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This week's magazine

22 July 2000

Issue 2248

New Scientist issue 2248 cover
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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.

Secret service

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.

Ocean's first light

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.

Life in the old dog

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.

Faster than a speeding bullet

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.

Everlasting flight

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.

Pigeon's pie

WE AREN'T the only ones with a "work ethic". Pigeons value hard-won rewards more than freebies, say researchers in Kentucky. This indicates that appreciating the fruits of our labour isn't a particularly human virtue, they say. Thomas Zentall and Tricia Clement of the University of Kentucky in Lexington trained pigeons to tap a button to …

News

We're not jamming

News

Mercury cuts

News

Starting over

News

Big browser

News

Africa's midnight sun

News

How two old bottles keep blindness at bay

News

Live TV

News

Beating that sinking feeling

News

Shrink to fit

News

Critical checkpoint

News

Keeping in trim

News

Not so dull

News

Handy snakes

News

Tea versus toxins

News

Too little, too soon

News

On-the-spot sensor

News

Family feast

News

Liver cancer patients get electric lifeline

News

Spot the difference

News

Racing hearts

News

Technology

ISS is on the up

News

Woolly thinking

News

Hot suit

News

Close encounter

News

A wing and a prayer

News

Second shot

News

Lasers reveal ancient words of wisdom

News

Feed me

News

Technology

Fooling the speed freaks

News

Technology

Altered beer

News

Technology

Self-dialling fax

News

Paper chase

News

It's not who you are, but what you do

News

Break all the rules

News

Hard-headed choice

News

Pufferfish make do with less

News

Secrets of the suicidal blood cell

News

Gut reaction

News

Gene sequence puts the squeeze on orange pest

News

Out of the vortex

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.

Humans

Westminster diary

CHRISTINE COX, a New Scientist reader, writes to me suggesting that if "elective ventilation"—attaching brain-dead people to respirators to supply oxygen to their organs for a few extra hours—was legalised and widely used, far more organs would be saved for transplant. I asked health minister Lord Hunt for his view. Hunt, a former senior hospital …

Opinion

Peak period for policy planning

Opinion

Words to the wise

Opinion

Earth

No, Mr President

Opinion

Prions everywhere?

Opinion

Head start for cyclists

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.

Secret service

They look like ordinary pencils. And they write like ordinary pencils. It's the green paint that's the giveaway. Pencils, on display at the Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick, were made during the Second World War, when paint was in short supply and pencils left the factory with a natural wood finish. The paint marks them …

Features

Ocean's first light

Features

Life in the old dog

Features

Faster than a speeding bullet

Features

Everlasting flight

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.

But is it science?

ANY museum of science and technology risks ending up like a python that's swallowed a goat: bloated with artefacts from human history, it struggles to digest its prey into pithy statements that show-case generations of ideas and objects. A museum has to look forward as well as back. It also needs to satisfy today's three-second …

Books & Arts

Bestsellers from Oxford

Books & Arts

Trilobite! by Richard Fortey

Books & Arts

Fingers crossed

Books & Arts

Vitamin sleuths

Books & Arts

Tokamak critic

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

THE TRADE in Internet addresses—URLs—gets more and more bizarre. According to a bulletin in The Associated Press, journalist Ted Fishman registered the name FreeWheelz when he was writing an April Fool's story for Esquire magazine about the excesses of e-commerce. In the story, he invented an online company that gave away free cars and made …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word

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