Issue 2317 | Magazine cover date: 17 November 2001 | New Scientist

Skip to content

17 November 2001

Issue 2317

New Scientist issue 2317 cover

Previous issue Next issue

On the cover

Features

Quicksilver quacks

News

Mini maths masters

Opinion

Westminster Diary

Access our magazine content direct via our website, app or print magazine

View in the app

Check out this magazine in our easy-to-navigate mobile app

Find a previous edition online

Search through our digital archive of over 30 years of magazines

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.

Quicksilver quacks

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.

Travelling 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.

The Best Medicine

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.

Songs before the storm

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.

Book of Riddles

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.

Mini maths masters

Ants don't have big brains, but they're pretty good at maths. Researchers have found that they can calculate the area of a potential nesting site with an error of less than 2 per cent. Eamonn Mallon and his colleagues from the University of Bath found that when the ants first visit the site, they walk …

News

Alligator's last stand

News

The rise and fall of nuts

News

Figs to the rescue

News

Fighting fit

News

Sound defence

News

Don't stop moving

News

Technology

Rubber souls

News

Technology

Stopcock symphonies

News

Technology

Watches get weird

News

Technology

Think small, think tiny

News

The robot most likely to...

News

Sniffing out polluters

News

Honeycomb mirror

News

Rolling into battle

News

Sperm counts spring through the roof

News

Attack of the fruit

News

Alien invasion

News

Ice spy

News

Assault on Troy

News

Wells of misery

News

Hunting the fossil frauds

News

Common cause

News

Lost at sea

News

Asteroid alert

News

Inside job

News

When time stands still

News

Should we worry?

News

Fishy decision riles conservationists

News

Fixing the script

News

Seized by God

News

WHO's to blame

News

No smell like home

News

Right on the money

News

Kill and cure

News

It's the real thing

News

Here are your stem cells, take 'em or leave 'em

News

Web Brother is watching

News

The final insult

News

Best to be last

News

Piercing the haze

News

Whodunnit?

News

Dying of thirst

News

Worldly wise

News

Earth

Global warning

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.

Westminster Diary

ENERGY was on the agenda at a packed Labour Party annual conference in Blackpool. I warned delegates that as much as we might like windmills to generate our electricity rather than nuclear power stations, it just wasn't practical. It would, I said, take 35,000 windmills—spaced out for aerodynamic reasons—to match the output of just one …

Opinion

You are what you read

Opinion

Gone native

Opinion

What downed Flight 587?

Opinion

An end to this madness

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.

Quicksilver quacks

When the Crawcour brothers opened for business in New York in 1833, they didn't have to wait long for their first clients. To anyone with tooth troubles, the brothers' advertisements were irresistible. Why pay a fortune to have your cavities plugged with gold when two brilliant dentists from Europe could fix them with a miraculous …

Features

Travelling light

Features

The Best Medicine

Features

Songs before the storm

Features

Book of Riddles

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.

Behind Every Great Man

Emma Darwin: The inspirational wife of a genius by Edna Healey, Headline, £20, ISBN 0747275793 ALL workaholics should give Emma Darwin to their partners in the hope that Emma's example might inspire them. Charles Darwin worked and worried incessantly, so much so that he made himself ill. Edna Healey tells us that Emma, meanwhile, was …

Books & Arts

Best Birding

Books & Arts

Forest of the Imagination

Books & Arts

A small slice through space

Books & Arts

Who's reading what

Books & Arts

Ring that Stone

Books & Arts

Cassell's Atlas of Evolution: The Earth, its landscape, and life forms by Richard Moody, Dougal Dixon, Ian Jenkins and Audrey Zhuravlev

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

FED UP with complaints about pollution and foul smells, Japan's Ministry of the Environment has published a list of the country's 100 most fragrant places. As well as sites that smell of lavender blossom and wisteria, it includes a Chinese medicine shop in Toyama Prefecture and the streets of Shizuoka with their heady scent of …

Regulars

The Last Word

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word