Issue 2279 | Magazine cover date: 24 February 2001 | New Scientist

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24 February 2001

Issue 2279

New Scientist issue 2279 cover

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On the cover

Features

Your best shot

Space-age spying

Opinion

Washington 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.

Your best shot

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.

Twelve scurvy men

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.

Water torture

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.

Chic geek

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.

Machine head

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.

Technology

Space-age spying

A modern version of the spy's "one-time pad" has been devised by a team of inventors in the Virgin Islands and Israel. Using the traditional method, two people who wanted to communicate securely would each use identical books of encryption codes, using each code once and then discarding it. The new system (WO 0067548) replaces …

News

Technology

Tyred footballers

News

Technology

Going to ground

News

Supergiant and the several hundred dwarfs

News

Let sleeping bears lie

News

Spot the blood

News

Girls lost in space

News

Stuck in the dirt

News

Run like the wind

News

Chips with vinegar

News

Fiddly factory

News

It's safe to talk

News

Muscling in

News

Mind reader

News

Of mice and humans

News

Save our sturgeon

News

Four-wheel danger

News

Big turn-off

News

Small but vicious

News

Armed and ready

News

Whispering wafers

News

A trickle of hope

News

Fossils galore

News

Long goodbye

News

Battle fields

News

Saving sniffles

News

Stopped in its tracks

News

Fight fire with fire

News

You need a lot of vents to get a lot of species

News

Mother's little helper

News

Verbal abuse

News

Candid cameras

News

Back seat learners

News

A fighting chance

News

Signs of life

News

East didn't meet west

News

Grape expectations

News

Umbilical cords give lifeline to stroke victims

News

Bad influences

News

Prepare for the worst

News

It's a pain in the Net

News

Why Big Al's butt was much worse than his bite

News

Follow my leader

News

Magnetic somersault

News

Harvest for the few

News

Head to head

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.

Washington Diary

IT WAS the event of the century—admittedly it's a brand new century and so the bar is rather low, but it's a big deal all the same. I'm talking, of course, about this month's publication of the complete sequence of the human genome. The big shots who run the two competing sequencing ventures, Francis Collins …

Opinion

Plain sailing

Opinion

Ode to the otter

Opinion

Playing the system

Opinion

Projecting a better image

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.

Your best shot

IT'S NOT much to look at. Just a tiny vial filled with clear fluid. But if its inventor is right, that fluid represents a new era in cancer treatment. It is a personalised cancer vaccine. Pramod Srivastava, a professor of medicine at the University of Connecticut, believes that the body's own immune system may ultimately …

Features

Twelve scurvy men

Features

Water torture

Features

Chic geek

Features

Machine head

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.

Slime and Slime Again

First Signals: The evolution of multicellular development by John Tyler Bonner, Princeton University Press, $49.50, ISBN 0691070385 INSIGHTFUL aphorisms have been a distinctive feature of John Tyler Bonner's writing ever since his first book, Morphogenesis. Half a century later, it's a delight to find him still in fine form with observations such as: "A tree …

Books & Arts

Aliens Have Landed

Books & Arts

Murdering Medicine

Books & Arts

Decline and free fall

Books & Arts

Douglas Richstone

Books & Arts

Rapt in Thought

Books & Arts

Pick a Card, Any Card

Books & Arts

Baruch Blumberg

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

PIONEERING researchers often have to battle to get their work accepted. Take the case of parasitologist Koichiro Fujita, who decided to put into practice his belief that a clean environment is destroying our immunity to germs and parasites. When Fujita, from Tokyo Medical and Dental University, studied tropical diseases in Borneo he noticed how healthy …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word