Issue 2277 | Magazine cover date: 10 February 2001 | New Scientist

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10 February 2001

Issue 2277

New Scientist issue 2277 cover

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On the cover

Features

Eat your crusts

News

Cell connected

Opinion

Postcards from the cutting edge

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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.

Eat your crusts

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.

Date with danger

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.

Jobs for the bots

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.

Scent of A man

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.

Cell connected

We're now a step closer to cyborgs—beings that are half-human, half-machine—with the successful connection of living tissue to electronic components. Peter Fromherz at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, took human kidney cells and genetically engineered them to make ion channels—the gateways in the cell membrane that allow nerves to transmit electrical signals. …

News

Whistling while you work but can't name that tune?

News

Life

Push my button

News

Technology

Double take

News

Starry eyed

News

Swiss roller

News

Technology

Touchscreen drive-in

News

Technology

High-protein vibes

News

Green monster

News

Twisted heart

News

Dangerous reflections

News

Pesticide scam

News

Nuclear deadline

News

Calls from the heart

News

Fish is food for thought

News

Let's get together

News

Flowers like nothing you've seen before

News

Upping the anti

News

Burn it down

News

Death throes

News

Breast is still best

News

Nowhere to hide

News

Dangerous dogs

News

Mad cow USA

News

Calories unlimited

News

Spacecraft falls into Eros's deadly embrace

News

Seen it all before

News

The day the dynamo died

News

Crushing the mutiny

News

No pushover

News

Space joyride

News

Not all crops are equal

News

Land powered by the rising sun

News

Not in my backyard

News

Dead birds do tell tales

News

How a cunning killer keeps its victims alive

News

Tomorrow the world

News

Lend me your beers

News

No wrinkles, no migraines

News

Homing instinct

News

Sonic the saviour

News

Shrinking ice sheet

News

Plague threat

News

Easing fears

News

Eat me, drink me

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.

Postcards from the cutting edge

IT'S the single most powerful driving force for change. In the space of a century we've seen the rise of Orville and Wilbur's engine with wings, the atom bomb, space travel, the Internet and now robots that sequence DNA at lightning speed. When it comes to changing our lives and world, nothing comes close to …

Opinion

The madness spreads

Opinion

Keeping rivers healthy

Opinion

Westminster Diary

Opinion

Loud and clear

Opinion

Accentuate the positive

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.

Eat your crusts

HOW do you swallow an island? It's a conundrum faced over and again by the great ocean trenches that skirt many of the world's continents, where the vast oceanic plates of the seabed are gulped down into the Earth's interior. The plates don't slip down easily. From the moment they are dished up on the …

Features

Date with danger

Features

Jobs for the bots

Features

Scent of A man

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.

Julian Barbour

In Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Vintage, 1991), its antihero, Billy Pilgrim, can see the whole of time at once. That Vonnegut's story is a must for physicist Julian Barbour isn't too surprising. Seeing all time at once is the thesis of his own book The End of Time (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999). Barbour is …

Books & Arts

Murray Gell-Mann

Books & Arts

Mars And The Boston Brahmin

Books & Arts

The Fragile Self

Books & Arts

Violent Element

Books & Arts

On Being A Wild Pig

Books & Arts

A Very Plain Man

Books & Arts

In the deepest south

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.

The Last Word

Up in the air Question : While discussing holiday flying arrangements, a friend and I began to speculate on how many people throughout the world, on average, are flying in an aircraft at any one time. What proportion of the world's population does this represent? Answer : According to the International Air Transport Association in …

Regulars

Feedback

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word