimpanzees. But …

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.

You can't beat experience

IF you are in the first eight years of your career and you have been doing the same job for two years or more, it's time to ask yourself if you are getting the right experiences to develop and move upwards, or maybe onwards. Opportunities to develop new skills, especially in high technology industries, are …

Features

Eco-nomics

Features

Out of this world

Features

Cunning plumbing

Features

The Lopsided Universe

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.

. . . . .

BEFORE Christmas, when attention was focused elsewhere and bombs rained down on Baghdad, the European Union's agricultural ministers voted to ban the use of the antibiotics bacitracin zinc, spiramycin, tylosin phosphate and virginiamycin as growth promoters in animal feed. The aim of the ban is not only to limit the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria on …

Forum

Gene switch bowls a bumper crop

Forum

Hounded to death

Books & Arts

Mind on paper

Books & Arts

The truth about Tibet

Books & Arts

For cable guys

Books & Arts

Fly by the century

Books & Arts

A long time coming

Forum

Don't let it die

Forum

Blithe spirit

Books & Arts

Faraday did it with a candle

Books & Arts

from San Francisco

Books & Arts

The lion king

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

CONTINUING our series on remarkable (to say the least) inventions, The Healthy House catalogue includes a description of the Tecno AO antenna, which you can attach to the side of your TV or computer if you are willing to pay £67.50 for it. Its makers tell us that "prolonged daily exposure to the electromagnetic fields …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word