Issue 2206 | Magazine cover date: 2 October 1999 | New Scientist

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2 October 1999

Issue 2206

New Scientist issue 2206 cover

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On the cover

Features

Hard cell, soft cell

News

No trace

Opinion

Basic overhaul needed

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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.

Hard cell, soft cell

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.

Here be giants

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.

Testing the waters

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.

Quantum confidential

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.

No trace

ON closer examination, Mars does not appear to have the ancient coastlines apparently visible on earlier images of the planet. Astronomers had interpreted features from Viking images of the northern lowlands as beaches, cliffs and spits formed by a now vanished ocean. Laser altimeter measurements from Mars Global Surveyor supported this interpretation, as they indicated …

News

The light way

News

Hatching a plot

News

On standby

News

Desirable fathers

News

Technology

Getting the picture

News

They do it with mirrors

News

Holy fire

News

Sounding out chemotherapy

News

Trouble ahead

News

Don't look now, blind corners may be safest

News

Forget rainforests

News

Bill wants billions

News

Cellphone uncertainty

News

Toxic legacy

News

Public enemy number one

News

What the cat saw

News

Sniff this

News

Counting down

News

Russians warn of radiation threat to Arctic

News

More the merrier

News

Minuscule but perfectly formed

News

Out of Africa, into the Bronx

News

Good clean muck

News

Crash course

News

Pleasurable purity

News

Daddy's girl

News

Shock tactics

News

Technology

One-shot needle

News

Technology

Visibly toasted

News

Technology

Pumping iron

News

Glow for it

News

Screen talk

News

To the rescue

News

Last resort

News

I'm innocent!

News

Own goal

News

Hope on ice

News

Entente cordiale

News

Third generation

News

Burning evidence

News

Flu fighters

News

Happy accident

News

Revealed, the gas that time forgot

News

Misguided

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.

Basic overhaul needed

RESEARCHERS are on the march over the state of basic science in Australia. A new report by a parliamentary committee poses serious questions about the future of research. And recent figures showing the effects of budget cuts on science in universities reinforce the committee's concerns. Now the scientists themselves are planning to descend on Parliament …

Opinion

Humans

Westminster diary

Opinion

Pill power

Opinion

Method madness

Opinion

Face off

Opinion

Stop that clock

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.

Hard cell, soft cell

IT IS the most basic unit of life. Its very name signifies self-contained simplicity. But, according to Don Ingber, a cell biologist from Harvard Medical School, the cell has an image problem. "The dogma has always been that a cell is like a balloon full of molasses," he says. This simplistic view, Ingber believes, does …

Features

Here be giants

Features

Testing the waters

Features

Quantum confidential

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.

Sweaty nights

In the hothouse of science, the human stories often get left out. But historian Gale Christianson has fun filling the gaps in Greenhouse: The 200-year Story of Global Warming. It is a scrapbook of scientific endeavour: moths mutating in Manchester smoke; Charles Keeling first measuring the atmosphere filling with carbon dioxide and sweaty nights negotiating …

Books & Arts

Phew

Books & Arts

Track masters

Books & Arts

The Carbon War: Dispatches from the End of the Oil Century by Jeremy Leggett

Books & Arts

Worldbeaters

Books & Arts

Bestsellers from London

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

A FEW years ago, Sony's co-founder Akio Morita was asked to name the gizmo that had most changed our lives. His answer was the remote control. We can now do most things without standing up or moving. But the problem with remotes is that they burrow beneath cushions, hide behind furniture or migrate inexplicably to …

Regulars

The Last Word

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word