Subscribe now

This week's magazine

8 May 2004

Issue 2446

New Scientist issue 2446 cover
Previous issue Next issue
arrow
Subscribe
Access our magazine content direct via our website, app or print magazine
arrow
View in the app
Check out this magazine in our easy-to-navigate mobile app
arrow
Find a previous edition online
Search through our digital archive of over 30 years of magazines

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.

Scalpel, suture, salt beef

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.

Blow out

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.

Stopping epilepsy at source

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.

Four days that shook the world

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

Nanotrees take circuits into another dimension

MICROELECTRONIC devices of the future may be grown from the ground up like trees rather than carved into silicon. That's the possibility raised by the growth of forests of semiconducting "nanotrees". They have properties that promise to overcome one of the most fundamental problems facing the microelectronics industry – maintaining the quality of signals within …

News

Technology

DNA robot takes its first steps

News

Technology

Cutting Edge

News

Technology

A single click generates the list to end all lists

News

Technology

Training tomorrow's spinners

News

Technology

You've got mail

News

Technology

One cartridge fits all

News

Space

Planetary rovers cure their own ills

News

Technology

Chasing the elusive shadows of e-crime

News

Love, the great gender bender

News

Yaws adds to plight of Congo's forest dwellers

News

Ancient fires found on banks of Jordan

News

Viruses have plagued the Earth for 3 billion years

News

Viral hijack

News

Language centre moves with age

News

Curiosity cures the chimp

News

Natural selection deals an even hand to the richest and poorest

News

Splash landing on an oily Titan

News

Colourful sound of a bright idea

News

The shape of life in the fast lane

News

Shrink your buckyballs with a chlorine tourniquet

News

Fisherman's friend

News

Milky Way spiral gets an extra arm

News

Sex, parasites and the evolution of men

News

Spiral pattern helps cacti deal with stress

News

Hardy's prime problem solved

News

Universal speed limit spells end for Moore's law

News

Soundbites

News

Dither over scope

News

Ancient map is eerily right about eddies

News

Military malady

News

Glacier meltdown

News

Search hots up

News

60 Seconds

News

Talking 'bout a revolution

News

Radical redraft could save Nuclear treaty

News

Body scan fears

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

MPs have not yet officially learned what passed between the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya at their March meeting in a Bedouin tent outside Tripoli. However, I hope that Blair was a little less concerned about the Libyan nuclear programme per se than the extent of the black market in …

Opinion

Going to extremes

Opinion

Heroes of the hour

Opinion

Enough is enough

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.

Scalpel, suture, salt beef

Alexis St Martin was a dead man: of that everyone was certain. When the young Canadian trapper entered the general store of the American Fur Company in the northern frontiertown of Mackinacon the morning of 6June1822, he had no booze-fuelled fights to pick, no slights to avenge, no pelt deals to dispute. He was simply …

Features

Blow out

Features

Stopping epilepsy at source

Features

Four days that shook the world

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.

Code read

Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway, MIT Press, $32.95, £21.95, ISBN 0262072475 Reviewed by Wendy M. Grossman IF COMPUTER languages are so similar to natural languages, Alexander Galloway asks, why are they virtually ignored by linguists and literary critics? Perhaps, he suggests, because they see them as closed and determinate. Setting …

Books & Arts

Survival of the fittest

Careers

Bestsellers - Cambridge

Books & Arts

Culture credit

Books & Arts

Where worlds met

Books & Arts

Mall of the imagination

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

FEEDBACK was in Paris recently, looking at an exhibition on women inventors in the Museum of Arts and Trades. It was frankly rather disappointing – mainly posters telling yet again how Hedy Lamarr helped invent frequency-hopping as used in the latest 3G cellphones, how Melitta Benz dreamed up filter coffee, and Stephanie Kwolek developed Kevlar …

Regulars

Regulars

Letters

Regulars

The last word

Browse past issues

View all
Piano Exit Overlay Banner Mobile Piano Exit Overlay Banner Desktop