Issue 2261 | Magazine cover date: 21 October 2000 | New Scientist

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21 October 2000

Issue 2261

New Scientist issue 2261 cover

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On the cover

Features

Power sharing

News

Red-hot birds

Westminster Diary

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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.

Power sharing

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.

Brave new fridge

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.

Karaoke Cars

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.

Being there

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.

YOUR everything

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 pen is mightier…

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.

Sayonara WAP

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 are here

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.

Everything, anywhere

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.

Your Phone Is You

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.

Red-hot birds

THE colourful songbirds of New Guinea are not as innocuous as they appear. In 1992, Jack Dumbacher of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC discovered that the skin and feathers of Pitohui songbirds contain a poison called a batrachotoxin. Now Dumbacher has found similar toxins in another species, Ifrita kowaldi, he reports in a forthcoming …

News

The odd couple

News

Primeval dust

News

Spring fever

News

Got it licked

News

The reactor that eats nuclear waste

News

Ouch! Not much fun for Mrs Weevil

News

Born addicts

News

A rock of your own

News

Space

The big thaw

News

Space

It's one small step for a cockroach

News

Space

Humble pioneers

News

Hooked on hash

News

Mir lives on

News

Nuclear managers charged

News

Cult of the clone

News

Run for your life

News

Nuclear families get the all-clear

News

Caramel bouquet

News

Don't look now

News

Backpack drone that peers behind enemy lines

News

Shot to pieces

News

Thanks for more memory

News

Follow that cat

News

Light-powered screen

News

Sleeping beauty

News

Could a gene cocktail halt Parkinson's?

News

Fantastic plastic

News

Chips with everything

News

The power of choice

News

Technology

Safer indicators

News

Mercury or bust

News

Technology

Eyes right

News

Technology

Mobiles curry favour

News

Premium genes

News

Spooking the spooks

News

A breed apart

News

No more heroes

News

Mapping the mouse

News

Titanic glitch

News

Stray genes highlight superweed danger

News

From death's icy grip

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

MY HOPES rose when I read that air travellers could soon be asked merely to walk through a tunnel system that can sniff out narcotic drugs and explosives (New Scientist, 5 August, p 7) . Could this be the end of those infernal queues at passenger search points? Ion Track Instruments of Massachusetts has developed …

Opinion

Bright sparks

Opinion

A very fishy tale

Opinion

Seeds of dissent

Opinion

Share the risk

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.

Power sharing

HAS your computer run out of processing power? Wouldn't it be great if you could just tap into someone else's. Anyone else's. This is the idea behind the Grid. The name is borrowed from the US electricity grid, and the goal is to make it as easy to access processing power over the Internet as …

Features

Brave new fridge

Features

Karaoke Cars

Features

Being there

Features

YOUR everything

Features

The pen is mightier…

Features

Sayonara WAP

Features

You are here

Features

Everything, anywhere

Features

Your Phone Is You

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.

Ultramagic

The dramatic story of the famous cracking of the codes ULTRA and MAGIC during the Second World War has been told before, but in Battle of Wits Stephen Budiansky takes advantage of newly declassified American and British documents, and provides excellent diagrams to explain the process. As well as explaining the primitive computers invented for …

Books & Arts

Ingots to go

Books & Arts

Dinner for 8 billion

Books & Arts

A natural view

Books & Arts

Grand old man

Books & Arts

Medulla in a bottle

Books & Arts

Gravity's tune

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

IT IS in the nature of the secret services that they are, well, secretive. Even so, we wonder if the British ones don't take themselves a little too seriously. A journalist we know was trying to find information about code-breaking operations during the Second World War. She wanted to talk to someone in the know …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word